On State Secrets, Why Didn't The Administration Seek A Continuance? - The Atlantic Politics Channel Of all the responses to the administration's endorsement of the state secrets privilege in Mohamed et. al. v. Jeppesen, one question pops out: why, if the administration were simply overwhelmed with information, didn't they just ask the court of appeals to give them some more time? Even if denied, it would signal their intention to review the government's strategy and the facts of the case. It's a valid question. The answer, I take it, is not going to satisfy critics, but here it is, based on discussions with administration officials and outside experts: Mohamed v. Clearly, the Obama Administration does not believe that the state secrets privilege ought to be taken out of the government's tool box when facing civil suits. A further objection: why do my sources claim that the reason they invoked the privilege was to give them more time to figure everything out? Three responses. So where does this leave the policy itself?
Hot Policy Wonks For The Democrats: The New Realists Michèle Flournoy hardly seems like a renegade. As president of the Center for a New American Security, she and her colleagues have assigned themselves the modest-sounding mission of coming up with a pragmatic foreign policy platform for the next president. But within the progressive foreign policy establishment, this makes them revolutionaries. “Part of what we’re saying is, let’s have some clear-eyed analysis based on the facts,” said Ms. Flournoy in an interview in her Washington office a few blocks from the White House. Ms. It’s a genuine clash of worldviews, and it’s just beginning. “The biggest cleavage in the Democratic Party is over America’s role in the world,” said Kenneth Baer, a co-founder of the quarterly publication Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and a former speechwriter for Al Gore’s presidential campaign. For years, top Democratic advisers on foreign policy have been drawn from the neoliberal or “Wilsonian” school. Ms. As Ms.
Senti-meter - Data Desk - The Envelope Check out the vox pop on your favorite (and least favorite) stars and films ahead of the 84th Academy Awards. Is Tinseltown in tune with, or out of touch with, movie fans? Credits: Armand Emamdjomeh, Stephanie Ferrell, Julie Makinen, Paul Olund, Anthony Pesce, Ken Schwencke and Ben Welsh. Interactive graphic by Thomas Suh Lauder Demián Bichir 848 tweets Sample tweets: RT @altfilmguide: "you gave a voice to the voiceless" Natalie Portman on Demian Bichir/A BETTER LIFE. My highlights were Octavia spencer winning, circus de sole act, and Demian Bichir being nominated... Demian Bichir got snubbed! George Clooney 2,474 tweets The Descendants and George Clooney are still the best in my mind. Not impressed at the fact George Clooney didn't win Best Actor Nothing against George Clooney - except his fame, wealth and good looks - but glad the Oscars showed you can't buy a statue with ads in NYT. Matt Damon 172 tweets Leonardo DiCaprio 176 tweets Jean Dujardin 9,708 tweets Michael Fassbender 106 tweets 78 tweets Hugo
Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as almost obligatory. One afternoon in January, Drake met with me, giving his first public interview about this case.
Fighting Facebook, a Campaign for a People’s Terms of Service Reuters Facebook is on the defensive again. Members of the social networking site sued the company for co-opting their identities in online ads, and Facebook agreed to revise its “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” and offer a $20 million settlement. The case has drawn less attention than the dorm disputes portrayed in The Social Network, but the impact is far wider. An underpublicized aspect of the dispute concerns the power of online contracts, and ultimately, whether users or corporations have more control over life online. Similar class action suits have been leveled against the popular photo-sharing application Instagram, and the mother of all platforms, Google. While a few of the particulars here are new—filtered photos or copyrightable tweets—the legal dilemma is actually very old. In return for driving the profits of social media companies, users get free software. Think of that cellphone contract you didn’t read, or the waiver you must sign to go river-rafting.
What's your perfect fitting top, skirt and dress on the highstreet? | News Last month, I was browsing the LK Bennett sales, and picked up an indigo pleated skirt in what I vaguely hoped would be the right size. But as I headed for the changing room, I had a feeling it would be too small. And as I struggled with the zip, I raged for the millionth time that a size 10 should be a size 10. As everyone who's ever bought clothes knows, high-street sizing is completely mad. You can easily be a size 8 in one store, and a size 14 in another, and it's impossible to guess your size without lots of zip-wrangling. I collected the official size data published by many different stores - LK Bennett, like many others, publishes its sizes online. My app lets you put in your measurements (bust, waist and hips) in inches and cm and see your most perfect fit in tops, skirts and dresses at shops from ASOS to Zara. The data I collected confirms that sizing is indeed madness. I assumed that the pricier stores would size smaller, but that's not actually true. Data summary More data
There’s A Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says | Danger Room You think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know. Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. “We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. What exactly does Wyden mean by that? “It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” Wyden says. That’s why Wyden and his colleague Sen. The amendment, first reported by Marcy Wheeler, blasts the administration for “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes.” Wyden says he “can’t answer” any specific questions about how the government thinks it can use the Patriot Act. Surveillance under the business-records provisions has recently spiked. Site: Oregon.gov See Also:
Declassified CIA Docs: Cheney is a Flagrant Liar The National Security Archive has obtained through a FOIA request newly released CIA documents pertaining to 9/11 . There do not appear to be any great revelations in the release, although one of them further illustrates what a liar former Vice President Dick Cheney is. The fact that the Bush administration, and Dick Cheney in particular, actively promoted the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was somehow tied to al-Qaeda and the attacks of September 11th is at this point uncontroversial. It was a deliberate propaganda campaign to help rally Americans to support a war on Iraq that had already been decided upon. Despite heavy redactions, one of these just-released CIA documents reveal that one day before Cheney’s appearance on Meet the Press, the CIA confirmed in a briefing that was sent to the White House Situation Room that “11 September 2001 hijacker Mohamed Atta did not travel to the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000.” MR.