In 2007, the Bush administrations Justice Department sent me a letter saying it was conducting a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information in my 2006 book, State of War.

When my lawyers called the Justice Department about the letter, the prosecutors refused to say I was not a subject of their leak investigation. That was ominous. If I were considered a subject, rather than simply a witness, it meant the government hadnt ruled out prosecuting me for publishing classified information.

From left to right: Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner.

Photo: Getty Images

Eventually after the Obama administration took over the case the Justice Department decided to treat me only as a witness and did not try to prosecute me.

But in the future, the outcome of a similar case for a journalist might be very different if Julian Assange is successfully prosecuted on the charges brought against him by President Donald Trumps Justice Department.

The Trump administration has charged Assange under the Espionage Act for conspiring to leak classified documents. The indictment focuses on his alleged efforts to encourage former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents to him and WikiLeaks. If the Assange prosecution is successful, it will set a dangerous precedent: that journalists can be prosecuted based on their interactions with sources who provide them with government secrets.

Such a precedent could make it extremely difficult for journalists to cover military, intelligence, and related national security matters, and thus leave the public in the dark about what the government is really doing around the world.

That is why the U.S. indictment of Julian Assange is so dangerous to liberty in America, and why the case against Assange should be dropped and he should be pardoned.

While Trump has still not publicly accepted his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, he has begun to issue a spate of pardons. On Tuesday, he issued pardons to a group that included two convicted of crimes in connection with the Trump-Russia investigation, and four former Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians.

Despite the stench surrounding Trumps latest pardons, supporters of several whistleblowers have launched public campaigns to lobby for pardons; the supporters of Assange and Edward Snowden have been the most vocal.

Like Assange, Snowden clearly deserves a pardon. Snowdens massive 2013 leak documented the full extent of the National Security Agencys domestic spying on Americans. But rather than recognize that Snowden has performed a public service, the U.S. government has forced him into exile in Russia. Meanwhile, Assange now sits in prison in Britain, awaiting extradition to face prosecution in the United States.

Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange demonstrate outside the Central Criminal Court after Assange appeared in court for a full extradition hearing on the last day of the trials in London on Oct. 01, 2020.

Photo: Hasan Esen/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Public support for the pardon of whistleblower Reality Winner has also begun to build. Winner was arrested in 2017 and accused of anonymously leaking an NSA document disclosing that Russian intelligence was seeking to hack into U.S. election voting systems. That document was allegedly leaked to The Intercept, which had no knowledge of the identity of its source. (The Intercepts parent company supported Winners legal defense through the First Look Medias Press Freedom Defense Fund, which I direct.) She pleaded guilty in the case in 2018 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison, the longest sentence ever imposed in a case involving a leak to the press.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court denied Winners request for compassionate early release after she contracted Covid-19 in prison. She remains in federal prison today.

Former Pentagon official J. William Leonard wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post earlier this week calling for Winners pardon, arguing in part that her prosecution constituted overreach by the government.

But there are other whistleblowers who deserve pardons as well.

During Trumps four years in office, his administration has arrested and charged eight government officials in leak cases. That is almost equal to the record nine (or 10, depending on how you count) leak prosecutions conducted by the Obama administration over eight years.

Four of the leak cases during the Trump administration were connected to disclosures related to Trump, the circle of people around him, and the Trump-Russia inquiry. The Justice Department was clearly under intense pressure from Trump to go after people who leaked stories that Trump didnt like.

Winners case was the first of those four. In addition, James Wolfe, the director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was charged in 2018 with making false statements to the FBI in connection with a leak investigation into a Washington Post story revealing that the government had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to monitor Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.

Wolfe pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with reporters and was sentenced to two months in prison.

Also in 2018, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, who was a senior adviser at the Treasurys Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, was charged with disclosing reports about financial transactions related to people under scrutiny in the Trump-Russia inquiry, including former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. She allegedly leaked the information to BuzzFeed News. In 2020, she pleaded guilty, and her sentencing is now scheduled for January 2021.

In 2019, John Fry, an IRS employee, was charged with leaking suspicious activity reports involving the financial transactions of Trumps former lawyer, Michael Cohen, including information about how a company owned by Cohen received $500,000 from a company with ties to a Russian oligarch. The Trump Justice Department recommended prison time for Fry, but in 2020, a federal judge instead gave Fry probation and ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine.

Other whistleblowers have also been caught up in Trumps crackdown, including FBI agent Terry Albury, who was arrested in 2018 and charged with leaking information about the systemic racial biases at the bureau, which were reported by The Intercept. And former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale was also arrested in 2019, charged with leaking information about the U.S. militarys use of drones to conduct targeted assassinations, also allegedly to The Intercept.

Former Minneapolis FBI agent Terry Albury, front, followed by his attorney, walks out of the federal courthouse in St. Paul after Albury was sentenced to four years in prison for leaking classified defense documents to a reporter on Oct. 18, 2018.

Photo: Shari L. Gross/Star Tribune/AP

While most of the public lobbying for pardons for whistleblowers has focused on Assange and Snowden, and to a lesser extent Winner, the other whistleblowers prosecuted by Trump have largely been forgotten.

For the most part, the small press freedom community has made the case for Assange and Snowden on the grounds of the First Amendment, press freedom, and government transparency. Yet the campaign to convince Trump to pardon Snowden and Assange has also attracted a strange group of extreme Trump supporters. They argue that pardoning the two men offers Trump the opportunity to stick it to the so-called deep state.

The deep state is, of course, the mythical beast at the heart of so many of Trumps conspiracy theories. Trump believes that a secret cabal of intelligence and national security officials has been trying to destroy him personally since at least the 2016 campaign.

It is important for press freedom advocates to steer clear of these deep state conspiracy theories and instead continue to argue for the pardons on the merits of press freedom. Indulging in Trumps fantasies in order to win the pardons will only taint the cause of press freedom in the future.

Its important for press freedom advocates to steer clear of deep state conspiracy theories and instead continue to argue for the pardons on the merits of press freedom.

As a journalist, I have spent much of my career covering, exposing, and criticizing the American national security establishment. Let there be no mistake: There is, in fact, a massive U.S. military-industrial complex, and a newer post-9/11 homeland security-industrial complex. Those two complexes overlap, comprising career military, intelligence, and federal law enforcement officials, executives at giant defense companies, and legions of smaller defense and intelligence contractors, as well as career political figures who take top positions in the defense and intelligence agencies when their party is in power, and become consultants or think-tank pundits when their party is out of power.

The military-industrial complex and the newer homeland security-industrial complex tend to support expansionist American national security and foreign policies, and since 9/11 have pushed for a continuation of American military involvement in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They are driven by greed and power, and they believe that endless war is good for business. As I wrote in Pay Any Price, my 2014 book, America has become accustomed to a permanent state of war. Only a small slice of society including many poor and rural teenagers fight and die, while a permanent national security elite rotates among senior government posts, contracting companies, think tanks and television commentary, opportunities that would disappear if America was suddenly at peace. To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

Whats more, the national security establishments power stems in part from its ability to suppress the truth about its activities at home and abroad, and thus it seeks to punish whistleblowers and journalists who try to disclose the truth. The CIA, the NSA, and other elements of the national security apparatus frequently apply pressure on the Justice Department and the White House to prosecute whistleblowers who disclose their abuses.

I have had firsthand experience with this ugly phenomenon.

But acknowledging the gravitational pull of a militaristic national security establishment toward war and imperialism doesnt mean that you believe in the existence of a deep state, as imagined by Trump and his allies.

Demagogues like Trump are dangerously effective at taking bits of truth and weaving conspiracy theories out of them. Trump has taken the truth about the existence of a military-industrial complex and twisted it into a conspiracy theory that claims that the military-industrial complex is actually a deep state out to destroy him personally. It is conspiracy theory victimology taken to its most extreme.

Rudy Giuliani appears before the Michigan House Oversight Committee for suspicion of voter fraud in Lansing, Mich., on Dec. 2, 2020.

Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images

Among Trumps ardent supporters, talk of a deep state often quickly descends into the madness of vile, rambling QAnon conspiracy theories.

Right-wing pundits and pro-Trump political figures, many of whom were longtime supporters of the governments draconian counterterrorism measures instituted after 9/11, including the NSAs illegal domestic spying program, suddenly became skeptics of the national security establishment when Trump began to complain about the investigation, conducted first by the FBI and later by special counsel Robert Mueller, into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible collaboration by the Trump campaign. Trumps claims that he has been the victim of a witch hunt, a hoax investigation perpetrated against him by the deep state, have been the central theme of his conspiracy theory-laden presidency. And so ardent Trump supporters who accepted Trumps deep state conspiracy theories now view pardons for Assange and Snowden through the Russia hoax narrative.

Newsmax, the pro-Trump website, recently published a column calling for pardons for Assange and Snowden. If there is any way to thoroughly get back at the left over the next month, President Trump should make it a priority to pardon those individuals whose clemency would get the attention of the deep state, wrote Kenny Cody at Newsmax. For the deep state has worked against this president and his administration unlike any other previously. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected Republicanrepresentative from Georgia who has been criticized for being a QAnon supporter, also tweeted her support for pardons for Assange and Snowden.

A smattering of Assange supporters are echoing the line of these pro-Trump pundits and right-wing politicians.

For example, Assanges partner, Stella Morris, said on Fox News recently that she wants Trump to pardon Assange to protect him from the deep state. George Christensen, a member of Australias parliament, sent a message to Trump on a website devoted to a pardon for Assange, who is also an Australian.Christensen wrote, The same people who are trying to take the election from you are the ones trying to prosecute Julian Assange.

Rep.Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat and one-time Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted that Trump should pardon Snowden and Assange because they exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.

What makes any endorsement of the deep state trope by advocates of Assange and Snowden particularly dangerous now is that it comes at the same time that Trump is employing his persecution fantasies to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him by a pro-Biden deep state.

The danger of enabling Trumps deep state rhetoric was highlighted by a frightening story on Saturday, when the New York Times reported that Trump met on Friday with conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell and discussed making her some sort of special counsel to investigate baseless claims of voter fraud that Trump believes cost him the election. The same story revealed that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has talked about trying to seize voting machines from around the country to try to prove the fiction that they were rigged against Trump.

As the pro-Trump supporters pushing for pardons for Assange and Snowden remain silent on so many of the other leak cases brought during the Trump administration, they have also said nothing to counter Trumps dangerous and hateful anti-press rhetoric, which has created a toxic climate for reporters working in the United States. Trumps constant attacks on the press have convinced his supporters as well as local, conservative politicians and law enforcement officials to intensify their rhetorical, legal, and physical attacks on journalists around the nation.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, shows that there have been 120 cases of a journalist arrested or detained on the job in the United States in 2020. The tracker found that during one week at the height of the racial justice protests in late May and early June, more reporters were arrested in the U.S. than in the previous three years combined. The tracker also found that more than a third of those journalists arrested were also beaten, hit with rubber bullets, or chemical agents.

The bottom line: Advocates of press freedom must remain disciplined as they campaign for the pardons for whistleblowers and make their arguments on the merits of press freedom. They must be careful not to indulge Trumps conspiracy theories while they lobby for the pardons.

Accepting Trumps insane conspiracy theories in order to get him to do the right thing has been the downfall of many prominent figures during Trumps presidency. Enabling Trumps worst instincts never works and only shreds the reputations of those who have sought to appease him.

More:
Snowden and Assange Deserve Pardons. So Do the Whistleblowers Trump Imprisoned. - The Intercept

Writing todays column felt like the Before Times: Watch plays, write about them, hope other people decide to see them. Except everything we saw was on screens instead of in theaters. We shared the experience with one other person and an old dog. We didnt care what we were wearing. Sometimes we ate crunchy snacks.

Screens are what we have these days, and were lucky to have them. Over the past several months, the choice for theaters for all performing arts organizations has been to stream or go silent. We miss the same things you do: crowds, people-watching, running into friends, the powerful connection we feel when were in a room together, held together by whats happening on a stage.

Were eager to return to live, in-person theater, dance, and music, but we wont do it until we feel absolutely safe. Which wont happen anytime soon. Meanwhile, weve found that screen casting or mirroring streams to our TV makes them more watchable. And, if you can spring for one, a soundbar with a subwoofer makes them more listenable. Way more.

Here are four plays, all virtual, worth watching and why. Weve put them in order by which ends first.

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Jungle Theater: Kate Cortesis Is Edward Snowden Single? Cortesi didnt write her play to go online, but director Christina Baldwin saw the potential for something new: an almost seamless blend of words and technology, very of-the-moment and groundbreaking in its way. Using green screens, split screens, animation, saturated solid colors and two excellent young actors, Becca Hart and Isabella Star LaBlanc (first seen together in The Wolves), the Jungle made Snowden seem made for streaming.

Along with their main roles as 20-somethings Mimi and April, Hart and LaBlanc play multiple characters in a jam-packed, fast-moving (maybe slightly too busy) comedy about a friendship challenged, a romance imagined and the meaning of integrity. FMI and tickets ($35). Some adult language. Audio description version available. Through Saturday, Dec. 26.

Guthrie Theater: Dickens Holiday Classic.For a time, because COVID, there wasnt going to be a Christmas Carol at the Guthrie this year. We canceled everything, Artistic Director Joe Haj said Friday in a virtual conversation with filmmaker E.G. Bailey. We shut down. Everything was gone. There wasnt a path to getting Christmas Carol on stage.

But Haj didnt want to skip this year. To him, Charles Dickens story of empathy, humanity and transformation was as important now as it ever has been in its 177-year history. Not to mention its 46-year history at the Guthrie.

Screen shot

Nathaniel Fuller in "Dickens' Holiday Classic."

Shot over 11 days on the Guthries proscenium stage, using costumes and set pieces from A Christmas Carol (and following strict COVID protocols), its the ghost story we know and love, pared down and told more intimately. Minus the big sets, huge cast, turntable stage, crowd scenes and special effects, the story is more direct and the language more beautiful.

Dickens Holiday Classic is not just a pandemic-era substitute for the Guthries usual holiday spectacle. Its a gem in its own right. During the virtual conversation, Bailey described it as a Palestinian-American [Haj] and a Liberian-American [Bailey] telling one of the greatest English stories ever. He also pointed out that it was filmed by the most diverse film crew in the city.

Dickens Holiday Classic is available on demand, meaning you can watch it whenever you want. FMI and tickets ($10; free to K-12 schools). Through Thursday, Dec. 31.

Walking Shadow Theatre Company: Charlie Bethels The Odyssey.This isnt a Walking Shadow production, but a filmed performance, using multiple cameras, of Bethel doing his one-man show. And this isnt Chapmans Homer, but Bethels own adaptation of the epic tale in contemporary language, with enough familiar phrases rosy-fingered dawn, wine-dark sea to keep us anchored to the original.

If Homer were alive today, he would love this version, because it speaks so broadly and makes The Odyssey so accessible.

Screen shot

Charlie Bethel in The Odyssey.

Watching The Odyssey reminded us of Stephen Yoakams An Iliad, which the Guthrie presented in 2013. Maybe this is how these ancient stories should be told, by one brilliant actor alone on a stage. FMI and tickets ($10 minimum choose-your-price). Contains adult language. On demand through Thursday, Dec. 31.

Guthrie Theater, PlayCo (New York), Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Washington, DC), American Repertory Theater at Harvard University and Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Amir Nizar Zuabis This Is Who I Am. For the second time this year, Guthrie audiences can see a play by Palestinian playwright Zuabi. The first was in January in the Dowling Studio, when the Guthrie presented another theaters production of his play Grey Rock. For This Is Who I Am, the Guthrie was part of a national cohort of arts institutions who got together to support a world premiere.

This is a livestream in the true sense of the word: Every performance is live. (There were technical difficulties on the day we saw it, and after a pause the actors started over.) The story an estranged father and son, one in Palestine and the other in New York, trying to connect by cooking a family recipe together over Zoom feels immediate and personal in a time when online connections with loved ones are all we have. The play is also about grief and loss; the fathers wife/sons mother has recently died, and the recipe is one she always prepared for the family. Its a peasant dish she explained by saying This is who I am.

Screen shot

Ramsey Faragallah and Yousof Sultani in This Is Who I Am.

Ramsey Faragallah (Bull, Homeland, The Blacklist) is the father, Yousof Sultani (The Brave, Empire, Chicago Fire) the son. Evren Odcikin of Oregon Shakespeare Festival is the director, with the Guthries Joseph Haj serving as production dramaturg. FMI and tickets (start at $15.99). Through Sunday, Jan. 3. Note: Tickets are sold by Woolly Mammoth and all times are EST.

If timing is everything, were confused by The Stand, the new limited-event TV series that premiered on CBS All Access last Thursday.

Its based on a 1978 Stephen King novel that sold millions of copies. At more than 1,000 pages, its a page-turner. For the new TV series, King wrote a new ending, one that gives Fannie a bigger role. (That was not a spoiler. Showrunner Ben Cavell told Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday about it during an online conversation before the series premiere.)

So whats it about? A pandemic that starts when a weaponized strain of flu gets loose in the world. People start sneezing, coughing and running fevers. Soon 7 billion are dead. A few survive. Some are good and some are evil.

When COVID hit, a lot of people watched Steven Soderberghs 2011 thriller Contagion. Google Best Pandemic Movies and Virus Outbreak Movies and youll find many lists online. Post-apocalyptic films are entertaining, with limitless opportunities for gruesome special effects.

CBS

Whoopi Goldberg in a scene from The Stand.

Weve read and enjoyed many Stephen King books. Weve seen and enjoyed several movies based on Stephen King books. But the more we saw of episode 1, the more uncomfortable we became. Uncomfortable and sad and borderline angry.

Maybe The Stand is just too close to real life. Today, right now, there are more than 18 million COVID cases and 323,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. New episodes will air every Thursday until Feb. 11. How many will be dead by then?

And maybe The Stand is too close to Christmas?

Its being called the most 2020 show, like thats a good thing. Thanks, but well pass.

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See more here:
Four plays to watch online right now; and what about 'The Stand'? - MinnPost

David Sanger, building on a Reuters story, reports in the New York Times that some country, probably Russia, broke into a range of key government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems. The breach appears to be much broader. [N]ational security-related agencies were also targeted, though it was not clear whether the systems contained highly classified material. The Department of Homeland Security appears to be one of those agencies. Sanger says that the intrusions have been underway for months and that the hackers have had free rein for much of the year. The original Reuters story on Dec. 13 noted that people familiar with the hacks feared the hacks uncovered so far may be the tip of the iceberg. On the evening of Dec. 13, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an Emergency Directive to all federal civilian agencies to review their networks for indicators of compromise.

This attack is the latest in a long string of other serious breaches of government networks by insiders and outsiders in the past decadefor example, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2014-2015; the White House, State Department, and Joint Chiefs email breach during those same years; the 2016 theft of CIA hacking tools; the Shadow Brokers theft of National Security Agency tools in 2017; and Edward Snowdens mammoth disclosures in 2013 and beyond. These events constitute a stunning display of the U.S. governments porous defenses of sensitive government networks and databases.

The U.S. approach to preventing these breaches appears to involve five elements: (a) tighten insider controls, (b) thicken defenses, (c) indict (but very rarely prosecute) responsible individuals, (d) impose sanctions on the responsible countries and (e) live in adversary networks to monitor and interrupt actions against the United States before they beginthe so-called defend forward strategy. The United States is probably retaliating for some of these breaches, but there is little information on that in the public record.

On the whole, these elements have failed to stop, prevent or deter high-level breaches. Of course, we do not know what we dont know, both about unreported or undetected breaches and about successful interruption of attempted breaches. Nor does the public know anything about how the costs of these breaches compare to the huge benefits, on the whole, of the digitalization of government information. But the public record is not a happy one for the U.S. government across the past few administrations.

For me, the Russia breach raises three questions.

First, is defend forward all its built up to be? Cyber Command has been touting its successes in, for example, preventing interference in the 2018 and 2020 elections. But the strategy did not prevent the Russia breach. As Sanger notes, while the government was worried about Russian intervention in the 2020 election, key agencies working for the administrationand unrelated to the electionwere actually the subject of a sophisticated attack that they were unaware of until recent weeks. I have always wondered how Cyber Command possibly possessed the intelligence resources and cyber tools to monitor, detect and prevent all possible major cyber threats. It will be interesting to see what Commander of Cyber Command Gen. Paul Nakasone, who has not been shy about the value and power of defend forward, says about how the strategy worked here, whether and why it failed, and what those answers imply about the value of the defend forward overall.

Second, is what the Russians did to U.S. government networks different from what the National Security Agency does on a daily basis? Government-to-government electronic espionage and data theft, including on this scale, is almost certainly commonplace. As then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said after the OPM breach: You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don't think we'd hesitate for a minute (emphasis added). It is important to keep this in mind when assessing the Russian operation. The public in the United States receives asymmetric information both about the cyber exploitations of our adversaries (Americans hear loads more about adversary activity than U.S. government activity abroad) and about breaches (Americans hear loads more about adversary breaches of U.S. systems than U.S. breaches in adversary systems).

Third, knowledge of what the U.S. government is doing in this realm is necessary to assess, among other things, whether the current posture of U.S. activity in foreign networks is optimal. One important question is: Does the United States gain more from living in adversary networks than adversaries gain from living in American networks? If not, might the United States pull back on some of its digital activities abroad in exchange for relief from the pain caused by our adversaries activities in our digital networks? I have suggested before that cooperation (in the sense of mutual restraint) may be the least bad approach to defending our networks, since the other approaches dont seem to be working very well. There would be many challenges, of course, including clarity on what counts as cooperationthat is, what precisely will each side not doand verification. But these challenges do not seem to me insurmountable in theory and are worth at least exploring. And yet U.S. government officials never publicly discuss restraint as a possible strategy.

Read the original here:
Quick Thoughts on the Russia Hack - Lawfare

The Patriot Act was passed in 2001 in the wake of the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In the name of combatting terrorism, the sweeping law vastly expanded the federal governments surveillance powers and ability to spy on Americans. In the nearly two decades since, the National Security Agencys mass warrantless surveillance of American citizens was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, a key government spying program was declared illegal by a federal court, and only a minuscule percentage of federal spying has been tied to terrorism.

Nevertheless, much of the Patriot Act has remained on the books and in use for decades. Two members of Congress from opposite sides of the political spectrum want to change that.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a progressive Democrat, has just introduced a bill alongside libertarian-leaning Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to repeal the Patriot Act, revoke much of the FISA Amendments Act, and restore Americans privacy protections. Their legislation would do the following (and more):

The case for this legislation is rooted in privacy rights and the need to restore Fourth Amendment stipulations that protect Americans from being spied on by their government.

The Constitution of the United States guarantees fundamental rights and freedoms for every Americanincluding the right to privacy and protection against illegal search and seizure without probable cause, Gabbard said. Unfortunately, the so-called Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act allowed the intelligence community to conduct mass surveillance on Americans, collecting information about our phone calls and our emails.

The Patriot Act contains many provisions that violate the Fourth Amendment and have led to a dramatic expansion of our domestic surveillance state, Massie added. "Our Founding Fathers fought and died to stop the kind of warrantless spying and searches that the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act authorize. It is long past time to repeal the Patriot Act and reassert the constitutional rights of all Americans.

As Massie indicates, this legislation is long overdue. Fortunately, it may find some allies in the Senate, given that figures such as Sen. Rand Paul have similarly opposed the Patriot Act and other Fourth Amendment intrusions. However, the legislation is likely to meet strong opposition from members of both parties establishments, so the chances of it becoming law in the immediate future are, its fair to say, quite slim.

Why?

The biggest reason is that expansions of government power are inherently difficult to roll back. In times of emergency, citizens acquiesce to sweeping expansions of state power they would never accept in normal times. But even after the emergency has passed, the government retains much of this power, because removing it would require government officials to vote to decrease their own powersomething most politicians are unlikely to do.

Thus, government power increases over time as it spikes during crises but never fully recedes. This cycle is what economist Robert Higgs dubbed the ratchet effect. And it's a lesson Americans should keep in mind during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whether Gabbard and Massies bill is successful or not, it offers an important reminder. If Americans accept extreme intrusions of government power during times of crisis, those invasions of our liberty may well remain on the books for decades to come.

See the article here:
Tulsi Gabbard and Thomas Massie Team Up to Take a Stand for the Fourth Amendment - Foundation for Economic Education

The best VPN acts as an intermediary between your internet service provider (ISP) and the rest of the net, creating a secure tunnel through which you perform all of your internet activities. The boom in popularity of US VPN services over the last few years can be explained by the enhanced anonymity and privacy they offertheir use of strong encryption can help prevent ISPs from monitoring and logging your activity.

The best services also prevent ISPs from blocking websites based on your location, which can be particularly useful if you wish to surf freely when visiting certain countries outside of the US.

One can see the justification for using a VPN in countries such as China, where large portions of the Internet are censored, but why might you want to use a VPN in the US specifically?

Youve more than likely experienced the frustration of reading about some highly anticipated new TV series, only to find out that for some obscure reason your streaming provider isnt showing it in the US.

VPNs give you a selection of servers that you can connect to in multiple geographic locations, thus hiding your true location from the websites that you visit and opening up the possibility of watching geo-blocked content.

This so-called location spoofing lets you watch streaming content from whatever country you like. If you wish, for example, to spend the entire evening checking out the Netflix Mexico library or watching some compelling content on BBC iPlayer, you can do so easily with a streaming VPN.

Identity theft is a major problem in the US, accounting for billions of dollars of financial loss for US citizens every year. One way a criminal might get access to your private data is when you connect to an unencrypted public Wi-Fi network such as in an airport or a caf.

If you use a VPN while connecting to a public network, your data becomes encrypted and secure, making it practically impossible for another person to decipher it and use it for fraudulent activity.

Another favorite tool of fraudsters is malwaremalicious software that attempts to send your private data to criminals once it's installed on your device. Certain VPN providers, such as NordVPN, maintain databases of sites known to contain malware and block you from accessing them, letting you surf more safely.

The laws governing data protection in the US are labyrinthinewhile some laws exist at a federal level, much of the legislation changes from state to state.

If you wish to avoid wasting hours researching state-specific data protection laws any time you hop on an inbound flight in the US, we recommend availing of a secure VPN service to protect your data from prying eyes and prevent it from being monetized by ISPs.

The US government has a history of spying on its citizensfrom the ramp-up in surveillance following the 9-11 attacks to the now-infamous PRISM program, dramatically disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013, which monitors private communications within the US on a massive scale.

Note that while VPNs are an excellent way of making it difficult for individuals or agencies to snoop on your internet activity and location, they are not infallible. If you are keen to surf the net with even better security we suggest using the TOR protocol, ideally in conjunction with a private VPN.

The only way of completely ensuring that the US authorities arent spying on your communications is to avoid internet use altogether, but if youre keen to not go to such extremes, we recommend getting a VPN and taking advantage of the added layer of security and anonymity that this technology offers.

ExpressVPN stands out from the competition in terms of price, features, and value. With servers in nearly 100 countries and plenty within the US, blazing connection speeds, and reliable access to multiple streaming services, ExpressVPN has everything that one would need from a VPN.

While some users may prefer certain features of other top VPNs, its the best overall option for most users and now Toms Guide readers can claim three months absolutely free.View Deal

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Why do you need a VPN in the US? - Tom's Guide

The armed Florida State Trooper raid on Monday on the Tallahassee Florida home of data scientist and COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones was shocking on many levels. This incident smacks of retaliation against someone working to provide the public with truthful information about the most pressing issue facing both Florida and our nation: the spread and impact of COVID-19. It was an act of retaliation that depended on two broken systems that EFF has spent decades trying to fix: first, that our computer crime laws are so poorly written and broadly interpreted that they allow for outrageous misuses of police, prosecutorial and judicial resources; and second, that police continue to overstate the reliability of IP addresses as a means of identifying people or locations.

All too often, misunderstandings about computers and the digital networks lead to gross miscarriages of justice.

On the first point, it seems that the police asked for, the prosecutors sought, (and the Court granted) a warrant for a home raid by state police in response to a text message sent to a group of governmental and nongovernmental people working on tracking COVID, urging members to speak up about government hiding and manipulating information about the COVID outbreak in Florida.

This isnt just a one-off misuse: in other cases, weve seen the criminalization of unauthorized access used to threaten security researchers who investigate the tools we all rely on, prosecute a mother for impersonating her daughter on a social network, threaten journalists seeking to scrape Facebook to figure out what it is doing with our data, and prosecute employees who did disloyal things on company computers. Unauthorized access was also used to prosecute our friend Aaron Swartz, and threaten him with decades in jail for downloading academic articles from the JSTOR database. Facing such threats, he committed suicide. How could a text message urging people to do the right thing ever result in an armed police home raid? Sadly, the answer lies in the vagueness and overbreadth of the Florida Computer Crime law, which closely mirrors the language in the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (laws in many states across the country are likewise based on the CFAA).

Police all too often liken an IP address to a fingerprint"

The law makes it a crime a serious felony - to have unauthorized access to a computer. But it doesnt define what unauthorized means. In cases across the country, and in one currently pending before the U.S. Supreme court called Van Buren, weve seen that the lack of a clear definition and boundaries around the word authorized causes great harm. Here, based upon the Affidavit in the Rebekah Jones case, the police took the position that sending a single text message to a group that you are not (or are no longer) a part of is unauthorized access to a computer and so is a crime that merits an armed home police raid. This, despite the obvious fact that no harm happened as a result of people getting a single message urging them to do the right thing.

In fact, if youve ever shared a password with a family member or asked someone else to log into a service on your behalf or even lied about your age on a dating website, youve likely engaged in unauthorized access under some court interpretations. We urged the Supreme Court in the Van Buren case to rule that violations of terms of use (as opposed to overcoming technical blocks) can never be criminal CFAA violations. This wont entirely fix the law, but it will take away some of the most egregious misuses.

This case confirms our serious, ongoing national failure to protect whistleblowers.

Even with the broader definition of unauthorized, though, its unclear whether the text message in question was criminal. The Affidavit from the police confirms that the text group shared a single user name and password and some have even said that the credentials were publicly available. Either way, its hard to see how the text could have been unauthorized if there was no technical or other notice to Ms. Jones that sending a message to the list was not allowed. Yet this wafer-thin reed was accepted by a Court as a basis for a search warrant of Ms. Jones family home.

On the second point, the Affidavit indicates that the police relied heavily on the IP address of the sender of the message to seek a warrant to send armed police to Ms. Jones home. The affidavit fails to state how the police were able to connect the IP address with the physical address, simply stating that they used investigative resources. Press reports claim that Comcast the ISP that handled that IP address - did confirm that Ms. Jones home was the customer associated with the IP address, but that isn't stated in the Affidavit. In other cases, the use of notoriously imprecise public reverse IP lookup tools has resulted in raids of the wrong homes, sometimes multiple times, so it is important that the police explain to the Court what they did to confirm the address and not just hide behind investigative sources.

EFF has long warned that the overreliance on IP addresses as a basis for either the identity or location of a suspect is dangerous. Police all too often liken an IP address to a fingerprint, a misleading comparison that suggests that IP-based identifications are much more reliable than they really are, making the metaphor a dangerous one. The metaphor really falls apart when you consider the reality that a single IP address used by a home network is usually providing Internet connectivity to multiple people with several different digital devices, making it difficult to pinpoint a particular individual. Here, the police did tell the court that that Ms. Jones had recently worked for the Florida Department of Health, so the IP address wasnt the only fact before the court, but its still pretty thin for a home invasion warrant, rather than, say, a simple police request that Ms. Jones come in for questioning.

Even if it turns out Florida police were correct in this case and for now Ms. Jones has denied sending the text the rest of us should be concerned that IP addresses alone, combined with some undisclosed investigative resources can be the basis for a judge allowing armed police into your home. And it shows that judges must scrutinize both IP address evidence and law enforcement claims about their reliability, along with other supporting evidence, before authorizing search warrants.

This case confirms our serious, ongoing national failure to protect whistleblowers. And in this case - as with Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning and many others - its clear that part of protecting whistleblowers means updating our computer crime laws to ensure that they can't be used as ready tools for prosecutorial overreach and misconduct. We also need to continue to educate judges about the unreliability of IP addresses so they require more information than just vague conclusions from police before granting search warrants.

All too often, misunderstandings about computers and the digital networks lead to gross miscarriages of justice. But computers and the Internet are here to stay. Its long past time we ensured that our criminal laws and processes stopped relying on outdated and imprecise words like authorized and metaphors like fingerprints, and instead apply technical rigor when deliberating about technology.

Read more here:
Raid on COVID Whistleblower in Florida Shows the Need to Reform Overbroad Computer Crime Laws and the Risks of Over-Reliance on IP Addresses - EFF

Curious minds deserve insightful books, and there was no shortage of excellent titles this year. Here is the Monitors list of superlative nonfiction books published in 2020, from histories to memoirs and everything in between.

Casteby Isabel Wilkerson

In her stirring follow-up to The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson persuasively argues that racism alone does not explain Americas social divisions. Rather, the United States ought to be understood as having a race-based caste system, one whose hierarchies, though artificial, are remarkably enduring.

Demagogueby Larry Tye

Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 597 pp.

Bestselling biographer Larry Tye writes a long and comprehensive biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the polarizing spearhead of the Red Scare of the 1950s and Tye contends the origin of some disturbing features in our 21st-century political landscape.

Warholby Blake Gopnik

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes, Andy Warhol is credited with saying. But there is nothing fleeting about his legacy as an artist, filmmaker, and self-created pop-culture phenomenon. His life and work are examined in detail in Blake Gopniks biography. Warhol devotees will rejoice, and more casual readers will receive an education in all things Andy.

Unionby Colin Woodard

Colin Woodard tells not the story of how America became a nation, but rather of how America crafted its own version of its national history, and how that national mythology has changed over the decades.

Stories of the Saharaby Sanmao

Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated from the Chinese by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury, 416 pp.

As a Chinese woman born in 1943, Sanmao was a pioneering global citizen. These 20 essays about living in one of the harshest areas of the world in the 1970s are testimony to her audacity and courage.

Just Usby Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine follows her prize-winning Citizen: An American Lyric with a brilliant and timely examination of whiteness in America. This consciousness-raising, bravura combination of personal essays, poems, photographs, and cultural commentary works on so many levels and is a skyscraper in the literature on racism.

Dark Mirrorby Barton Gellman

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman writes an insider account of the breaking of Edward Snowdens story and its wider implications for the modern world, all told in prose as gripping as a spy thriller.

Cross of Snowby Nicholas A. Basbanes

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes, Alfred A. Knopf, 465 pp.

The poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow arent in fashion today, but in the first major biography of the fabled New England poet in many years, Nicholas A. Basbanes argues that Longfellow is making a comeback. His exhaustively researched account of Longfellows career should give that reappraisal a boost.

Becoming Wildby Carl Safina

Carl Safina looks at three species the sperm whale, the scarlet macaw, and the chimpanzee to chart all the ways they build and sustain their societies. He explores how those cultures echo and differ from our own.

The Golden Threadby Ravi Somaiya

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjld was negotiating an end to the Congolese civil war when he died in a plane crash in 1961. To this day, many believe he was assassinated. Journalist Ravi Somaiya explores one of the most compelling mysteries of the Cold War in this grim and absorbing book.

Abeby David S. Reynolds

Abraham Lincoln had less than a year of formal education; he has often been portrayed as inexperienced and unprepared to lead. David S. Reynolds monumental, reverential biography rejects that narrative, arguing that Lincolns immersion in the high and low culture of 19th-century America, along with his deep moral convictions, equipped him to steer the Union through the Civil War.

Eleanorby David Michaelis

This riveting, cinematic biography of Americas longest-serving first lady spans Eleanor Roosevelts lonely childhood, her frosty marriage to FDR, their White House years, her intimate relationships outside their marriage, and her widowhood, during which she became an advocate for human rights.

Veritasby Ariel Sabar

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar, Doubleday, 416 pp.

In 2012, a religion scholar announced a discovery: an ancient papyrus fragment that suggested that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene may have been married. Expanding on his 2016 article for The Atlantic, Ariel Sabar digs into the story of the papyrus and the couple who tried to pass it off as real.

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The Adventurers Sonby Roman Dial

Renowned biologist and explorer Roman Dial searches for his 27-year-old son, who has gone missing in the jungles of Costa Rica. Part memoir, part mystery, The Adventurers Son is a story of a fathers love for his son, and for the natural world.

Excerpt from:
The best nonfiction books of 2020 offer wisdom and insight - Christian Science Monitor

By far the greatest beneficiary of the whistleblower revolution is the Western Balkans. This region, where budding democracies are struggling to succeed in the wake of the Communist era, may seem an unlikely place for whistleblower rights to be advancing. It is actually because of this struggle that these rights are being strengthened more than in any other region in the world.

Every Western Balkan country now has in place a whistleblower protection law that meets most European and international standards. All of these laws have been passed since 2013, thanks to the hard work of activists, journalists and elected officials, and with support from the EU, the Council of Europe and the UN. This wave of new laws began in Bosnia and Herzegovina in December 2013 six months after Snowden went public with details of mass surveillance by US spy agencies.

With these laws now in place, every country in the region has set up an official system to receive, investigate and act on whistleblower reports and retaliation complaints. Most of these systems are overseen by anti-corruption agencies and ombudsman offices, which already have experience investigating crimes and protecting civil rights. Most of the agencies have whistleblower hotlines, specially trained staff and designated budgets.

We are pleased to report that in Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, these systems are starting to function rather well. In all of these countries, employees who reported crime or corruption have been protected from retaliation, in one fashion or another. Officials have developed a high level of expertise in whistleblower protection concepts and procedures, and are working on behalf of citizens.

These new laws and systems are not perfect. Some gaps and shortcomings are limiting the ability of officials to investigate cases and grant stronger protections. But the initial results are very positive. This is particularly true in light of the fact that with the exception of South Korea, the US and a very few other countries, well-functioning systems are largely absent.

Out of a justified concern for the whistleblowers, and to protect their identity and all of their identifying information, we are not at liberty to release any details of these recent cases. In the future we hope to report some details in order to highlight these important successes, while preserving confidentiality of the citizens.

Read this article:
Southeast Europe is Pioneering a Global 'Whistleblower Revolution' - Balkan Insight

Theres no denying that the past 100 years have been a transformative time for the entire world, but particularly for the United States as a nation. With the two major political parties established, the country cast their votes in more than 25 elections, leading to the election of the first African American president and the first female vice presidentwho is also the first person of color to be elected to that role.

It was also a century of war, as the United States entered into World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Iraq War, to name a few. While the armed forces were finally desegregated, the cost and bloodshed associated with what many citizens deemed to be unnecessary endeavors led to strong antiwar protests that challenged Americans views of the countrys military entanglements.

National alliances grew and changed, with the United States entering NATO and engaging in a prolonged conflict with the Soviet Union and other potentially communist enemies.

While it has been a century tinged with hardship and strife, the United States has also seen a huge wave of social activism, as communities of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community fought to pass legislation that would truly grant Americans equal opportunity under the lawfrom the Civil Rights Act to the case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage across the country.

To put these changes into perspective, Stacker compiled a list of notable U.S. political occurrences from the past century from a variety of news articles, nonprofits, government pages, and historical records. From Warren G. Hardings election as the United States 29th president in 1921 to Joe Bidens election as the United States 46th president in 2020, read on to find out what was happening in American politics during the year you were born.

You may also like: States that have accepted the most refugees in the past decade

See more here:
US political history from the year you were born - Bryan-College Station Eagle

On November 16, the case of Bilal Abdul Kareem came on for argument before the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. The claim made by the Trump administration and accepted by the federal judge in September 2019 was that the US government could assassinate Bilal with a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. Because this was a matter of national security, neither Kareem nor the Supreme Court of the United States should have any say in the matter.

Reprieve, the organisation of lawyers fighting state-sponsored human rights abuses, and the pro bono DC firm of Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss originally brought the case on behalf of two people Kareem and Al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Zaidan. Kareem was brought up in New York by a mother dedicated to civil rights and, after wandering the stand-up comedian circuit for a while, he found his faith in Islam, and decided to stand up for the rights of Muslims in Syria as a war journalist. Zaidan was already in the media business, as Al Jazeeras Islamabad bureau chief, and he secured some scoops all the way up to Osama bin Laden. As a result of this, he was falsely labelled a member of al-Qaeda by the CIA, which we learned from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

The federal judge dismissed Zaidans case in her original order in 2018 as he had returned from Pakistan to Doha, and was not deemed realistically to be in fear of death. But, originally, the judge ruled in favour of Kareem, finding that this Black American had plausibly shown that his own government was trying to murder him. It was not clear why Kareem merited execution that was the CIAs secret. Perhaps they had tracked his movements to his interviews and did not like him broadcasting the views of a broad range of people involved in the Syrian civil war.

One matter was clear: on five occasions he had narrowly avoided death. His office building had been hit twice, and the US owed him for two vehicles they had apparently blown up moments after he had got out of them. He found it hard to believe when the first strike came but, by the fifth, he was sure his own country wanted him dead. After all, at the time the US was the only country deploying weaponised drones in the region.

This is, ultimately, a case of President Barack Obamas chickens coming home to roost in President Donald Trumps White House. Obama was the one who ramped up the execution without trial as a bizarre replacement for detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

He set no limit to where those deemed to be terrorists might be targeted. We would, he writes in his latest book, A Promised Land, hunt down terrorist suspects mostly inside but sometimes outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he did not actually limit this to terrorists: in 2009, inexorably, the kill list began to include drug dealers. Why not? We had a War on Drugs long before the War on Terror. President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines was allegedly responsible for 7,000 deaths of drug dealers in his first year in office and bragged that he had personally murdered a drug dealer. He deems the scourge of narcotics to be far more damaging to his society than terrorism.

It did not take long for the US Drug Enforcement Agency to argue that the Taliban was being funded by the Afghan heroin trade and this rapidly led to another euphemistic kill list (the Joint Prioritized Effects List, leaked by Edward Snowden), including drug dealers for elimination.

Imagine Donald Trumps excitement when he inherited this power. Now, in the waning days of his presidency, the lawyers in his Department of Justice are taking the Obama doctrine to its logical extreme. All Kareem wanted was an assurance that his government would not try to kill him again, which might not sound like much of an ask. But it was a bridge too far for Trumps lawyers when it came to the appeal in the District of Columbia. They announced that any fact related to who the president might wish to assassinate was top secret and they demanded that the judge respect a bright line national security privilege that, they insisted, allowed them to do what they like, when they like, with no oversight from the courts or anyone else. Horrifyingly, the federal judge agreed.

Obviously, we appealed to try to set the record straight. The judges on the federal appeals court seemed shocked, too, by the scope of Trumps power grab. Yet the government lawyer pushed even further. Not only is this a matter of national security, he argued, but any White House plan to murder Kareem is also an unreviewable political question. One judge demanded to know whether Trump claimed the unfettered power to assassinate her as well, perhaps sitting at her desk in the DC Circuit Courthouse.

Theres no difference between me and Kareem?she demanded of the government lawyer, incredulous. You would still argue political question just as you do here. And you would argue state secrets just as you do here. And if we rule for you, that means Im hosed. Nothing I can do about this death sentence.

If your question is: Can a court, once the [political or national security] privilege is properly invoked, the Trump lawyer replied, after some waffling, in that circumstance, the answer is no. In other words, the Trump administration was asserting that there was no difference, in principle, between killing Kareem in Idlib, Syria, and killing the judge in her office in Washington, DC.

This was no academic discussion, but a power grab made by a president who still refuses to admit that the vote went against him, and a Tyrannosaurus rex in its death throes can be very dangerous.

Do you appreciate how extraordinary that proposition is? exclaimed the incredulous jurist. That the US Government the executive branch [the president] can unilaterally decide to kill US citizens?

Perhaps I should not be writing this article. It might give Trump ideas, as he stews in the West Wing between his post-election rounds of golf. After all, under his theory he would not be limited to killing judges the same principle would apply to the patently political question of whether an opposition politician is a threat to national security (which, in Trumps case, is often conflated with Trump security). So, rather than waste time on frivolous law suits challenging the votes in Pennsylvania, why not just send a Predator drone to seek out Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

Trump would only be plagiarising the plans of one of his close friends. The consensus of Western intelligenceis that the order to kill Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny came directly from the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin appears to have taken the view that political opponents are, indeed, a threat to national security.

Trump is not going to do that (one must hope!) but when the US abandons the high ground, it prompts everyone to dive into the depths. The argument made by Trumps lawyer will allow Putin to tell Biden to back off if he complains about attempts to murder political opponents from Salisbury to Istanbul just as Obamas kill list prompted Duterte to tellthe former president to go to hell in a call about the drug assassinations. There has been much talk of an American descent into despotism under Trump. Perhaps our institutions are strong enough to withstand a direct assault. Perhaps the greater danger comes from an insidious grasp of extraordinary power.

Perhaps, indeed,the revelation that President Obama, operating off a government kill list, has been personally directing who should be targeted for death by military drones merely pushes us that much closer to that precipitous drop-off to authoritarianism. If so, we must remember the famous words of Edmund Burke: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing. Obamas initial insistence on the right to dispense with the right to a trial before execution is one of the most dangerous steps we have taken towards the cliff edge.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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Why should the US be afforded the power of assassination? - Al Jazeera English