All Your ISP Are Belong to U.S.

This is horrifying:

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year—in case police want to review them in the future—under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

It represents “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.

Lofgren said the data retention requirements are easily avoided because they only apply to “commercial” providers. Criminals would simply go to libraries or Starbucks coffeehouses and use the Web anonymously, she said, while law-abiding Americans would have their activities recorded.

To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.

“The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

Once again, Democrats and Republicans unite to fight terrorism the drug war kiddie porn and in the process throw your privacy rights out the window. And while some Democrats put up token resistance, the damned bill was sponsored by none other than Debbie Wasserman Schultz. You know her as the chair to the DNC.

It’s really quite a disgusting piece of legislation, and it won’t do jack shit to stop child porn. It will, however, become a treasure trove of data for the Feds to do whatever the fuck that want to do with it, because after all, who doesn’t want to fight terrorism the drug war kiddie porn?

I can’t wait to see if the loudmouth “freedom” lovers in the tea party actually come out on the side of freedom. Although they are probably too focussed on keeping the Koch’s taxes low and making sure Michelle doesn’t have too many calories for lunch.

▲

CSI: Real World

ED Kain has an interesting post on crime labs, highlighting a study showing that Indiana’s toxicology lab’s results were awful:

IU hired Colorado-based auditor Forensic Consultants Inc. to examine the paper records for every positive test result from 2007 to 2009. Auditors found errors in 10 percent of marijuana cases and 32 percent of cocaine cases. They were working on the substance involved in the most cases—alcohol—when informed by email to “place a hold” on the audit.

The commission Mitch Daniels appointed  stopped that audit because it was too expensive.  ED also links to a Balko piece, where he highlights a good suggestion:

Under Koppl’s plan, a city or state would create a position of “evidence handler.” The evidence handler’s job would be to distribute the testable evidence in a case to the appropriate crime lab. Under a fully privatized system, the evidence handler would distribute it to one of a rotating series of private labs. Under a partially-privatized system, there would still be a state lab, but under both systems, in every third case or so, the evidence would be sumbitted to a second or third lab for verification. The original lab would not know when it was being checked by other labs.

This system, which Koppl calls “rivalrous redundancy,” flips the incentive problem upside down. For the individual crime lab worker, the incentive is no longer to please prosecutors or police, but to do the most thorough, sound, objective analysis possible. For the private labs, the incentive is to catch the state labs—or another private lab—making a mistake. When there’s conflict over test results, a third or fourth lab could come into the mix.

Unlike the fantasyland CSI series, real-world crime labs are full of errors, and defendants in criminal cases (especially poor ones) have no way to challenge their findings.  Indiana’s audit, and a public/private system that uses the possibility of a double-check to ensure higher quality results, are both steps in the right direction.

What’s missing from ED’s piece is recognition that Mitch Daniels, who is pretty good on prison reform, is probably not going to be good on this issue.  Daniels is simply looking to save money.  Prison reform can save money, so it’s on his to-do list.  Auditing the toxicology lab costs money, so his commission shut it down.  Daniels is no warrior for liberty, he’s just starving the beast.  The plan that Balko advocates will not save money – it’s going to cost to make extra checks.  Some taxes will have to be paid in order to get that done.  Will libertarians advocate for those taxes in order to ensure more freedom for criminal defendants?

▲

SWAT Follow Up

ED Kain has posted a bit more about SWAT teams. Here’s an interesting statistic from a Baltimore Sun report he highlighted:

The statistics compiled on police raids give a broad picture of how the tactic is used in Maryland. Of the 806 raids conducted in the six-month period, more than 94 percent stemmed from search or arrest warrants. Most of the others came as the result of a barricade situation.

As Radley Balko notes, Maryland is the first state in the nation to require that cities report how their SWAT teams are used. In one county, over half of the SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and non-serious felonies.

In my post yesterday, I wondered why the Rochester SWAT team had fired only one shot in 30 years. I found this old story that indicates a couple of reasons. First, Rochester’s team is made up of on-call members of the police force—it’s not a standing unit. It was recently renamed the “Emergency Task Force”. Since “emergency” being the opposite of “routine”, I assume the point is that the group is to be used for extraordinary situations, not serving misdemeanor warrants.

A lot of the paramilitary hardware used by SWAT teams was purchased with post-9/11 Homeland Security grants. There’s no reason the federal government couldn’t impose national standards for equipping, usage and reporting on police departments who get money for their SWAT teams.

▲

SWAT

I don’t know much about the use of SWAT teams by police departments, just what Radley Balko, ED Kain and others have been writing about their misuse and the tragic deaths involved.

This may just be ignorance on my part, but there seems to be a fair amount of variation in the way these teams are used. For example, last week was the 30 year anniversary of a terrible hostage situation in Rochester. A deranged man shot his parents and another man at his home and then walked down the street to a local bank and took hostages. Here’s how it ended:

“Our sniper who took this guy out,” John Strong a now retired veteran of the Rochester Police SWAT Team said. “He saved more innocent lives that day than you’ll ever know.”

The incident ended when a sharpshooter fired through a bank window from his position across the street in a church window. He struck and killed Griffin moments after Griffin shot and killed a hostage in front of the bank’s side door.

To this day Faggiano [another policeman] and Strong say that one shot represents the only bullet the Rochester SWAT team has ever fired in a combat situation.

There are plenty of drug arrests in Rochester, and there have been incidents of questionable shootings during those arrests. But apparently the SWAT teams at least have kept their powder dry, if they were involved at all, if they’ve only fired one shot in 30 years. Yet other jurisdictions deploy paramilitary police regularly for what sound like fairly routine raids and warrants, and those cops tend to fire their weapons with terrible results. Do any of you guys know if the standards for deploying paramilitary police are really this scattershot, or am I just drawing conclusions from a few anecdotes?

▲

Happens Every Day

Here’s my local town spokeswoman, excusing the theft of $139,000 by “hackers” from the town’s online bank account:

“We had good firewalls, anti-virus software and even with all of those measures, it still happened,” she said. “No matter who you are, you will always be vulnerable because new viruses are coming out every day, and these people make it their business to come up with new ways to get the information.”

In addition to this kind of duty shirking, the whole article is full of black-box techno-voodoo explanations of the hacker attack, which I think some people might take as a better excuse than this lame version of hoocoodanode. I don’t—city offices are about 50 yards from a locally-owned bank, yet the town chose to bank online, and they got ripped off. Writing paper checks in longhand was an option when they made their bad decision, and it’s still an option today.

Update: That last sentence wasn’t clear. My point isn’t that they should have been using paper checks, but rather that every method of distributing money to employees and creditors has security risks. Once upon a time, the town wrote paper checks. One day, they decided to switch to online banking. What safeguards did they put in place when they did that? Are they insured against this kind of theft? Did they consider the new risks that were different from the old? Answer those questions, but don’t shine me on with talk of trojans, and other bad voodoo. And tell me why every other little town in this region hasn’t been the victim of this kind of theft – are they lucky? Or did they do a better job with their security.

▲

The WaPo Risks A Victory Lap

Giving the Obama Administration due credit for its latest service to civil liberties:

In the Byzantine realm of government record-keeping, publication of a document in the country’s biggest newspapers, including this one, does not mean declassification. Despite the release of multiple versions of the Pentagon Papers, no complete, fully unredacted text has ever been publicly disclosed.

On Monday, the National Archives and Records Administration will change that, as it officially declassifies the papers 40 years to the day after portions were first disclosed by the New York Times. In doing so, and in making the papers available online, the Archives could provide researchers with a more holistic way of understanding a remarkable chapter of U.S. history.

It could also bring a small measure of solace to advocates of open government frustrated by what they see as the overzealous classification of important documents. They note that tens of thousands of the classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks also remain classified…

Hat tip to commentor Mike Kay (True Grit) for reminding me to check a certain prominent blogger on civil liberties for his opinion on the latest news in the Drake case:

... [T]he benefit of prosecuting whistleblowers endures even if the case crumbles because (as is true for the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks) it is legally frivolous: namely, it still serves as a thuggish deterrent to future would-be whistleblowers thinking about exposing government corruption, deceit and illegality.

▲

A Win (of Sorts) for Truth, Justice & the American Way

I try to avoid joining the Parade of the Front-Pagers, where everyone feels required to chip in on some crucial national issue like a congresspod’s twitpics, but the collapse of the government’s prosecution against whistleblower Thomas Drake seems like a big fvcking deal:

A former official with the National Security Agency who faced felony counts of mishandling classified documents pleaded guilty Friday to a misdemeanor in a deal with prosecutors. The deal avoided a trial that could have created political problems for the Obama administration and sent the official to prison for the rest of his life.

Thomas Drake’s plea pleased civil-liberties advocates who are generally sympathetic to Obama, but is a setback for the administration’s effort to crack down on leakers. The administration is pursuing charges against four other accused government leakers under the Act, regarded by some lawyers as vague and overbroad…

The government claimed in its indictment that he had secretly passed information from the documents to an unnamed reporter for a national newspaper. Court documents identified the reporter as Siobhan Gorman, who published a series of articles detailing management malpractice and dubious legal activities by the NSA in The Baltimore Sun in 2006 and 2007.

The government never disclosed the contents of the highly-classified documents they accused Drake of leaking. But they are thought to be related to the NSA’s internal debate over TrailBlazer, an ill-fated project launched in 2002 to overhaul the agency’s vast computer systems that capture and screen information flooding into the agency’s computers from around the world.

Drake and a small group of internal critics regarded Trailblazer as a billion-dollar boondoggle that benefitted defense contractors, and lost a struggle to get the NSA to adopt an internally-designed system called ThinThread at a fraction of the cost. Some of those critics claim that ThinThread might have alerted the U.S. to the 9/11 plot…

The difference between the NYTimes report John quoted earlier and the Washington Post story I’m quoting here is that the WaPo, in its role as the paper of record for the DC company town’s local industry, understands that such prosecutions involve not just some abstract vision of good government practice but the daily workdays of a significant chunk of its readers:

James Bamford, the author of “The Shadow Factory” and two other books on the NSA, says it is the country’s largest, costliest and most secretive spying organization. “And it’s arguably the most influential,” he said.

He sat in on Friday’s hearing and said defense attorneys had asked him to testify in the trial as an expert witness. As far he knows, Drake was the first NSA official accused of leaking to the press.

Bamford called the Drake prosecution “a very important case” because it set a precedent for the four similar Espionage Act trials to follow.

If you have any interest at all in civil liberties, much less this particular case, Jane Mayer’s NYorker article “The Secret Sharer” is an excellent weekend read:

... One afternoon in January, Drake met with me, giving his first public interview about this case. He is tall, with thinning sandy hair framing a domed forehead, and he has the erect bearing of a member of the Air Force, where he served before joining the N.S.A., in 2001. Obsessive, dramatic, and emotional, he has an unwavering belief in his own rectitude. Sitting at a Formica table at the Tastee Diner, in Bethesda, Drake—who is a registered Republican—groaned and thrust his head into his hands. “I actually had hopes for Obama,” he said. He had not only expected the President to roll back the prosecutions launched by the Bush Administration; he had thought that Bush Administration officials would be investigated for overstepping the law in the “war on terror.”

“But power is incredibly destructive,” Drake said. “It’s a weird, pathological thing. I also think the intelligence community coöpted Obama, because he’s rather naïve about national security. He’s accepted the fear and secrecy. We’re in a scary space in this country.”...

More »

▲

Hanging by A ThinThread

Jane Mayer has been reporting brilliantly on the American government’s “security” systems since the Reagan administration. She’s got a long article in the May 23 New Yorker,The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?” that’s well worth reading in its entirety:

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.

The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”

Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as almost obligatory. Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General who supervises the department’s criminal division, told me, “You don’t get to break the law and disclose classified information just because you want to.” He added, “Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.”

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.
[...]

The morning that Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. was, coincidentally, Drake’s first full day of work as a civilian employee at the N.S.A.—an agency that James Bamford, the author of “The Shadow Factory” (2008), calls “the largest, most costly, and most technologically sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known.” Drake, a linguist and a computer expert with a background in military crypto-electronics, had worked for twelve years as an outside contractor at the N.S.A. Under a program code-named Jackpot, he focussed on finding and fixing weaknesses in the agency’s software programs. But, after going through interviews and background checks, he began working full time for Maureen Baginski, the chief of the Signals Intelligence Directorate at the N.S.A., and the agency’s third-highest-ranking official…

Drake, hoping to help fight back against Al Qaeda, immediately thought of a tantalizing secret project he had come across while working on Jackpot. Code-named ThinThread, it had been developed by technological wizards in a kind of Skunk Works on the N.S.A. campus. Formally, the project was supervised by the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, or SARC.

While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.” Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed…

▲

Prince Cowboy Ninja & His Fightin’ Expendibles

Ripping yarns for a rainy summer evening! This is serious business, but it’s hard not to think that both Erik Prince and Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan should’ve picked more sophisticated philosophical wellsprings than Atlas Shrugged and the Indiana Jones movies. From the excellent NYTimes report on the “Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder“:

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year. [...]

For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

More »

▲

Open Thread: Bad Example, Mr. Ambassador

Tom Scocca, at Slate: “Pakistan’s Ambassador Might Want to Reconsider Comparing Osama bin Laden to Whitey Bulger“.

▲

Prisoners

From Britain’s The Independent, 27 April 2011, “US doctors ‘hid signs of torture’ at Guantanamo“:

US government doctors who cared for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay deliberately concealed or ignored evidence that their patients were being tortured, the first official study of its kind has found.

A detailed review of the medical records and case files of nine Guantanamo inmates has concluded that medical personnel at the US detention centre were complicit in suppressing evidence that would demonstrate systematic torture of the inmates.

The review is published in an online scientific journal, PLoS Medicine, and is the first peer-reviewed study analysing the behaviour of the doctors in charge of Guantanamo inmates who were subjected to “enhanced interrogation” techniques that a decade ago had been classed by the US government as torture.

Vincent Iacopino, senior medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights, and Brigadier General Stephen Xenakis, a retired US Army medical officer, had access to the medical records and case files while acting on behalf of defence lawyers.

They concluded that no doctor could have failed to notice the medical signs and symptoms of the extreme interrogation techniques and unauthorised assaults that other physicians would recognise as torture, such as severe beatings resulting in bone fractures, sexual assaults, mock executions, and simulated drowning by “waterboarding”.

“The findings in these nine cases indicate that medical doctors and mental health personnel assigned to the US Department of Defence neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm,” the authors of the study concluded. “The full extent of medical complicity in US torture practices will not be known until there is a thorough, impartial investigation including relevant classified information. We believe that, until such time as such an investigation is undertaken, and those responsible for torture are held accountable, the ethical integrity of medical and other healing professions remains compromised.”

Nancy Pelosi, (then) House Speaker, Tim Dickinson interview published in the 5 March 2009 issue of Rolling Stone:

The last administration didn’t place much of an emphasis on accountability. Sen. Patrick Leahy called yesterday for a “truth commission” to investigate abuses of power under Bush, and Rep. John Conyers has sponsored a similar bill. Do you support such a process?

I support what Mr. Conyers is doing. I look at it from the standpoint of a separation of powers. We believe there was a politicizing of the Justice Department under President Bush, that conversations took place at the White House that supported that activity. We asked for those documents, but we did not receive them. We asked for those people to testify, but they did not come. That, for us, is a violation of the Constitution. So what we’re talking about is bigger than any specific activity. We’re talking about contempt of Congress — Article One, the legislative branch.

I also support what President Obama has said: “My approach is to look forward, recognizing that no one is above the law.” Both of those approaches are correct. It is also correct for us, as the first branch of government, to say, “The White House, no matter who is in it, cannot violate the Constitution by not being accountable to the Congress.” [...]

But Conyers is asking for more than that. He wants subpoena power to investigate potential abuses of war powers, to force people to testify about torture and find out what was done at Guantánamo and the CIA’s black sites. Do you foresee a scenario in which senior members of the Bush administration are actually prosecuted?

I think so. The American people deserve answers… Under Bush, the Justice Department told the U.S. attorney not to prosecute the case. So the beat goes on — it just gets worse. We don’t know what will happen, because they’ve delayed it a long time.

I’m talking more about the level of a Donald Rumsfeld — people who authorized torture and greenlighted the kidnapping and rendition of innocent people.

I didn’t like their policies, which is why we needed to win the election — to get them out of power. But I don’t know what the evidence is against them on any specific charge. When you have a truth-and-reconciliation commission . . . look, I’m still fighting the bombing of Cambodia. I still have my gripes with the administration that bombed Cambodia before you were born, so I think it’s important to bring these things out. If you have a case against someone, you bring a case.

More »

▲

“Your Papers, Citizen?”

Via Digby:

Remember when Alaskan extremist candidate Joe Miller cited East Germany’s border fence as a fine example and we all laughed and laughed because their fence was built to keep their own people in rather than keeping foreign people out?

Well, the laugh’s on us. We may not be literally building such a fence, but we are creating a virtual one:

If you don’t want it to get even harder for a U.S. citizen to get a passport — now required for travel even to Canada or Mexico — you only have until Monday to let the State Department know.

The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for some passport applicants: The proposed new Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information. According to the proposed form, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.”

The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form.

It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories. So if the passport examiner wants to deny your application, all they will have to do is give you the impossible new form to complete….

What in the hell is this about?

If the worry is that non-US citizens are getting passports then they need to change the verification process in a way that’s possible to meet. If it’s about something else, then they need to explain what it is..

This is Big Brother stuff—- they are setting up a series of roadblocks to use “just in case” they want to deny someone a passport. The question is, who and why? Basically, this will potentially deny US citizens the ability to travel outside the country. It may not be a wall, but it functions pretty effectively as one if they want it to.

I’m guessing this may be related to the Governmental-bureaucratic mindset that assumed, per the Gitmo papers, that travelling to Afghanistan after 9/11 was sufficient indication of terrorist sympathies to permit ‘extrajudicial incarceration.’

All this does is give low-level drones new and inventive reasons to fvck up ordinary citizens’ daily lives. I, for example, have not a clue what my parents’ address was a year before I was born—somewhere in Manhattan, and at two different addresses, since they weren’t married at that time. And I can’t just call and ask them (assuming they’d remember, after 56 years) because they’re both dead. It would take me more than 45 minutes to google the city census, or more likely end up paying someone else to do it for me, and I’d still have more than half a century of personal data to compile.

Per the Consumer Traveler website:

There’s more information in the Federal Register notice (also available here as a PDF) and from the Identity Project.

You can submit comments to the State Dept. online at Regulations.gov until midnight Eastern time on Monday, April 25, 2011. Go here, then click the “Submit a Comment” button at the upper right of the page. If that link doesn’t work for you, it’s probably a problem with the javascript used on the Regulations.gov website. There are alternate instructions for submitting comments by email here.

Wanted to get this up before the deadline. Mandatory disclaimer, the innocent have nothing to hide…

▲

Long Form Snark

Someone explain to me how he is wrong:

A serious leak of classified information has just taken place—which, as we all know, is a dastardly crime for which the harshest punishment is merited. To make matters even more grave, this time the unauthorized disclosure has taken place during A Time of War, resulting in the illegal publication of sensitive information about the nation’s enemy. The leak was transmitted to Associated Press, which then published it to the world:

Libyan state television showed blackened and mangled bodies that it said were victims of airstrikes in Tripoli. . . . A U.S. intelligence report on Monday, the day after coalition missiles attacked Gadhafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound in the capitol, said that a senior Gadhafi aide was told to take bodies from a morgue and place them at the scene of the bomb damage, to be displayed for visiting journalists. A senior U.S. defense official revealed the contents of the intelligence report on condition of anonymity because it was classified secret.

I wonder if Eric Holder will shortly announce an investigation to find out who is responsible for this leak? Will the guilty party be charged with a capital crime and be held in solitary confinement near a cell occupied by Bradley Manning? Only time will tell.

And, since he is in the Defense Department, we can keep him in solitary for 24 hours a day, declare him mentally unstable, take away his reading glasses, parade him around nude, and all the internet tough guys can say “That’s what you get for fucking around while in the military” and then make Jane Hamsher jokes.

Tags: Glenn Greenwald uses too many words so therefore he is wrong, Some leaks are more equal than others ▲

Piss Tests for Everyone

Florida Governor Rick Scott, who owns Solantic, an urgent care center chain that offers drug screens, has ordered random drug testing for state employees and applicants.

This comes on the heels of Scott’s last plan, which would push Medicaid recipients into private HMOs:

Scott’s budget would curb growth in Medicaid spending, the state-federal safety net insurance program, by requiring most recipients to join private HMOs. Solantic accepts Medicaid HMO reimbursements, but not state Medicaid, so adding clients could broaden the clinics’ customer base.

Scott’s Cato-based health advisor also wants healthcare to come in the form of vouchers that they could use to pay for direct medical care or to buy insurance. One might think that this benefits Scott, since those vouchers will be used at his clinics while insurance often limits their use, but Solantic co-founder Karen Bowling will set you straight:

Bowling said Floridians can count on Scott to do the right thing. His push to privatize government-provided health is born of deep personal conviction, not out of any designs to benefit Solantic, she said.

As long as what you know in your heart benefits big business, it’s OK to have those kinds of deep personal convictions.

▲

Speaking of Radiation

Shocker:

The Transportation Security Administration is reanalyzing the radiation levels of X-ray body scanners installed in airports nationwide, after testing produced dramatically higher-than-expected results.

The TSA, which has deployed at least 500 body scanners to at least 78 airports, said Tuesday the machines meet all safety standards and would remain in operation despite a “calculation error” in safety studies. The flawed results showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

These were the aptly-named “Rapiscan” machines.

Update: If you read the whole article, which I did, the claim is that the Rapiscan techs didn’t divide by 10 when collecting data. I find it hard to buy that a manufacturer that has a huge interest in the radiation values matching spec would allow that to happen, and so I thought this was worth posting. But, if you buy that Rapiscan would let that kind of an error happen, then it wasn’t worth posting, or even worth writing about in Ars Technica.

▲