For those of us who believe in core progressive American values – multiculturalism, civil liberty and civil rights, free speech, a free press, truth in government, economic fairness, environmental protection, inclusiveness, equal justice, a humane society, the list goes on – today marks the first day of a disaster on a scale that until a few months ago was beyond our imagination.

The White House is now in the hands of a pathological liar and megalomaniac, a mutation spawned of our celebrity culture, a thin-skinned authoritarian whose only real constituent is himself, and whose intentions, to the extent we can discern them, are to destroy a lot of the things that make this country (truly) great.

Plus he has no idea what he’s doing. He’s slowly collecting corrupt and venal misfits who hate government and thrusting them into positions of power, with the sickly acquiescence of a self-serving Republican leadership that until recently saw him as a madman. But even they don’t know what they’re saying yes to.

No matter what you may hear in the coming days from the mainstream press and other elite institutions, this is not normal. This is aberrational. This is crazy.

It’s almost too painful to watch, but we all must watch. To the extent that we care about our core values, we must resist. And we need to figure out how to make things better when it’s over.

If one thing is certain, it is that the solution will not come from the current leaders of either of our political parties. Both groups respond to money and power more than to the public will. Both put winning above values. True deliverance from this disaster will have to be people-powered.

Political observers who have not been blinded by partisanship have long recognized that Washington elites are addicted to corruption, cronyism, authoritarianism and international aggression. But like the proverbial frog in the warming pot of water, it’s been a slow and gradual process. Now suddenly we’re boiling – and boiling mad.

Donald Trump ran a long con on the American people, promising them to clean out Washington, make the economy work for them, and disentangle us from international quagmires. He is perhaps the least likely person in the world to do any of those things. But the best con men are astute at figuring out what their marks want most badly.

So on the bright side, perhaps we can use this moment to examine the corrupting influences now so plainly in sight, and reject them, so that whatever comes next, if we make it past this catastrophe, will be fundamentally different.

At The Intercept, we’re already accustomed to viewing the claims of powerful people skeptically, and finding sources willing to reveal information the government wants to keep hidden but the public has a right to know. That is how we will approach our coverage of the Trump administration: adversarially.

And we hope we’ll be serving another purpose going forward, especially as the media elites feel the pressure to accept this as the new normal. We’ll stay outraged. Because there is nothing normal about this.

Top photo: Preparations are made for the inauguration of Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2017 in Washington.

The post Welcome to the United States of Emergency appeared first on The Intercept.

The warning came in an unencrypted email chain forwarded by Denis McDonough, then a top Obama campaign aide and currently the White House chief of staff, to Podesta, who at the time was running Obama’s transition team.

McDonough initially sent the warning to Obama economic adviser Daniel Tarullo in an email on November 3, 2008, the day before President Obama’s election victory, presumably in response to a detailed November 2 memo Tarullo sent around about the upcoming G-20 meeting President Bush had called to discuss the ongoing financial crisis.

McDonough wrote:

I was struck by the memo partly because it was first I had heard of it but much more because it was a sensitive doc bumping around on public email addresses.

There is a very real threat to the security of our documents (particularly sensitive ones like the one you worked up), and we need to protect them by at least encrypting them.

Tarullo emailed back:

I had never heard anything like this from either the campaign or the pre-transition effort and, in fact, have been receiving things of equal or greater sensitivity for some time from both sources. You guys are presumably much more likely to be made aware of such issues, so when the economic side of the transition gets named, you should probably get in touch with them to give guidance on this.

McDonough then forwarded the thread to Podesta, with the following comment:

Hey, John,

I know I’m like a broken record on this, but I think we should arrange a briefing on the cyber threat for all associated with your effort.

We have a real security threat on our stuff here. I would gladly work up something with our techie. We’ve developed a lot of expertise in this, unfortunately.

The email, ironically enough, showed up in Thursday morning’s release of the latest batch of Podesta’s emails being published daily by WikiLeaks. Their source is unclear; U.S. intelligence officials say they have evidence they were hacked by people working under Russian government supervision, but they have not made that evidence public.

The emails have spawned countless news articles, about Clinton’s private speeches to megabanks like Goldman Sachs, her campaign team’s coordination with Super PACs, internal squabbles about Clinton’s use of a private email server, how the Clinton Foundation enriched the Clintons, and many other subjects.

The earliest email from McDonough to Podesta about security seems to have come on October 12, 2008, when McDonough noted to Podesta, who was already well along in planning the transition: “we gotta figure our security. Our tech guy is in wdc tomorro.”

The fact that foreign actors were actively trying to hack U.S. presidential campaigns as well as the U.S. government was hardly a closely-held secret. As The Intercept reported in May, incoming members of the Obama administration were explicitly warned by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that “foreign intelligence services have been tracking this election cycle like no other.”

McDonough himself is the sender and recipient of numerous nonencrypted emails in the trove, including many discussing personnel choices for top security and intelligence jobs.

Podesta, of course, continued to email in the clear at least through March 2016, when he was hacked, even when his communications included sensitive and embarrassing communications and passwords. We recently offered him some security tips.

Top photo: Then-White House counselor John Podesta (left) with Chief of Staff Denis McDonough in 2014.

The post John Podesta Was Warned in 2008 to Start Encrypting Sensitive Emails appeared first on The Intercept.

The biggest thing he had going for him on Sunday night, besides his diehard fans, was a corporate media whose members praised his performance, quite possibly because they still want this to look like a real contest so people will keep watching them and advertisers will keep paying.

Reeling from a devastating video that recorded him effectively confessing to serial sexual assault, Trump attacked Clinton instead, trotting out alleged victims of her husband Bill Clinton. Marking the death of irony, he said Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself.

The Intercept’s staff live-blogged the debate, trying desperately to focus on any significant issues that matter to ordinary Americans and the rest of the world, and we identified a few.

Foremost among them was Trump’s frank acknowledgement that he totally disagrees with his running mate, Mike Pence, about how to respond to Syrian and Russian government atrocities in Syria. Pence last week declared his support for “immediately” establishing a safe zone in Syria for civilians fleeing violence. Trump declared his opposition to such a move, instead praising the Syrian, Russian, and Iranian governments for “killing ISIS.” When the mostly excellent moderator Martha Raddatz asked him to explain such an astonishing discrepancy, Trump replied, “He and I haven’t spoken and I disagree.”

Clinton, meanwhile, contradicted herself rather than her running mate, saying she supports creating “safe zones” in Syria but is against sending in any U.S. ground troops. You can’t have it both ways.

Clinton also effectively confirmed the authenticity of the presumably hacked speech excerpts, released by WikiLeaks last week, that showed her speaking more frankly than she ever does in public about her pro-corporate agenda with the groups that paid her millions in speaking fees. She said one passage was taken out of context — insisting that she was paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, of all people — thereby making it even more incumbent upon her to release the full transcripts herself.

Our blog also featured what were effectively dueling post-mortems of Trump’s campaign. Jeremy Scahill despaired that Trump “has empowered fascists, racists, and bigots. He did not create them, but he has legitimized them by becoming the nominee and openly expressing their heinous, hateful beliefs.” (Clinton, meanwhile, “represents more of the same bipartisan warmongering.”) Zaid Jilani countered that Trump doesn’t leave behind any viable political movement, because his campaign ultimately had less to do with politics than with “demonstrating how easy it is to capture the narratives on television without really anything of substance to say.” Of course, they can both be right, and probably are.

Here are last night’s live blog posts:

Domestic policy

• Donald Trump attacks Obamacare as akin to Canadian single payer, a system he praised
• Muslims have helped foil two out of every five al Qaeda plots between 9/11 and 2013

Foreign policy

• Clinton wants no ground troops in Syria, but her plan would require them
• Donald Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, have completely different positions on Syria
• “Russia is new in terms of nuclear,” Trump says, in bizarre error

Trump’s legacy

• A debate like no other
• Prediction: Democrats won’t tie the GOP brand to Trump, tonight or ever
• Trump may go away, but the people he has empowered will not
• Media pundits are pretending Donald Trump is still competitive to keep up their ratings
• Donald Trump will have no political legacy except proving the weaknesses of political media

Clinton’s paid speeches

• Tim Kaine plays dumb about WikiLeaks revelations from Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches
• Hillary Clinton should release the full transcripts of her speeches, to clear everything up

Sexual assault

• Trump tricks media into covering meeting with Clinton accusers by calling it “debate prep”
• Here is a list of Donald Trump’s accusers
• Less than a second after apologizing, Donald Trump defends sex assault comments
• Trump’s angry talk goes over well on Fox News, except for the women in its focus group

Debate tactics

• Hillary Clinton says Donald Trump is the only Republican nominee ever to be unfit
• Trump threatens to jail his political opponent
• Who will attack Republicans more?
• Trump, refusing to sit, looms over Clinton as she speaks

The moderators

• Debate moderators appear to have violated online question rules
• Martha Raddatz should moderate every debate
• People are mad about the debate’s unasked questions
• At St. Louis debate, where’s St. Louis?

The post Debate Recap: The Night Donald Trump Imploded and Irony Died appeared first on The Intercept.

They agreed that Russia is evil and terrifying and must be aggressively countered. They agreed that the U.S. should militarily intervene in Syria. They agreed that the national debt is frightening. They agreed that community policing, a euphemism for doing nothing, is going to make everything better again. And they agreed to talk over the female moderator, Elaine Quijano.

The Intercept’s staff liveblogged the debate, sympathizing with the routinely ignored moderator, while at the same time marveling over the irrelevance of some of her questions – fearmongering about the debt and Social Security? Seriously? With all the real things we should be worrying about?

Glenn Greenwald wrote about how “Mike Pence and Tim Kaine puffed up their chests and grappled with one another over who can be more antagonistic to Russia and who can scare Vladimir Putin more.” In Pence’s case, this happened in spite of the fact that Trump has called for a de-escalation of tensions with Russia, which has in turn led to Democrats’ “repeated accusations that he is some sort of agent of the Kremlin.”

While Trump has favored isolationist rhetoric, both of their running mates sounded distinctly neocon themes in the context of the Middle East. Lee Fang noted that “Mike Pence broke in a big way with the top of his ticket on foreign policy during the debate, declaring that his administration would be prepared to ‘strike military targets of the Assad regime.'” Zaid Jilani pointed out that Pence and Kaine “surprisingly agreed on establishing ‘safe zones’ in Syria for beleaguered civilians,” while both also “failed to mention the troop commitments such zones would take to defend.”

Kaine and Pence also agreed on some domestic issues. Alice Speri wrote about how they both enthusiastically support community policing because “It sounds great. It means basically nothing.”

We noted that, in a debate that barely focused on the two vice presidential candidates themselves at all, Kaine ended up somehow straddling some wide moral chasms: He repeatedly noted his missionary work in Honduras, while ducking Hillary Clinton’s warm relations with military coup leaders there and their U.S. enablers; he spoke about carrying out executions even though it violated his personal convictions.

We fact-checked Mike Pence’s claim that he didn’t support Social Security privatization; his claim that foreign money isn’t at play in U.S. elections, and his assertion that our military is weak; and his assertion that Trump’s economic plans would help solve our debt problems.

And to kick the evening off, Jeremy Scahill exploded The Daily Beast’s cheap exercise in red-baiting with a post about Tim Kaine, John Negroponte and the Priest Who Was Thrown From a Helicopter.

Here are our posts from the evening:

Domestic issues

• Mike Pence and Donald Trump have both supported privatizing social security
• Tim Kaine boasts of carrying out executions even though he found them immoral
• Kaine and Pence agree on community policing because it sounds good, means nothing

Foreign policy

• Mike Pence and Tim Kaine’s Syrian “Safe Zone” would require thousands of troops
• Mike Pence remakes Trump foreign policy, calls for strikes on Syrian military
• Bizarre moments: Mike Pence echoes Democrats, advocates confrontation with Russia and Putin
• Court overruled Pence on blocking Syrian refugees
• Mike Pence and America’s favorite Christian crusader

Media

• The networks tasked political hacks to evaluate the debate, not Americans impacted by it
• NPR does us all a service with live transcript

Sexism

• People wanted Quijano to talk about women, then the men on stage did
• Men are talking over women — again

The debate and the moderator

• Sympathy for the moderator
• Debate moderator cites billionaire front group to fearmonger about national debt
• Why the Greens and Libertarians aren’t in tonight’s debate

Fact check

• Mike Pence is wrong; foreigners absolutely can put money into U.S. elections
• Pence is wrong: The U.S. spends way too much on its military
• Whoever the next president is, she or he will love dictators
• No, Social Security is not in any danger of going bankrupt
• Donald Trump would massively cut taxes for richest one percent, add trillions to debt

Donald Trump

• Donald Trump quotes from exchange with fan worried about “white genocide”
• Donald Trump already attacking Megyn Kelly

Hillary Clinton

• What do Hillary Clinton and the Contra death squads in Nicaragua have in common?
• Kaine brags about his time in Honduras, not his running mate’s record there

The post Debate Wrap-Up: Tim Kaine and Mike Pence Agreed on Some Terrifying Policies appeared first on The Intercept.

In the few brief moments in which a scowling Donald Trump was not engaged in free association about himself, not interrupting Hillary Clinton, and not sniffling, a few matters of substance emerged. That’s what The Intercept staff mostly focused on during our live-blogging of the event. We went beyond fact-checking the event to add some much-needed context.

There was some unexpected news: Trump endorsed a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, something neither Clinton nor President Obama are willing to do.

Our reviews of the moderator, Lester Holt, were profoundly negative, especially about his refusal to control Trump and his decision not to ask the most important questions.

The sexist view certain male pundits have of Clinton was on full display before and after.

And don’t miss Jeremy Scahill on the hard-partying surfer turned master assassin who is Trump’s guest at the debate.

See below for what we posted, categorized by topic. Did the debate go as you expected? What did we miss? Tell me in the comments or on Twitter.

Moderator

• Lester Holt has one job, and he’s blowing it 
• The moderator didn’t ask a single question about immigration and climate change

Sexism

• On Fox, Brit Hume says Hillary Clinton’s face was “not necessarily attractive”
• How many times has Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton?
• CNN host already advising Hillary Clinton to smile

The issues

• Trump, to the left of Obama, pledges not to use nuclear weapons first
• Racial profiling is all “stop and frisk” was about
• Trump on rooting for the 2008 housing crisis: “That’s called business”
• Hillary Clinton’s touted “no-fly list” gun proposal is discriminatory and flawed
• Trump attacks Clinton for Libya position he shared
• Conservatives aren’t just backing Clinton because Trump is scary
• Trump infrastructure plan depends on corporate tax cut that would move jobs overseas

Fact-checking

• Hillary Clinton in the 1990s personally lobbied business to push harder for liberalized trade with China
• Trump lies about not calling climate change a hoax invented by China
• In 2000, Gore’s live fact-check of Bush tax plan was laughed off, and we paid the price
• Hordes of journalists are fact-checking tonight’s presidential debate
• “So what?”: In 1984, Bush official celebrated impotence of post-debate fact-checking 
• Political consultant running Donald Trump’s Super PAC mocks fact-checking

Debate politics

• Why no third parties tonight? Because two parties control the process
• U.S. government advises other countries to include minor parties in presidential debates
• The questions you won’t hear tonight because they’re too good
• The hard-partying surfer turned master assassin who is Trump’s guest at the debate
• News networks promote the presidential debate like a football game, wrestling match
• As Trump and Clinton prepare, Hofstra students demonstrate for Black Lives Matter

Donors and sponsors

• Trump once hated big donors getting debate tickets — now he’s handing them out to Sheldon Adelson
• Democratic Party used moments before debate to finally disclose convention sponsors
• Debate Commission waits until last minute to reveal (and thank) its corporate donors

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The post Beyond Sniffles and Sexism, What the Hell Was the Debate About? appeared first on The Intercept.

It wasn’t the first time he’d used the word that way. He accused China of rape last month: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said. “And that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

But looking at how Trump uses the word rape, and whom he accuses of it, reveals a pattern. He uses it to demonize his political targets. At the same time, he seems to lack empathy or understanding of what rape actually is.

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said last year about Mexican  immigrants. He defended the statement by citing a Fusion report that an estimated 80 percent of Central American women coming across the border are raped. “I use the word rape and all of a sudden everyone goes crazy,” he said last July.

“Donald Trump has no problem throwing the word out,” said Lisa Bloom, a civil rights attorney. “I think he lacks seriousness when he uses the word. I think that’s offensive to rape victims and to women.”

Back in 1989, when five New York teenagers — four African-American and one Hispanic — were accused of beating and raping a white woman jogging in Central Park, Trump launched a massive PR campaign against them. He called them “crazed misfits.” They were in the park “wilding,” he said. He took out newspaper advertisements advocating for the death penalty to be used on the boys, all of whom turned out to be innocent.

When alleged rapists are members of a group Trump likes, however, he is more sympathetic. In 2013, in response to the Pentagon’s annual report on sexual assault, he tweeted: “26,000 unreported sexual assults [sic] in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”

Trump has gleefully brought up the various unproven allegations of sexual assault against Bill Clinton, at one point asserting that the former president was guilty of rape and calling Hillary Clinton an “enabler.” “She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.”

Trump himself has been accused of rape and sexual assault, although none of the accusations has ever been proven. One accuser dropped her 1997 federal lawsuit. Another lawsuit, alleging that in 1994 Trump raped a 13-year-old, was filed last week. Trump’s ex-wife Ivana accused him of rape, though she later said it was “not in a literal or criminal sense.” The two divorced over Trump’s “cruel and inhuman treatment” of his wife.

Bloom has called those allegations credible. “I think anybody would consider it important if someone had been accused — in his case three times — of rape or attempted rape, and all of them in the context of court proceedings,” she said.

When Ivana Trump’s accusations resurfaced last year, Trump Organization special counsel Michael Cohen was dismissive: “You’re talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse,” he said. That is not true, and he later apologized.

When Trump’s friend Mike Tyson was convicted of rape in 1992, Trump proposed that he should be allowed to pay millions of dollars to rape victims instead of going to jail.

Trump has denied reports this week that Tyson was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. One person who will be there, though, according to Bloomberg, is former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, who once said: “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

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The post Donald Trump Doesn’t Seem to Understand What Rape Is appeared first on The Intercept.

An article by Mark Hertsgaard, adapted from his new book, Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing in the Age of Snowden, describes how former NSA official Thomas Drake went through proper channels in his attempt to expose civil-liberties violations at the NSA — and was punished for it. The article vindicates open-government activists who have long argued that whistleblower protections aren’t sufficient in the national security realm.

It vindicates NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who, well aware of what happened to Drake, gave up his attempts to go through traditional whistleblower channels – and instead handed over his trove of classified documents directly to journalists.

And it adds to the vindication for Drake, who was already a hero in the whistleblower’s pantheon for having endured a four-year persecution by the Justice Department that a judge called “unconscionable.”

The case against Drake, who was initially charged with 10 felony counts of espionage, famously disintegrated before trial – but not before he was professionally and financially ruined. And now it turns out that going through official channels may have actually set off the chain of events that led to his prosecution.

Drake initially took his concerns about wasteful, illegal, and unconstitutional actions by the NSA to high-ranking NSA officials, then to appropriate staff and members of Congress. When that didn’t work, he signed onto a whistleblower complaint to the Pentagon inspector general made by some recently retired NSA staffers. But because he was still working at the NSA, he asked the office to keep his participation anonymous.

Now, Hertsgaard writes that Crane alleges that his former colleagues in the inspector general’s office “revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.”

Crane’s growing concerns about his office’s conduct pushed him to his breaking point, according to Hertsgaard. But his supervisors ignored his concerns, gave him the silent treatment, and finally forced him to resign in January 2013.

Due to Crane’s continued efforts, however, the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the Department of Defense for its treatment of whistleblowers, and Hertsgaard tells The Intercept that a public report on the results of the investigation is expected next year.

Crane brings unprecedented evidence from inside the system that ostensibly protects whistleblowers that the system isn’t working. And defenders of the system can’t accuse him of having an outside agenda. Crane has never taken a position for or against the NSA’s programs, or made contact with Drake during the investigation.

“Crane kind of made it a point not to know him,” Hertsgaard told The Intercept on Monday. “He didn’t want it to become something personal.”

For him, it was about whistleblowing, Hertsgaard explained, and the principle that “anonymity must be absolutely sacred.”

Snowden told The Guardian that Drake’s persecution was very much on his mind when he decided to go outside normal channels. And he told The Guardian that colleagues and supervisors warned him about raising his concerns, telling him, “You’re playing with fire.”

In his Guardian interview, Snowden called for changes.

“We need iron-clad, enforceable protections for whistleblowers, and we need a public record of success stories,” he said. “Protect the people who go to members of Congress with oversight roles, and if their efforts lead to a positive change in policy – recognize them for their efforts. There are no incentives for people to stand up against an agency on the wrong side of the law today, and that’s got to change.”

U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, have insisted that Snowden should and could have gone through channels – and would have been heard.

“When people look at Edward Snowden, he’s the most famous,” Hertsgaard told The Intercept. “What they don’t realize is just how exceptional he is. He actually got his message out and he lived to tell the tale. … That is highly unusual. In most cases, whistleblowers pay with their lives to save ours.”

Hertsgaard writes in his book about many other whistleblowers whose stories are slightly less dramatic, but no less important. “I’m hoping campaign reporters will press Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump on this,” he said.

Related:

• Whistleblowers Back “Surveillance State Repeal Act”
• The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports
• XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications
• The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program

Top photo: Screengrab from the Guardian interview with Crane.

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The post Vindication for Edward Snowden From a New Player in NSA Whistleblowing Saga appeared first on The Intercept.

The FBI took over a dark web child-pornography site called Playpen last year and, rather than shut it down, used a secret, still-undisclosed vulnerability in the Tor Browser to install malware on the computers of more than 1,000 users that allowed the FBI to determine their locations.

But in Tacoma, Washington, lawyers for a school administrator caught in the dragnet have successfully demanded the right to review the malware in order to pursue their argument that it, rather than he, was responsible for the illicit material ending up on his computer.

The Tor Browser is a free browser that shields a user’s identity. It is also based on code from the Firefox browser.

Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, has long worried that the Tor Browser vulnerability might still be out there, could be exploited by bad actors, and could exist in Firefox, which is much more widely used than the Tor Browser.

So while it seems likely that the FBI will go to great lengths not to turn over the code – possibly dropping the case altogether – Mozilla’s top lawyer, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, is now arguing “that the government must disclose the vulnerability to us before it is disclosed to any other party.”

She explained: “Court ordered disclosure of vulnerabilities should follow the best practice of advance disclosure that is standard in the security research community. In this instance, the judge should require the government to disclose the vulnerability to the affected technology companies first, so it can be patched quickly.”

Dixon-Thayer noted that Mozilla isn’t taking sides, pro- or anti-disclosure. It just wants to make sure that if there is disclosure, Mozilla gets it first. Here is the legal brief Mozilla filed on Wednesday.

The issue of when the government should disclose security vulnerabilities is a hotly contested issue outside the courtroom as well.

The Obama administration’s policy is that when the government learns of a new flaw, it has to submit the flaw to an interagency group. The White House says that group has a “strong bias” toward disclosure to vendors so that they can fix them, rather than just letting the agencies keep the flaws secret and continue to use them. But the evidence suggests that is not the case.

Top photo: “Mozilla Booth” by Mozilla in Europe using CC BY 2.0, photo cropped.

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The post Mozilla Wants Heads-Up From FBI on Tor Browser Hack appeared first on The Intercept.

The programs, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are called PRISM and Upstream. PRISM collects hundreds of millions of internet communications of “targeted individuals” from providers such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Skype. Upstream takes communications straight from the major U.S. internet backbones run by telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon and harvests data that involves selectors related to foreign targets.

But both programs, though nominally targeted at foreigners overseas, inevitably sweep up massive amounts of data involving innocent Americans.

The question is: How much? The government won’t answer.

Fourteen members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Friday asking for at least a rough estimate.

“In order that we may properly evaluate these programs, we write to ask that you provide us with a public estimate of the number of communications or transactions involving United States persons subject to Section 702 surveillance on an annual basis,” said the letter. Signatories included ranking Democrat John Conyers Jr. and a senior Republican member, James Sensenbrenner.

Sen. Ron Wyden has asked for a number since 2011; the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended in July 2014 that the government provide several. In October, more than 30 privacy groups asked for an estimate and explained how easy it would be to come up with one.

“House Judiciary Committee members have lent their voices to the growing chorus demanding hard facts about how foreign intelligence surveillance affects Americans,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, in a statement. “The NSA will soon be asking Congress to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it will repeat its past claims that any collection of Americans’ communications is merely ‘incidental.’”

But, Goitein said, “We still don’t have this basic information.”

Top photo: “Red Bricks” by Grzesiek used under CC BY, modified with NSA logo.

The post Stonewalled by NSA, Members of Congress Ask Really Basic Question Again appeared first on The Intercept.

And when a candidate won’t directly answer the question, it’s also legitimate to speculate why that might be.

I’m not talking here about the positions on the issues that the candidates are taking, and whether they are logically consistent or wise. I’m not fact-checking. I’m just looking at evasive responses, and what they mean.

So here are some of the most glaring evasions of Thursday night’s Democratic debate in Brooklyn.

1. Hillary Clinton dissembling about why she won’t release transcripts of her highly paid speeches to banks.

The first time she was asked to release these transcripts, by my colleague Lee Fang, Clinton’s response was to laugh and keep moving. This exchange with CNN’s Dana Bash shows her answers have not gotten any less evasive over time.

BASH: Secretary Clinton, if I may, Senator Sanders keeping bringing up the speeches that you gave to Goldman Sachs. So I’d like to ask you, so you’ve said that you don’t want to release the transcripts, until everybody does it, but if there’s nothing in those speeches that you think would change voters’ minds, why not just release the transcripts and put this whole issue to bed?

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: You know, first of all — first of all, there isn’t an issue. When I was in public service serving as the senator from New York, I did stand up to the banks. I did make it clear that their behavior would not be excused.

I’m the only one on this stage who did not vote to deregulate swaps and derivatives, as Senator Sanders did, which led to a lot of the problems that we had with Lehman Brothers.

Now, if you’re going to look at the problems that actually caused the Great Recession, you’ve got to look at the whole picture. It was a giant insurance company, AIG. It was an investment bank, Lehman Brothers. It was mortgage companies like Countrywide.

I’m not saying that Senator Sanders did something untoward when he voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives …

BASH: Madam Secretary …

CLINTON: … but the fact is he did.

CLINTON: And that contributed to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and started the cascade …

(APPLAUSE)

(CROSSTALK)

BASH: Senator Sanders, one second, please. Secretary Clinton, the question was about the transcripts of the speeches to Goldman Sachs.

(APPLAUSE)

Why not release them?

CLINTON: I have said, look, there are certain — there are certain expectations when you run for president. This is a new one. And I’ve said, if everybody agrees to do it — because there are speeches for money on the other side. I know that.

But I will tell you this, there is — there is a long-standing expectation that everybody running release their tax returns, and you can go — you can go to my website and see eight years of tax returns. And I’ve released 30 years of tax returns. And I think every candidate, including Senator Sanders and Donald Trump, should do the same.

(APPLAUSE)

BASH: Secretary Clinton, we’re going to get to the tax returns later, but just to put a button on this, you’re running now for the Democratic nomination.

CLINTON: Right.

BASH: And it is your Democratic opponent and many Democratic voters who want to see those transcripts. It’s not about the Republicans …

(CROSSTALK)

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: You know, let’s set the same standard for everybody. When everybody does it, OK, I will do it, but let’s set and expect the same standard on tax returns. Everybody does it, and then we move forward.

Kudos to Dana Bash for pursuing the question. “When everybody does it,” is now right up there with Donald Trump’s “I didn’t start it.” This is flat-out evasion.

Reasonable Surmise: Clinton said embarrassing things during those speeches that belie her tough-on-Wall-Street rhetoric and she doesn’t want them to be public.

2. Bernie Sanders dissembling about why he hasn’t released his tax returns.

Hillary Clinton challenged Sanders to release his tax returns, which is entirely reasonable. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked him to respond, it went like this:

SANDERS: [O]f course we will release our taxes. Jane does our taxes. We’ve been a little bit busy lately. You’ll excuse us. But we will …

BLITZER: Senator …

SANDERS: We will get them out.

BLITZER: Senator …

CLINTON: Well, you know, there are a lot of copy machines around.

BLITZER: Senator, when are you — when are you — you’ve been asked for weeks and weeks to release your tax returns.

SANDERS: Well, I think we got one that’s coming out tomorrow.

BLITZER: Which one?

SANDERS: Last year’s.

BLITZER: 2014?

SANDERS: Yes.

BLITZER: What about 2013, all the other ones?

SANDERS: You’ll get them, yes. Yeah, look, I don’t want to get anybody very excited. They are very boring tax returns. No big money from speeches, no major investments. Unfortunately — unfortunately, I remain one of the poorer members of the United States Senate. And that’s what that will show.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: So, Senator, just to be clear, tomorrow you will release the 2014 tax returns from you and your family?

SANDERS: Yes.

BLITZER: And what about the earlier ones? What’s the problem …

SANDERS: Yes.

BLITZER: What’s taking so long? Because you just have to go to the filing cabinet, make a copy, and release them.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: Wolf, the answer is, you know, what we have always done in my family is, Jane does them. And she’s been out on the campaign trail. We will get them out. We’ll get them out very shortly. It’s not a big deal.

“Jane does them” is a non-answer. He should have released them ages ago. And it sounds like he may be getting ready to blame Jane for something.

Reasonable Surmise: There is something hinky with his taxes, and his campaign staff is scrambling to figure out how to contain the damage.

3. Hillary Clinton dissembling about her position on increasing the wage cap on Social Security taxes.

This was really one for the ages. Clinton appeared to answer the question affirmatively, but then made it clear she was responding affirmatively to another question entirely that hadn’t been asked. Then she assured us she wasn’t actually answering yes or no to the question she had been asked. Maybe Bill could have pulled that off, but not Hillary.

When Hillary Clinton says, “I have supported it,” I guess it depends upon what the meaning of “it” is.

BLITZER: Secretary, let’s talk about Social Security, another critically important issue. Senator Sanders has challenged you to give a clear answer when it comes to extending the life of Social Security and expanding benefits. Are you prepared to lift the cap on taxable income, which currently stands at $118,500? Yes or no, would you lift the cap?

CLINTON: I have said repeatedly, Wolf, I am going to make the wealthy pay into Social Security to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. That is one way. If that is the way that we pursue, I will follow that.

But there are other ways. We should be looking at taxing passive income by wealthy people. We should be looking at taxing all of their investment.

But here’s the real issue, because I — I’ve heard this, I’ve seen the reports of it. I have said from the very beginning, we are going to protect Social Security. I was one of the leaders in the fight against Bush when he was trying to privatize Social Security.

But we also, in addition to extending the Trust Fund, which I am absolutely determined to do, we’ve got to help people who are not being taken care of now. And because Social Security started in the 1930s, a lot of women have been left out and left behind.

And it’s time that we provide more benefits for widows, divorcees, for caregivers, for women who deserve more from the Social Security …

BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.

CLINTON: — system and that will be my highest priority.

BLITZER: Senator?

Go ahead, Senator.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: An interesting comment, but you didn’t answer the question.

CLINTON: I did. If that’s the way we’re …

SANDERS: No, you didn’t. My legi …

CLINTON: — yes, I did.

SANDERS: Can I answer …

CLINTON: I did answer the …

SANDERS: — may I please …

CLINTON: Well, don’t — don’t put words …

SANDERS: — can I have …

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: — into my mouth and say something…

SANDERS: — do I not?

CLINTON: — that’s not accurate.

BLITZER: Go ahead, Senator.

SANDERS: All right. Essentially what you described is my legislation, which includes (INAUDIBLE) …

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: Now, we’ve got — here is the issue. Your answer has been the same year after year. In fact, the idea that I’m bringing forth, I have to admit it, you know, it wasn’t my idea. It was Barack Obama’s idea in 2008, the exact same idea.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: He called for lifting the cap, which is now higher — it’s at 118 — and starting at 250 and going on up. If you do that, you’re going to extend the life of Social Security for 58 years. You will significantly expand benefits by 1,300 bucks a year for seniors and disabled vets under $16,000 a year.

What’s wrong with that?

Are you prepared to support it?

CLINTON: I have supported it. You know, we are in vigorous agreement here, Senator.

SANDERS: You have sup …

CLINTON: I think it’s important …

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: — to point out that …

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: — you know, we’re — we’re having a discussion about the best way to raise money from wealthy people to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. Think about what the other side wants to do. They’re calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. They still want to privatize it.

In fact, their whole idea is to turn over the Social Security Trust Fund to Wall Street, something you and I would never let happen.

SANDERS: All right, so …

CLINTON: So, yes, we both want to make sure …

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: Look, Wolf …

CLINTON: — Social Security (INAUDIBLE) …

SANDERS: — I am very glad that …

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: — and well-funded …

SANDERS: I am very glad to …

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Thank you, Secretary.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.

SANDERS: — campaign of challenging, if I hear you correctly, Madam Secretary, you are now coming out finally in favor of lifting the cap on taxable income…

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: — and extending and expanding Social Security. If that is the case, welcome on board. I’m glad you’re here.

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: No.

[…]

CLINTON: I — as he said, I’ve said the same thing for years. I didn’t say anything different tonight. We are going to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. There is still something called Congress. Now, I happen to support Democrats and I want to get Democrats to take back the majority in the United States Senate…

[…]

SANDERS: I’ve got to admit …

BLITZER: Go ahead, Senator.

SANDERS: — maybe I’m a little bit confused.

Are you or are you not supporting legislation to lift the cap on taxable income and expand Social Security for 58 years and increase benefits …

CLINTON: I am …

SANDERS: — yes or no?

CLINTON: I have said yes, we are going to pick the best way or combination …

SANDERS: Oh, you — ah.

(APPLAUSE)

(BOOS)

SANDERS: OK.

CLINTON: — or combination of ways …

(BOOS)

CLINTON: — you know …

(BOOS)

CLINTON: — it — it’s all — it’s always a little bit, uh, challenging because, you know, if Senator Sanders doesn’t agree with how you are approaching something, then you are a member of the establishment.

Well, let me say then …

SANDERS: Well, look …

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: — let me say this …

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: — we are going to extend the Social Security Trust Fund. We’ve got some good ideas to do it. Let’s get a Congress elected …

BLITZER: Thank you.

CLINTON: — that will actually agree …

BLITZER: Well, thank you …

CLINTON: — with us in doing it.

Reasonable Surmise: Clinton is against lifting the cap, but doesn’t want to say so because it would infuriate the overwhelming majorities of Democratic (and Republican) voters who support lifting it. Her position is shared by a bipartisan elite in Washington who would rather lower benefits than raise taxes.

4. Hillary Clinton refusing to answer the question about whether or not the Israeli attack on Gaza was disproportionate.

“I will certainly be willing to answer it. I think I did answer it,” Clinton said — while not answering it.

BLITZER: Thank you. Secretary Clinton, do you agree with Senator Sanders that Israel overreacts to Palestinians attacks, and that in order for there to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel must, quote, end its disproportionate responses?

CLINTON: I negotiated the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November of 2012. I did it in concert with …

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: President Abbas of the Palestinian authority based in Ramallah, I did it with the then Muslim Brotherhood President, Morsi, based in Cairo, working closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli cabinet. I can tell you right now I have been there with Israeli officials going back more than 25 years that they do not seek this kind of attacks. They do not invite the rockets raining down on their towns and villages.

(APPLAUSE)

They do not believe that there should be a constant incitement by Hamas aided and abetted by Iran against Israel. And, so when it came time after they had taken the incoming rockets, taken the assaults and ambushes on their soldiers and they called and told me, I was in Cambodia, that they were getting ready to have to invade Gaza again because they couldn’t find anybody to talk to tell them to stop it, I flew all night, I got there, I negotiated that.

So, I don’t know how you run a country when you are under constant threat, terrorist tact, rockets coming at you. You have a right to defend yourself.

(APPLAUSE)

That does not mean — that does not mean that you don’t take appropriate precautions. And, I understand that there’s always second guessing anytime there is a war. It also does not mean that we should not continue to do everything we can to try to reach a two-state solution, which would give the Palestinians the rights and…

BLITZER: … Thank you …

CLINTON: … just let me finish. The rights and the autonomy that they deserve. And, let me say this, if Yasser Arafat had agreed with my husband at Camp David in the Late 1990s to the offer then Prime Minister Barat put on the table, we would have had a Palestinian state for 15 years.

(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)

BLITZER: Thank you, Senator, go ahead — go ahead, Senator.

SANDERS: I don’t think that anybody would suggest that Israel invites and welcomes missiles flying into their country. That is not the issue.

And, you evaded the answer. You evaded the question. The question is not does Israel have a right to respond, nor does Israel have a right to go after terrorists and destroy terrorism. That’s not the debate. Was their response disproportionate?

I believe that it was, you have not answered that.

(CHEERING)

CLINTON: I will certainly be willing to answer it. I think I did answer it by saying that of course there have to be precautions taken but even the most independent analyst will say the way that Hamas places its weapons, the way that it often has its fighters in civilian garb, it is terrible.

(AUDIENCE REACTION)

I’m not saying it’s anything other than terrible. It would be great — remember, Israel left Gaza. They took out all the Israelis. They turned the keys over to the Palestinian people.

CLINTON: And what happened? Hamas took over Gaza.

So instead of having a thriving economy with the kind of opportunities that the children of the Palestinians deserve, we have a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in from Iran and elsewhere.

[…]

SANDERS: There comes a time — there comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: Well …

BLITZER: Secretary.

CLINTON: … you know, I have spoken about and written at some length the very candid conversations I’ve had with him and other Israeli leaders. Nobody is saying that any individual leader is always right, but it is a difficult position.

If you are from whatever perspective trying to seek peace, trying to create the conditions for peace when there is a terrorist group embedded in Gaza that does not want to see you exist, that is a very difficult challenge.

Reasonable Surmise: Clinton does not think Israel did anything wrong (possibly ever) and/or she is unwilling to say anything remotely critical of Israel, for political reasons. But she doesn’t want to say publicly that Gaza was OK with her because of the extraordinary brutality of the Israeli attack, which has been well-documented.

5. Bernie Sanders refusing to describe how he would effectively promote American businesses around the world.

BLITZER: Thank you. Senator, Senator, you’ve slammed companies like General Electric and Verizon for moving jobs outside of the United States. Yesterday, the CEO of Verizon called your views contemptible and said in your home state of Vermont Verizon has invested more than $16 million and pays millions of dollars a year to local businesses. He says you are, quote, “uninformed on this issue” and disconnected from reality. Given your obvious contempt for large American corporations, how would you as president of the United States be able to effectively promote American businesses around the world?

Sanders was clearly not remotely interested in answering the question he was asked.

SANDERS: And this is — this is a perfect example, Wolf, of the kind of corporate greed which is destroying the middle class of this country. This gentleman makes $18 million a year in salary. That’s his — that’s his compensation. This gentleman is now negotiating to take away health care benefits of Verizon workers, outsource call center jobs to the Philippines, and — and trying to create a situation where workers will lose their jobs. He is not investing in the way he should in inner cities in America.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: All right. Senator, but the question was, the question was, given your contempt for large American corporations, as president, how would you be able to promote American business around the world?

SANDERS: First of all, the word contempt is not right. There are some great businesses who treat their workers and the environment with respect.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: Verizon happens not to be one of them.

Reasonable Surmise: No doubt to the chagrin of American multinationals, this is apparently not an issue that Sanders is worrying about.

6. Hillary Clinton trying to duck responsibility for what happened in Libya.

BLITZER: — the issue of national security and foreign policy.

Secretary Clinton, President Obama says the worst mistake in office that he made over these past seven and a half years was not preparing for Libya after Moammar Qadafi was removed. You were his secretary of State.

Aren’t you also responsible for that?

CLINTON: Well, let me say I think we did a great deal to help the Libyan people after Qadafi’s demise. And here’s what we did.

We helped them hold two successful elections, something that is not easy, which they did very well because they had a pent up desire to try to chart their own future after 42 years of dictatorship.

I was very proud of that.

We got rid of the chemical weapons stockpile that Qadafi had, getting it out of Libya, getting it away from militias or terrorist groups.

We also worked to help them set up their government. We sent a lot of American experts there. We offered to help them secure their borders, to train a new military.

They, at the end, when it came to security issues, Wolf, did not want troops from any other country, not just us, European or other countries, in Libya.

And so we were caught in a very difficult position. They could not provide security on their own, which we could see and we told them that, but they didn’t want to have others helping to provide that security.

And the result has been a clash between different parts of the country, terrorists taking up some locations in the country.

And we can’t walk away from that. We need to be working with European and Arab partners …

BLITZER: Thank you.

CLINTON: — with the United Nations in order to continue to try to support them.

The Libyan people deserve a chance at democracy and self- government. And I, as president, will keep trying to give that to them.

BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.

SANDERS: According to the New York Times …

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: — for President Obama, this was a pretty tough call, like a 51-49 call, do you overthrow Qaddafi, who, of course, was a horrific dictator?

The New York Times told us it was Secretary Clinton who led the effort for that regime change. And this is the same type of mentality that supported the war in Iraq.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: Look …

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: — Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein are brutal, brutal murdering thugs. No debate about that.

But what we have got to do and what the president was saying is we didn’t think thoroughly about what happens the day after you get rid of these dictators.

Regime change often has unintended consequences in Iraq and in Libya right now, where ISIS has a very dangerous foothold. And I think if you studied the whole history of …

BLITZER: Yes.

SANDERS: — American involvement in regime change, you see that quite often.

After refusing to acknowledge that she made a mistake, Clinton then tried to blame Sanders for it.

CLINTON: — I — I would just point out that there was a vote in the Senate as to whether or not the United States should support the efforts by the Libyan people to protect themselves against the threats, the genocidal threats coming from Gadhafi, and whether we should go to the United Nations to seek Security Council support.

Senator Sanders voted for that, and that’s exactly what we did.

Sanders then pointed out:

SANDERS: Yes, 100-0 in the Senate voted for democracy in Libya and I would vote for that again. But that is very different from getting actively involved to overthrow and bring about regime change without fully understanding what the consequence of that regime change would be.

Reasonable Surmise: Clinton’s push for regime change in Libya had disastrous consequences, as even Obama has acknowledged — and Clinton knows it. But she doesn’t want to admit she made a mistake because it would support Sanders’s arguments about her judgment when it comes to foreign intervention.

7. Hillary Clinton refusing to say if she’s for or against a carbon tax.

SANDERS: Are you in favor of a tax on carbon so that we can transition away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy at the level and speed we need to do?

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: You know, I have laid out a set of actions that build on what President Obama was able to accomplish, building on the clean power plan, which is currently under attack by fossil fuels and the right in the Supreme Court, which is one of the reasons why we need to get the Supreme Court justice that President Obama has nominated to be confirmed so that we can actually continue to make progress.

I don’t take a back seat to your legislation that you’ve introduced that you haven’t been able to get passed. I want to do what we can do to actually make progress in dealing with the crisis. That’s exactly what I have proposed.

ERROL LOUIS: OK, thank you, Secretary Clinton.

CLINTON: And my approach I think is going to get us there faster without tying us up into political knots with a Congress that still would not support what you are proposing.

(CROSSTALK)

LOUIS: Senator Sanders, you’ve said that climate change is the greatest change to our nation’s security.

SANDERS: Secretary Clinton did not answer one simple question.

LOUIS: Excuse me, Senator, Senator, Senator, Senator, Senator …

SANDERS: Are you for a tax on carbon or not?

Reasonable Surmise: Clinton opposes a carbon tax, although many scientists say that imposing a cost on carbon is the only way to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. A carbon tax is strongly opposed by the fossil-fuel industry.

8. Clinton dissembling about (and unwittingly announcing) her support for a $15 minimum wage.

BLITZER: — if a Democratic Congress put a $15 minimum wage bill on your desk, would you sign it?

CLINTON: Well, of course I would. And I have supported …

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: — I have supported the fight for 15. I am proud to have the endorsement of most of the unions that have led the fight for 15. I was proud to stand on the stage with Governor Cuomo, with SEIU and others who have been leading this battle and I will work as hard as I can to raise the minimum wage. I always have. I supported that when I was in the Senate.

SANDERS: Well, look …

CLINTON: But what I have also said is that we’ve got to be smart about it, just the way Governor Cuomo was here in New York. If you look at it, we moved more quickly to $15 in New York City, more deliberately toward $12, $12.50 upstate then to $15. That is exactly my position. It’s a model for the nation and that’s what I will do as president.

BLITZER: Thank you.

CLINTON: Go as quickly as …

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: — to get to $15.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: I am sure a lot of people are very surprised to learn that you supported raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: You know, wait a minute…

SANDERS: (INAUDIBLE).

CLINTON: — wait a minute.

SANDERS: (INAUDIBLE).

CLINTON: — wait, wait …

SANDERS: That’s just not accurate. Well …

CLINTON: Come on, I have stood on the debate stage …

SANDERS: — well and I …

CLINTON: — with Senator Sanders eight …

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: — times.

SANDERS: Excuse me.

CLINTON: I have said the …

SANDERS: Well …

CLINTON: Exact same thing.

BLITZER: Secretary, Senator, please.

CLINTON: If we can …

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: — raise it to $15 in New York…

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: — or Los Angeles or Seattle …

BLITZER: Secretary, the viewers …

CLINTON: — let’s do it.

BLITZER: If you’re both screaming at each other, the viewers won’t be able to hear either of you.

SANDERS: OK.

BLITZER: So please …

SANDERS: I will …

BLITZER: — don’t talk over each other.

SANDERS: I believe I was …

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Go ahead.

SANDERS: — responding.

All right? When this campaign began, I said that we got to end the starvation minimum wage of $7.25, raise it to $15. Secretary Clinton said let’s raise it to $12. There’s a difference. And, by the way, what has happened is history has outpaced Secretary Clinton, because all over this country, people are standing up and they’re saying $12 is not good enough, we need $15 an hour.

CLINTON: OK.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: Go ahead, Secretary. Secretary?

SANDERS: And suddenly …

BLITZER: Secretary, go ahead.

SANDERS: To suddenly …

CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you very much.

SANDERS: To suddenly announce now that you’re for $15, I don’t think is quite accurate.

BLITZER: All right. Secretary?

CLINTON: All right. I have said from the very beginning that I supported the fight for $15. I supported those on the front lines of the fight for — it happens to be true. I also — I supported the $15 effort in L.A. I supported in Seattle. I supported it for the fast food workers in New York.

The minimum wage at the national level right now is $7.25, right? We want to raise it higher than it ever has been, but we also have to recognize some states and some cities will go higher, and I support that. I have taken my cue from the Democrats in the Senate, led by Senator Patty Murray and others, like my good friend Kirsten Gillibrand, who has said we will set a national level of $12 and then urge any place that can go above it to go above it.

Going from $7.25 to $12 is a huge difference. Thirty-five million people will get a raise. One in four working mothers will get a raise. I want to get something done. And I think setting the goal to get to $12 is the way to go, encouraging others to get to $15. But, of course, if we have a Democratic Congress, we will go to $15.

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: Senator, go ahead.

SANDERS: Well, I think the secretary has confused a lot of people. I don’t know how you’re there for the fight for $15 when you say you want a $12-an-hour national minimum wage.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, in fact — in fact, there is an effort, Patty Murray has introduced legislation for $12 minimum wage. That’s good. I introduced legislation for $15 an hour minimum wage which is better.

(APPLAUSE)

And ultimately what we have got to determine is after massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 0.1 percent, when millions of our people are working longer hours for low wages…

BLITZER: Thank you, Senator.

SANDERS: I think we have got to be clear, not equivocate, $15 in minimum wage in 50 states in this country as soon as possible.

Reasonable Surmise: Clinton wishes she had supported the $15 minimum wage earlier, and now wants people to believe she did, even though she didn’t.

Top photo: Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debate as Wolf Blitzer moderates during the CNN Democratic Presidential Primary Debate at the Duggal Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on April 14, 2016, in New York City.

The post The Brooklyn Dodgers: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders Give Non-Answers at Debate appeared first on The Intercept.

After the 2013 Snowden revelations, as mainstream technology companies started spreading encryption by putting it in popular consumer products, the wars erupted again. Law enforcement officials, led by FBI Director James Comey, loudly insisted that U.S. companies should build backdoors to break the encryption just for them.

That won’t happen because what these law enforcement officials are asking for isn’t possible (any backdoor can be used by hackers, too) and wouldn’t be effective (because encryption is widely available globally now). They’ve succeeded in slowing the spread of unbreakable encryption by intimidating tech companies that might otherwise be rolling it out faster, but not much else.

Indeed, as almost everyone else acknowledges, unbreakable encryption is here to stay.

Tech privacy advocates continue to remain vigilant about encryption, actively pointing out the inadequacies and impossibilities of the anti-encryption movement, and jumping on any sign of backsliding.

But even as they have stayed focused on defending encryption, the government has been shifting its focus to something else.

The ongoing, very public dispute between Apple and the FBI, in fact, marks a key inflection point — at least as far as the public’s understanding of the issue.

You might say we’re entering the Post-Crypto phase of the Crypto Wars.

Think about it: The more we learn about the FBI’s demand that Apple help it hack into a password-protected iPhone, the more it looks like part of a concerted, long-term effort by the government to find new ways around unbreakable encryption — rather than try to break it.

The Court Order

The court order Apple is fighting would require it to come up with a new way to hack into an iPhone 5c belonging to San Bernardino killer Syed Rizwan Farook.

The fact is that Apple couldn’t break the encryption scrambling the phone’s data if it tried. But the FBI doesn’t have to worry about that if it can just open the phone with the right password.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook put it, in his rebellious public response to the court order: “The ‘key’ to an encrypted system is a piece of information that unlocks the data, and it is only as secure as the protections around it.”

And it’s those protections that are now under siege.

This is not a sudden move for the government. As Bloomberg News recently reported, President Obama’s National Security Council last fall shaped a secret “decision memo” requesting government agencies to find both technical and legal ways to skirt encryption instead of break it.

They were instructed to figure out how much each option would cost, whether there were any laws that might need changing — and to report back.

According to a Washington Post story in September, an Obama administration working group spent months coming up with a list of technological methods to defeat encryption. One idea — particularly abhorrent to computer security professionals — was to force companies to send malware to suspects’ phones using automatic software updates.

And despite Comey’s constant complaint that law enforcement is “going dark” because of encryption, the FBI has been developing and purchasing viruses, Trojan horses, and other forms of malware to help break into digital devices — and in that way get around unbreakable encryption — for years.

They don’t like to talk about it. The FBI “routinely identifies, evaluates, and tests potential exploits in the interest of cybersecurity,” FBI spokesperson Christopher Allen wrote in an email to The Intercept in September.

But the public record shows that the FBI has been physically hacking into computers since at least 2001, when it put a keystroke-logger on “Little Nicky” Scarfo’s computer during an investigation of the American Mafia.

These days, the FBI uses its own brand of malware called the Computer and IP Address Verifier (CIPAV). In 2007, agents tricked a high school kid in Washington into downloading it and exposing his identity when he was making bomb threats. The FBI has consulted with outside shops, too, including the Italian firm Hacking Team — whose emails were leaked last summer, exposing its business dealings.

“I think that for many within law enforcement, the priority is to access data, point blank. That could mean installing backdoors directly into encryption standards or finding some kind of workaround,” Andrea Castillo, the technology policy program manager for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

“The first strategy failed in the court of public opinion, so it appears that they are now attempting more covert methods to get around encryption. Unfortunately, there are major security risks with both approaches,” she said.

National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers seems to already be pivoting away from the idea that we need to get rid of unbreakable encryption. He said in January that encryption is here to stay — and that “spending time arguing” about it is “a waste of time.” When pushed by Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff on whether or not encryption is a crippling threat to the intelligence community, he deflected, suggesting that it’s a bigger issue for domestic local law enforcement.

And documents in the Snowden archive show the NSA has spent years actively trying to hack Apple products and mobile devices. Its efforts to hack the iPhone date back to 2006, before it was even unveiled.

A Big Con?

“Over the past few months, I’ve been wondering why it is the FBI has been pushing so hard in the public forum to advocate for backdoors when almost everyone, from technologists to the tech industry to civil society to Congress, has been opposed to such an approach,” Ryan Hagemann, technology and civil liberties policy analyst for the Niskanen Center, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

“I think what we’re seeing unfold here is part of a multi-pronged strategy by law enforcement, possibly with the tacit approval and support of the intelligence community.”

Hagemann said what the FBI is pursuing is much more dangerous than any legislative route. “I think we should be more fearful of the strategy the FBI is using in the courts to push their ill-advised and Constitutionally dubious agenda.”

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, recently proposed that the government’s strategy all along has been to use the push for backdoors into encryption as “a feint.”

Writing for the national security law blog Just Security, Sanchez speculated that “the threat of a costly fight over legislation, even if unlikely to become law, may be largely geared toward getting Silicon Valley, or at least a critical mass of companies, to adopt a more cooperative posture. ” That means “quietly finding ways to accommodate the government.”

Sanchez concluded that when the government finally admits the obvious — and gives up on fighting unbreakable encryption — it will demand some sort of “compromise” legislation.

Sanchez imagined “privacy groups celebrating a victory” when that happens, “while intel officials snicker into their sleeves at a ‘defeat’ according to plan.”

Related:

• New Court Filing Reveals Apple Faces 12 Other Requests to Break Into Locked iPhones
• FBI Says Apple Court Order Is Narrow, But Other Law Enforcers Hungry to Exploit It
• Apple Slams Court Order to Hack a Killer’s iPhone, Inflaming Encryption Debate

The post FBI vs. Apple Establishes a New Phase of the Crypto Wars appeared first on The Intercept.

Clinton and Sanders stand on opposite sides of that divide. One represents the hawkish Washington foreign policy establishment, which reveres and in some cases actually works for Kissinger. The other represents the marginalized non-interventionists, who can’t possibly forgive someone with the blood of millions of brown people on his hands.

Kissinger is an amazing and appropriate lens through which to see what’s at stake in the choice between Clinton and Sanders. But that only works, of course, if you understand who Kissinger is — which surely many of today’s voters don’t.

Some may only dimly recall that Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the Vietnam War (comedian Tom Lehrer famously said the award made political satire obsolete), and that he played a central role in President Nixon’s opening of relations with China.

But Kissinger is reviled by many left-leaning observers of foreign policy. They consider him an amoral egotist who enabled dictators, extended the Vietnam War, laid the path to the Khmer Rouge killing fields, stage-managed a genocide in East Timor, overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government in Chile, and encouraged Nixon to wiretap his political adversaries.

First, let’s review what happened at the debate. Here’s the video, followed by the transcript:

SANDERS: Where the secretary and I have a very profound difference, in the last debate — and I believe in her book — very good book, by the way — in her book and in this last debate, she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger. Now, I find it rather amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.

(APPLAUSE)

I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some 3 million innocent people, one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.

(APPLAUSE)

IFILL: Secretary Clinton?

CLINTON: Well, I know journalists have asked who you do listen to on foreign policy, and we have yet to know who that is.

SANDERS: Well, it ain’t Henry Kissinger. That’s for sure.

CLINTON: That’s fine. That’s fine.

(LAUGHTER)

You know, I listen to a wide variety of voices that have expertise in various areas. I think it is fair to say, whatever the complaints that you want to make about him are, that with respect to China, one of the most challenging relationships we have, his opening up China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an incredibly useful relationship for the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

So if we want to pick and choose — and I certainly do — people I listen to, people I don’t listen to, people I listen to for certain areas, then I think we have to be fair and look at the entire world, because it’s a big, complicated world out there.

SANDERS: It is.

CLINTON: And, yes, people we may disagree with on a number of things may have some insight, may have some relationships that are important for the president to understand in order to best protect the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

SANDERS: I find — I mean, it’s just a very different, you know, historical perspective here. Kissinger was one of those people during the Vietnam era who talked about the domino theory. Not everybody remembers that. You do. I do. The domino theory, you know, if Vietnam goes, China, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. That’s what he talked about, the great threat of China.

And then, after the war, this is the guy who, in fact, yes, you’re right, he opened up relations with China, and now pushed various type of trade agreements, resulting in American workers losing their jobs as corporations moved to China. The terrible, authoritarian, Communist dictatorship he warned us about, now he’s urging companies to shut down and move to China. Not my kind of guy.

(APPLAUSE)

And now, some background about Kissinger.

Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, just published a timely book called Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. In an article in The Nation last week, “Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace,” he offered this pithy summary:

Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker. He (1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years; (2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos; (3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists; (4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; (5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House; (6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan; (7) began the U.S.’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran; (8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead; (9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and (10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level. Read all about it in Kissinger’s Shadow!

A full tally hasn’t been done, but a back-of-the-envelope count would attribute 3, maybe 4 million deaths to Kissinger’s actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims in southern Africa. Pull but one string from the current tangle of today’s multiple foreign policy crises, and odds are it will lead back to something Kissinger did between 1968 and 1977. Over-reliance on Saudi oil? That’s Kissinger. Blowback from the instrumental use of radical Islam to destabilize Soviet allies? Again, Kissinger. An unstable arms race in the Middle East? Check, Kissinger. Sunni-Shia rivalry? Yup, Kissinger. The impasse in Israel-Palestine? Kissinger. Radicalization of Iran?  “An act of folly” was how veteran diplomat George Ball described Kissinger’s relationship to the Shah. Militarization of the Persian Gulf?  Kissinger, Kissinger, Kissinger.

The late essayist Christopher Hitchens examined Kissinger’s war crimes in his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. He listed the key elements of his case:

1. The deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina.
2. Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh.
3. The personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation — Chile — with which the United States was not at war.
4. Personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus.
5. The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor
6. Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, D.C.

Kissinger’s role in the genocide that took place in East Timor is less well-known than the one he enabled in Indochina. Author Charles Glass wrote about that episode in 2011:

On December 6, 1975, Kissinger and Gerald Ford met President Suharto in Indonesia and promised to increase arms supplies to sustain Indonesian suppression of the former Portuguese colony. Kissinger, quoted verbatim in U.S. Embassy cables of that war council, insisted that American weapons for the Indonesian Army’s invasion could be finessed: “It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation.”

Since no one in East Timor had attacked or intended to attack Indonesia, Suharto could hardly plead self-defense. But Kissinger would make the case for him. All he asked was that Suharto delay the invasion a few hours until he and Ford had left Jakarta. He presumably relied on the American public’s inability to connect the Jakarta conference with the invasion so long as he and Ford were back in Washington when the killing began. As far as the American media went, he was right. The Indonesian Army invaded on the anniversary of a previous day of infamy, December 7, massacring about a third of the population. The press, apart from five Australian journalists whom the Indonesian Army slaughtered, ignored the invasion and subsequent occupation. Well done, Henry.

By the time Suharto was overthrown in 1998, Kissinger had gone private — charging vast fees to advise people like Suharto on methods for marketing their crimes. He also kept posing as an elder statesman whose views were sought (and often paid for) by a media that enabled his penchant for self-publicity. He was a patriot whose love of country stopped short of taking part in the 9/11 Commission if it meant disclosing how much the Saudi royal family paid him for his counsel.

The continuing role Kissinger plays in modern foreign policy is perfectly illustrated by Hillary Clinton, his longtime fan and friend. Just recently, in November, she reviewed Kissinger’s latest book, World Order, for the Washington Post. There’s a summary of that here.

Clinton called it “vintage Kissinger, with his singular combination of breadth and acuity along with his knack for connecting headlines to trend lines.” She wrote that “his analysis, despite some differences over specific policies, largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.”

And she said he came off as “surprisingly idealistic. Even when there are tensions between our values and other objectives, America, he reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the source of legitimacy, not governments alone.”

A key passage:

Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels. Though we have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past, what comes through clearly in this new book is a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.

The difference between the two views of Kissinger is not simply of academic or historical interest. How a presidential candidate feels about him is a clear sign of her or his worldview and indicates the kind of decisions she or he will make in office – and, perhaps even more importantly, suggests the kind of staffers she or he will appoint to key positions of authority in areas of diplomacy, defense, national security, and intelligence.

Sanders has not made clear who he is turning to for foreign policy advice, if anyone. (What’s your dream foreign policy team? Email me at froomkin@theintercept.com.)

But Clinton is clearly picking from the usual suspects — the “securocrats in waiting” who make up the Washington, D.C., foreign policy establishment.

They work at places like Albright Stonebridge, the powerhouse global consulting firm led by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a staunch Clinton backer. They work at places like Beacon Global Strategies, which is providing high-profile foreign policy guidance to Clinton — as well as to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. And they work at places like Kissinger Associates. In fact, Bob Hormats, who was a Goldman Sachs vice chairman before serving as Clinton’s undersecretary of state, is now advising Clinton’s campaign even while serving as the vice chairman of Kissinger Associates.

Despite the wildly bellicose and human rights-averse rhetoric from the leading Republican presidential candidates, they’re picking from essentially the same pool as well.

A few weeks ago, I talked to Chas Freeman, the former diplomat I once called a “one-man destroyer of groupthink,” whose non-interventionism and even-handed approach to the Middle East was so un-Kissingeresque that his surprising appointment to President Obama’s National Intelligence Council in 2009 lasted all of a few days.

He marveled at the lack of any “honest brokers” in the D.C. foreign policy establishment. “We have a foreign policy elite in this country that’s off its meds, basically,” he said.

“There’s no debate because everybody’s interventionist, everybody’s militaristic.” They all are pretty much in the thrall of neoconservatism, he said. You can see them “speckled all over the Republican side” and “also in the Clinton group.”

Henry Kissinger is thus a litmus test for foreign policy. But don’t count on the mainstream media to help you understand that.

Imagine two types of people: those who would schmooze with Kissinger at a cocktail party, and those who would spit in his eye. The elite Washington media is almost without exception in that first category. In fact, they’d probably have anyone who spit in Kissinger’s eye arrested.

Since they only see one side, they don’t want to get into it. And there was a little indicator at Thursday night’s debate, hosted by PBS, of just how eagerly the elite political media welcomes an honest exploration of the subject.

Just as Sanders raised the issue of Kissinger’s legacy in Vietnam, either Gwen Ifill or Judy Woodruff — both of whom are very conventional, establishment, Washington cocktail-party celebrities — was caught audibly muttering, “Oh, God.”

Top photo:  Hillary Clinton smiles as Henry Kissinger presents her with a Distinguished Leadership Award from the Atlantic Council in Washington in May 2013. 

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The post Henry Kissinger’s War Crimes Are Central to the Divide Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appeared first on The Intercept.

The spectacle of one Republican presidential candidate being identified by another as a “pussy” for failing to sufficiently endorse an archetypal form of torture exemplifies the moral state of the current race for the GOP nomination.

The Republican candidates have seemingly been competing with one another over who would commit the gravest war crimes if elected. In recent months, one candidate or another has promised to waterboard, do a “helluva lot worse than waterboarding,” repopulate Guantánamo, engage in wars of aggression, kill families of suspected terrorists, and “carpet bomb” Middle Eastern countries until we find out if “sand can glow in the dark.”

The over-the-top bombast plays well in front of self-selected Republican audiences — the crowd responded to the description of Cruz Monday night with full-throated chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” But such promises of future criminality from potential presidential nominees have outraged many legal experts.

“Torture, indiscriminate killing of civilians, and indefinite detention are clear violations of international and domestic law,” says Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.

Cruz not only called for the reinstitution of waterboarding during Saturday’s presidential debate, but actually justified the practice using language reminiscent of the infamous 2002 “Bybee Memo,” authored by disgraced former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo. The Texas senator, who had previously said that “torture is wrong, unambiguously, period, the end,” was asked if waterboarding qualified as torture, and responded: “Well, under the definition of torture, no, it’s not. Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, it is not. It is enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.”

But Yoo’s definition is absolutely not “the law.” His torture memos, written for Vice President Dick Cheney to provide legal cover for clearly illegal acts, were later rescinded and repudiated by the Bush administration itself, for being barbaric, legally unsupported, and unreasonable. “This question regarding whether waterboarding is torture? It’s not arguable,” says Pardiss Kebriaei, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Trump, at the same debate, said, “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a helluva lot worse than waterboarding.”

Trump has vociferously argued in favor of the utility of torture, despite the fact that interrogation experts are nearly unanimous that, moral considerations aside, it’s no good for extracting truthful information; it’s best for revenge, false confessions, and propaganda. “Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, OK? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work,” Trump said in November. But, he added, “If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.”

Says Kebriaei: “Ted Cruz and Donald Trump can choose to opt in or out of both international and American understandings of what constitutes torture, but that doesn’t change the legal status of waterboarding as torture.”

Another frequent Republican presidential talking point, embraced most vocally by Cruz, is the need to “carpet bomb” territories under the control of ISIS. These territories happen to be home to millions of civilians with no connection to ISIS, other than having the misfortune to live under the group’s control. Nonetheless, Cruz has pledged to “carpet-bomb them into oblivion,” stating that “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!”

Cruz has further claimed that his carpet-bombing would actually be restrained. “When I say saturation carpet bombing, that is not indiscriminate,” Cruz said during the most recent debate. “It’s targeted at infrastructure. It’s targeted at communications. It’s targeted at bombing all of the roads and bridges going in and out of Raqqa. It’s using overwhelming air power.”

But when asked if he would like to expand the rules of engagement that currently serve as a restraint to bombing civilians, Cruz responded: “Absolutely, yes.”

Experts say that carpet-bombing is by definition a war crime because it lacks individual targets. “One must always distinguish civilians and civilian objects from combatants and military objects and never target that which is civilian,” says Widney Brown of Physicians for Human Rights. “Depriving civilians of energy, attacking communications infrastructure, roads and bridges … such a bombing plan is a form of collective punishment against civilians and it is unlawful.”

Under Rule 7 of the International Committee for the Red Cross guidelines for the laws of war, “parties [to] conflict must at all times distinguish between civilian objects and military objectives. Attacks may only be directed against military objectives. Attacks must not be directed against civilian objects.”

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio has promised voters that he would start sending new prisoners to the facility at Guantánamo Bay at a time when the Obama administration is trying to close it. In the January 14 debate, Rubio said of members of ISIS, “If we capture any of them alive, they are getting a one-way ticket to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and we are going to find out everything they know.”

At Saturday’s debate, Rubio left the clear impression that the only reason he was not specifying what kind of torture he supported was that “we should not be discussing in a widespread way the exact tactics that we’re going to use because that allows terrorists to know to practice how to evade us.”

Hope Metcalfe, an international law expert at Yale Law School, warns that any of these policies would be a “disaster, on both legal and policy fronts.”

“The United States is bound by international treaties prohibiting practices that result in physical and psychological harm to detainees, which is why the Bush administration had no choice but to reverse course when the Yoo memo became public,” Metcalfe says. “Prior attempts to evade settled law on torture were met with universal disdain, because arguments in its favor are morally corrupt and legally indefensible. ”

But the ACLU’s Shamsi argues that the current positions of the candidates are a reflection of the U.S.’s unsettled moral climate related to national security. “Policies like these would be harder for politicians to embrace today if the Obama administration had provided meaningful torture accountability, and if it weren’t carrying out unlawful drone strikes or holding Guantánamo prisoners indefinitely,” she says.

The debate is also alarming American allies, particularly in Europe, says Scott Horton, an international human rights lawyer. “How could somebody who talks like this be the leader of the Atlantic alliance? It’s not possible. It’s disqualifying. And nobody in the United States seems to get that,” he says.

Horton says that mainstream U.S. media are barely covering the outrageous comments being made by the candidates. “They are so obsessed with the horserace,” he laments. To write about issues like torture — and put outrageous comments in their proper context — “you actually have to know facts, which is so hard,” Horton says. “Just talking about the latest opinion polls, that’s so easy.”

Additional reporting: Alex Emmon, Zaid Jilani, and Jenna McLaughlin

The post GOP Candidates Compete Over Who Will Commit Most War Crimes Once Elected appeared first on The Intercept.

In an email his campaign blasted out on Tuesday, Cruz wrote: “I just got off the phone with a few very generous supporters who — after our big win in Iowa last night — have pledged huge support for my campaign.”

The donors “have agreed to match all online donations to my campaign made through the links below,” he said. The page he linked to allowed supporters to give up to $5,400 ($2,700 for the primary election; $2,700 for the general election) and, for a 48-hour period, have their donations matched dollar for dollar.

The email did not say exactly how that would work.

Email sent out Tuesday from ted@tedcruz.org.

The operative rule is that individual donations to campaigns are legally capped. “If this money is going to his campaign, any one of those donors can only give a maximum of $2,700 [per cycle] including any money they have given before,” said Fred Wertheimer, a campaign finance expert at Democracy 21.

Many of Cruz’s most “generous donors” have presumably already hit that limit, which is called “maxing out.”

“I don’t know what he’s doing or how he’s doing it, but the only way that I could imagine he could be doing it that’s legal is if he’s got a bunch of not maxed-out donors who are willing to match the contributions of others until they themselves max out at $2,700,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, deputy executive director of the Campaign Legal Center.

Richard Skinner, a policy analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, speculated that the Cruz campaign could perhaps have lined up a conference call with “like a hundred contributors who have not maxed out.” In that scenario, if each one could still give $1,000 and remain below the cap, they could match $100,000 in donations — but that would be all, and Cruz didn’t say there was a limit beyond which donations would no longer be matched.

Rick Tyler, a Cruz campaign spokesperson, said that he was only “vaguely familiar” with the program, but “you have to get multiple people to agree to do it.”

He then emailed me the following statement: “I am not going to get into specifics about the performance of our match program. Suffice is to say it meets compliance standards for reporting. We have enough donors to match new contributions under the program. This program has been widely used successfully by many campaigns.” He pointed me toward similar email campaigns, including one just the other day from fellow Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee actually offers a triple match.

But if Cruz is telling the truth about the match being covered with only “a few very generous donors” he spoke to on the phone, the only way that could work would be if his campaign is either ignoring the campaign donation limit — or the donors are giving the “matching funds” money to a Cruz-affiliated Super PAC.

Neither of those would be remotely legal.

After recent Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United and SpeechNow — and with the Federal Election Commission almost totally paralyzed by its three Republican members — there isn’t much operative campaign finance law left on the books. Super PACs, for instance, are allowed to accept unlimited contributions as long as they don’t coordinate directly with campaigns. But it seems that every campaign, with the exception of that of Bernie Sanders, is constantly finding new ways to weasel around that restriction.

One of the few rules still standing, however, is that $2,700 limit to campaign giving. Another is that federal candidates are not allowed to solicit more than $5,000 in Super PAC contributions from any one person.

“If it is not a large pool of donors, if it is truly just a few generous supporters, it does appear that taking him at his word … his strategy runs afoul of the law one way or the other,” Krumholtz said.

The rule about solicitation is outlined in an FEC advisory opinion from 2011. According to the federal statute in question, which dates back to the McCain-Feingold soft money ban of 2002, “a candidate, individual holding Federal office, agent of a candidate or an individual holding Federal office … shall not … solicit, receive, direct, transfer, or spend funds in connection with an election for Federal office, including funds for any Federal election activity, unless the funds are subject to the limitations, prohibitions, and reporting requirements of this Act.”

And there’s no wiggle room. “To direct,” according to federal regulations, “means to guide, directly or indirectly, a person who has expressed an intent to make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value, by identifying a candidate, political committee or organization, for the receipt of such funds, or things of value.”

To solicit “means to ask, request, or recommend, explicitly or implicitly, that another person make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value.”

According to Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center, “If the matching contributions by Senator Cruz’s ‘very generous supporters’ are going to a Super PAC and exceed $5,000 by any one supporter, Cruz is violating the federal law that prohibits candidates from soliciting or directing soft money to Super PACs.”

And it’s hard to imagine Cruz denying he played a part. “The problem there would be that he was on the phone call, strategically planning this campaign,” said Krumholtz. “How do you walk that back?”

Cruz could be counting on the fact that the FEC won’t rouse itself even for such a blatant violation.

“There’s no enforcement of the campaign finance laws — all the campaigns and political operatives know that,” said Wertheimer. “There are three Republican commissioners at the FEC who block enforcement of the laws. So it’s the Wild West without a sheriff.

“As long as you think there is going to be no enforcement of the law, it’s just up to each political operative or campaign to decide what they want to do,” Wertheimer said. “It’s a voluntary system, the way the FEC treats it.”

Of course, there’s one other possibility: that the whole thing is just a fake marketing gimmick, a scam.

The web page the campaign email linked to, with a box for $5,400 checked.

That would be news to billionaire Robert Mercer, the New York hedge funder who originally met Cruz at a meeting of the Club for Growth, a prominent D.C. special interest group, then gave $11 million to Keep the Promise, a Cruz Super PAC.

Another billionaire, energy investor Toby Negegebauer, gave $10 million to one of Cruz’s Super PACs. Farris and Dan Wilks, two billionaire brothers who were enriched by the Texas fracking industry, gave $15 million to a Cruz Super PAC.

As for Cruz’s pledge that he has never received money from D.C. lobbyists, that’s also demonstrably false. A number of lobbyists have given to his campaign for a total of $5,700, according to Opensecrets.org.

They include James Hyland, the president of the Pennsylvania Avenue Group, which instructs visitors to its website: “Even if you are unsure if you need our lobbying assistance, make an appointment to discuss your options.”

There’s also Ed Rogers, chairman of the lobbying powerhouse BGR Group; Andrew Biar, the founder of Strategic Public Affairs; Jewell Patek, owner of Patek & Associates; and Joseph Mondello, principal of the Mondello Group, who was recently arrested after a worker who failed to fix his computer told police that Mondello became enraged, told him, “You’re not leaving until you fix this,” then pulled out a gun and said, “I’m going to kill you slowly.”

Overall, however, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has received far and away the most donations from lobbyists, with Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as her nearest competitors.

The post Ted Cruz’s Promise That Big Donors Will Match Campaign Donations Could Break Rules appeared first on The Intercept.

Clinton told Sanders during Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate that he would not find a single example of money changing her mind or her vote, and she attacked him for his criticism “by innuendo, by insinuation” that “anybody who ever took donations or speaking fees from any interest group has to be bought.”

Sanders responded by citing examples of political and prosecutorial decisions in the recent past that couldn’t really be explained any other way.

Let’s talk about why, in the 1990s, Wall Street got deregulated. Did it have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street provided — spent billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions?

Well, some people might think, yeah, that had some influence.

(LAUGHTER)

Let’s ask why it is that we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, and [the price of] your medicine can be doubled tomorrow, and there’s nothing that the government can do to stop it. …

Let’s talk about climate change. Do you think there’s a reason why not one Republican has the guts to recognize that climate change is real, and that we need to transform our energy system? Do you think it has anything to do with the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil pouring huge amounts of money into the political system?

That is what goes on in America. I am not — I like …

(APPLAUSE)

… There is a reason. You know, there is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system. And in my view, it is undermining American democracy and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors and not the working families of this country.

Clinton said she herself had been the target of corporate interests:

I don’t think you could find any person in political life today who has been subjected to more attacks and had more money spent against her by special interests, among whom you have named a few, than I.

And I’m proud of that. You know, when I took on the drug companies and the insurance companies for universal health care coverage, they went after me with a vengeance.

Today, you’ve got hedge fund billionaires aligned with Karl Rove, running ads against me to try to get Democrats to vote for you. I know this game. I’m going to stop this game.

And she insisted that Wall Street was against her:

I think the best evidence that the Wall Street people at least know where I stand and where I have always stood is because they are trying to beat me in this primary. They have collected and spent as much as $6 million on these ads. Hedge fund billionaires, Karl Rove, another billionaire, jumped in.

And why are they doing that? These are guys who try to make smart investments. They know my record, they know me, they know that I say what I believe and I will do it. And I also have a pretty good understanding about how to stop them.

But as the Washington Post reported on Thursday, “donors at hedge funds, banks, insurance companies and other financial services firms had given at least $21.4 million to support Clinton’s 2016 presidential run — more than 10 percent of the $157.8 million contributed to back her bid.” In fact, the Post even noted that Hillary Clinton has now “brought in more money from the financial sector during her four federal campaigns than her ­husband did during his ­quarter-century political career.”

Sanders hasn’t directly accused Clinton of being corrupted, but his argument is essentially that no one is incorruptible — that no one could take millions of dollars in contributions and speaking fees from Wall Street and not be influenced by that.

By giving just 12 speeches to Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and other financial corporations, Clinton made $2,935,000 from 2013 to 2015 — more than many people earn in a lifetime.

In all, she and her husband have collected over $125 million in speaking fees since 2001. They’ve also raised $2 billion for the Clinton Foundation.

More recently, Hillary Clinton’s affiliated Super PAC has depended on the extraordinary largess of billionaires: George Soros gave Priorities USA $7 million last year, pro-Israel billionaire power couple Haim and Cheryl Saban each gave $2.5 million, as did financiers Donald Sussman and Herbert Sandler.

Clinton didn’t necessarily say that money has no influence on anyone, she said it has no influence on her.

But the obvious, inevitable influence of massive campaign donations in particular has been a central element of Sanders’ campaign. And he’s had extraordinary success in collecting small donations — averaging $27 — from millions of supporters, keeping him competitive with Clinton and her more deep-pocketed donors.

Clinton’s relationship with Goldman Sachs has become a particular flashpoint. Clinton was asked Thursday night if she would release the transcripts from her private, highly paid speeches there — and elsewhere. She demurred.

Clinton made $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies.

Sanders had a lot to say about Wall Street in general, and Goldman Sachs in particular:

Wall Street is perhaps the most powerful economic and political force in this country. You have companies like Goldman Sachs, who just recently paid a settlement fine with the federal government for $5 billion for defrauding investors.

Goldman Sachs was one of those companies whose illegal activity helped destroy our economy and ruin the lives of millions of Americans. But this is what a rigged economy and a corrupt campaign finance system and a broken criminal justice is about. These guys are so powerful that not one of the executives on Wall Street has been charged with anything after paying, in this case of Goldman Sachs, a $5 billion fine.

Kid gets caught with marijuana, that kid has a police record. A Wall Street executive destroys the economy, $5 billion settlement with the government, no criminal record. That is what power is about. That is what corruption is about. And that is what has to change in the United States of America.

Related:

• Hillary Clinton Won’t Say if She’ll Release Transcripts of Goldman Sachs Speeches
• Top Hillary Clinton PAC Donation Amounts to 222,000 Bernie Sanders Donations
• Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches
• Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime 
• Hillary Clinton’s Single-Payer Pivot Greased by Millions in Industry Speech Fees

The post Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Brawl Over His “Insinuation” That She’s Corrupt appeared first on The Intercept.

End-to-end encryption, which is the state of the art in providing secure communications on the internet, has become increasingly common and desirable in the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance by the government.

Comey had previously argued that tech companies could somehow come up with a “solution” that allowed for government access but didn’t weaken security. Tech experts called this a “magic pony” and mocked him for his naivete.

Now, Comey said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday morning, extensive conversations with tech companies have persuaded him that “it’s not a technical issue.”

“It is a business model question,” he said. “The question we have to ask is: Should they change their business model?”

Watch the video:

Comey’s clear implication was that companies that think it’s a good business model to offer end-to-end encryption — or, like Apple, allow users to fully encrypt their iPhones — should roll those services back.

Comey and other government representatives have been pressuring companies like Apple and Google for many months in public hearings to find a way to provide law enforcement access to decrypted communications whenever there’s a lawful request. Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates said in a July hearing that some sort of mandate or legislation “may ultimately be necessary” to compel companies to comply, but insisted that wasn’t the DOJ’s desire. Now, there’s little pussyfooting about it.

“There are plenty of companies today that provide secure services to their customers and still comply with court orders,” he said. “There are plenty of folks who make good phones who are able to unlock them in response to a court order. In fact, the makers of phones that today can’t be unlocked, a year ago they could be unlocked.”

Comey indicated that these companies should be satisfied providing customers with encryption that allows for interception by the providers, who can then turn over the information to law enforcement.

Privacy experts say that the same holes in encryption that allow for authorized interception also allow for unauthorized interception — and therefore provide insufficient security.

Comey called on customers, who he said are becoming more aware of the “dangers” of encryption, to “speak to” phone companies and insist they’ll “keep using [their] phones” if they stopped offering the technology.

Comey acknowledged that encrypted apps would still exist. But, he said, encryption “by default” is the real problem. He told Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, that “I think there’s no way we solve this entire problem. … The sophisticated user could still find a way.”

That didn’t stop him from calling for an international standard for encryption technologies, however. Many popular encrypted applications are not U.S. based. Any action imposed on American companies would likely handicap them and lead customers to turn to overseas options.

“We have to remember limits of what we can do legislatively,” said Lee. “If we’re going to mandate that legislatively” — force companies to stop offering strong encryption — “it wouldn’t necessarily fix the problem,” he said.

Here is Comey’s exchange with Lee:

For the first time, Comey made a specific allegation about encryption having interfered with an FBI terror investigation.

“In May, when two terrorists attempted to kill a whole lot of people in Garland, Texas, and were stopped by the action of great local law enforcement … that morning, before one of those terrorists left to try to commit mass murder, he exchanged 109 messages with an overseas terrorist. We have no idea what he said, because those messages were encrypted.”

“That is a big problem,” Comey said.

But in the Garland case, the FBI had been tracking one of the would-be attackers for months — and had alerted local police that he might be headed to a controversial anti-Muslim exhibition. But FBI surveillance didn’t stop Elton Simpson — the Garland Police Department did. The local police never got the FBI’s email.

Comey did not request specific legislation to compel companies to abandon end-to-end encryption, but told Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that he would like to see all companies responding to lawful requests for data. Feinstein offered to pursue legislation herself, citing fear that her grandchildren might start communicating with terrorists over encrypted PlayStation systems.

Toward the end of the hearing, Comey seemed to contradict his earlier comments urging companies to reconsider their business models. “I don’t want to tell them how to do their business,” he said. Then, moments later, he added that “there are costs to being an American business — you can’t pollute.” The implication there was that American businesses might need to comply with new standards regardless of what the rest of the world does — as if providing end-to-end encryption to protect the average person’s communications is the same as destroying the environment.

Technologists, privacy advocates, and journalists reacted on Twitter with confusion and frustration.

The post Comey Calls on Tech Companies Offering End-to-End Encryption to Reconsider “Their Business Model” appeared first on The Intercept.

In his Oval Office speech on Sunday night about the fight against ISIS, President Obama devoted one line in his speech to the topic. “I will urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice,” he said.

Meanwhile, Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, gave a talk at the Brookings Institution where she urged tech companies to deny ISIS “online space,” and waved away concerns about First Amendment issues.

“We’re going to have to have more support from our friends in the technology world to deny online space. Just as we have to destroy [ISIS’s] would-be caliphate, we have to deny them online space,” she said.

“And this is complicated. You’re going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating. It’s more complicated with some of what they do on encrypted apps, and I’m well aware of that, and that requires even more thinking about how to do it.”

A “senior administration official” told Reuters that the White House intends to talk to tech companies in the coming days about developing a “clearer understanding of when we believe social media is being used actively and operationally to promote terrorism.” Major social media sites are already deeply engaged in combating online propaganda and recruitment by Islamic militants.

But Obama’s comments were also clearly related to end-to-end encryption, a once rare but now increasingly common method that assures people that anyone intercepting their communications will simply see a series of seemingly random characters. (Significantly, even the best encryption does not preclude law enforcement or other actors from accessing those communications by hacking a target’s devices, something that is particularly easy for organizations like the FBI or NSA.)

In his comments, Obama was echoing statements by FBI Director James Comey, who is the administration’s chief advocate for finding a way to give law enforcement some sort of special doorway into encrypted communications that does not unduly jeopardize the security of those communications.

The tech industry, however, along with other experts and privacy researchers, have been adamant that no such way exists. Any “backdoor” for law enforcement use could inevitably be abused by bad actors as well, they say.

A Washington Post article in September reported that Obama had decided not to push for legislation that would require an encryption backdoor. But the article also quoted an email from the intelligence community’s top lawyer, Robert S. Litt, in which he told colleagues that congressional support for anti-encryption legislation “could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.”

Clinton, meanwhile, said that “what we see right now I think is just the beginning of directed attacks and self-radicalization that leads to attacks like what we think happened in San Bernardino. And we’re going to have to ask our technology companies … to help us on this.”

The “threat from radical jihadism has metastasized and become more complex and challenging,” she said. “It’s the nexus of terrorism and technology, and we have a lot of work to do to end it.”

The San Bernardino shootings are also being cited by some Republicans, including presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, as a reason to reinstate the warrantless bulk collection of domestic telephone data — the one program that was shut down by Congress after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a massive, secret surveillance dragnet.

An Associated Press story on Saturday added fuel to the fire when it claimed that as a result of the shutdown, the government could no longer access historical call records by the San Bernardino couple. But as Emptywheel blogger Marcy Wheeler amply explained, the FBI has plenty of other ways of getting the information.

Several analyses of Obama’s comments present themselves:

1. He, like Comey, actually believes there is a “magic pony” solution to the encryption dilemma that the brightest technological minds in the world have simply failed to come up with yet.
2. He, like Comey, is simply ramping up the pressure on tech companies in an attempt to slow down the spread of end-to-end encryption, thereby extending what has been a “Golden Age” of surveillance.
3. It was just a line in a speech.

After I tweeted Obama’s comments on Sunday night, Zack Whittaker, who writes about cybersecurity and privacy for ZDNet, declared the start of a new crypto war. (Crypto War I, in the 1990s, was resolved when the government realized there really wasn’t anything it could do to stop the spread of encryption in the long run.)

The post Obama Hints at Renewed Pressure on Encryption, Clinton Waves Off First Amendment appeared first on The Intercept.

But as The Intercept’s Lee Fang wrote earlier this month, the ostensible alliance over liberalization of America’s criminal justice laws was based on a misunderstanding of the Koch brothers’ fundamental political goal.

That goal is, quite consistently, to advance their own corporate interests.

So, while the Kochs and the liberal groups used similar language in their critique of the criminal justice system, when it came down to actual legislation, the Kochs were focused on reducing criminal prosecutions of corporations, not people.

Koch and the House Republicans turned out to be pushing a bill that critics describe as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for white-collar criminals.

Members of Washington’s elite media crave stories about bipartisanship, so groups like the pro-Clinton Center for American Progress garnered positive media attention for finding common ground with the Kochs earlier this year.

Now, CAP president Neera Tanden is issuing statements that “the bill is not aimed at addressing the aspects of the criminal justice system that are the drivers of mass incarceration and inequality and should not be part of any genuine discussion of criminal justice reform.” To the contrary, she says: “The bill would make it much more difficult to enforce bedrock regulatory safeguards — such as environmental, health, and consumer safety protections — and leave communities of color disproportionately vulnerable to unscrupulous, fraudulent, and predatory business practices that exacerbate existing inequality in our communities.”

There are some conservatives truly devoted to criminal justice reform — and there’s even a truly united left-right coalition on some specific criminal justice issues, like prison rape.

But, as Fang wrote, even while the Kochs were talking criminal justice reform, their money was notably continuing to finance election-year efforts that promote tough-on-crime politics.

Of the 38 federal lobbyists employed by Koch, one is registered to work on criminal justice issues; the rest work on projects more important to Koch Industries.

And if that wasn’t clear enough, Fang described how Koch’s interest in criminal justice reform was sparked not by the plight of overcrowded prisons or racial disparities in law enforcement, but by federal and state probes of the company’s own environmental crimes.

Top photo: Activists hold a protest near the Manhattan apartment of billionaire and Republican financier David Koch in 2014.

The post Koch “Alliance” on Criminal Justice Reform Exposed as Trojan Horse appeared first on The Intercept.

Yet news emerging from Paris — as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted.

European media outlets are reporting that the location of a raid conducted on a suspected safe house Wednesday morning was extracted from a cellphone, apparently belonging to one of the attackers, found in the trash outside the Bataclan concert hall massacre. Le Monde reported that investigators were able to access the data on the phone, including a detailed map of the concert hall and an SMS messaging saying “we’re off; we’re starting.” Police were also able to trace the phone’s movements.

The Telegraph reported that “eyewitness accounts and surveillance of mobile telephone traffic” suggested that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected strategist of both the Paris attack and one that was foiled in Belgium, was staying at the safe house.

Details about the major ISIS terror plot averted 10 months ago in Belgium also indicate that while Abaaoud previously attempted to avoid government surveillance, he did not use encryption.

A prescient bulletin sent out in May by the Department of Homeland Security assessed “that the plot disrupted by Belgian authorities in January 2015 is the first instance in which a large group of terrorists possibly operating under ISIL direction has been discovered and may indicate the group has developed the capability to launch more complex operations in the West.”

Abaaoud’s planned operation in Belgium was blown when authorities, who had been closely surveilling his three accomplices, stormed their safe house in the city of Verviers after determining that they were planning a major attack — very much like the one that took place in Paris on Friday. A pitched firefight between Belgian commandos and the ISIS veterans firing Kalashnikov rifles and lobbing grenades ended with two suspects dead and a third captured.

Belgian investigators concluded that Abaaoud directed the foiled operation there by cellphone from Greece — and that despite his attempts to avoid surveillance, his communications were in fact intercepted. Just a few days after the raid, Belgian news website RTL Info ran a whole article titled “What the Terrorist Suspects under Surveillance Were Saying.” It described surveillance over several months, through wiretaps and listening devices placed in the suspects’ car and their apartment.

Screen grab of Abdelhamid Abaaoud wearing a GoPro camera.

Photo: RTBF video

Some of the telephone conversations that were intercepted used code or obscure Morroccan dialects. Ironically, the suspects were overheard discussing the need to frequently swap out their cellphones.

Abaaoud has a brilliant history of avoiding capture — in fact, in an interview with ISIS’ Dabiq magazine he bragged that his “name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary.”

But when it comes to defeating electronic surveillance, there’s good reason to question his tradecraft. After all, he wore a video camera on his head (what is that, a GoPro 3?) And he lost a cellphone in Syria that was full of unencrypted pictures and videos.

A journalist, Etienne Huver, obtained the phone from sources in a Syrian refugee camp last year. His report for RTBF Belgian television, about the contents of the phone of the most wanted man in Europe included footage of Abaaoud clowning around, posing with a rifle, and driving a car dragging the corpses of Free Syrian Army fighters.

The post Signs Point to Unencrypted Communications Between Terror Suspects appeared first on The Intercept.

Bond is doomed because early in the movie Spectre, the otherwise benevolent Q, muttering something about nanotechnology and microchips, injects him with “smart blood.”

“Smart blood,” Q tells us, allows MI6 to track Bond absolutely anywhere he goes in the entire world. Presumably it turns his circulatory system into a radio, battery, and powerful antenna all in one, and is irreversible. For Bond, constantly broadcasting his location makes it virtually impossible to sneak around.

Sure, in Spectre, he manages to slip off the grid temporarily — thanks to Q’s plot-friendly indulgence. But long term? Even assuming that only MI6 can lock onto his bloody beacon and that MI6 can’t be hacked, his bosses will still always know where he is. And trusting in the security of government computer systems, as the movie demonstrates, is probably not a good idea.

There is no such thing as “smart blood,” of course. But it’s a pretty good metaphor for those omnipresent tracking devices that, in real life, have become a de facto extension of our bodies: our phones.

Most of us have no choice any longer but to carry mobile phones, even though they rob us of our locational privacy. For Bond, his very blood now robs him of his M.O. Smart blood equals geospatial emasculation.

And there’s another way that Spectre makes a valuable contribution to the typically staid public discourse about the surveillance state.

The standard inside-the-Beltway arguments about surveillance assume there’s a tradeoff between national security and privacy. But Spectre emphatically asserts that you can do more harm with total information than you can good.

Knowing everything about everyone is actually of limited use to the good guys. But it’s hugely useful to the bad guys — be they extortionists, terrorists, or power-mad bureaucrats. And if it’s collected, somewhere, be assured the bad guys can get their hands on it.

While Bond is pursuing his super-villain, his boss M wages a losing bureaucratic war with C, who’s more of an NSA/GCHQ type. M inevitably describes the massive surveillance network that C is building as “George Orwell’s worst nightmare.” In response, C literally laughs at M’s devotion to the quaint notion of “democracy.” Subtle it ain’t, but the central point — that ubiquitous surveillance is an inevitably totalitarian tool, not just inappropriate for democratic society, but actively inimical to it — is often underappreciated in the current debate.

The timing of the movie is extraordinarily propitious, especially in Britain, which is already much more of a surveillance state than the U.S. — with one surveillance camera for every 11 people. A draft Investigatory Powers Bill unveiled just last week would institutionalize profound invasions of privacy, from snooping on domestic web-browsing histories to bulk hacking.

Way back in 1998, science-fiction author David Brin published a influential non-fiction book called The Transparent Society in which he argues that limiting the collection of information is futile, and that therefore the only solution is to share the powers of surveillance with the citizenry — enabling the public to watch the government as well as the government watches the public. It’s a nice idea, but so unrealistic that Spectre’s more dystopian vision actually seems more plausible.

What if mass surveillance by an ostensibly beneficent national government really means that whatever the government collects is de facto transparent to SPECTRE, SMERSH, Kaos, the mob, the cartels, Carlos the Jackal, ISIS, and Vladimir Putin?

M is an imperfect messenger, calling as he does for a return to the traditional core value of assassination mano a mano — but he makes a powerful argument, on purely pragmatic terms: “All the surveillance in the world can’t tell you what to do next.”

The movie also shows us what kind of hero we need to prevent such a dystopian future — and it isn’t Bond. It’s Q, who bears a striking resemblance to Edward Snowden.

Sure, Q starts off by forever damning Bond to life as a radio antenna on a virtual tether, but he turns out to be a geek with an unshakeable moral center. With his heavily be-stickered laptop, he transforms in Spectre from outfitter of nifty death machines to white-hat hacker, singlehandedly bringing down a surveillance network that threatens the free world.

The post Only Edward Snowden Can Save James Bond appeared first on The Intercept.