Tag Archives: government

The Wall Street Journal’s Embarrassing…Naiveté

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In a Friday op-ed, the editors of the WSJ had this to say, among other things, about the government’s invasion of American privacy in the name of “security.”

The effectiveness of data-mining is proportional to the size of the sample, so the NSA must sweep broadly to learn what is normal and refine the deviations.  A nongovernment analogue might be the credit card flags that freeze payment when, say, a New Yorker goes on a shopping spree in Phoenix.

This is beyond naïve, it’s disingenuous.  The “analogue” has nothing to do with what the government is doing.  The credit card company that does such flagging—data mining—is a private enterprise away from which any and all customers easily can walk should they disagree with the data mining.  Americans can’t walk away from our government without emigrating.  And waiting for the next election lets the government’s damaging invasion continue apace in the interim.

Moreover, that credit card company is data mining a single customer, albeit it’s likely doing this for each of its customers.  It’s not routinely aggregating, by…credit card number…those data with every other customer’s data.  But wait—the government, in its Verizon data mining isn’t collecting personally identifiable data—only phone numbers called and called from.  Please.  The point of the government’s data mining is to find out who and to whom—phone numbers aren’t the terrorists.  It’s breathtakingly easy to attach a name to a phone number.

Then they write this:

The Washington Post also revealed Thursday that NSA has a parallel metadata program for Internet address packets called Blarney.

If the NSA’s version of a computer science department operates like the rest of FISA, the government is cautious to ensure that its searches are narrowly tailored and specific protocols are reviewed by FISA judges.

On what basis does the WSJ make their assumption of that monumental “if?”  Do they really think a government (not just Obama’s administration) that has the present IRS, the present DoJ, the present HHS, the present EPA, etc can be trusted to honor secret limits?

Further, the Washington Post led their article with this:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs….

That’s content, not just address packets (the Internet’s analogue to phone numbers).

Given all of this, and the associated secrecy, I have to wonder who else is being investigated.  Conservative Americans, perhaps?  Americans who disagree with this government’s policies?

Finally, and this can’t be emphasized enough: we have no security without our individual liberties.  Ben Franklin understood this; it’s unfortunate that this conservative newspaper has made this mistake.

Holder’s Defense

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On 15 May, Attorney General Eric Holder testified under oath before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that

With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something that I have ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy.

Yet he had already been consulted concerning, and subsequently approved, a search warrant application to search the personal emails of an individual reporter (James Rosen of Fox News), a warrant that said in part

Because of the Reporter’s [Rosen’s] own potential criminal liability in this matter….

A three-page Department of Justice letter to the Chairmen of the House Judiciary Committee and that committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations is cynically unresponsive (quite aside from the fact that while the chairmen had addressed their concern on the “disconnect” to Holder, the latter didn’t deign respond, instead having an underling do so).

The letter devoted two and a half pages first to piously proclaiming Holder’s reverence for the role of a free press in American society and then to outlining the way getting warrants to search members of the press is supposed to work.  The underling then proclaimed that there was and is no disconnect between the facts of Holder’s testimony and the fact of the warrant’s accusation.  That’s it—just a bald, unsubstantiated pronouncement.  The underling offered not the least shred of evidence to support that claim.  The underling did, though, include this shocker in his penultimate paragraph:

At no time during the pendency of this matter—before or after seeking the search warrant—have prosecutors sought approval to bring criminal charges against the reporter.

DoJ and writers of the Left have made much of that word “potential,” saying that there was no prosecution after the fact, as though this non sequitur eliminates any potential.

Yet Holder did not testify “with regard to prosecution;” he testified explicitly to its potential.  And the warrant he’d already approved at the time of his testimony spoke explicitly about that potential.

It’s clear that Holder still has some tap dancingexplaining to do in order to reconcile his sworn testimony with the content of the search warrant he’d approved prior to his sworn testimony.

But there’re an additional couple of questions in my mind that goes to Holder’s fitness as the US’ chief prosecutor.  What kind of prosecutor accuses a man of criminal activity—that warrant—in order to obtain a search warrant while, at the time of the accusation, having no intent of prosecuting that man should the warrant produce the relevant evidence?

Did Holder lie to the judge in his warrant—he didn’t consider the reporter to be “potentially” criminally liable at the time?  Related to that, is it normal DoJ practice to deliberately mislead a judge with such ruses in order to get a warrant to conduct a search?  And: if the warrant is unobtainable without such shenanigans, how legitimate can the warrant be?

The DoJ letter can be read here.  The Rosen search warrant can be read here.

A Thought on the IRS

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Peggy Noonan wants an investigation into the IRS and its behavior over the last few years.  She has ample justification for one:

We do not know who ordered the targeting of conservative groups and individuals, or why, or exactly when it began.  We don’t know who executed the orders or directives. We do not know the full scope or extent of the scandal.  We don’t know, for instance, how many applicants for tax-exempt status were abused.

We know the IRS commissioner wasn’t telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: “There’s absolutely no targeting.”  We have learned that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting.  …  We know the tax-exempt bureau Ms Lerner ran did not simply make mistakes because it was overwhelmed with requests—the targeting began before a surge in applications.  And Ms Lerner did not learn about the targeting in 2012—the IRS audit timeline shows she was briefed in June 2011.  She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office.  But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: “Everything comes from the top.”

And, she points out that we know about Catherine Engelbrecht.  We also know that the weight of the targets do not support the premise of this being simply an inability by low-level IRS employees to interpret the relevant tax law—”they” interpreted it, in Noonan’s words, “with a vengeance.”  And we know who “they” is: as a worker in the IRS’ Cincinnati office told the Washington Post,

Everything comes from the top.  We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them.  There has to be a directive.

“The top” would include Lerner, who after denying any wrong-doing then pled the 5th in an effort to prevent anyone questioning whether that was true.  “The top” would include the ex-IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman, who lied to the House of Representatives when he testified that there was no targeting going on—even as it then was going full tilt.  “The top” would include soon-to-be ex-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, who actively stonewalled, if not outright lied to, the House during his own testimony.

Noonan wants an investigation, a dead serious one:

The IRS has colorfully demonstrated that it cannot investigate itself.  The Obama administration wants the FBI—which answers to Eric Holder’s Justice Department—to investigate, but that would not be credible.  The investigators of the IRS must be independent of the administration, or their conclusions will not be trustworthy.

An independent counsel, with all the powers of that office, is what we need.

As she says, if the IRS isn’t stopped now, it never will be.  But an independent investigation also will meet with stonewalling and delay—and we have two critical national elections coming up in 2014 and 2016, short one and three years away.

What’s needed is a complete elimination of the IRS and a new agency put into its place— with today’s IRS incumbents, at all levels, ineligible to apply for work there.  (Separately, but just as critically, a total reform of our tax code into a simple flat rate, no exceptions system is necessary—which would dovetail nicely with replacing the present IRS with a much smaller, simpler tax collection agency.)  Unfortunately, this both is no more likely to happen than a serious investigation, and it also will take time.

Which puts a premium on getting started.

Some Later Thoughts on Obama’s Counterterrorism Speech

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President Barack Obama had this to say, also, in that…speech:

We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.

Let’s see how he did that:

He banned interrogation techniques that produced results, after torture had already been banned for years.

He’s been pushing for five years to try terrorists and other illegal combatants as common criminals and to try Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in New York courts or to release them outright.

He interrupts interrogations in progress in order to read the prisoner his Miranda “rights.”

He had his Attorney General drop a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panthers and their white voter victims after the particular NBP miscreants had pled out.

He’s done nothing material about his DoJ’s program of running guns to Mexican drug cartels.

He’s had his HHS Secretary “encourage” fund “contributions” to his federal health insurance exchange from the insurance companies she regulates.

He’s doing nothing material about his Treasury Department’s IRS (which he falsely claims is an “Independent Agency”) program of targeting Americans and groups of Americans of whom he disapproves for the special treatments of tax audits, invasion of their donor lists, deliberate and prolonged delays on finalizing their tax exempt status applications.

He’s actively covering up his and his State and Defense failures in the run-up to the Benghazi terrorist attack in which an American ambassador and three men attached to him were murdered, their failures during the attack, and their failures in the aftermath.

He’s doing nothing material about his DoJ’s assault on our free press via secret seizure of phone records, emails, and obtaining search warrants by falsely accusing individual journalists of criminal activity.

He’s played a couple of rounds of gold with the House leadership and invited them to dinner, and then he’s castigated them for not kowtowing to him and giving him everything he wants.

That’s a powerful alignment.