The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons. Why Kinsley is Wrong About the Connection Between Democracy and the Publication of National Security Secrets. Michael Kinsley, in his review of Glenn Greenwald’s book, made the following claims about leaks of national security secrets: The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay.
But ultimately you can’t square this circle. I disagree with Kinsley, as both a descriptive matter and a normative matter.. As a descriptive matter, the press does effectively have the final say over the publication of U.S. national security secrets. How to resolve this paradox? Secret America: how states hide the source of their lethal injection drugs. Guardian challenges lethal injection secrecy in landmark Missouri lawsuit | Law. The growing secrecy adopted by death penalty states to hide the source of their lethal injection drugs used in executions is being challenged in a new lawsuit in Missouri, which argues that the American people have a right to know how the ultimate punishment is being carried out in their name.
The legal challenge, brought by the Guardian, Associated Press and the three largest Missouri newspapers, calls on state judges to intervene to put a stop to the creeping secrecy that has taken hold in the state in common with many other death penalty jurisdictions. The lawsuit argues that under the first amendment of the US constitution the public has a right of access to know “the type, quality and source of drugs used by a state to execute an individual in the name of the people”. It is believed to be the first time that the first amendment right of access has been used to challenge secrecy in the application of the death penalty. Top Secret America. Top Secret America | FRONTLINE. September 6, 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest traces the journey from 9/11 to the Marathon bombings and investigates the secret history of the 12-year battle against terrorism. Big Brother Is Watching You Drive July 17, 2013, 3:46 pm ET · by Sarah Childress Law enforcement agencies nationwide increasingly rely on automatic license-plate readers to track and store information on American drivers, a new report found, in the latest revelation on how the government gathers data on its citizens.
Is “Top Secret America” Making Us Safer? Live Chat Wed. 2 pm ET April 30, 2013, 9:50 pm ET · by Nathan Tobey Join us for a live chat about “Top Secret America: 9/11 to the Boston Bombings” with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, FRONTLINE producer Mike Wiser and Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen. The Boston Bombers: Who Knew What When April 30, 2013, 9:40 pm ET · by Sarah Childress The FBI and the CIA had been tipped off about one of the bombers two years ago.
Has the Balance Tipped? Mapping the Blind Spots: Developer Unearths Secret U.S. Military Bases. If you look closely enough on Google or Bing Maps, some places are blanked out, hidden from public view. Many of those places disguise secret or sensitive American military facilities. The United States military has a foothold in every corner of the world, with military bases on every continent. It's not even clear how many there are out there. The Pentagon says there are around 5,000 in total, and 598 in foreign countries, but those numbers are disputed by the media. But how do these facilities look from above? To answer that question, you first need to locate the bases. Which, as it turns out, is relatively easy. That's what Josh Begley, a data artist, found out when he embarked on a project to map all known U.S. military bases around the world, collect satellite pictures of them using Google Maps and Bing Maps, and display them all online.
"I wanted to apply this to a digital landscape," Begley told Mashable. Which leads us to the question: Is any of this actually a good idea? The NSA Files: PRISM & Boundless Information. FOIA. Court Rebukes White House Over "Secret Law" DC District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle yesterday ordered the Obama Administration to release a copy of an unclassified presidential directive, and she said the attempt to withhold it represented an improper exercise of “secret law.” The Obama White House has a “limitless” view of its authority to withhold presidential communications from the public, she wrote, but that view is wrong.
“The government appears to adopt the cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight– to engage in what is in effect governance by ‘secret law’,” Judge Huvelle wrote in her December 17 opinion. “The Court finds equally troubling the government’s complementary suggestion that ‘effective’ governance requires that a President’s substantive and non-classified directives to Executive Branch agencies remain concealed from public scrutiny,” she wrote.
She criticized the government for “the unbounded nature” of its claim. Former CIA officer charged in leaks. Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted. In its criminal filing, the Justice Department obscured many of the details of Kiriakou’s alleged disclosures. But the document suggests that Kiriakou was a source for stories by the New York Times and other news organizations in 2008 and 2009 about some of the agency’s most sensitive operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
These include the capture of alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaida and the interrogation of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In an appearance in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on Monday afternoon, Magistrate Judge John F. Kiriakou did not comment on the charges in court. Feds: Ex-NSA analyst had top-secret-plus info on home computers. Computers seized from a retired National Security Agency analyst's home in 2007 contained information that is classified at a level beyond "top secret," officials said in court filings Tuesday. A prosecutor and a senior NSA official made the claim to a federal court in Baltimore in response to a motion ex-NSA analyst Kirk Wiebe filed in November, demanding that the Federal Bureau of Investigation return items seized from Wiebe's Westminster, Md. home four-and-a-half years ago.
"Documents [found on hard drives in Wiebe's home] contain information that is currently and properly classified TOP SECRET//SI/REL to USA, FVEY," the deputy chief of staff for signals intelligence policy and corporate issues in NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate wrote in a declaration. The NSA official who signed the declaration (posted here) gave his name solely as "Steven E. T. ," in keeping with an NSA policy of not publicly identifying most of its employees. "Steven E.
2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark. Bradley Manning Trial: Questioning Why So Much Is Classified. White supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller, arrested in three killings Sunday, turned white opportunist when facing decades in prison, testifying against his fellow haters in two trials. A quarter-century before he was charged with Sunday’s three hate murders outside Kansas City, Frazier Glenn Miller figured prominently in a triple hate homicide in North Carolina. People intimately familiar with the earlier case say Miller, founder of a Ku Klux Klan chapter and a white political party, should have been a prime suspect in those killings, as well.
Instead Miller became a star witness in both that murder trial and in a sedition case against 13 fellow white supremacists. Miller had proved himself to be not so much a white supremacist as a white opportunist when he found himself facing decades in prison on weapons charges in 1987. He has said that a lead prosecutor threatened to pile on individual sentences on various charges until they totaled 200 years. Miller made a deal for just five years.
Secrecy defines Obama’s drone war. The administration has said that its covert, targeted killings with remote-controlled aircraft in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and potentially beyond are proper under both domestic and international law. It has said that the targets are chosen under strict criteria, with rigorous internal oversight. It has parried reports of collateral damage and the alleged killing of innocents by saying that drones, with their surveillance capabilities and precision missiles, result in far fewer mistakes than less sophisticated weapons. Yet in carrying out hundreds of strikes over three years — resulting in an estimated 1,350 to 2,250 deaths in Pakistan — it has provided virtually no details to support those assertions. In outlining its legal reasoning, the administration has cited broad congressional authorizations and presidential approvals, the international laws of war and the right to self-defense.
In Pakistan, at least 240 CIA drone strikes have been reported since 2009. Secrecy’s fierce defenders. South Africa Parliament Passes Secrecy Bill - Corruption Currents. The choice between “liberty” and “security” never was so clear. Rodger Bosch/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Some 1,000 people protest on Nov. 22, 2011, outside the South African Parliament in Cape Town against the Protection of State Information Bill. South Africa’s parliament passed a controversial bill Tuesday that supporters said will help protect the country while its critics say it will help the ruling party cover up corruption.
The legislation, called the Protection of State Information Bill (pdf), seeks to update state-secrets legislation the ruling African National Congress party said was last changed 30 years ago, during the apartheid era. The bill’s preamble emphasizes the right of the government to restrict information it deems necessary for national security. Disclosing a state secret under the legislation carries a jail sentence of up to 25 years, depending on the classification of the information. The bill is caught in a pitched battle between the government and the media. What the South African Secrecy Bill Means for the Open Government Partnership.
As South Africa took up its chairmanship of the UN COP17 in Durban this week, committing the country to play a role in saving our planet, a less than healthy environment has been created at home for other basic rights such as freedom of information. Last week, the South African parliament passed legislation overhauling the country’s apartheid-era secrecy law. The new secrecy bill, formally called the Protection of State Information Bill (POSIB), defines how the government can classify and withhold sensitive information from the public, including exempting the disclosure of such information from freedom of information requests. It was met with protests and criticism from civil society and other non-governmental quarters. The debate over the bill has actually been a long-brewing argument going back years despite the international media picking up on the issue only recently. Many critics of the bill in its current form have been accused of being unpatriotic and “foreign spies.”
Secret panel can put Americans on kill list' A Nation of "Suspects" | Truthout - In the wake of COINTELPRO and the Watergate scandal, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas sent a letter to a group of young lawyers at the Washington State Bar Association. "As nightfall does not come all at once," he wrote, "neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. "[1] The recent dramatic expansion of intelligence collection at the federal, state and local level raises profound civil liberties concerns regarding freedoms and protections we have long taken for granted. There are layers of secrecy that cannot even be penetrated by most members of Congress. During a decade of relentless fearmongering about the terrorist threat, most Americans appear to have accommodated themselves to the visible signs of change without questioning their broad implications. 1. 2. 3.
State Department Employee Faces Firing for Posting WikiLeaks Link | Threat Level. A veteran U.S. State Department foreign service officer says his job is on the line after he posted a link on his blog to a WikiLeaks document. Peter Van Buren, who has worked for the department for 23 years and just published a book that is critical of U.S. reconstruction projects in Iraq, said this week that the State Department had launched an investigation against him earlier this month for disclosing classified information.
His crime, he said, was a link he posted on August 25 in a blog post discussing the hypocrisy of recent U.S. actions against Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi. The link went to a 2009 cable about the sale of U.S. military spare parts to Qadaffi through a Portuguese middleman. We recently recapped the weird history of US-Libyan relations, focusing on how, after years of hating on and bombing Qaddafi, soon after the Iraq war commenced we suddenly decided we liked him. “The advantage of all this? The State Department did not respond to a request for comment. Interrogated by the State Department.
On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Web. As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material.
The agents demanded to know who might be helping me with my blog (“Name names!”) Had I, they asked, looked at the WikiLeaks site at home on my own time on my own computer? Why me? Security at State: Hamburgers and Mud State did not restrict access. Top Secret America. The explosion of America’s intelligence world after 9/11. We’ll look at security, civil liberties, and the cost of everything that’s now top secret.
The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md. (AP) Since 9.11, America’s world of top secret intelligence and security operations has exploded in scale and reach. However big you may think it is, odds are it’s much, much bigger. A vast, underground, often unaccountable sprawling universe of agents and agencies, public and private, tracking and tracing and probing, and killing. Ten years on, it’s time to take stock of whether it’s defending or infringing. This hour On Point: the explosion of top secret America. -Tom Ashbrook Guests Dana Priest, staff writer for the Washington Post, who covers national security, intelligence, and counterterrorism.
Read an excerpt, and watch the Frontline documentary based on the book. Vance Gilbert, folk musician who had a high-profile altercation with airport security this summer. More. Top Secret America | washingtonpost.com - projects.washingtonpost.com. U.S. Seeks to Keep Lawyer From Sharing Secret Data With Judge. There’s A Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says | Danger Room. Sen. Ron Wyden: How Can Congress Debate a Secret Law? Atlas Bugged: Why the “Secret Law” of the Patriot Act Is Probably About Location Tracking.
Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake. On State Secrets, Why Didn't The Administration Seek A Continuance? - The Atlantic Politics Channel.