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Thu, 10 Oct 2013 21:14

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

October 10, 2013

GENERAL PULASKI MEMORIAL DAY, 2013

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BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Today, we honor the memory of Brigadier General Casimir Pulaski, the Polish-born hero of the American Revolutionary War. General Pulaski's devotion to liberty knew no boundaries, and his bravery on the battlefield helped secure our independence. He sacrificed his life in defense of our freedom, and each year on October 11 -- the anniversary of his death -- we honor his sacrifice and service and reflect on the contributions made by so many Polish-Americans throughout our Nation's history.

A skilled cavalryman even as a youth, Casimir Pulaski spent years defending his native Poland from foreign domination. Unable to win Polish sovereignty, Pulaski found a kindred cause in the fledgling American Nation. Encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, he set sail across the Atlantic in 1777 to join the Revolutionary forces. "I could not submit to stoop before the sovereigns of Europe," he later wrote to Congress, "So I came to hazard all for the freedom of America."

Casimir Pulaski quickly distinguished himself at the Battle of Brandywine, where his courageous charge covered General George Washington's retreat, saving Washington's life. The Continental Congress promoted him to Brigadier General, and for his command on horseback, he became known as the "Father of the American Cavalry." Pulaski went on to form an independent cavalry legion, comprised of men from across Europe and America. While leading this unit, General Pulaski was mortally wounded. He did not live to see the Revolution's end, but he died with hope that our Nation would be free.

On General Pulaski Memorial Day, we celebrate the rights and freedoms Pulaski fought for, and we honor the generations of Polish-Americans who have contributed to our society and defended our Nation since its founding. We also reflect on the steadfast, enduring friendship between the United States and Poland, which have long shared the ideals of freedom and democracy. Through this alliance, and our proud Polish heritage, Casimir Pulaski's legacy lives on.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 11, 2013, as General Pulaski Memorial Day. I encourage all Americans to commemorate this occasion with appropriate programs and activities paying tribute to Casimir Pulaski and honoring all those who defend the freedom of our Nation.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this tenth day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.

BARACK OBAMA

Presidential Proclamation -- International Day of the Girl, 2013

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Fri, 11 Oct 2013 20:58

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

October 10, 2013

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF THE GIRL, 2013

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BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

From Asia to Europe, from Africa to the Americas, nations that have embraced the ideals of equality and inclusion have emerged more stable, peaceful, and prosperous. When countries empower girls to pursue their dreams, they not only fulfill a basic moral obligation, they also realize more fully their social and economic potential. Over the past few decades, the global community has made great progress in increasing opportunity and equality for women and girls, but far too many girls face futures limited by violence, social norms, educational barriers, and even national law. On International Day of the Girl, we stand firm in the belief that all men and women are created equal, and we advance the vision of a world where girls and boys look to the future with the same sense of promise and possibility.

My Administration is committed to expanding opportunity for girls on the world stage. We are promoting gender equality in education, cracking down on human trafficking, and working to empower women and girls to contribute in the workplace and in public life. Building on my challenge to the United Nations in September 2011, a broad coalition of countries and organizations has joined the United States in forming the Equal Futures Partnership, an international effort to break down barriers to the economic and political empowerment of women and girls. We are working to break the cycle of poverty by educating and empowering girls, including through a new global outreach and engagement campaign. We are funding programs to encourage girls around the world to pursue careers in science and technology. And because child marriage is a threat to fundamental human rights, my Administration has strengthened reporting and launched several initiatives to prevent child marriage.

At home, we are leading by example. We are encouraging girls to pursue degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics -- fields that will allow them to drive innovation while working in the high-paying jobs of the future. We are funding evidence-based strategies to reduce teen pregnancy in the United States, and we are also motivating girls to become leaders -- from hosting the first-ever White House conference on girls' leadership and civic engagement to sponsoring an app challenge to spur new ways to inspire girls to become leaders in government.

As we observe this day, there is a girl in an unknown country who will grow to spark the next great scientific revolution, but only if she gets a shot at a higher education.

Across the globe there are girls who will one day lead nations, if only we afford them the chance to choose their own destinies.

And on every continent, there are girls who will go on to change the world in ways we can only imagine, if only we allow them the freedom to dream.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 11, 2013, as International Day of the Girl. I call upon all Americans to observe this day withprograms, ceremonies, and activities that advance equality and opportunity for girls everywhere.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this tenth day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.

BARACK OBAMA

Presidential Proclamation -- Blind Americans Equality Day, 2013

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 14:28

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

October 11, 2013

BLIND AMERICANS EQUALITY DAY, 2013

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BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Blind and visually impaired persons have always played an important role in American life and culture, and today we recommit to our goals of full access and opportunity. Whether sprinting across finish lines, leading innovation in business and government, or creating powerful music and art, blind and visually impaired Americans imagine and pursue ideas and goals that move our country forward. As a Nation, it is our task to ensure they can always access the tools and support they need to turn those ideas and goals into realities.

My Administration is committed to advancing opportunity for people with disabilities through the Americans with Disabilities Act and other important avenues. In June of this year, the United States joined with over 150 countries in approving a landmark treaty that aims to expand access for visually impaired persons and other persons with print disabilities to information, culture, and education. By facilitating access to books and other printed material, the treaty holds the potential to open up worlds of knowledge. If the United States becomes a party to this treaty, we can reduce the book famine that confronts the blind community while maintaining the integrity of the international copyright framework.

The United States was also proud to join 141 other countries in signing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009, and we are working toward its ratification. Americans with Disabilities, including those who are blind or visually impaired, should have the same opportunities to work, study, and travel in other countries as any other American, and the Convention can help us realize that goal.

To create a more level playing field and ensure students with disabilities have access to the general education curriculum, the Department of Education issued new guidance in June for the use of Braille as a literacy tool under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This guidance reaffirms my Administration's commitment to using Braille to open doors for students who are blind or visually impaired, so every student has a chance to succeed in the classroom and graduate from high school prepared for college and careers.

We have come a long way in our journey toward a more perfect Union, but we still have work ahead. We must fulfill the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and expand the freedom to make of our lives what we will. On this day, we celebrate the accomplishments of our blind and visually impaired citizens, and we recommit to building a Nation where all Americans, including those who are blind or visually impaired, live with the assurance of equal opportunity and equal respect.

By joint resolution approved on October 6, 1964 (Public Law 88-628, as amended), the Congress designated October 15 of each year as "White Cane Safety Day" to recognize the contributions of Americans who are blind or have low vision. Today, let us recommit to ensuring we remain a Nation where all our people, including those with disabilities, have every opportunity to achieve their dreams.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 15, 2013, as Blind Americans Equality Day. I call upon public officials, business and community leaders, educators, librarians, and Americans across the country to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eleventh day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.

BARACK OBAMA

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Blackout: thought-provoking Channel 4 'what if?' cyber-attack drama

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:57

Channel 4's Blackout explores the devastating effects of a cyber-attack on Britain's national grid.

Watch the trailer for Channel 4's Blackout here (C) Channel 4

What if the lights went out? Not just in your house or your street. What if the lights went out all over the country? And what if it was caused by a cyber-attack?

That's the question confronted head-on by Channel 4's feature-length drama Blackout, which racked up a very decent overnight average of nearly 2 million, including viewers who watched on Channel 4 +1.

A temporary power cut is unsettling if one is unprepared: the search for the torch, the hope it doesn't require fresh batteries, trying to remember where the candles are and if any matches are to hand. And what to do about the food in the fridge and the freezer?

Now imagine that feeling extended over days and days: how would everyone react? Would we help each other and show a bit of bulldog spirit or would Britain descend into anarchy? If Blackout's anything to go by, we'll film first and act later.

Depicting the first five days that immediately follow the catastrophe, we watched as ordinary people struggled to do the basics without power, such as feeding themselves and their families and getting to work and school.

The disastrous impact on the country's infrastructure, how it would affect hospitals, transport, food, water supply and law and order, is all too clear.

The clever weaving of real footage recorded during actual power cuts and other emergencies into its story immediately enhanced the feeling of utter calamity in Blackout.

And to underline the eerie realism, there was even an appearance from the current prime minister. Thanks to recordings appropriated from previous events, David Cameron was on hand to spout stern words at looters and reassure a frantic public.

Blackout will join a long line of dramas that, intentionally or not, end up scaring the heck out of its viewers. It's nothing new, as the likes of 1966's The War Game (about a nuclear attack on Kent) or notorious 1984 nuclear apocalypse scare-a-thon Threads (about a nuclear attack in Sheffield) demonstrate.

On Twitter, the message was hitting home. '@dancingstarlisa tweeted: "#Blackout is such a crazy programme. Loving it, scary though because it seriously could happen!" '@leahanna28 posted: "Watching last night's #Blackout... scary stuff and a bit too realistic... time to invest in a generator and some more tins food lol."

'@markgloverOSH mused: "After watching C4's excellent #Blackout docudrama last night, it makes me wonder how much we are really prepared for such an event." '@cupofteague tweeted: "Shouldn't have watched #Blackout now. I just want to go out and buy generators and tinned beans."

Not all the responses were positive, '@jadeaaaustin posted: "#Blackout was so badly acted and very unrealistic (unless people are actually that stupid), but I liked the overall theme. Makes you think."

Following this dramatisation, I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see a surge in sales of generators in the next few days.

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EBT BS-"It just takes a while to reboot these systems," she said.

Computer Upgrade Blamed For Nationwide EBT System Shutdown On Saturday CBS Boston

'Riot time!': Food stamp users in near-panic over EBT card failures | Twitchy

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Cyber warrior shortage hits anti-hacker fightback

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Source: Reuters: Technology News

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 13:23

A man types on a computer keyboard in Warsaw in this February 28, 2013 illustration file picture.

Credit: Reuters/Kacper Pempel/Files

By Peter Apps and Brenda Goh

LONDON | Sun Oct 13, 2013 9:06am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - For the governments and corporations facing increasing computer attacks, the biggest challenge is finding the right cyber warriors to fight back.

Hostile computer activity from spies, saboteurs, competitors and criminals has spawned a growing industry of corporate defenders who can attract the best talent from government cyber units.

The U.S. military's Cyber Command is due to quadruple in size by 2015 with 4,000 new personnel while Britain announced a new Joint Cyber Reserve last month. From Brazil to Indonesia, similar forces have been set up.

But demand for specialists has far outpaced the number of those qualified to do the job, leading to a staffing crunch as talent is poached by competitors offering big salaries.

"As with anything, it really comes down to human capital and there simply isn't enough of it," says Chris Finan, White House director for cyber security from 2011-12, who is now a senior fellow at the Truman National Security Project and working for a start-up in Silicon Valley.

"They will choose where they work based on salary, lifestyle and the lack of an interfering bureaucracy and that makes it particularly hard to get them into government."

Cyber attacks can be expensive: one unidentified London-listed company incurred losses of 800 million pounds ($1.29 billion) in a cyber attack several years ago, according to the British security services.

Global losses are in the range of $80 billion to $400 billion a year, according to research by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies that was sponsored by Intel Corp's McAfee anti-virus division.

There is a whole range of attacks. Some involve simply transferring money, but more often clients' credit card details are stolen. There is also intellectual property theft or theft of commercially sensitive information for business advantage.

Victims can also suffer a "hacktivist" attack, such as a directed denial of service to bring a website down, which can cost a lot of money to fix.

Quantifying the exact damage is almost impossible, especially when secrets and money are not the only targets.

While no government has taken responsibility for the Stuxnet computer virus that destroyed centrifuges at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility, it was widely reported to have been a U.S.-Israeli project.

Britain says it blocked 400,000 advanced cyber threats to the government's secure intranet last year while a virus unleashed against Saudi Arabia's energy group Aramco, likely to be the world's most valuable company, destroyed data on thousands of computers and put an image of a burning American flag onto screens.

GOING VIRAL?

Most cyber expertise remains in the private sector where companies are seeing an steep increase in spending on security products and services.

Depending on the cyber threat, a variety of firms are bidding for cyber talent. Google is currently advertising 129 IT security jobs, while defense companies such as Lockheed Martin Corp and BAE Systems are looking to hire in this area.

Anti-virus maker Symantec Corp is also doing good business. "The threat environment is exploding," Chief Executive Steve Bennett told Reuters in an interview in July.

The perception of an increased threat, has also led to explosive demand for the best talent.

The U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics says the number of Information Technology security roles in the U.S. will increase by some 22 percent in the decade to 2020, creating 65,700 new jobs. Experts say it is a similar situation globally, with salaries often rising 5-7 percent a year.

"Recruitment and retention in cyber is a challenge for everybody working in this area," says Mike Bradshaw, head of security and smart systems at Finmeccanica IT unit Selex. "It's an area where demand exceeds supply ... it's going to take a while for supply to catch up."

A growing number of security firms - such as UK-based Protection Group International (PGI) - now also offer cyber services. PGI started out providing armed guards to protect merchant ships against pirates but has now hired former staff from Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping agency.

COUNTRY OR CASH?

A graduate with a good computer studies degree can walk into a $100,000 salary with a similar amount upfront as a golden handshake, several times what the U.S. National Security Agency would be likely to offer.

Western universities turn out far too few graduates with the necessary computer skills while some students complain that many of the courses on offer are too theoretical for the challenges of cyber warfare.

But applicants need not have a computer science degree to get lucrative jobs as long as they can do the hardest-to-fill jobs such as finding bugs in software, identifying elusive infections and reverse engineering computer viruses that are found on computers, said Alan Paller, founder of the non-profit SANS Institute in Washington.

SANS has worked with officials in Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and other states to sponsor hacking contests that test skills in those and other areas. Educational background does not necessarily help in these contests.

Those who have "very good" skills in the most-needed areas can earn $110,000 to $140,000, while the very top get paid as much as $200,000 in private sector jobs, according to Paller.

While the private sector offers big cash, the government is still able to retain some talent by appealing to people's sense of public service and patriotism.

"I want to serve my country. What I am doing is important," one hacker who conducts classified research for the U.S. military told Reuters at the Def Con hacking conference in July. He declined to provide his name because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

There is also an expectation that government workers can move to more lucrative jobs in the private sector after several years in public service.

But some senior officers in Western militaries still fear they may struggle to attract the requisite talent, citing both cultural and administrative problems.

General Keith Alexander, head of both the NSA and Cyber Command, told Reuters earlier this year finding the right talent was a priority. He has attended events such as the Def Con hacker conference, trading his uniform for a black T-shirt.

Hiring outsiders has long been thought to be a tactic employed by the United States as well as China and Russia.

Western security officials believe Russia, China and other emerging cyber powers such as Iran and North Korea have cut deals with their own criminal hacker community to borrow their expertise to assist with attacks.

Russia and China, which have been accused by the West of mounting repeated attacks on government and commercial interests, deny direct involvement in hacking.

"We are at the very beginning of this process and we are building it brick by brick," says Colonel Gregory Conti, head of the cyber Security Department at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. "It's going to be like the creation of the air force - a process of several decades getting the right people and structures." ($1 = 0.6209 British pounds)

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Giles Elgood)

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Arkansas man charged in connection with power grid sabotage - CNN.com

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JPMorgan's Dimon Posts First Loss on $7.2 Billion Legal Cost - Bloomberg

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Fri, 11 Oct 2013 21:30

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Did Jamie Dimon Underestimate U.S. Probes?

JPMorgan Chase & Co. reported its first loss under Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon after taking a $7.2 billion charge to cover the cost of mounting litigation and regulatory probes.

The third-quarter loss was $380 million, or 17 cents a share, compared with a profit of $5.71 billion, or $1.40, a year earlier, the New York-based company said today in a statement. The last time the bank failed to report a profit was the second quarter of 2004, when William Harrison was CEO.

''Over the last few weeks the environment has become highly charged and very volatile,'' Chief Financial Officer Marianne Lake said on a conference call. ''Things have been very fluid and the situation escalated to the point where we are facing very large premiums and penalties, the level of which have gone far beyond what we reasonably expected.''

Dimon, 57, who led JPMorgan to record earnings in each of the past three years, is grappling with regulatory investigations and tightening internal controls following a trading loss last year of more than $6.2 billion. The legal costs contributed to a 54 percent surge in non-interest expenses to $23.6 billion, as revenue dropped 8 percent from a year earlier.

'Very Painful'''This is very painful for the company,'' Dimon told analysts on the call. JPMorgan has spent $8 billion on litigation and set aside $20 billion toward legal and regulatory costs since January 2010. Those expenses will remain elevated for the next year or two, according to Dimon.

''We would love to reduce the uncertainty around this for ourselves and for you, but it's very, very hard to do,'' he said.

JPMorgan was little changed at $52.49 at 11:01 a.m. in New York trading. Earnings adjusted for one-time items were $1.42 a share, exceeding the $1.30 average estimate of 20 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

The pretax legal charge was $9.2 billion, compared with $684 million a year earlier. Litigation reserves at the end of September were $23 billion, the bank said, adding that ''reasonably possible'' losses in excess of those reserves were $5.7 billion.

JPMorgan said on Aug. 7 that its mortgage-bond sales practices were under criminal investigation by U.S. prosecutors in California. The company has been discussing a potential $11 billion deal with state and federal authorities to settle that case as well as other related investigations, a person with knowledge of the talks said last month.

Asia ProbeThe firm is also facing an investigation of its hiring practices in Asia and a criminal inquiry into its energy trading business.

The company agreed on Sept. 19 to pay about $1.3 billion to resolve U.S. and U.K. investigations into a record trading loss in its chief investment office last year and to settle unrelated claims it unfairly charged customers for credit-monitoring products.

Two former employees were indicted Sept. 16 on charges including securities fraud and conspiracy in connection with the trading loss on credit derivatives that exceeded $6.2 billion last year. Bruno Iksil, who built the position and came to be known as the London Whale because of the size of the bets, is cooperating in the investigation and hasn't been charged, prosecutors said.

Multiple Agencies''As we settle, as we negotiate, remember there are multiple agencies involved in every case now,'' Dimon said on the conference call. The company has so far paid fines to four different agencies for its trading loss last year and may be penalized by a fifth, ''which we did not expect,'' he said.

''We just have to deal with it and the reality as it is,'' Dimon said. ''It will abate over time.''

Revenue at the corporate and investment-banking unit, run by Daniel Pinto and Michael Cavanagh, declined 2 percent to $8.19 billion.

Trading revenue fell 2 percent to $4.69 billion in the third quarter, the bank said. Fixed-income trading revenue declined 8 percent to $3.44 billion from a year earlier. Equity trading revenue rose 20 percent to $1.25 billion.

Ten-year Treasury yields, which are used to set rates for some consumer and corporate loans, rose from this year's low of 1.63 percent on May 2 to 3 percent on Sept. 5. Rising rates reduce the value of banks' bond holdings and cut mortgage-fee revenue for home lenders such as JPMorgan and Wells Fargo & Co., which reported a 13 percent profit increase today as improving credit quality allowed it to reclaim surplus reserves.

Refinancings DropRefinancings, which accounted for 76 percent of last year's $1.75 trillion in loan originations, slumped after rates on 30-year loans jumped from historical lows of less than 3.5 percent earlier this year to an average of 4.32 percent at the end of September, data compiled by Freddie Mac show. Mortgage volumes were estimated to have fallen 25 percent from $494 billion in the second quarter to $369 billion in the third, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, a Washington-based trade group.

''This quarter is probably going to be the most challenging quarter the banks are going to have since they began their recovery over two years ago,'' Marty Mosby, an analyst with Guggenheim Securities in New York, said in a Sept. 30 interview. Interest rates that rose ''shockingly high'' damped trading results and ''paralyzed'' home lending, which had been gaining momentum in the first half of the year, he said.

Consumer BankJPMorgan's consumer and community banking, which includes home loans and checking accounts, earned $2.7 billion, up 15 percent from a year earlier. The net interest margin, which measures the profit margin on lending, narrowed to 2.18 percent from 2.43 percent a year earlier and 2.2 percent in the second quarter of this year.

Mortgage fees and related revenue plunged 65 percent to $839 million, compared with $2.38 billion a year earlier.

Fewer consumers fell behind on their credit-card payments in the third quarter compared with the same period in 2012. Loans at least 30 days overdue, a signal of future write-offs, dropped to 1.69 percent from 2.15 percent in 2012. Write-offs declined to 2.86 percent from 3.57 percent the prior year and 3.31 percent in the previous quarter.

Revenue in asset management, which includes JPMorgan's mutual-fund family, retirement planning, hedge funds and private bank, rose 12 percent to $2.76 billion, and profit increased 7 percent to $476 million. Run by Mary Erdoes, the division grew assets under management 12 percent to $1.54 trillion.

Annual ProfitMounting fines and other sanctions are eroding JPMorgan's profit for the year and placing the firm's $6 billion share-repurchase program at risk, Charles Peabody, an analyst at Portales Partners LLC, wrote in a Sept. 25 note to investors. He cut his 2013 earnings estimate 12.5 percent to $4.90 a share.

''Both the materiality of the potential litigation charges and the potential suspension of the share-repurchase program could have a significant impact'' on the bank's stock, Peabody wrote.

JPMorgan slowed its pace of stock buybacks in the third quarter. The bank repurchased $739.7 million of shares in the period, down from $1.17 billion in the three months ended June 30 and $2.58 billion in the first quarter of the year.

Shareholder VoteDimon survived a shareholder vote in May recommending the board split his dual duties as chairman and CEO. He said the bank will fight ''till the end'' anyone who sues the company claiming they were misled over the London losses at the chief investment office.

The CEO stepped down as chairman of JPMorgan's main operating subsidiary July 1, according to a person briefed on the matter. JPMorgan has sought to bolster corporate governance and rebuild its relationship with supervisors after U.S. regulators and a Senate panel faulted the firm for withholding information during the trading losses last year.

Dimon, who is still chairman of the parent corporation, handed off the title at the subsidiary because company attorneys recommended it for technical reasons, rather than because of pressure from regulators or investors, said the person.

The board cut Dimon's pay in half for 2012 after concluding that he bore some responsibility for the trading loss. It also credited his leadership for the lender's performance. JPMorgan reported a third straight year of record profit in 2012 with $21.3 billion of net income.

The investigations are ''a concerted effort to convince Jamie Dimon that he needs to be much more accepting of regulatory suggestions,'' Mosby said. Dimon, who has railed against excessive regulation and once publicly challenged Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke on new bank rules, needs to ''work with regulators instead of fight with regulators,'' Mosby said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dawn Kopecki in New York at dkopecki@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net; Christine Harper at charper@bloomberg.net

Pedestrians walk by the offices of JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

6:40

Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Robert Albertson, principal and chief strategist at Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP, talks about JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s third-quarter loss reported today, the outlook for bank earnings and the bond market. He speaks with Tom Keene and Scarlet Fu on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance." (Source: Bloomberg)

6:32

Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Charles Peabody, an analyst at Portales Partners LLC, talks about JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s third-quarter loss and the outlook for Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon. JPMorgan Chase reported its first loss under Dimon after taking a $7.2 billion charge to cover the cost of mounting litigation and regulatory probes. Peabody speaks with Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg Television's "Market Makers." (Source: Bloomberg)

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon, who led JPMorgan to record earnings in each of the past three years, is grappling with regulatory investigations as the bank works to tighten internal controls following its more than $6.2 billion trading loss last year. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

CCAR-FRB: Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review

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A Repo Implosion - Truthdig

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Sun, 13 Oct 2013 13:57

A Repo ImplosionPosted on Oct 13, 2013By Mike Whitney, CounterPunch

This piece first appeared at CounterPunch.

President Barack Obama is determined to prevail in his battle with GOP congressional leaders on the debt ceiling issue, but not for the reasons stated in the media. Obama is less concerned with the prospect of higher interest rates and frustrated bondholders than he is with the big Wall Street banks who would be thrust back into crisis if there is no resolution before October 17. Absent a debt ceiling deal, the repurchase market''known as repo''would undergo another deep-freeze as it did in 2008 when Lehman Brothers defaulted triggering a run on the Reserve Primary Fund which had been exposed to Lehman's short-term debt. The frenzied selloff sparked a widespread panic across global financial markets pushing the system to the brink of collapse and forcing the Federal Reserve to backstop regulated and unregulated financial institutions with more than $11 trillion in loans and other obligations. The same tragedy will play out again, if congress fails to lift the ceiling and reinforce the present value of US debt.

Repo is at the heart of the shadow banking system, that opaque off-balance sheet underworld where maturity transformation and other risky banking activities take place beyond the watchful eye of government regulators. It is where banks exchange collateralized securities for short-term loans from investors, mainly large financial institutions. The banks use these loans to fund their other investments boosting their leverage many times over to maximize their profits. The so called congressional reforms, like Dodd Frank, which were ratified after the crisis, have done nothing to change the basic structure of the market or to reign in excessive risk-taking by undercapitalized speculators. The system is as wobbly and crisis-prone ever, as the debt ceiling fiasco suggests. The situation speaks to the impressive power of the bank cartel and their army of lawyers and lobbyists. They own Capital Hill, the White House, and most of the judges in the country. The system remains the same, because that's the way the like it.

US Treasuries provide the bulk of collateral the banks use in acquiring their short-term funding. If the US defaults on its debt, the value that collateral would fall precipitously leaving much of the banking system either underwater or dangerously undercapitalized. The wholesale funding market would grind to a halt, and interbank lending would slow to a crawl. The financial system would suffer its second major heart attack in less than a decade. This is from American Banker:

As banking policy analyst Karen Shaw Petrou describes it, Treasury obligations are the ''water'' in the financial system's plumbing.

''They're the global reserve currency and they are perceived to be the most secure thing you can own,'' said Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics. ''That is why it is pledged as collateral. '... The very biggest banks fear that a debt ceiling breach breaks the pipes.'''....Rob Toomey, managing director and associate general counsel at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said institutions are concerned about whether Treasury bonds that default are no longer transferable between market participants.

''Essentially, whatever the size is of the obligation that Treasury is unable to pay, that kind of liquidity would just disappear from the market for whatever time the payment is not made,'' Toomey said.

By some estimates, the amount of liquidity that would be drained from the system immediately following a default would be roughly $600 billion, enough to require emergency action by either the Fed or the US Treasury. Despite post-crisis legislation that forbids future bailouts, the government would surely ride to rescue committing taxpayer revenues once again to save Wall Street.

Keep in mind, the US government does not have to default on its debt to trigger a panic in the credit markets. Changing expectations can easily produce the same result. If the holders of US Treasuries (USTs) begin to doubt that the debt ceiling issue will be resolved, then they'll sell their bonds prematurely to avoid greater losses. That, in turn, will push up interest rates which will strangle the recovery, slow growth, and throw a wrench in the repo market credit engine. We saw an example of how this works in late May when the Fed announced its decision to scale-back its asset purchase. The fact that the Fed continued to buy the same amount of USTs and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) didn't stem the selloff. Long-term rates went up anyway. Why? Because expectations changed and the market reset prices. That same phenomenon could happen now, in fact, it is happening now. The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that ''Fidelity Investments, the largest manager of money market funds'... had sold all of its holdings of US Treasury bills due to mature towards the end of October as a ''precautionary measure.''

This is what happens when people start to doubt that US Treasuries will be liquid cash equivalents in the future. They ditch them. And when they ditch them, rates go up and the economy slips into low gear. (Note: ''China and Japan together hold more than $2.4 trillion in U.S. Treasuries'' Bloomberg)

Now the media has been trying to soft-peddle the implications of the debt ceiling standoff by saying, ''No one thinks that holders of USTs won't get repaid.''

While this is true, it's also irrelevant. The reason that USTs are the gold standard of financial assets, is because they are considered risk-free and liquid. That's it. If you have to wait to get your money, then the asset you purchased is not completely liquid, right?

And if there is some doubt, however small, that you will not be repaid in full, then the asset is not really risk free, right?

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Chinese state media calls for 'de-Americanised' world after US shutdown

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Source: Global Geopolitics

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 13:25

Xinhua says 'new world order should be put in place' where all nations can have interests respected on equal footing

While US politicians grapple with how to reopen their shuttered government and avoid a potentially disastrous default on their debt, the world should consider 'de-Americanising', a commentary on China's official news agency said on Sunday.

''As US politicians of both political parties (fail to find a) viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanised world,'' the commentary on state news agency Xinhua said.

In a lengthy polemic against American hegemony since the second world war, it added: ''Such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated.

''A new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing.''

'...

Beijing has in recent days issued warnings as well as appeals for a deal, all the while emphasising the inseparable economic ties that bind the world's two biggest economies.

''The cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonised,'' said the commentary.

China is the biggest foreign holder of US Treasury bonds, worth a total of $1.28 trillion according to US government data.

''Instead of honouring its duties as a responsible leading power, a self-serving Washington has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas,'' but equally stoked ''regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies'' the commentary said, referring to Iraq.

Full article: Chinese state media calls for 'de-Americanised' world after US shutdown (South China Morning Post)

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Snowden's CIA bosses suspected he'd leak files in '09, didn't warn NSA | Ars Technica

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Edward Snowden in a Moscow airport. At left, Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks.

NSA leaksView all'...Edward Snowden's superiors at the CIA suspected in 2009 that he "was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access," the New York Times reported yesterday. The agency then "decided to send him home" from his job as a technician in Geneva.

Snowden's supervisor noted the suspicion in a "derogatory report in his personnel file" that also noted "a distinct change in the young man's behavior and work habits."

Snowden then became a contractor for the National Security Agency, but "the supervisor's cautionary note and the CIA's suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the NSA or its contractors." They only came to light after Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents.

Unnamed officials told the Times that the CIA suspicions were the "biggest missed opportunity" to review Snowden's access to top-secret files.

The systems used by the agencies to manage security clearances were intended to track only major rule violations rather than less serious complaints about personal behavior, the Times report said. "Thus, lesser derogatory information about Mr. Snowden was unlikely to have been given to the NSA unless it was specifically requested. As a result of Mr. Snowden's case, two law enforcement officials said, that flaw has since been corrected and such information is now being pushed forward."

CIA officials were correct in their suspicions. Snowden told The Guardian that he did consider exposing government secrets while at the CIA. The newspaper wrote in June:

He said it was during his CIA stint in Geneva that he thought for the first time about exposing government secrets. But, at the time, he chose not to for two reasons.

First, he said: "Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone." Secondly, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary.

He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he "watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in," and as a result, "I got hardened."

Promoted CommentsJon Brodkin / Jon is Ars Technica's senior IT reporter, covering business technology and the impact of consumer tech on IT. He also writes about tech policy, the FCC and spectrum policy, open source, supercomputing, data centers, and wireless technology.

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C.I.A. Warning on Snowden in '09 Said to Slip Through the Cracks - NYTimes.com

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Fri, 11 Oct 2013 20:29

WASHINGTON '-- Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man's behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion.

The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.

But the red flags went unheeded. Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. to become a contractor for the National Security Agency, and four years later he leaked thousands of classified documents. The supervisor's cautionary note and the C.I.A.'s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden's record once the documents began spilling out, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

''It slipped through the cracks,'' one veteran law enforcement official said of the report.

Edward J. Snowden now lives in Moscow, where he surfaced this week for the first time since receiving temporary asylum.

The Guardian / Reuters

Spokesmen for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. all declined to comment on the precise nature of the warning and why it was not forwarded, citing the investigation into Mr. Snowden's activities.

Half a dozen law enforcement, intelligence and Congressional officials with direct knowledge of the supervisor's report were contacted for this article. All of the officials agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing criminal investigation.

In hindsight, officials said, the report by the C.I.A. supervisor and the agency's suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Mr. Snowden's top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the N.S.A. under much greater scrutiny.

''The weakness of the system was if derogatory information came in, he could still keep his security clearance and move to another job, and the information wasn't passed on,'' said a Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on Mr. Snowden's activities.

Mr. Snowden now lives in Moscow, where he surfaced this week for the first time since receiving temporary asylum from the Russian government over the summer. On Wednesday night, he met with four American whistle-blowers who have championed his case in the United States and who presented him with an award they said was given annually by a group of retired C.I.A. officers to members of the intelligence community ''who exhibit integrity in intelligence.''

In a television interview, one member of the group, Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department official, said that Mr. Snowden ''looked great.''

''He seemed very centered and brilliant,'' Ms. Radack said. ''Smart, funny, very engaged. I thought he looked very well.''

Another of the whistle-blowers, Coleen Rowley, a former F.B.I. agent who testified before the Senate about missteps in the agency's investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said, ''We talked about prior examples of great people in history that had themselves been under this kind of pressure, and he's remarkably centered.''

On Thursday, Mr. Snowden's father, Lon, arrived in Moscow to see his son after assurances from Mr. Snowden's legal aide that there would be ''no complications'' in organizing a meeting with his father. But in a telephone interview later in the day, Lon Snowden said he had not yet been able to meet with his son.

''I can't tell you the where and the when,'' the elder Mr. Snowden said. ''I have no idea. I hope something happens.''

It is difficult to tell what would have happened had N.S.A. supervisors been made aware of the warning the C.I.A. issued Mr. Snowden in what is called a ''derog'' in federal personnel policy parlance.

''The spectrum of things in your personnel file could be A to Z,'' said Charles B. Sowell, who until June was a top official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence working on improving the security clearance process. ''There's a chance that that information could be missed and might not be surfaced.''

Mr. Sowell, now a senior vice president at Salient Federal Solutions, an information technology company in Fairfax, Va., emphasized that he left the government before Mr. Snowden's disclosures became public.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials say the report could have affected the assignments Mr. Snowden was given, first as an N.S.A. contractor with the computer company Dell in Japan and later with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, as well as the level of supervision he received.

The electronic systems the C.I.A. and N.S.A. use to manage the security clearances for its full-time and contracted employees are intended to track major rule-based infractions, not less serious complaints about personal behavior, a senior law enforcement official said. Thus, lesser derogatory information about Mr. Snowden was unlikely to have been given to the N.S.A. unless it was specifically requested. As a result of Mr. Snowden's case, two law enforcement officials said, that flaw has since been corrected and such information is now being pushed forward.

The revelation of the C.I.A.'s derogatory report comes as Congress is examining the process of granting security clearances, particularly by USIS, a company that has performed 700,000 yearly security checks for the government. Among the individuals the company vetted were Mr. Snowden and Aaron Alexis, who the police say shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last month.

''We have a compelling need to monitor those trusted with this sensitive information on a more regular basis and with broader sets of data,'' said Kathy Pherson, a former C.I.A. security officer who belongs to an intelligence industry task force that is expected to issue a report on the matter by year's end.

While it is unclear what exactly the supervisor's negative report said, it coincides with a period of Mr. Snowden's life in 2009 when he was a prolific online commenter on government and security issues, complained about civil surveillance and, according to a friend, was suffering ''a crisis of conscience.''

Mr. Snowden got an information technology job at the C.I.A. in mid-2006. Despite his lack of formal credentials, he gained a top-secret clearance and a choice job under State Department cover in Geneva. Little is known about what his duties were there.

Mavanee Anderson, who worked with Mr. Snowden in Geneva and also had a high security clearance, said in an article in The Chattanooga Times Free Press of Tennessee in June that when they worked from 2007 through early 2009, Mr. Snowden ''was already experiencing a crisis of conscience of sorts.''

''Anyone smart enough to be involved in the type of work he does, who is privy to the type of information to which he was privy, will have at least moments like these,'' she said.

Later, Mr. Snowden would tell the newspaper The Guardian that he was shocked and saddened by some of the techniques C.I.A. operatives in Geneva used to recruit sources. ''Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world,'' he told The Guardian. ''I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.''

There were other signs that have since drawn investigators' attention. In early 2009, someone using Mr. Snowden's screen name expressed outrage at government officials who leaked information to the news media, telling a friend in an Internet chat that leakers ''should be shot.''

''They're just like WikiLeaks,'' Mr. Snowden '-- or someone identified as him from his screen name, ''TheTrueHOOHA,'' and other details '-- wrote in January 2009 about an article in The New York Times on secret exchanges between Israel and the United States about Iran's nuclear program.

He later told The Guardian he was disappointed that President Obama ''advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.''

''I got hardened,'' he said.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Washington, and Andrew Roth from Moscow.

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FIRST VIDEO: Snowden receives Sam Adams Award in Moscow '-- RT News

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:46

Published time: October 11, 2013 23:55Edited time: October 12, 2013 18:09The first videos of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have surfaced since he received asylum in Russia. The footage, provided by WikiLeaks, was taken during the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence awards ceremony.

The video fragments of a meeting, attended by the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, and Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks '' all whistleblowers in their own respects '' were released by WikiLeaks on Friday.

In the first video appearance since he was granted asylum in Russia, Snowden spoke about US government transparency and dangers to democracy caused by the NSA mass spying programs.

''This is not about any sort of particular program, this is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in America,'' Snowden said speaking about the government transparency situation in the US. ''That is increasingly coming into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic people. If we can't understand the policies and the programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them.''

''As someone very clever said recently, we don't have an oversight problem in the US we have an undersight problem.''

The problem has grown up to a point where Americans have ''an executive, the Department of Justice, that's unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera but they'll stop at nothing to prosecute someone who told them the truth,'' Snowden added.

Snowden has expressed his satisfaction that people around the globe are starting to understand mass surveillance doesn't increase safety at all.

''People all over the world are realizing that these programs don't make us more safe, they hurt our economy, they hurt our country they limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely.''

There is a huge difference between surveillance programs aimed at increasing security and Big Brother mass surveillance, the NSA leaker added.

''There's a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement where it's targeted, it's based on reasonable suspicion, an individualized suspicion, and a warranted action '' and a sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under a sort of eye that sees everything, even when it's not needed.''

Although it is known that the ceremony took place in Moscow, the exact location remains a mystery for security reasons. In an exclusive interview with RT Julian Assange said Edward Snowden is safe in Russia, but the fates of journalists who helped him and published his leaks are now of more concern for WikiLeaks.

After a meeting with Snowden, the four whistleblowers '' former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former FBI agent Coleen Rowley and Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project '' all met in RT's to share their thoughts on Snowden and tell their stories.

Of Snowden, Jesselyn Radack said that ''he looked great. He seemed very centered and brilliant, smart, funny, very engaged. I thought he looked very well.''

Ray McGovern, called Snowden ''an extraordinary person'' who has ''no regrets'' for his actions.

Thomas Andrews Drake is a former NSA senior executive and a whistleblower indicted in 2010 for espionage after leaking documents to the press that alleged that the intelligence organization had committed fraud, waste and abuse against the American people. For his whistleblowing activities, Drake was honored in 2011 with the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.

In the studio he recalled his experience being a whistleblower.''I disclosed high crimes and misdemeanors by the US government while at the National Security Agency (NSA). That involved both secret surveillance and massive fraud, waste and abuse. And no regrets at all in blowing the whistle, recognizing that I paid a very high price,'' Drake told RT.

Coleen Rowley is a former FBI agent and whistleblower. In 2002, Rowley testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee revealing problems facing the US intelligence community by highlighting some of the pre 9/11 intelligence lapses.

''When you saw this 180-degree switch to the war paradigm and the use of intelligence rather than judicial process, due process, you know, the law of interrogation '' I had to speak out and explain the failures of 9/11.'' Rowley told RT.

For her activity TIME magazine chose her as one of three whistleblower persons of the year.

Former ethics adviser to the Department of Justice, Jesselyn Radack, became a whistleblower after she exposed the FBI for committing violations in their interrogation of John Walker Lindh, an alleged Taliban fighter captured in 2001 in Afghanistan, without an attorney present. She also exposed the Department of Justice for allegedly attempting to suppress that information. ''The justice department was willing to cut corners to prosecute people,'' she told RT.

Former National Security Whistleblowers Meet in Moscow and Award Sam Adams Prize to Snowden - Government Accountability Project

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:33

2013 Sam Adams Award recipient Edward Snowden has now formally received the symbolic candlestick prize given annually by a group of retired CIA officers for members of the intelligence community who exhibit integrity in intelligence. The award was conferred in Moscow last night in a ceremony that brought together former Sam Adams recipients who are some of the most prominent whistleblowers in recent history, including former NSA Senior Analyst Thomas Drake, former Department of Justice Ethics Advisor Jesselyn Radack, and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, along with activist and former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern.

Snowden was also recently a finalist for the 2013 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded by the European Parliament. The Sam Adams Award is significant as an endorsement by former intelligence workers of his actions as a whistleblower who revealed dragnet US surveillance in June 2013, and as an asylum-seeker who fled to Russia later that month.

The award also offered a rare glimpse of a stateless American deprived of his passport and forced into asylum abroad. Jesselyn Radack, now the National Security & Human Rights Director for the Government Accountability Project (GAP), called this a worldwide ''trend'' and noted:

"Mr. Snowden is not free to go where he wants. Laura Poitras is living in Germany and does not feel she can return to the US without being detained. I believe Glenn Greenwald harbors similar concerns because his partner was detained. These are all Americans who are being penalized for telling the truth and practicing journalism. Also, WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison is stranded in Russia with Mr. Snowden because of the prospect of being detained on terrorism charges in the UK. It's abhorrent.''

Of Snowden's health and general demeanor, Ms. Radack noted: ''Edward looks great. He's centered, articulate, and closely following the issues, both in the United States and globally.''

Radack relayed Snowden's positive descriptions of Russia and the US.

''He is grateful he was granted asylum by Russia after being rendered stateless by the US government. He loves America and wants to see it returned to its democratic ideals, which are completely antithetical to a closed and secret society that make for turn-key tyranny. In the meantime, he is integrating and adapting to his new life in Russia.''

''It's clear that people of conscience within the intelligence community '-- people who are clearly in-the-know '-- condone Mr. Snowden's actions,'' stated Beatrice Edwards, GAP Executive Director. ''This one fact speaks volumes and we expect to know more in the coming days.''

GAP champions government and corporate accountability and transparency by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers, and empowering citizen activists. Since its founding in 1977, GAP has fought to make large bureaucratic institutions accountable through the effective exercise of conscience.Editor's Note (clarification): The Sam Adams Award is neither administered nor awarded by GAP.

Contact: Douglas Kim, GAP External Relations OfficerPhone: (917) 907-4394Email: DouglasK@whistleblower.org

Sam Adams Award - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The Obama Administration and the Press - Reports - Committee to Protect Journalists

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U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists. A CPJ special report by Leonard Downie Jr. with reporting by Sara Rafsky

Published October 10, 2013

WASHINGTON, D.C.In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records. An ''Insider Threat Program'' being implemented in every government department requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press'--compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are under way. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being ''an aider, abettor and/or conspirator'' of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail.

More in this report' CPJ's RecommendationsOn the blog' The US press is our pressIn print' Download the pdfIn other languages' Espa±ol' PortuguªsCompounding the concerns of journalists and the government officials they contact, news stories based on classified documents obtained from Snowden have revealed extensive surveillance of Americans' telephone and e-mail traffic by the National Security Agency. Numerous Washington-based journalists told me that officials are reluctant to discuss even unclassified information with them because they fear that leak investigations and government surveillance make it more difficult for reporters to protect them as sources. ''I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,'' said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, an influential nonprofit government accountability news organization in Washington. ''It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the government to monitor those contacts,'' he said.

''I think we have a real problem,'' said New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane. ''Most people are deterred by those leaks prosecutions. They're scared to death. There's a gray zone between classified and unclassified information, and most sources were in that gray zone. Sources are now afraid to enter that gray zone. It's having a deterrent effect. If we consider aggressive press coverage of government activities being at the core of American democracy, this tips the balance heavily in favor of the government.''

At the same time, the journalists told me, designated administration spokesmen are often unresponsive or hostile to press inquiries, even when reporters have been sent to them by officials who won't talk on their own. Despite President Barack Obama's repeated promise that his administration would be the most open and transparent in American history, reporters and government transparency advocates said they are disappointed by its performance in improving access to the information they need.

''This is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered,'' said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times.

The Obama administration has notably used social media, videos, and its own sophisticated websites to provide the public with administration-generated information about its activities, along with considerable government data useful for consumers and businesses. However, with some exceptions, such as putting the White House visitors' logs on the whitehouse.gov website and selected declassified documents on the new U.S. Intelligence Community website, it discloses too little of the information most needed by the press and public to hold the administration accountable for its policies and actions. ''Government should be transparent,'' Obama stated on the White House website, as he has repeatedly in presidential directives. ''Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their government is doing.''

But his administration's actions have too often contradicted Obama's stated intentions. ''Instead,'' New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote earlier this year, ''it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.''

''President Obama had said that default should be disclosure,'' Times reporter Shane told me. ''The culture they've created is not one that favors disclosure.''

White House officials, in discussions with me, strongly objected to such characterizations. They cited statistics showing that Obama gave more interviews to news, entertainment, and digital media in his first four-plus years in office than Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did in their respective first terms, combined. They pointed to presidential directives to put more government data online, to speed up processing of Freedom of Information Act requests, and to limit the amount of government information classified as secret. And they noted the declassification and public release of information about NSA communications surveillance programs in the wake of Snowden's leak of voluminous secret documents to The Washington Post and the Guardian.

''The idea that people are shutting up and not leaking to reporters is belied by the facts,'' Obama's press secretary, Jay Carney, told me, pointing in frustration to anonymously sourced media reports that same day about planning for military action against the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

''We make an effort to communicate about national security issues in on-the-record and background briefings by sanctioned sources,'' said deputy White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes. ''And we still see investigative reporting from nonsanctioned sources with lots of unclassified information and some sensitive information.''

He cited as an example the administration's growing, if belated, official openness about its use of drone aircraft to attack suspected terrorists, including declassification of information about strikes in Yemen and Somalia, following revelations about drone attacks in the news media. ''If you can be transparent, you can defend the policy,'' Rhodes told me. ''But then you're accused of jeopardizing national security. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. There is so much political controversy over everything in Washington. It can be a disincentive.''

The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.

''There's no question that sources are looking over their shoulders,'' Michael Oreskes, a senior managing editor of The Associated Press, told me months after the government, in an extensive leak investigation, secretly subpoenaed and seized records for telephone lines and switchboards used by more than 100 AP reporters in its Washington bureau and elsewhere. ''Sources are more jittery and more standoffish, not just in national security reporting. A lot of skittishness is at the more routine level. The Obama administration has been extremely controlling and extremely resistant to journalistic intervention. There's a mind-set and approach that holds journalists at a greater distance.''

Washington Post national security reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a member of CPJ's board of directors, told me that ''one of the most pernicious effects is the chilling effect created across government on matters that are less sensitive but certainly in the public interest as a check on government and elected officials. It serves to shield and obscure the business of government from necessary accountability.''

Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, said he thought the combined efforts of the administration were ''squeezing the flow of information at several pressure points.'' He cited investigations of ''leakers and journalists doing business with them'' and limitations on ''everyday access necessary for the administration to explain itself and be held accountable.''

The Insider Threat Program being implemented throughout the Obama administration to stop leaks'--first detailed by the McClatchy newspapers' Washington bureau in late June'--has already ''created internal surveillance, heightened a degree of paranoia in government and made people conscious of contacts with the public, advocates, and the press,'' said a prominent transparency advocate, Steven Aftergood, director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. None of these measures is anything like the government controls, censorship, repression, physical danger, and even death that journalists and their sources face daily in many countries throughout the world'--from Asia, the Middle East and Africa to Russia, parts of Europe and Latin America, and including nations that have offered asylum from U.S. prosecution to Snowden. But the United States, with its unique constitutional guarantees of free speech and a free press'--essential to its tradition of government accountability'--is not any other country.

''The investigation and potential indictment of investigative journalists for the crime of doing their jobs well enough to make the government squirm is nothing new,'' Suzanne Nossel, executive director of PEN American Center, wrote earlier this year. ''It happens all over the world, and is part of what the Obama administration has fought against in championing press and Internet freedom globally. By allowing its own campaign against national security leaks to become grounds for trampling free expression, the administration has put a significant piece of its very own foreign policy and human rights legacy at risk.''

Financial Times correspondent Richard McGregor told me that, after coming to Washington several years ago from a posting in China, he was surprised to find that ''covering this White House is pretty miserable in terms of getting anything of substance to report on in what should be a much more open system. If the U.S. starts backsliding, it is not only a bad example for more closed states, but also for other democracies that have been influenced by the U.S.'' to make their governments more transparent.

This report will examine all these issues: legal policies of the Obama administration that disrupt relationships between journalists and government sources; the surveillance programs that cast doubt on journalists' ability to protect those sources; restrictive practices for disclosing information that make it more difficult to hold the government accountable for its actions and decision-making; and manipulative use of administration-controlled media to circumvent scrutiny by the press.

September 11, 2001, is a watershedOf course, every U.S. administration in modern times has tried, with varying degrees of success, to control its message and manage contacts with the media and the public. ''When I'm asked what is the most manipulative and secretive administration I've covered, I always say it's the one in office now,'' Bob Schieffer, the veteran CBS television news anchor and chief Washington correspondent, told me. ''Every administration learns from the previous administration. They become more secretive and put tighter clamps on information. This administration exercises more control than George W. Bush's did, and his before that.''

The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, were a watershed. They led to a rapid buildup of what The Washington Post later characterized as a sprawling ''Top Secret America'' of intelligence and other government agencies, special military forces, and private contractors to combat terrorism. The ''black budget'' for the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies alone was more than $50 billion for the fiscal year 2013, according to an NSA document Edward Snowden gave to The Post.

Since the 9/11 attacks, ''the national security role of the government has increased hugely,'' said Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, a senior national security lawyer in the Pentagon and the Justice Department during the Bush administration. It has amounted to a ''gigantic expansion of the secrecy system,'' he told me, ''both the number of secrets and the numbers of people with access to secrets.''

By 2011, more than 4 million Americans had security clearances for access to classified information of one kind or another, according to a U. S. Intelligence Community report to Congress required by the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, and more and more information was being classified as secret. In that year alone, government employees made 92 million decisions to classify information'--one measure of what Goldsmith called ''massive, massive over-classification.'' For example, the 250,000 U.S. State Department cables that Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning (then known as Pvt. Bradley Manning) downloaded and gave to the Wikileaks website included countless previously published newspaper articles that were classified as secret in diplomatic dispatches to Washington.

The Patriot Act, passed by Congress after the 9/11 attacks and since amended and extended in duration, gave the government increased powers to protect national security, including secret investigations of suspected terrorist activity. During the Bush administration, the NSA, working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, secretly monitored large amounts of telephone calls that flowed through U.S. telecommunications companies and facilities. This electronic surveillance to detect terrorism threats was eventually authorized and expanded by the closed FISA court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enabling the NSA to secretly collect, store, and access records of most telephone and Internet traffic in and passing through the United States.

Initially, the American press did not discover these or other secret counterterrorism activities. It also did not appear to be aggressive in challenging President George W. Bush's rationale for going to war in Iraq, in addition to the continuing military activity in Afghanistan. ''The Bush administration was working to sell the wars and covert programs to journalists,'' syndicated foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius told me. ''Access was a routine matter.''

But the press coverage gradually changed. In 2003, reporter Barton Gellman detailed in The Washington Post how an American task force had been unable to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the American invasion. In 2004, CBS television news and New Yorkermagazine writer Seymour Hersh separately reported that U.S. soldiers and intelligence agency interrogators had abused and tortured wartime prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. In 2005, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had detained and aggressively interrogated terrorism suspects in extralegal ''black site'' secret prisons outside the U.S. Later that year, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau first reported about the warrantless intercepts of Americans' telephone calls in the NSA's secret electronic surveillance program. In 2006, Risen published a book in which he revealed a failed CIA covert operation to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

These kinds of revelations enabled Americans to learn about questionable actions by their government and judge for themselves. But they infuriated Bush administration officials, who tried to persuade news executives to stop or delay such stories, which depended, in part, on confidential government sources of classified information. The Bush administration started intensive investigations to identify the sources for the stories on CIA secret prisons and NSA electronic surveillance and for Risen's book. By the time Bush left office, no one had been prosecuted, although a CIA officer was fired for unreported contacts with Priest, and several Justice Department investigations were continuing.

The Bush White House and Vice President Dick Cheney did not hesitate to take issue with an increasingly adversarial press publicly and privately, especially as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan'--and the Bush administration itself'--became more unpopular. But journalists and news executives, including myself, were still able to engage knowledgeable officials at the highest levels of the administration in productive dialogue, including discussions of sensitive stories about classified national security activities. ''The Bush administration had a worse reputation,'' Marcus Brauchli, my immediate successor as executive editor of The Washington Post, told me, ''but, in practice, it was much more accepting of the role of journalism in national security.''

And not just in national security. Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said ''the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration'' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies. Among several examples she cited, the Environmental Protection Agency ''just wouldn't talk to us'' or release records about environmental policy review panels ''filled by people with ties to target companies.''

Obama promises transparencyObama, who during the 2008 campaign had criticized the ''excessive secrecy'' of the Bush administration, came into the Oval Office promising an unprecedentedly open government. By the end of his first full day there on January 21, 2009, he had issued directives to government agencies to speed up their responses to Freedom of Information Act requests and to establish ''Open Government Initiative'' websites with information about their activities and the data they collect.

The government websites turned out to be part of a strategy, honed during Obama's presidential campaign, to use the Internet to dispense to the public large amounts of favorable information and images generated by his administration, while limiting its exposure to probing by the press. Veteran political journalists Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen described the administration's message machine this way on the news website Politico: ''One authentically new technique pioneered by the Obama White House is government creation of content'--photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides'--which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. And they are obsessed with taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every other social media forum, not just for campaigning, but governing. They are more disciplined about cracking down on staff that leak, or reporters who write things they don't like.''

A senior White House official told me, ''There are new means available to us because of changes in the media, and we'd be guilty of malpractice if we didn't use them.'' The official said that, for example, the White House often communicated brief news announcements on Twitter to the more than 4 million followers of @whitehouse.''Some of you have said that I'm ignoring the Washington press corps'--that we're too controlling,'' Obama jokingly told assembled journalists at the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington in March. ''Well, you know what? You were right. I was wrong, and I want to apologize in a video you can watch exclusively at whitehouse.gov,'' one of the administration's websites.

''There is no access to the daily business in the Oval Office, who the president meets with, who he gets advice from,'' said ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton, who has been covering presidents since Gerald Ford. She said many of Obama's important meetings with major figures from outside the administration on issues like health care, immigration, or the economy are not even listed on Obama's public schedule. This makes it more difficult for the news media to inform citizens about how the president makes decisions and who is influencing them.

''In the past,'' Compton told me, ''we would often be called into the Roosevelt Room at the beginning of meetings to hear the president's opening remarks and see who's in the meeting, and then we could talk to some of them outside on the driveway afterward. This president has wiped all that coverage off the map. He's the least transparent of the seven presidents I've covered in terms of how he does his daily business.''

Instead of providing greater access for reporting by knowledgeable members of the press, Compton noted, the Obama White House produces its own short newscast, ''West Wing Week,'' which it posts on the White House website. ''It's five minutes of their own video and sound from events the press didn't even know about,'' she said.

''When you call the White House press office to ask a question or seek information, they refer us to White House websites,'' said Chris Schlemon, Washington producer for Britain's Channel 4 television news network. ''We have to use White House website content, White House videos of the president's interviews with local television stations and White House photographs of the president.''

The Obama administration is using social media ''to end run the news media completely,'' Sesno at George Washington University told me. ''Open dialogue with the public without filters is good, but if used for propaganda and to avoid contact with journalists, it's a slippery slope.''

Brushing off such concerns as special pleading from the news media, a senior administration official told me that White House videos of otherwise closed meetings, for example, provide the public with ''a net increase in the visibility of these meetings.'' Several reporters told me that the White House press office and public affairs officials in many government agencies often don't respond to their questions and interview requests or are bullying when they do. ''In the Obama administration, there is across-the-board hostility to the media,'' said veteran Washington correspondent and author Josh Meyer, who reports for the Atlantic Media national news website Quartz. ''They don't return repeated phone calls and e-mails. They feel entitled to and expect supportive media coverage.''

Reporters and editors said they often get calls from the White House complaining about news content about the administration. ''Sometimes their levels of sensitivity amaze me'--about something on Twitter or a headline on our website,'' said Washington Post Managing Editor Kevin Merida.

Obama press secretary Carney, who had covered the White House for Time magazine, minimized such complaints as being part of a ''natural tension'' in any administration's relationship with the press. ''That's not new. I was yelled at by people during the Clinton and Bush administrations,'' he told me.

''The Obama people will spend an hour with you, off the record, arguing about the premise of the story,'' said Josh Gerstein, who covers the White House and its information policies for Politico. ''If the story is basically one that they don't want to come out, they won't even give you the basic facts.''

Eric Schmitt, national security correspondent of The New York Times, told me: ''There's almost an obligation to control the message the way they did during the campaign. More insidious than the chilling effect of the leaks investigations is the slow roll or stall. People say, 'I have to get back to you. I have to clear it with public affairs.'''

''They're so on message,'' said Channel 4's Schlemon. ''I thought Bush was on message, but they've taken it to a whole new level.''

White House under pressure to stop leaksAs this information-control culture took root after Obama entered the White House in January 2009, his administration also came under growing pressure from U.S. intelligence agencies and congressional intelligence committees to stem what they considered an alarming accumulation of leaks of national security information. According to a New York Times story this summer, Obama's first director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, noted that during the previous four years 153 national security leaks had been referred by the intelligence agencies in ''crime reports'' to the Justice Department, but that only 24 had been investigated by the FBI, and no leaker had yet been prosecuted in those investigations.

''According to Mr. Blair,'' The Timesreported, ''the effort got under way after Fox News reported in June 2009 that American intelligence had gleaned word from within North Korea of plans for an imminent nuclear test.'' Blair told The Times that he and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. then coordinated a more aggressive approach aimed at producing speedy prosecutions. ''We were hoping to get somebody and make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop,'' Blair told The Times. ''It was never a conscious decision to bring more of these cases than we ever had,'' Matthew Miller, Holder's spokesman at the time, told me this summer. ''It was a combination of things. There were more crime reports from the intelligence agencies than in previous years. There was pressure'' from Capitol Hill, where Holder, Blair and other administration officials ''were being harangued by both sides: 'Why aren't leakers being prosecuted? Why aren't they being disciplined?'''

''Some strong cases,'' inherited from the Bush administration, ''were already in process,'' Miller said. ''And a number of cases popped up that were easier to prosecute'' with ''electronic evidence,'' including telephone and e-mail records of government officials and journalists. ''Before, you needed to have the leaker admit it, which doesn't happen,'' he added, ''or the reporter to testify about it, which doesn't happen.''

Leak prosecutions under Obama have been ''a kind of slap in the face,'' said Smith of the Center for Public Integrity. ''It means you have to use extraordinary measures for contacts with officials speaking without authorization.''

Use of Espionage Act gathers steamThe first Obama administration prosecution for leaking information popped up quickly in April 2009, when a Hebrew linguist under contract with the FBI, Shamai K. Leibowitz, gave a blogger classified information about Israel. The administration has never disclosed the nature of the information, the identity of the blogger, or the government's evidence in the relatively little-noticed case. Leibowitz pleaded guilty in May 2010, and was sentenced to 20 months in prison for a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. It was the Obama administration's initial use of a law passed during World War I to prevent spying for foreign enemies.

The campaign against leaks then gathered steam with Espionage Act prosecutions in two of the investigations inherited from the Bush administration.

In the first, NSA employee Thomas Drake was indicted on April 14, 2010, on charges of providing information to The Baltimore Sun in 2006 and 2007 about spending and management issues at the NSA, including disagreements about competing secret communications surveillance programs. Drake gave information to Siobhan Gorman, then a Sun reporter, including copies of documents that, in his view, showed the NSA had wrongly shelved a cheaper surveillance program with privacy safeguards for Americans in favor of a much more costly program without such safeguards. Drake and two of his NSA colleagues believed they were whistle-blowers who had first voiced their concerns within the NSA and to a sympathetic congressional investigator, to no avail. Gorman's stories in the Sun angered government officials, including Gen. Michael Hayden, who was the NSA director when Drake objected to Hayden's decision to switch the communications surveillance programs.

At the time when the Sun was publishing Gorman's stories, the Bush administration's investigation of the 2005 New York Times story about NSA warrantless communications surveillance had not found any leakers to prosecute. Apparently Drake, his NSA colleagues, and the congressional investigator to whom Drake had turned then became the focus of that investigation, even though they were never identified as sources for The Times. The homes of the other three'--former NSA officials William Binney and J. Kirk Weibe and House Intelligence Committee staff member Diane Roark'--were raided by armed federal agents on July 26, 2007. The raids frightened and angered them, but they were not prosecuted.

However, when Drake's home was searched four months later, federal agents found copies of documents about the NSA programs that were the subjects of The Baltimore Sun stories. Drake volunteered to investigators that, acting as a whistle-blower, he had sent copies of documents and hundreds of e-mails to Sun reporter Gorman. Only after the Obama administration took office more than a year later, and the Justice Department became more aggressive in prosecuting leakers, was Drake indicted on 10 felony counts, including violations of the Espionage Act, for ''willful retention of national defense information'' and ''making false statements'' when he insisted to federal agents that the documents he had copies of were not secret.

Eventually, Drake's lawyers and supporters showed that most of the information at issue was not classified or, as former Justice spokesman Miller told me, ''other officials had been talking about the same things.'' In June, as the government's case ''fell apart,'' in Miller's words, the federal prosecutor agreed not to seek a prison sentence for Drake in return for his guilty plea to the misdemeanor crime of misusing the NSA's computer system. When Judge Richard D. Bennett sentenced Drake in Federal District Court to a year's probation and 240 hours of community service, he said it was ''unconscionable'' that Drake and his family had endured ''four years of hell'' before the government dismissed its 10-count felony indictment. Drake, who was forced to resign from the NSA, now works in an Apple computer store.

Former NSA director Hayden told me that, despite his differences with Drake, the employee should never have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. ''He should have been fired for unauthorized meetings with the press,'' Hayden said. ''Prosecutorial overreach was so great that it collapsed under its own weight.''

Whatever his role in the NSA's internal rivalries at the time, Drake appears to be a whistle-blower whose information about the secretive agency's telecommunications surveillance methods should have resulted in greater government accountability at the time, rather than a criminal prosecution for spying.

Who is a whistle-blower?In the second investigation inherited from the Bush administration, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was indicted on Dec. 22, 2010, and arrested on Jan. 6, 2011, on charges of providing New York Times reporter James Risen with extensive information about a failed CIA effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. TheTimes never published a story about it, but the information appeared to be the basis for a chapter in Risen's 2006 book, State of War. Sterling, who is black, had unsuccessfully sued the CIA for discrimination after he lost his job there.

Years of communications records for the two men were subpoenaed and seized during the government's investigation'--and itemized in Sterling's indictment. They showed dozens of telephone calls and e-mails between Sterling and Risen, beginning in 2002, when Risen wrote in TheTimes about Sterling's allegations of racial discrimination when he worked on the CIA's Iran task force. In hindsight, it was the first clear evidence that the Justice Department was digging into the phone and e-mail records of both government officials and journalists while investigating leaks.

''Jeffrey Sterling is not a whistle-blower,'' Miller, the former Justice Department spokesman, insisted to me, even though Sterling, whatever his motive, apparently was knowledgeable about significant problems plaguing the CIA at the time. ''He was fired for cause. He went to court and the case was thrown out. No waste, fraud, or abuse was involved.''

This is a disturbing distinction that the Obama administration has made repeatedly. Exposing ''waste, fraud and abuse'' is considered to be whistle-blowing. But exposing questionable government policies and actions, even if they could be illegal or unconstitutional, is often considered to be leaking that must be stopped and punished. This greatly reduces the potential for the press to help hold the government accountable to citizens.

Beginning in early 2008, the Justice Department repeatedly tried to subpoena Risen to testify against Sterling in what has become a long-running legal battle closely watched by journalists and media lawyers. In support of the latest subpoena, filed in April 2010, Justice argued that ''James Risen is an eyewitness to the serious crimes with which the grand jury charged Sterling.''

In July 2011, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled in Federal District Court that, while Risen must testify to the accuracy of his reporting, he could not be compelled by the government to reveal his source. She concluded that courts, dating back to the U.S. Supreme Court's divided ruling in Branzburg v. Hayes in 1972, had, in effect, established a qualified privilege under the First Amendment that protects reporters against identifying their sources if their need to protect their sources' identities to do their reporting outweighs the government's need for the reporters' testimony to establish its case. It was the first time a reporter had successfully invoked such a privilege at the grand jury and trial stages of a federal prosecution.

The Obama administration appealed Brinkema's decision, leaving the Sterling trial in limbo. A coalition of 29 news organizations and related groups came forward to support Risen, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. In an appellate brief, they pointed to the many significant national security and government accountability news stories over the years that could not have been reported by the press without confidential sources.

However, in July this year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., reversed Brinkema's decision from two years earlier. A 2-to-1 majority ruled that the First Amendment did not protect Risen from being forced to testify against his source. Also citing Branzburg, Chief Judge William Byrd Traxler wrote: ''Clearly, Risen's direct, firsthand account of the criminal conduct indicted by the grand jury cannot be obtained by alternative means, as Risen is without dispute the only witness who can offer this testimony.''

Ominously, perhaps, Traxler added that Risen ''is inextricably involved in it. Without him, the alleged crime would not have occurred, since he was the recipient of illegally-disclosed, classified information.''

Dissenting, Judge Roger Gregory argued that the decision could be a serious blow to investigative journalism. ''The majority exalts the interests of the government while unduly trampling those of the press,'' he wrote, ''and, in doing so, severely impinges on the press and the free flow of information in our society.''

Risen asked the full 15-judge appellate court to review the case, and he vowed to go to jail rather than identify his source. Backed once again by many press organizations, he also formally asked the Justice Department to withdraw the subpoena. The Justice Department has continued to press for enforcement of the subpoena by asking the full appellate court not to hear further arguments in the case.

Manning case is a turning pointThe Obama administration's next prosecution originated with a June 11, 2009, story on the Fox News network's website. Fox News's chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, reported that U.S. Intelligence had discovered that North Korea was planning, in defiance of the United Nations, to escalate its nuclear program and conduct another nuclear weapons test. The Justice Department soon began a secret investigation, which produced an August 19, 2010, felony indictment of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department contract analyst. He was charged with violating the Espionage Act by giving classified intelligence information about North Korea to Rosen, who was not named in the indictment.

The indictment of Kim contained just two bare-bones paragraphs'--the tip of an iceberg of secret investigations on which the Obama administration and the press would collide resoundingly nearly three years later.

Overshadowing the Kim case at the time was the arrest in May 2010 of Manning, the Army private, in the most voluminous leak of classified documents in U.S. history. Manning was an emotionally troubled young soldier concerned about U.S. conduct in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning used computer access as an Army intelligence analyst in Baghdad to download an enormous amount of classified information and give it to the anti-secrecy group Wikileaks. The data included more than 250,000 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables, 500,000 U.S. Army incident reports from the two wars, dossiers on terrorist suspects detained at Guantnamo Bay, and videos of two American airstrikes that killed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

News media throughout the world published scores of stories based on the documents obtained through Wikileaks during 2010 and 2011. The State Department cables contained American diplomats' unvarnished views of numerous countries' government and diplomatic activities. The military logs detailed troubling issues, including civilian deaths, in waging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While news organizations did further reporting for what they published, and decided to leave out some names and other details after talking to government officials, Wikileaks posted unredacted documents on its own website, exposing, among other things, the identities of foreign nationals in contact with U.S. embassies around the world.

Manning was eventually charged in a military court with 22 offenses, including violations of the Espionage Act, and pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the lesser charges of accessing and communicating classified information. The government nevertheless continued to pursue the prosecution, and Manning was convicted by a military judge in July of the rest of the charges, except the most serious offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice'--aiding the enemy. In August, the court-martial judge, Col. Denise R. Lind, sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison. With credit for time served awaiting the trial and verdict, she could be eligible for parole in seven years. It was a long sentence for leaking classified information, as extensive as it was, to news media, rather than spying for a foreign government.

The Manning case appears to have been another turning point. ''After Wikileaks, the administration got together and decided we're not going to let this happen again,'' said Lucy Dalglish, who monitored developments closely while director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. ''Prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act is almost their only tool,'' she told me. ''They're sending a message. It's a strategy.''

Dalglish, now dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, along with Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and other longtime government transparency advocates, met with President Obama in the Oval Office on March 28, 2011, to thank him for his frequent promises about transparency and early actions on open government. They used the opportunity to explain why they thought much more needed to be done. According to Brian's written account in the POGO blog the next day, the president seemed sympathetic to the issues they raised, including the over-classification of government information as secret.

But when Brian brought up ''the current aggressive prosecution of national security whistle-blowers'' and the ''need to create safe channels for disclosure of wrongdoing in national security agencies,'' she wrote, ''The president shifted in his seat and learned forward. He said he wanted to engage on this topic because that may be where we have some differences. He said he doesn't want to protect the people who leak to the media war plans that could impact the troops. He differentiated these leaks from those whistle-blowers exposing a contractor getting paid for work they are not performing.''

Dalglish told me there was a follow-up meeting at the White House in June 2011, with national security journalists and lawyers from the director of national intelligence, CIA, FBI and the Pentagon. But they made little progress. ''When the journalists said that in the past you could negotiate with agencies'' about national security information, ''there was no real response,'' Dalglish recalled. When they asked, with the Risen subpoena in mind, about a proposed federal shield law that could protect reporters from being forced to identify their sources, Dalglish said, the lawyers told them, ''You can get a shield law, but you've probably seen your last subpoena. We don't need you anymore.''

Another leaker's motives in questionOn October 7, 2011, the Obama White House launched an ambitious new effort to curb leaks. ''Following the unlawful disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks,'' it announced, ''the National Security Staff formed an interagency committee to review the policies and practices surrounding the handling of classified information, and to recommend government-wide actions to reduce the risk of a future breach.'' An accompanying executive order from the president established an Insider Threat Task Force to develop within a year ''a government-wide program for insider threat detection and prevention to improve protection and reduce potential vulnerabilities of classified information from exploitation, compromise, or other unauthorized disclosure.''

Meanwhile, the administration launched another Espionage Act prosecution. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou was indicted on April 5, 2012, on five felony counts accusing him of disclosing classified information, including the names of two CIA agents, to freelance journalist Matthew Cole and to New York Times reporter Scott Shane. Kiriakou, who retired from the CIA in 2004, had led the team that located and captured senior Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in 2002 in Pakistan. He became a sought-after news source'--and a bªte noire for the CIA'--after a 2007 ABC News television interview in which he confirmed that Zubaydah had been water-boarded during his interrogation. Kiriakou said he believed the measure was necessary, legal, and effective, but probably constituted torture that should not be used again.

Amid his many subsequent media appearances and contacts with journalists, Kiriakou discussed a covert CIA agent with Cole, who, in turn, discussed the agent with a researcher for defense lawyers for Al Qaeda suspects detained at Guantnamo Bay. Later, Kiriakou confirmed to Shane the identity of a former CIA officer, Deuce Martinez, who was involved in the Zubaydah interrogation. Shane told me that Kiriakou had showed him a non-CIA private business card for Martinez, whom Shane was trying to locate. ''Martinez had been undercover, but he had asked that he no longer be, and he wasn't,'' said Shane, who wrote a detailed Timesstory about ''enhanced interrogations'' of terrorist suspects, which stated that Martinez had declined to be interviewed.

When government officials discovered that the Guantnamo defense lawyers were identifying CIA witnesses to their clients' interrogation, the agency filed a crime report that prompted a Justice Department investigation. A defense lawyer and a researcher, who had been targets of the inquiry, were eventually cleared of any illegality. Instead, the investigation turned into a criminal leaks case after investigators seized scores of e-mails between Kiriakou and journalists. They revealed Kiriakou as both Cole's source of the identity of the covert CIA agent and a frequent contact of Times reporter Shane. In a plea bargain, Kiriakou admitted guilt on October 22, 2012, to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for giving the covert CIA agent's name to Cole. In return, the other charges, including three counts of violating the Espionage Act, were dropped. Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Once again, there was disagreement about the leaker's motivation in a questionable espionage case. Kiriakou and his supporters characterized him as a patriotic, if self-promoting, whistle-blower who exposed abusive interrogation methods later condemned as torture, while none of the government officials responsible for them had been punished. However, Judge Brinkema said in sentencing Kiriakou, ''this is not a case of a whistle-blower'' because of the seriousness of revealing the identity of a covert intelligence officer.

In a statement to CIA employees the day after Kiriakou's sentencing, David H. Petraeus, then the CIA director, made clear the administration's intentions. ''The case yielded the first successful prosecution'''--under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act'--''in 27 years, and it marks an important victory for our agency, for our intelligence community, and for the country,'' Petraeus told them. ''Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.''

The chilling lesson for reporters and sources, TheTimes's Shane told me, contrary to Petraeus, ''is that seemingly innocuous e-mails not containing classified information can be construed as a crime.''

Journalist and author Steve Coll, now dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, raised questions about the case in a New Yorker magazine article last April. ''Which matters more: Kiriakou's motives or his reliability, or the fact that, however inelegantly, he helped to reveal that a sitting president'''--George W. Bush'--''had ordered international crimes?'' Coll asked. ''Does the emphasis on the messenger obscure the message?'' There is no ''perfect solution to this problem'' of how to protect necessary secrets while informing citizens about their government, Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law professor and former Bush administration lawyer, told me. ''Too much secrecy and too much leaking are both bad.'' he said. ''A leaker has to be prepared to subject himself to the penalties of law, but leaks can serve a really important role in helping to correct government malfeasance, to encourage government to be careful about what it does in secret and to preserve democratic processes.''

Climate of fear sets inThe next escalation in the Obama administration's war on leaks had already been prompted by a May 7, 2012, Associated Press story revealing the CIA's success in penetrating a Yemen-based group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that had developed an improved ''underwear bomb'' improvised explosive device (IED) for a suicide bomber to detonate aboard U.S.-bound aircraft. At the request of the White House and the CIA, the AP had held the story for five days to protect continuing aspects of the covert operation. The AP's discussions with government officials were similar to many I had participated in with several administrations during my years as executive editor of The Washington Post, when I was deciding how to publish significant stories about national security without causing unnecessary harm.

After the AP story first appeared on its wire service, the White House spoke freely about it on the record, publicly congratulating the CIA. Intelligence officials, however, were angry that the AP story and subsequent reporting had revealed their covert operation in Yemen. ''The irresponsible and damaging leak of information was made,'' CIA Director John Brennan later told Congress, ''when someone informed The Associated Press that the U.S. had intercepted an IED that was supposed to be used in an attack and that the U.S. government currently had the IED in its possession and was studying it.'' Brennan said that he had himself been questioned by the FBI in the investigation of the leak.

Then, on June 1, 2012, The New York Times published a story by David E. Sanger describing a covert operation code-named Olympic Games, in which a computer worm called Stuxnet, developed by the U.S. and Israel, had been used in cyberattacks on the computer systems running Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities. Sanger also detailed the operation in his book, Confront and Conceal, published at the same time.

Even though the existence of the worm was already known because a computer error had sent it around the world two years earlier, the details in Sanger's story and book helped cause political trouble for Obama. Republicans in Congress and conservative pundits loudly accused the administration of purposely leaking classified information used in the AP and New York Times stories to embellish Obama's counterterrorism credentials in an election year.

The Justice Department responded by opening aggressive investigations to find and prosecute the unnamed sources of both stories. Rejecting Republican calls for special prosecutors, Attorney General Holder assigned two senior U.S. attorneys to run the investigations. The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors and the FBI questioned scores of officials throughout the government who had knowledge of either covert operation or who were identified in computer analyses of phone, text, and e-mail records as having any contact with the journalists involved.

''A memo went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and the intelligence agencies that told people to freeze and retain any e-mail, and presumably phone logs, of communications with me,'' Sanger told me. As a result, he said, longtime sources would no longer talk to him. ''They tell me, 'David, I love you, but don't e-mail me. Let's don't chat until this blows over.'''

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced on June 25, 2012, his own internal steps to stem leaks. Employees of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies'--including the CIA, NSA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency'--would be asked during routine polygraph examinations whether they had disclosed any classified information to anyone. And the new inspector general for the Intelligence Community, with jurisdiction over all its agencies, would investigate leak cases that had not produced prosecutions by the Justice Department to determine what alternative action should be taken. A classified report from the inspector general to Clapper, obtained about the same time by the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, showed that the inspector general was already reviewing 375 unresolved investigations of intelligence agency employees.

Five months later, on November 21, 2012, after a year's planning by its Insider Threat Task Force, the White House issued a presidential memorandum instructing all federal government departments and agencies to set up Insider Threat Programs to monitor employees with access to classified information and prevent ''unauthorized disclosure.'' According to the National Insider Threat Policy, each agency must, among other things, develop procedures ''ensuring employee awareness of their responsibility to report, as well as how and to whom to report, suspected insider threat activity.'' Officials cited the Manning case as the kind of threat the program was intended to prevent.

A survey of government department and agencies this summer by the Washington bureau of the McClatchy newspapers found that they had wide latitude in defining what kinds of behavior constituted a threat. ''Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material,'' it reported in June. ''They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for 'high-risk persons or behaviors' among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to media are equated with espionage.''

Michael Hayden, who was director of the NSA and then the CIA during the Bush administration, told me that, in his view, the unfolding Insider Threat Program ''is designed to chill any conversation whatsoever.''

''The simplest thing to do is to avoid contacts with the press,'' the government transparency advocate Steven Aftergood said about the program. ''It discourages even casual contacts with the press and members of the public,'' he said.

''Reporters are interviewing sources through intermediaries now,'' Washington Post national news editor Cameron Barr told me, ''so the sources can truthfully answer on polygraphs that they didn't talk to reporters.''

Media outraged over AP secret subpoenaIn May of this year, two revelations of Justice Department tactics in the war on leaks caused already roiling tensions between news media and the Obama administration to boil over.

On May 13, the Justice Department informed the Associated Press'--three months after the fact'--that as part of its investigation of the AP story a year earlier about the CIA's covert operation in Yemen, it had secretly subpoenaed and seized all records for 20 AP telephone lines and switchboards for April and May of 2012. The records included outgoing calls for the work and personal phone lines of individual reporters, for AP news bureau lines in New York, Washington, and Hartford, Conn., and for the main AP phone number in the press gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives. Although only five AP reporters and an editor were involved in the May 12, 2012, Yemen story, ''thousands upon thousands of newsgathering calls'' by more than 100 AP journalists using newsroom, home, and mobile phones were included in the seized records, AP President Gary Pruitt said in an interview with CBS News' ''Face the Nation'' television program. ''There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,'' Pruitt wrote in a letter of protest to Attorney General Holder. ''These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP's activities and operation that the government has no conceivable right to know.''

''I don't know what their motive is,'' Pruitt said on ''Face the Nation.'' But, he added, ''I know what the message being sent is: If you talk to the press, we're going after you.'' There was an immediate outcry from the rest of the press. The next day, a coalition of more than 50 American news media organizations'--including the Newspaper Association of America, National Association of Broadcasters, American Society of News Editors, Society of Professional Journalists, ABC, NBC, CNN, NPR, Gannett, McClatchy, Tribune, The New York Times, and The Washington Post'--joined the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press in a strong protest letter to Holder. The secret subpoena and seizure of AP phone records, the letter stated, call ''into question the very integrity of Department of Justice policies toward the press and its ability to balance, on its own, its police powers against the First Amendment rights of the news media and the public's interest in reporting all manner of government conduct, including matters touching on national security which lie at the heart of this case.'' CPJ's board of directors also sent an unprecedented letter of protest to Holder.

Substantively, the news organizations charged in their letter that the Justice Department ''appears to have ignored or brushed aside almost every aspect'' of its own four-decade-old guidelines governing subpoenas of journalists and news organizations. The Justice guidelines prescribed that such a subpoena should be used only a last resort in a federal investigation. They stated that ''the subpoena should be as narrowly drawn as possible,'' that the targeted news organization ''shall be given reasonable and timely notice'' to negotiate the subpoena with Justice or to fight it in court, and that ''the approach in every case must be to strike the proper balance between the public's interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information and the public's interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice.''

By secretly serving the subpoena for the records directly on telephone companies without notifying the AP, the Justice Department avoided negotiations with the news agency or a court challenge over its broad scope. That would be permitted as an exception to the Justice guidelines if prosecutors believed prior notification and negotiations would ''pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.'' But there was never an explanation of what threat might have been posed in this case, since preservation of the records by the phone companies was never in question and the news leak under investigation had occurred long before.

I can remember only one similar event during my 17 years as executive editor of The Washington Post. In 2008, the FBI director at the time, Robert S. Mueller III, formally apologized to me and to the executive editor of The New York Times for the unexplained secret seizure four years earlier of the phone records of our foreign correspondents working in Jakarta, Indonesia'--because the Justice guidelines had been violated and no subpoena had been issued. But I recall a number of instances during several U.S. administrations in which other federal investigative requests, for which the newspaper had prior notification, were successfully negotiated in ways that protected our newsgathering independence in accordance with the Justice guidelines.

A week after the revelation of the secret seizure of AP telephone records, The Washington Postreported that the Justice Department had also secretly subpoenaed and seized telephone and e-mail records of the Fox News chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, in the Espionage Act prosecution of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Federal investigators used the records to trace phone conversations and e-mail exchanges between Rosen and Kim in June, 2009, at the time of Rosen's story about U.S. intelligence monitoring of North Korea's nuclear program. Although investigators had already gathered evidence from Kim's phone records and computer at the State Department, where he worked as a contract analyst with access to classified information, they used the secret subpoena to seize Rosen's phone records and personal e-mails. They also used electronic security badge records to track the comings and goings of Rosen and Kim at the State Department.

Most disturbing for journalists and news organizations, the FBI affidavit filed in support of the successful federal court application for the secret subpoena declared that ''there is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed or is committing a violation'' of the Espionage Act'--''at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator'' '--in seeking and accepting information from Kim while doing his job as a journalist. ''The reporter did so by employing flattery and playing to Mr. Kim's vanity and ego,'' the affidavit said, potentially'--if not laughably'--criminalizing a routine interview tip taught to every cub reporter.

Although the secret subpoena was approved by Holder in May 2010, it and the records seizure did not become known until court records were unsealed three years later. Those records showed that the Justice Department went back to court repeatedly during that time for approval to avoid notifying Rosen and Fox News about the subpoena, in an apparent effort to continue to monitor Rosen's e-mail for other contacts with government officials. It amounted to open-ended government surveillance of a reporter's communications.

''As with the AP subpoenas, this search is overbroad and has a chilling effect on reporters,'' stated a Wall Street Journaleditorial that expressed a view widespread among journalists. ''The chilling is even worse in this case because Mr. Rosen's personal communications were subject to search for what appears to be an extended period of time. With the Fox News search following the AP subpoenas, we now have evidence of a pattern of anti-media behavior. '... The suspicion has to be that maybe these 'leak' investigations are less about deterring leakers and more about intimidating the press.''

In the midst of the controversy, Obama said in a major speech on national security at the National Defense University on May 23 that he was ''troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.'' He said, ''Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs,'' even though his administration would still aggressively investigate government officials ''who break the law'' by leaking classified information.

The president asked Holder ''to review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters.'' And Obama called on Congress to revive and pass a federal ''shield law'''--similar to those in 40 states and the District of Columbia'--that would spell out defenses for journalists facing legal efforts to uncover their confidential sources and reporting contacts.

Two months later, after a series of Justice Department meetings with news executives, reporters, and media lawyers, Holder announced Obama-approved revisions to the Justice guidelines that somewhat narrowed the circumstances under which federal investigators could subpoena and seize communications records of news organizations or reporters. News organizations would be given advance notice of such subpoenas unless the attorney general personally determined ''for compelling reasons'' that it would pose a clear and substantial threat to an investigation. Search warrants could be issued for a reporter's phone and e-mail records only if the journalist was the focus of a criminal investigation for conduct not connected to ordinary newsgathering.

''Members of the news media will not be subject to prosecution based solely on newsgathering activities,'' the Justice Department said. It also would explore ''ways in which intelligence agencies themselves, in the first instance, can address information leaks internally through administrative means, such as the withdrawal of security clearances and imposition of other sanctions,'' rather than criminal prosecutions.

Media lawyers who negotiated with Justice welcomed the revisions to the guidelines as significant progress, despite remaining exceptions. The reactions of journalists were mixed. Times reporter Sanger told me that the revisions were ''just formalizing what was observed in past administrations. The guidelines worked pretty well until the Obama administration came in.''

Even as the Justice Department was working with the news media on revising the guidelines, it was using the Associated Press reporters' phone records it had secretly seized to identify and convict a former FBI agent for the leak about the covert CIA operation in Yemen. On September 23, Justice announced that Donald J. Sachtleben, a former FBI bomb technician working as a contractor for the bureau, had agreed to plead guilty to ''unlawfully disclosing national defense information relating to a disrupted terrorist plot'' in Yemen. ''Sachtleben was identified as a suspect in the case of this unauthorized disclosure'' to a reporter, according to the announcement, ''only after toll records for phone numbers related to the reporter were obtained through a subpoena and compared to other evidence collected during the leak investigation.'' Sachtleben agreed to a 43-month prison sentence in the leak case, in addition to a 97-month sentence for his guilty plea in an unrelated child pornography case.

Focusing on what it called the defendant's ''egregious betrayal of our national security'' in the AP case, the Justice announcement contained another strong warning to potential leakers of classified information to the news media. ''This prosecution demonstrates our deep resolve to hold accountable anyone who would violate their solemn duty to protect our nation's secrets and to prevent future, potentially devastating leaks by those who would wantonly ignore their obligations to safeguard classified information,'' it stated. ''With these charges, a message has been sent that this type of behavior is completely unacceptable and no person is above the law.''

After reiterating that the seized phone records of AP reporters had enabled the FBI to identify Sachtleben, the statement added, ''The FBI will continue to take all necessary steps to pursue such individuals who put the security of our nation and the lives of others at risk by their disclosure of sensitive information.'' While it didn't address the breadth and secrecy of the AP subpoena, Justice appeared to be vowing that it would, when it deemed necessary, make aggressive use of the national security exceptions in both its revised guidelines and a proposed federal shield law for reporters.

Weeks before this announcement, a supporter of a federal shield law, Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, expressed his concerns about targeting reporters' phone records to discover their sources. ''As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee for a decade now, I won't take a back seat to anybody in protecting genuine national security information, but that doesn't mean that everything done in the name of stopping leaks is a good public policy,'' Wyden told me. ''Some of the tactics the Justice Department has used in recent leaks investigations have been overly broad. Seizing phone records of journalists is in effect treating journalists as accomplices in committing crimes.''

Obama and Holder have both expressed support for congressional passage of a federal reporter shield law. A compromise bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 12 would make it more difficult for the government in federal investigations to compel reporters to reveal their sources except in ''classified leak cases when information would prevent or mitigate an act of terrorism or harm to national security.'' It would require a judge, not the attorney general, to approve subpoenas for reporters' records or sources.

A potential sticking point for the shield law had been how Congress should define who is a journalist in this participatory digital media era. The compromise language in the Senate bill would cover anyone who had an ''employment relationship'' with a news organization for at least one year in the past 20 years, or three months in the previous five years; student journalists; anyone with a ''substantial track record'' of freelance journalism in the previous five years; and anyone else ''whom a federal judge has decided should be able to avail him or herself of the protections of the privilege, consistent with the interests of justice and the protection of lawful and legitimate newsgathering activities.'' Journalists and press freedom advocates are divided over whether the federal government should define who is a journalist at all, even though many state shield laws already do. They are concerned about any restrictions on whose journalism would be protected.

''You give us a definition of what a journalist is, you define exemptions, you're painting us into a corner,'' Scott Armstrong, an independent investigative journalist and the executive director of the government transparency advocate Information Trust, said of the reporter shield legislation at a Newseum Institute panel discussion in Washington in September. Armstrong said that, as a First Amendment absolutist, he opposes any congressional legislation governing the press. He added that the national security exemption means that the legislation ''won't protect national security reporters. Federal agencies can still investigate us.''

But others on the panel argued that a shield law would provide some needed protection from federal government interference for countless journalists covering other subjects across the country. ''This shield law could keep a lot of reporters out of court,'' said Kevin Goldberg, legal counsel for the American Society of News Editors.

Congressional passage of a federal shield law in some form would ''not be a cure-all, but helpful,'' Michael Oreskes of the AP told me, if it is ''a statement that the act of reporting and finding sources is as important as the constitutional right to publish.''

Surveillance revelations deepen the chillWhile the fate of the shield legislation remained uncertain, the Obama administration, Congress, and the American people reacted to Snowden's revelations about the NSA's extensive secret collection and surveillance of American and foreign telephone and e-mail traffic. On June 5, the Guardian and The Washington Post began publishing what became a steady stream of stories, documents, and exhibits from the large amount of highly classified information Snowden had given separately to Post reporter Barton Gellman and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. Snowden was connected to them by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was developing a documentary about U.S. electronic surveillance, and who shared some reporting with the two journalists.

Snowden, while working as a Booz Allen Hamilton consultant for the NSA in Hawaii in the spring of 2013, downloaded a still-unknown amount of information about the NSA's secret surveillance programs. He communicated with Gellman by encrypted e-mail and met secretly with Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong. Their stories revealed details of secret NSA operations that acquire, store, and search huge amounts of telephone call, text, and e-mail data from American telephone and Internet companies, under secret FISA court authorization, to find and track communications that might be tied to terrorist activity. The published documents also included the ''black budget'' for U.S. intelligence agencies, classified government charts illustrating how the NSA surveillance programs operate, and legal memos and FISA court decisions underpinning the programs.

Not long after publication began in ThePost and the Guardian, Snowden publicly identified himself as the source of their information. When Gellman asked him at the time about his motive, Snowden said he had discovered an immense expansion of government electronic surveillance, which is ''such a direct threat to democratic government that I have risked my life and family for it.''

On June 21, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint, filed a week earlier, charging Snowden with several violations of the Espionage Act. The U.S. government began a wide-ranging effort to have him extradited to the United States, including revoking his passport. But Snowden eventually made his way from Hong Kong to Russia, where he was granted temporary asylum on August 1.

Greenwald and Poitras worked on his stories and her documentary in Brazil, expressing concern about the U.S. and allied governments' using border security powers to harass and hamper them. Poitras, whose previous films were critical of U.S. anti-terrorism policies, had already been stopped and questioned and had her computers searched several times by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol when re-entering the country in recent years. Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, serving as a courier for him and the Guardian, was similarly detained and his equipment confiscated at Heathrow airport in London on his way back to Rio de Janeiro from Europe in mid-August.

That appeared to be part of an effort by British officials to stop or limit the Guardian's publication of material from Snowden, which included U.S. government documents describing the NSA's collaboration on electronic surveillance with its secretive British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). After threatening the use of Britain's draconian Official Secrets Act, officials supervised destruction in the Guardian offices of computer hard drives containing some of the secret files obtained by Snowden, even though other copies remained in the U.S. and Brazil. Like The Washington Post, the Guardian continued to publish stories based on Snowden's documents, and it began sharing some of them with The New York Times and the nonprofit investigative reporting group ProPublica, based in New York.

At this writing, no connection has been established between the NSA surveillance programs and the many leak investigations being conducted by the Obama administration'--but the surveillance has added to the fearful atmosphere surrounding contacts between American journalists and government sources.

''There is greater concern that their communications are being monitored'--office phones, e-mail systems,'' Post reporter Chandrasekaran said. ''I have to resort to personal e-mail or face to face, even for things I would consider routine.''

Journalists who aren't worried about their communications being monitored should be; if not, they could be putting their sources at risk, said Oktava J"nsd"ttir, program director of the S.A.F.E. Initiative of the Washington-based nonprofit IREX, which advocates for independent media and civil society internationally.

''The key I think is whether journalists today can guarantee their sources anonymity, and at this point that is very difficult, but I will say, not impossible,'' J"nsd"ttir said. ''Sources need to understand the risks they take, agree with the journalists how far they will go and then put ultimate trust in that individual's ability to protect that information and ensure that even though the information may be compromised, the source is not.''

Washington Post national security reporter Dana Priest told me: ''People think they're looking at reporters' records. I'm writing fewer things in e-mail. I'm even afraid to tell officials what I want to talk about because it's all going into one giant computer.''

The work of foreign journalists could be especially vulnerable to surveillance by the NSA or other U.S. intelligence agencies, because they are legally authorized to monitor telephone and Internet communications of non-U.S. nationals. The German magazine Der Spiegel, citing documents from Snowden, reported in August that the NSA had hacked into internal communications of the international news organization Al-Jazeera. The Qatar-based broadcaster and the U.S. government have often been at odds since it broadcast videotaped statements by Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks.

Peter Horrocks, director of global news at the BBC, said all journalists at the British broadcaster must now take training in information security. ''The nature of their work means journalists are often in touch with organizations representing extremist viewpoints and sources whose identities must be protected, and the BBC is particularly concerned with protecting those journalists who are travelling and working in sensitive locations,'' he said.

The European Union opened an investigation in September ''to determine the impact of [U.S.] surveillance activities on EU citizens,'' including journalists. In teleconferenced testimony to the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said that Miranda's airport detention and the destruction of NSA materials at the Guardian could be ''chilling and obstructive to journalism.'' He called for EU oversight of such actions by member governments, adding, ''Please find ways to protect journalism.''

Five days after Snowden was charged, Barton Gellman was asked in a panel discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington why he and ThePost had published stories based on classified documents from Snowden. ''Congress passes a vague law and a secret court makes secret rulings,'' Gellman said. ''Where should the line be between intelligence gathering and privacy? We haven't had that discussion.''

The discussion started by Snowden's revelations quickly grew into a national debate. Members of Congress complained publicly that they had been kept in the dark or misled about the nature and dimensions of the NSA programs. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was forced to apologize for falsely denying in earlier testimony to Congress that the NSA had secretly collected data about the telephone calls of millions of Americans. A bipartisan group of 26 senators wrote to Clapper to demand more information about the NSA surveillance, which they said ''raises serious civil liberties concerns and all but removes the public from an informed national security and civil liberties debate.'' Two judges of the secret FISA court gave unprecedented, if brief, statements about how it worked to The Washington Post. Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein wrote an opinion article in ThePost defending the NSA surveillance as a necessary counterterrorism tool, while promising to work in Congress to make changes ''to increase transparency and improve privacy protections.''

In July, as more members of Congress expressed skepticism about the NSA programs and what they knew about them, several of them introduced bills to rein in the programs. On July 24, a bipartisan plan to defund the NSA's telephone data collection program was defeated by just seven votes in the House of Representatives.

The Obama administration responded by explaining for the first time the legal rationale, execution and oversight of the secret NSA surveillance programs. The president declassified and ordered the release of many previously secret government reports, court decisions, and other documents, including the total number of surveillance orders issued each year to telecommunications companies. At a news conference on August 9, the president said he would ask Congress to tighten privacy protections in the Patriot Act authorization of the NSA programs and add an advocate for privacy rights to the secret FISA court proceedings that govern the NSA programs, in which only the government has been represented. He also created a panel to assess the phone records collection programs and suggest changes by the end of the year.

Adding to his administration's roster of government-run information sites, Obama announced that the 16-agency U.S. Intelligence Community was launching its own website, ''IC on the Record.'' The website posts statements from intelligence agencies, responses to what they characterize as erroneous press reports, and copies of declassified documents, which were dramatically labeled on the website with illustrations of opened locks.

Though the White House is taking credit for this welcome new openness about the NSA's activities, the fact is that the Obama administration'--and the Bush administration before it'--should have been more open and accountable for the NSA's surveillance activities in the first place. It seems highly unlikely this new transparency would have begun without Snowden's disclosures. That would appear to make him a whistle-blower, although he obviously broke laws governing access to highly classified information and his own security clearance, and the full extent, distribution and potential national security impact of the information he obtained is still not known.

In November, the president signed the congressionally passed Whistle-Blower Act of 2012, along with a presidential policy directive aimed at protecting from retaliation all government whistle-blowers, including employees'--but not contractors'--in intelligence agencies. However, the administration won an appellate court decision in August that takes away from the many federal employees in designated ''national security sensitive'' positions the right to appeal personnel actions by their agencies, which could include retaliation for whistle-blowing. And the administration has insisted that government whistle-blowers first raise their issues internally, rather than to outsiders, including the press.

Senator Wyden told me that he has studied the intelligence agencies' personnel rules and found that whistle-blowers ''have to go first to the people perpetrating the problems they want to expose, before they can come to Congress, for example. There are a mountain of barriers and hurdles for intelligence agency whistle-blowers,'' he said.

''We have a president with two minds in regard to whistle-blowing,'' said Angela Canterbury, director of public policy for the Project on Government Oversight. ''He deserves credit for doing more than any other president, but there's a different policy for classified information whistle-blowers.''

When I asked deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes about this, he said, ''The president doesn't like leaks of unauthorized information that can harm national security.'' But not nearly all ''unauthorized'' or classified government information presents that danger. The Obama administration could do much more to reduce unnecessary classification. ''The system is bent deeply in the direction of over-classification of information,'' Senator Wyden said. ''If done properly to protect only genuine national security information, it would be easier to protect government secrets.'' He said it seemed as if classification were being used more to protect people from political embarrassment.

''Even when acting in good faith, officials are liable to over-classify,'' said open government advocate Steven Aftergood. ''There is no review of classification decisions.''

Obama directed government officials in a December 2009 executive order not to classify information if they had significant doubts about whether it needed to be secret. The number of newly classified documents has declined somewhat since then, according to the White House, and declassification of older documents has accelerated. But the administration has yet to take action on more far-reaching recommendations to reduce over-classification made to the president in a December 6, 2012, report by the congressionally authorized Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB). It concluded that ''present practices for classification and declassification of national security information are outmoded, unsustainable and keep too much information from the public.''

The administration's accelerated cyberwarfare activities, revealed in news reports of documents provided by Snowden, were cited by TheTimes'sSanger as an example of information the government should have declassified in some form before it was leaked. ''I think there is a public interest in revealing things like that to alert the American people that an entirely new class of weapons to which the U.S. would be vulnerable were being deployed by the U.S.'--to start public debate, even if the details of it are classified.''

In an April 23, 2013, open letter, 30 government transparency organizations called on the president ''to promptly establish and provide active White House leadership for a Security Classification Reform Steering Committee'' to push government agencies to implement the PIDB recommendations ''to help correct what you have called 'the problem of over-classification.''' The groups urged that the White House ''take ownership of the reform effort.''

The White House and the Justice Department should also vigorously enforce the directive they issued on the president's first full day in office, ordering government agencies to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests ''promptly and in a spirit of cooperation.'' It directed that information should not be withheld merely because ''public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.'' The default response to information inquiries, with or without formal FOIA requests, was supposed to be disclosure.

Instead, reporters and open government advocates told me that their FOIA requests too often faced denials, delays, unresponsiveness or demands for exorbitant fees, with cooperation or obstruction varying widely from agency to agency. Government transparency advocate Danielle Brian of POGO told me that, while ''non-intelligence parts'' of the Pentagon were responsive to information requests, many other parts of the Obama administration'--especially the State Department, Agency for International Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency'--were ''off the charts bad on FOIA.''

An Associated Press analysis, published in March, found that ''more often than it ever has,'' the Obama administration ''cited legal exceptions to censor or withhold the material'' and ''frequently cited the need to protect national security and internal deliberations.'' Some of the administration's new government information policies also contain vague privacy exceptions that could be used to hide records crucial to accountability reporting about such subjects as health care payments, government subsidies, workplace accidents, or detentions of terrorism suspects.

A Washington-based consortium of more than 80 open government advocacy organizations called OpenTheGovernment.org is working on recommendations to the Obama administration to make the FOIA work better for the press and the public. They include reducing the number and breadth of exemptions used to withhold requested information, creating an effective process for appealing and overturning denials of information, reforming fee systems in federal agencies, and streamlining and centralizing the federal FOIA system, as some other countries have done.

When I asked Lucy Dalglish what she thought the Obama administration should do to fulfill the president's promises of transparency and open government, her list included: Keep fewer secrets, improve the FOIA process, be open and honest about government surveillance, and build better bridges with the press, rather than trying to control or shut it out.

With so much government information digitally accessible in so many places to so many people, there are likely to be more Mannings and Snowdens among those who grew up in a digital world with blurred boundaries between public and private, shared and secret information. That makes access by the press to a range of government sources of information and guidance more important than ever.

''Closing doors to reporters is hurting themselves,'' Washington Post journalist and author Bob Woodward told me, ''because less responsible news organizations will publish or broadcast whatever they want. In the end, it does not hurt the press; it can damage national security.''

Journalists from other countries pointed out that hostility by the U.S. government to the news media can be damaging to press freedom elsewhere, contrary to the openness the Obama administration has been advocating internationally. Mohamed Elmenshawy, the widely published Egyptian columnist and director of regional studies at the Middle Eastern Institute in Washington, said, ''As journalists from Third World countries, we look at the U.S. as a model for the very things we want: more freedom of expression and professionalism. We are fighting for free news and not to be threatened, and when we see some issues here regarding regulating news and reporting, it is bad news for us because usually our governments, especially undemocratic ones, use this as an example in a very negative way.''

President Obama is faced with many challenges during his remaining years in office, the outcome of which will help shape his legacy. Among them is fulfilling his very first promise'--to make his administration the most transparent in American history amid national security concerns, economic uncertainty, political polarization, and rapid technological change. Whether he succeeds could have a lasting impact on U.S. government accountability and on the standing of America as an international example of press freedom.

Leonard Downie Jr., vice president at large and former executive editor of The Washington Post, is the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is a founder and a current director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the author of five books.

Sara Rafsky, Americas research associate for the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York, contributed to this report.

Parties agree state controls on the press - Telegraph

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Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, announced on Friday that the main political parties had agreed rules for regulating journalists' conduct and dealing with complaints. It was the latest move towards strengthening press regulation following last year's Leveson Inquiry into wrongdoing by tabloid journalists.

After the inquiry, politicians and the newspaper industry put forward differing proposals for regulation, both to be backed by a Royal Charter. Under the industry plan, regulation would have been independent of the state and expose newspapers to £1'‰million fines. Described as the toughest regulatory regime in the free world, it was rejected by ministers sitting on the Privy Counsel.

By contrast, politicians proposed a system underpinned by statute, compelling newspapers to submit to the new regime. Those that refuse to participate would face ''exemplary'' damages in the event of libel cases. The latest plan was drawn up in talks between Mrs Miller for the Conservatives, Harriet Harman for Labour and Lord Wallace of Tankerness for the Liberal Democrats. It is expected to be approved by the Privy Council on Oct 30.

Following criticism from the industry, politicians agreed that people filing complaints against newspapers could face a fee under the new regulatory regime, to deter speculative or frivolous claims.

They also agreed that editors could be involved in drawing up a new code of conduct for the press, which would be approved by the independent regulator.

Mrs Miller told the BBC: ''We have made really important changes which I think will make this charter work much better, safeguarding the freedom of the press. We want to make sure that this works for the long-term.''

The steering group for the newspaper and magazine industry said the proposals remained deeply flawed. ''This remains a charter written by politicians, imposed by politicians and controlled by politicians. It has not been approved by any of the newspapers or magazines it seeks to regulate,'' it said in a statement.

''Lord Justice Leveson called for 'voluntary, independent self-regulation' of the press. It is impossible to see how a regulator operating under rules imposed by politicians, and enforced by draconian and discriminatory provisions for damages and costs in civil cases, could be said to be either voluntary or independent.''

Report: CNN's Piers Morgan out at 9 p.m. | The Daily Caller

Cash costs Americans $200 billion a year - CNBC

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 12:27

The study found that getting paid electronically (either through direct deposit or a payroll card) is often significantly cheaper than receiving a paper check if there are check-cashing fees (for the unbanked).

Who has the cash?

Most of us have some cash on hand, but that amount varies by income and key demographic factors. Here are some key findings from the study:

Those in households with income of $20,000 to $100,000 a year usually have less than $100 in cash.Those under 35 have median cash balances roughly half the size of those over 55, but they pay more in fees than older people.Men carry nearly double the amount of cash women do. Men are also slightly more likely than women to always keep some cash on hand. This might explain why men use roughly 50 percent more cash each month than women.The self-employed and those who hold multiple jobs have the greatest cash balances.Latinos, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans report much higher average cash holdings than white, African-American and, in particular, Asian-Americans.Is there a lesson here?

Benjamin Mazzotta, a research fellow at Tufts who co-authored this study, believes it has important public policy implications. They include if something should be done to help people on fixed incomes, or those who don't have or want a bank account but need a modern, cost-effective way to pay for things.

(Read more:Employers can't force debit cards on their workers)

"Why shouldn't they have access to reliable, cheap, universally accepted payment instruments like the ones you and I use and take for granted every day, like debit and credit cards and direct deposit?" Mazzotta asked.

The National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group for lower-income and other disadvantaged Americans, agrees that it's important to give people access to electronic payments, so they don't have to rely on cash. But staff attorney Lauren Saunders isn't convinced that all the new systems are superior to cash, which is so easy to use.

"In the financial world, there are costs to everything," Saunders said.

(Read more: How to complain about your bank)

The center wants people to have access to both cash and electronic payments, whatever works for them.

"We shouldn't discourage cash and push everybody to electronic payments, because a lot of that is being driven by industry looking for ways to get their two cents out of it, to earn fees that you don't get when people pay with cash," she said. "Cash is still very useful."

'--By CNBC contributor Herb Weisbaum. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter@TheConsumermanor visit The ConsumerMan website.

Correction:

This story has been updated to correct the cash figure in the headline.

Alles pinnen op 'Zaterdag zonder contanten' - Binnenland | Het laatste nieuws uit Nederland leest u op Telegraaf.nl [binnenland]

Austerity Now! Red Cross launches first emergency food aid for UK since WWII

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Source: RT - News

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 14:29

Published time: October 11, 2013 22:58Reuters / Luke MacGregor

Austerity measures and the economic downturn in the UK have prompted the British branch of the Red Cross to begin formulating an emergency food aid plan for Britain '' the first the charity has set up for the country since WWII.

The Geneva-based charity is to start gathering and distributing food with the help of fellow charities and a supermarket chain, allocating donations to Britain's needy.

The Red Cross is traditionally recognized for its work in disaster-struck regions rather than in developed countries, and the move appears to be a by-product of ''indiscriminate cuts in public health and social welfare,'' according to Bekele Geleta, the Secretary General of the International Federation of the Red Cross, who spoke to the UK's Independent.

An announcement on the website stated that ''Struggling families and individuals across the UK will benefit from [the partnership].''

Surplus perishable food from supermarkets is to be redistributed to charities, lunch clubs for ageing sectors of the population, and food banks. While FareShare, which is participating in the Red Cross scheme, has been undertaking this action since roughly 2004, it has to now cope with increasing demands from food banks.''Unbelievably, 3 million tonnes of food are wasted in the UK every year while thousands go hungry. We're delighted to help FareShare give much-needed support to people in crisis,'' said Simon Lewis, Red Cross head of emergency planning and response.

It ''should be a wake-up-call to David Cameron over his failure to tackle the cost of living crisis,'' Maria Eagle MP, Labour's Shadow Environment Secretary told the Independent.

The UK poverty director for Oxfam charity Chris Johnes, said that he was ''genuinely shocked'' that Britain was struggling to feed the poor and that the Red Cross is stepping in. ''They don't do things for reasons of grandstanding at all,'' he told The Independent. ''The fact that they are doing this... is a very clear signal how serious things have become.''

Trussell Trust charity estimates that around 500,000 people in the UK needed support from food banks last year.

A Red Cross report published on Thursday indicated that Europe as a whole was spiraling into a cycle of poverty as some 120 million are at risk of poverty while around 43 million people across Europe are hungry every day.

The charity concluded that austerity measures taken during Europe's economic downturn have further contributed to snowballing poverty and unemployment, and identifies weakening health; a toughening stance on increasing migration; and a steep rise in unemployment alongside a poverty spiral.

''We do not have all the answers, but we encourage all stakeholders '' including ourselves '' to think in new, different and creative ways to deal with the crisis. Whereas we all hope this will end soon, we need to face reality and take action, so that this humanitarian crisis does not turn into a social and moral crisis for Europe,'' says Anitta Underlin, the IFRC's Director for Europe.

The UK is not the only country turning to charity to feed its struggling population. As austerity continues to wreak havoc for families in Portugal, people are turning to volunteer charities, such as Re-Food, which employs similar methods, using surplus food from restaurants involved in the scheme for food parcels. Charities are now essential in the lives of increasingly deprived sectors of the population.

In Europe, Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have increased their domestic relief programs. In 2012, the Red Cross claims, it handed out food to some 3.5 million Europeans through 22 National Societies, that is an increase of 75 percent compared to three years ago.

''The amount of people depending on Red Cross food distributions in 22 of the surveyed countries has increased by 75 percent between 2009 and 2012,'' the report says.

In Latvia, the Red Cross is engaged in handing out food to more than 140,000 people in a country of around 2 million people. Meanwhile the Spanish Red Cross is now helping more than 2.4 million people Spaniards. Some 50,000 people in Milan alone are receiving food aid.

''While we fully understand that governments need to save money, we strongly advise against indiscriminate cuts in public health and social welfare, as it may cost more in the long run,'' said Bekele Geleta, the Secretary General of the International Federation of the Red Cross.

Chicago Marathon Security Theatre

Machines Gauging Your Star Potential Automate HR Hiring - Bloomberg

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 20:13

They can drive cars, win Jeopardy and find your soon-to-be favorite song. Machines are also learning to decipher the most human qualities about you -- and help businesses predict your potential to be their next star employee.

A handful of technology companies from Knack.it Corp. to Evolv Inc. are doing just that, developing video games and online questionnaires that measure personality attributes in a job applicant. Based on patterns of how a company's best performers responded in these assessments, the software estimates a candidate's suitability to be everything from a warehouse worker to an investment bank analyst.

Welcome to hiring in the age of big data, an ambition marrying automation with analysis in the race to better allocate talent. Having people work at what they do best would make them more productive, bolstering the economy's capacity to expand, according to Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

''People are our biggest resource, and right now a lot of them are mismatched,'' said Brynjolfsson, who specializes in research on information technology and productivity and is an advisor to Knack. ''If you put the right kind of person in the right task, it's good for that person and it's good for the company.''

The advent of the Internet has been both a gift and a curse to recruiters, who now can access a greater pool of potential workers yet also get inundated with too many applications to process. The problem has been a lack of tools to quickly, cheaply and accurately sort through that deluge in an economy that has seen almost five years of above-7 percent unemployment.

Jobs UnfilledSome 3.7 million U.S. jobs went unfilled in July, even though more than 11 million Americans were looking for work, according to Labor Department figures.

''You have this enormous pool of people that's being missed because of the way the entire industry goes after the same kinds of people, asking, did you go to Stanford, did you work at this company?'' said Erik Juhl, head of talent at Vungle Inc., a San Francisco-based video advertising startup, and formerly a recruiter at Google Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. ''You miss what you're looking for, which is -- what is this person going to bring to the table?''

Online GameTo aid that search, Juhl this month will begin using an online video game designed to track, record and analyze every millisecond of its players' behavior. Developed by Knack in Palo Alto, California, Wasabi Waiter places job-seekers in the shoes of a sushi server who must identify the mood of his cartoon customers and bring them the dish labeled with the matching emotion. On a running clock, they must also clear empty dishes into the sink while tending to new customers who take a seat at the bar.

Using about a megabyte of data per candidate, Knack's software measures a variety of attributes shown in academic studies to relate to job performance, including conscientiousness and the capacity to recognize others' emotions. Knack's clients will also see a score estimating each applicant's likelihood of being a high performer.

In a study last year, Knack piloted its technology with Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA)'s GameChanger, a program that invests in entrepreneurs to develop their ideas into new products for the energy sector. Hans Haringa, an executive at GameChanger, wanted to see if Knack's video games could predict who pitched the ideas that turned out to be successful.

Innovative Talents''Knack built themselves a calibrated model with the capacity to predict innovative talents,'' said Haringa, who added that GameChanger is considering adding Knack's tool to select the right people in whom to invest. ''It's early days for the technology but it clearly has upside and potential.''

Home to a more widely-used human resources machine is Evolv, which specializes at evaluating candidates for hourly positions at companies including Xerox Corp. (XRX) and Harte-Hanks Inc. (HHS) The San Francisco-based company administers an online questionnaire to applicants on behalf of its clients. A computer model translates those results into a traffic light for hiring managers so they can decide whom to interview: green for high-potential, yellow for medium-potential and red for risky.

Evolv's advantage is the oceans of information it has tracked on the survey results and those candidates' real-life outcomes if they got hired: how well they performed on the job and how long they ended up staying with the company. In the way that years of experience informs a veteran recruiter, terabytes of data teach Evolv's algorithms to see who has the makings of a good hire.

Debunked AssumptionsThe patterns gleaned since the company's founding in 2007 have debunked many of the common assumptions held by recruiters, Evolv executives say. For example, a history of job-hopping or long bouts of unemployment has little relationship with how long the candidate will stay at his or her next job, according to Evolv's analysis of call center agents.

''As human beings, we're actually pretty bad at evaluating other human beings,'' said David Ostberg, vice president of workforce science at Evolv. ''We're making sure people are using the right data, instead of the traditional methods that were previously thought to be valid but big data's showing are not.''

Cognitive AbilitiesNew York-based ConnectCubed has also developed software to determine the personality and cognitive abilities of job applicants that, at its largest clients, is tailored for that specific company. ConnectCubed has existing workers at those businesses complete its video games and questionnaires so the behavioral profiles of the star employees serve as a benchmark for who managers should hire in the future.

''When new people apply, you can say, wow this guy has all the makings of our top salesmen,'' said Michael Tanenbaum, chief executive officer and co-founder of the service. ''These are things that are impossible to measure from a resume, especially with educational backgrounds that are often more determined by socioeconomic status than your innate ability.''

To be sure, Knack and ConnectCubed, which say they can predict high-performers across a broad set of workers, haven't been around for long enough to track, over time, whether their technologies actually are improving the quality of the employees their clients hire or those businesses' bottom line.

''My concern is, with only a 9.5-minute sample of behavior, is that really enough?'' said Frederick Morgeson, a professor of management specializing in personnel psychology at Michigan State University in East Lansing, referring to Knacks' video game assessment. ''Are we sampling enough of those behaviors to be confident that we're capturing what the person might do in the totality of their complex behavior?''

Amassed EvidenceEvolv on the other hand has amassed evidence of results for its clients. San Antonio, Texas-based direct marketing company Harte-Hanks found call center agents selected by Evolv's software had a 35 percent lower 30-day attrition rate, reported 29 percent fewer hours of missed work in the first six months and handled calls 15 percent more quickly than those hired through the company's existing recruiting services provider at the time.

Still that success may be harder to achieve among higher-skilled professionals. There's a reason Evolv has kept its focus on evaluating hourly workers, Chief Executive Officer Max Simkoff said.

For ''our largest telco customers, a single percentage-point increase in any customer experience metric they track, they can correlate to additional percentage points in subscriber base,'' said Simkoff, who is also co-founder of the company. ''The performance data is not there yet'' for employees engaging in higher-level tasks, he said.

Guessing GameJuhl at Vungle says the algorithms will never replace the age-old interview altogether, no matter how accurate Knack's predictions are. The goal is to experiment with a variety of tools that can offer more information about each candidate and make the recruiting process less of a guessing game, he said.

''As we grow in scale, we're trying to put in the foundation now so we can measure it down the line,'' he said. ''What I would like for it is to gain substantial weight in the process -- as valued as the opinion of the most senior members of the team.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Aki Ito in San Francisco at aito16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net

''You have this enormous pool of people that's being missed because of the way the entire industry goes after the same kinds of people, asking, did you go to Stanford, did you work at this company?'' said Erik Juhl, head of talent at Vungle Inc. Photographer: Ron Antonelli/Bloomberg

Enlarge imageM.I.T. Professor Erik BrynjolfssonNeilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New York Times

''People are our biggest resource, and right now a lot of them are mismatched,'' said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Digital Business and an advisor to Knack.it Corp. ''If you put the right kind of person in the right task, it's good for that person and it's good for the company.''

''People are our biggest resource, and right now a lot of them are mismatched,'' said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Digital Business and an advisor to Knack.it Corp. ''If you put the right kind of person in the right task, it's good for that person and it's good for the company.'' Photographer: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New York Times

Google's Going to Start Sticking Your Face and Name in Ads

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Source: Valleywag

Fri, 11 Oct 2013 21:00

This was bound to happen. Following Facebook's highly controversial attempts to make social endorsements ubiquitous on the site, Google just announced a Terms of Service update that will enable the company to use your name, photo and endorsements in its advertising network.

So how does that make you feel? Google obviously wants you to feel okay about the changes. The company assured users in its announcement blog post, "On Google, you're in control of what you share." (Emphasis Google's) And that's technically true. You can opt out of the face-flaunting new feature through this settings page in Google+, but if you don't do anything, Google says it will use your information without explicit consent.

Ugh. Doing anything from leaving a YouTube comment to starring something in Google Play to giving it the +1 treatment will cause your face to show up on ads. (Users under 18, however, will not appear in ads.) Google is also somewhat vague about who will see your face: "So your friends, family and others may see your Profile name and photo, and content like the reviews you share or the ads you +1'd." Facebook, however, is less vague: "If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it."

Although the new changes don't sound awesome, Google's learned from Facebook's mistakes in a way. Facebook similarly uses your likeness in so-called Sponsored Stories, however you can't opt out. When Facebook started doing this, users freaked out and said that Facebook hadn't properly notified them about how the social network was using their endorsements. And when we say "freaked out," we mean "filed a class action lawsuit"'--which they won'--prompting Facebook to change the site's privacy policy. The FTC has since opened an investigation into the matter.

Obviously, Google wants to avoid the shitstorm that Facebook has endured, so they're trying to be better communicators. That doesn't detract from the fact that the search giant is going to start slinging your face and name all over the internet without your explicit consent. You'll be notified with some banner ads on Google's homepage before the new Terms of Service goes into effect on November 1. But it's up to you'--and only you'--to opt out if you don't like that. [Google via NYT]

Facebook gets rid of setting that lets users control who can search for them

Google unveils plans for user names, comments to appear in ads

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Source: Reuters: Technology News

Fri, 11 Oct 2013 21:48

A Google logo is seen at the entrance to the company's offices in Toronto September 5, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Chris Helgren

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Oct 11, 2013 3:28pm EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc plans to launch new product-endorsement ads incorporating photos, comments and names of its users, in a move to match the "social" ads pioneered by rival Facebook Inc that is raising some privacy concerns.

The changes, which Google announced in a revised terms of service policy on Friday, set the stage for Google to introduce "shared endorsements" ads on its sites as well as millions of other websites that are part of Google's display advertising network.

The new types of ads would use personal information of the members of Google+, the social network launched by the company in 2011.

If a Google+ user has publicly endorsed a particular brand or product by clicking on the +1 button, that person's image might appear in an ad. Reviews and ratings of restaurants or music that Google+ users share on other Google services, such as in the Google Play online store, would also become fair game for advertisers.

The ads are similar to the social ads on Facebook, the world's No. 1 social network, which has 1.15 billion users.

Those ads are attractive to marketers, but they unfairly commercialize Internet users' images, said Marc Rotenberg, the director of online privacy group EPIC.

"It's a huge privacy problem," said Rotenberg. He said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission should review the policy change to determine whether it violates a 2011 consent order Google entered into which prohibits the company from retroactively changing users' privacy settings.

Users under 18 will be exempt from the ads and Google+ users will have the ability to opt out. But Rotenberg said users "shouldn't have to go back and restore their privacy defaults every time Google makes a change."

Information Google+ users have previously shared with a limited "circle" of friends will remain viewable only to that group, as will any shared endorsement ads that incorporate the information, Google said in a posting on its website explaining the new terms of service.

Google, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising, operates the world's most popular Web search engine as well as other online services such as maps, email and video website YouTube.

The revised terms of service are the latest policy change by Google to raise privacy concerns. Last month, French regulators said they would begin a process to sanction Google for a 2012 change to its policy that allowed the company to combine data collected on individual users across its services, including YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+. Google has said its privacy policy respects European law and is intended to create better services for its users.

Google's latest terms of service change will go live on November 11.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Gunna Dickson)

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BBC News - Dutch sorry on Russia diplomat case

Russian Lawmaker Urges Dutch Ministers to Resign over Diplomat's Arrest | Russia | RIA Novosti

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Former NRC Chairman Says U.S. Nuclear Industry is "Going Away" - IEEE Spectrum

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 20:22

Gregory Jaczko, who was chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, didn't mince words in an interview with IEEE Spectrum. The United States is turning away from nuclear power, he said, and he expects the rest of the world to eventually do the same.

"I've never seen a movie that's set 200 years in the future and the planet is being powered by fission reactors'--that's nobody's vision of the future," he said. "This is not a future technology. It's an old technology, and it serves a useful purpose. But that purpose is running its course."

Jaczko bases his assessment of the U.S. nuclear industry on a simple reading of the calendar. The 104 commercial nuclear reactors in the United States are aging, and he thinks that even those nuclear power stations that have received 20 year license extensions, allowing them to operate until they're 60 years old, may not see out that term. Jaczko said the economics of nuclear reactors are increasingly difficult, as the expense of repairs and upgrades makes nuclear power less competitive than cheap natural gas. He added that Entergy's recent decision to close the Vermont Yankee plant was a case in point.

"The industry is going away," he said bluntly. "Four reactors are being built, but there's absolutely no money and no desire to finance more plants than that. So in 20 or 30 years we're going to have very few nuclear power plants in this country'--that's just a fact."

Jaczko spoke to IEEE Spectrum following his participation in an anti-nuclear event in New York City at which speakers discussed the lessons that could be learned from the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Speakers also included former Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan, who headed the government during the Fukushima accident, and Ralph Nader. Several speakers talked about New York's Indian Point nuclear power station, and Jaczko expressed his personal opinion that the plant should be shut down.

Jaczko argued that more Fukushima-type accidents are inevitable if the world continues to rely on the current types of nuclear fission reactors, and he believes that society will not accept nuclear power on that condition. "For nuclear power plants to be considered safe, they should not produce accidents like this," he said. "By 'should not' I don't mean that they have a low probability, but simply that they should not be able to produce accidents like this [at all]. That is what the public has said quite clearly. That is what we need as a new safety standard for nuclear power going forward." He acknowledged that new reactor designs such as small modular nuclear reactors and some Generation IV reactor designs could conceivably meet such a safety standard, but he didn't sound enthusiastic.

Learn MoreFukushima DaiichiGregory JaczkoIndian PointNRCNuclear Regulatory Commissionnuclear energynuclear powerPlease enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

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Administration sources: Obamacare website received just 51,000 completed insurance applications | Mail Online

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Sat, 12 Oct 2013 20:26

Obamacare's main signup engine attracted just 6,200 new customers on its launch day and 51,000 after the first weekAt the same rate, the 6-month open enrollment period would sign up just 2 million Americans, including 14 states and D.C., which have their own insurance exchangesThe Congressional Budget Office says Obamacare needs at least 7 million customers to stay afloat financiallyNumerous Obama administration officials have denied seeing any enrollment figures at allMailOnline's sources are two Health and Human Services workers who have access to the data as it's crunchedTexas congressman says anemic national enrollment numbers are 'roughly the population of a small town in my district'By David Martosko, U.s. Political Editor

PUBLISHED: 14:29 EST, 10 October 2013 | UPDATED: 11:50 EST, 11 October 2013

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Just 51,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week the Healthcare.gov website was online, according to two sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services who gave MailOnline an exclusive look at the earliest enrollment numbers.

The career civil servants, who process data inside the agency, confirmed independently that just 6,200 Americans applied for health insurance through the problem-plagued website on October 1, the day it first opened to the public.

Neither HHS nor the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would comment on the record about the numbers. Enroll America, on Obama administration-related organization that aims to help Americans sign up, only replied to a request for information a day after this article was first published.

'I don't have any hard numbers beyond what HHS and the state-based exchanges have released,' said spokesman Justin Nisly, who insisted that Americans have been 'enthusiastic' and 'grateful' for Obamacare.

The White House did not respond to emails seeking comment.

But several administration officials have claimed this month that they didn't have access to the kinds of raw figures MailOnline obtained from the people who work for them. And the anemic totals suggest a far lower level of interest in coverage through the Affordable Care Act than the Obama administration has hoped to see.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEOS

More than a week into the glitch-littered launch of the Obamacare insurance exchanges, MailOnline has learned that just 51,000 Americans have used Healthcare.gov to enroll

Organizing For Action, the latest incarnation of President Obama's 2012 campaign organization, celebrated the Oct. 1 launch of the Obamacare exchanges in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, but the numbers so far have been nothing to celebrate

Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican who chairs the House Ways & Means Health Subcommittee, said that 'if the numbers are accurate,' they show 'that relatively few people have navigated the challenges of the first step of the process '' roughly the population of a small town in my district.'

'The White House and HHS have continually claimed they did not have these figures,' Brady told MailOnline. 'If they do, they have misled the Congress and the American people.'

The low numbers also reflect a level of technological frustration on the part of Americans whose attempts to investigate their new health insurance options have been met with crashes, error messages and interminable delays.

CNN host Wolf Blitzer agreed on Wednesday that the White House should consider granting Republicans' demands for a one-year delay of the rule requiring individual taxpayers to buy insurance, given the failings of the glitch-prone enrollment website that has produced more headaches than new customers.

'If they weren't fully ready, they should accept the advice that a lot of Republicans are giving them,' Blitzer said. 'Delay it another year, get it ready, and make sure it works'

'I don't know': HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on The Daily Show that she hadn't seen Obamacare enrollment numbers

Obama was passionate on launch day, saying in a Rose Garden ceremony that millions of Americans would benefit from the Affordable Care Act. But so far those numbers have seemed far out of reach

White House unsure on Obamacare numbers

The open enrollment period for Obamacare coverage is slated to last for six months. If the first week's total were an indication of how many Americans will sign up during that time through the Obama administration's website, its final tally would reach a paltry 1.32 million.

Healthcare.gov provides enrollment services for Americans in 36 states; the remaining 14 states and the District of Columbia, which operate enrollment programs in their own exchanges, represent 33.7 per cent of the U.S. population, according to census projections.

If the state-run exchanges were to have a similar response rate for six months, the national enrollment total would be approximately 2 million.

That number is less than 29 per cent of the 7 million the Obama administration would need, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, in order to balance the new health insurance system's books and keep it from financial collapse.

'The administration's goal is seven million people in the first year,' Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, a long-time Obamacare opponent, told MailOnline. 'We are not on track for anything like seven million. New Coke was retired for being a smaller disappointment.'

'There was no good reason to hide these number,' he said. 'This is not keeping a secret from the Russians or the Syrians. ... Why lie about this, for crying out loud?'

'These numbers reflect what we all know: Obamacare is a disaster,' Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn told MailOnline. 'It is time for the president to admit Obamacare is not working and that the American people deserve better.'

Spokespersons for five different Democratic senators declined to provide comment, with most saying they are paying greater attention to the debt-ceiling and government-shutdown standoffs that have gripped Washington, D.C. since before Oct. 1.

'These numbers reflect what we all know,' said Texas GOP Senator John Cornyn (C). 'Obamacare is a disaster.'

Rep. Kevin Brady, an outspoken Texas Republcan, said everyone who has used the federal government's website to enroll in Obamacare would fit in a single small town in his legislative district

House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee chair Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said the small enrollment numbers are a symptom of a larger problem.

'Far more people have been unable to complete their applications because of crashing websites or impossible wait times than have successfully enrolled,' said Issa. 'Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and the window for open enrollment gets smaller every day.'

They've lost Wolf: CNN personality Wolf Blitzer, who seldom aligns himself with Republicans, said Wednesday that the White House should give Republicans the Obamacare delay they seek, if only to give tech issues time to sort themselves out

Issa said Wednesday during a committee hearing on Capitol Hill that 'in just the past decade, the federal government cancelled at least fifteen major IT projects after wasting $10 billion on their development. But none of those costly mistakes were anywhere near as big or complex, as Obamacare.'

The White House aims to see the health care exchanges enroll at least 2.7 million young, healthy people between the ages of 18 and 35, whose monthly premiums are needed to offset the cost of health care for older, sicker Americans.

It's unclear how many of the early enrollees fall in that age group.

A projected enrollment total of 2 million would also represent just 4 per cent of the overall number who could participate.

'More than 50 million Americans qualify for the Obamacare exchanges,' Americans for Limited Government vice president Rick Manning pointed out, claiming that 'this paltry response is a clear rejection of the system.'

It remains possible, according to the sources who provided the enrollment data, that overall rates of enrollment will tick up after the much-maligned healthcare.gov website is retrofitted with technology fixes that allow more Americans to navigate it smoothly.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney drew criticism on Monday after he boasted that website response times were cut by one-third after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services implemented virtual 'waiting rooms' that allowed users to trickle in according to the load the government's servers could handle.

Another flood of customers could hypothetically come in after Jan. 1, the sources said, if a significant number of private employers cancel their employee benefit plans and dump their workers into the Affordable Care Act's health care exchanges.

Jon Stewart accuses Kathleen Sebelius of lying

'You should ask HHS. I don't have a number,' said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Oct. 4, when reporters quizzed him on Obamacare enrollment numbers

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Sunday on Fox News that 'it's obviously not my primary area of responsibility' to know how many Obamacare enrollees have clicked the error-prone 'submit' button

The availability of raw Obamacare enrollment numbers will come as an embarrassment to the Obama administration, since its public faces have insisted that such figures are unknown or unknowable.

Carney reiterated on Monday that the administration would 'release enrollment data on regularly, monthly intervals.'

'I'm not sure when that begins,' he told reporters, 'but I'm sure we'll let you know in plenty of time so you can plan and put it on your calendar.'

'The clock is ticking,' says Rep. Darrell Issa, 'and the window for open enrollment gets smaller every day'

That night, Comedy Central host Jon Stewart asked Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on 'The Daily Show' how many Americans had enrolled in Obamacare.

'I can't tell you,' the secretary answered, 'because I don't know.'

An unnamed senior White House official told CNN host Jake Tapper on Monday that the administration would start releasing numbers after November 1, and would combine data from healthcare.gov with those from more than a dozen states that run their own health insurance exchanges, in order 'to have a good picture of what's happening across the country.'

Sen. Ted Cruz, the feisty tea party standard-bearer who led a lengthy quasi-filibuster last month that raised the profile of what Republicans say are Obamacare's legal and philosophical shortcomings, said Thursday that 'every day our concerns are validated as we learn more about how the law can't deliver on its promises.'

'The law has failed on every single measure,' Cruz told MailOnline. 'It does not make healthcare more affordable or accessible. It does the opposite.'

Tea Party Patriots national coordinator Jenny Beth Martin said Thursday that the Obamacare enrollment numbers were unlikely to keep pace with the numbers of Americans who are losing their insurance as the program goes into effect.

'Over 800,000 people in New Jersey alone have lost their current health insurance in the last month,' Martin said, 'yet nationwide only 51,000 people have received health insurance from Obamacare. The numbers just do not add up.'

Overlaid on top of Obamacare's rocky launch has been a partial government shutdown whose broad personnel layoffs have compounded what was already a difficult rollout.

On Wednesday a press spokesperson who answered a Department of Health and Human Services press line told MailOnline to allow at least 24 hours for a comment '' one which never came anyway.

'We're in furlough status right now, so we're short-staffed,' she said. 'All our requests are going through email. Drop us a line, and if anyone's available, they'll get back to you.'

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From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal - NYTimes.com

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Sun, 13 Oct 2013 12:56

By ROBERT PEAR, SHARON LaFRANIERE and IAN AUSTEN.

WASHINGTON '-- In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration's new online insurance marketplace, told industry executives that he was deeply worried about the Web site's debut. ''Let's just make sure it's not a third-world experience,'' he told them.

Two weeks after the rollout, few would say his hopes were realized.

For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.

''These are not glitches,'' said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. ''The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, 'It's awful, just awful.' ''

Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps '-- financial, technical and managerial '-- that led to the troubles.

Politics made things worse. To avoid giving ammunition to Republicans opposed to the project, the administration put off issuing several major rules until after last November's elections. The Republican-controlled House blocked funds. More than 30 states refused to set up their own exchanges, requiring the federal government to vastly expand its project in unexpected ways.

The stakes rose even higher when Congressional opponents forced a government shutdown in the latest fight over the health care law, which will require most Americans to have health insurance. Administration officials dug in their heels, repeatedly insisting that the project was on track despite evidence to the contrary.

Dr. Donald M. Berwick, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2010 and 2011, said the time and budgetary pressures were a constant worry. ''The staff was heroic and dedicated, but we did not have enough money, and we all knew that,'' he said in an interview on Friday.

Administration officials have said there is plenty of time to resolve the problems before the mid-December deadline to sign up for coverage that begins Jan. 1 and the March 31 deadline for coverage that starts later. A round-the-clock effort is under way, with the government leaning more heavily on the major contractors, including the United States subsidiary of the Montreal-based CGI Group and Booz Allen Hamilton.

One person familiar with the system's development said that the project was now roughly 70 percent of the way toward operating properly, but that predictions varied on when the remaining 30 percent would be done. ''I've heard as little as two weeks or as much as a couple of months,'' that person said. Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process.

Confidential progress reports from the Health and Human Services Department show that senior officials repeatedly expressed doubts that the computer systems for the federal exchange would be ready on time, blaming delayed regulations, a lack of resources and other factors.

Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.

One highly unusual decision, reached early in the project, proved critical: the Medicare and Medicaid agency assumed the role of project quarterback, responsible for making sure each separately designed database and piece of software worked with the others, instead of assigning that task to a lead contractor.

Some people intimately involved in the project seriously doubted that the agency had the in-house capability to handle such a mammoth technical task of software engineering while simultaneously supervising 55 contractors. An internal government progress report in September 2011 identified a lack of employees ''to manage the multiple activities and contractors happening concurrently'' as a ''major risk'' to the whole project.

While some branches of the military have large software engineering departments capable of acting as the so-called system integrator, often on medium-size weapons projects, the rest of the federal government typically does not, said Stan Soloway, the president and chief executive of the Professional Services Council, which represents 350 government contractors. CGI officials have publicly said that while their company created the system's overall software framework, the Medicare and Medicaid agency was responsible for integrating and testing all the combined components.

By early this year, people inside and outside the federal bureaucracy were raising red flags. ''We foresee a train wreck,'' an insurance executive working on information technology said in a February interview. ''We don't have the I.T. specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.''

The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, warned in June that many challenges had to be overcome before the Oct. 1 rollout.

''So much testing of the new system was so far behind schedule, I was not confident it would work well,'' Richard S. Foster, who retired in January as chief actuary of the Medicare program, said in an interview last week.

But Mr. Chao's superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services told him, in effect, that failure was not an option, according to people who have spoken with him. Nor was rolling out the system in stages or on a smaller scale, as companies like Google typically do so that problems can more easily and quietly be fixed. Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.

Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, both insisted in July that the project was not in trouble. Last month, Gary M. Cohen, the federal official in charge of health insurance exchanges, promised federal legislators that on Oct. 1, ''consumers will be able to go online, they'll be able to get a determination of what tax subsidies they are eligible for, they'll be able to see the premium net of subsidy,'' and they will be able to sign up.

But just a trickle of the 14.6 million people who have visited the federal exchange so far have managed to enroll in insurance plans, according to executives of major insurance companies who receive enrollment files from the government. And some of those enrollments are marred by mistakes. Insurance executives said the government had sent some enrollment files to the wrong insurer, confusing companies that have similar names but are in different states. Other files were unusable because crucial information was missing, they said.

Many users of the federal exchange were stuck at square one. A New York Times researcher, for instance, managed to register at 6 a.m. on Oct. 1. But despite more than 40 attempts over the next 11 days, she was never able to log in. Her last attempts led her to a blank screen.

Neither Ms. Tavenner nor other agency officials would answer questions about the exchange or its performance last week.

Worried about their reputations, contractors are now publicly distancing themselves from the troubled parts of the federally run project. Eric Gundersen, the president of Development Seed, emphasized that his company had built the home page of HealthCare.gov but had nothing to do with what happened after a user hit the ''Apply Now'' button.

Senior executives at Oracle, a subcontractor based in California that provided identity management software used in the registration process that has frustrated so many users, defended the company's work. ''Our software is running properly,'' said Deborah Hellinger, Oracle's vice president for corporate communications. The identical software has been widely used in complex systems, she said.

The serious technical problems threaten to obscure what some see as a nationwide demonstration of a desire for more affordable health insurance. The government has been heavily promoting the HeathCare.gov site as the best source of information on health insurance. An August government e-mail said: ''35 days to open enrollment.'' A September e-mail followed: ''5 days to open enrollment. Don't wait another minute.''

The response was huge. Insurance companies report much higher traffic on their Web sites and many more callers to their phone lines than predicted.

That made the flawed opening all the more disappointing to supporters of the health plan, including Timothy S. Jost, a law professor and a consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

''Even if a fix happens quickly, I remain very disappointed that the Department of Health and Human Services was not better prepared for the rollout,'' he said.

Robert Pear reported from Washington, Sharon LaFraniere from New York and Ian Austen from Ottawa. Quentin Hardy contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Healthcare.gov JBoss Admin Scaling email

Zweedse politie wil data direct bij sysadmins vorderen

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Source: WT news feed

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 20:28

27 sep. 2013 door Andreas Udo de HaesGoogle+

Nieuws-De Zweedse regering wil een cybercrimewet waarmee politie en Justitie systeembeheerders van isp's persoonlijk strafrechtelijk kan dwingen tot afgifte van data.

Niet alleen Nederland is bezig met een nieuwe wet computercriminaliteit. Ook in Zweden ligt er een wetsvoorstel op tafel en ook dat is zeer omstreden. De controverse in ons land draait vooral om de decryptieplicht en het terughacken. In Zweden staan de providers op hun achterste benen vanwege het plan om systeembeheerders van internetproviders persoonlijk te dwingen om aan datavorderingen te voldoen.

Meewerken en geheimhoudenZij moeten deze vorderingen ook nog eens geheimhouden voor hun collega's, leidinggevenden en werkgever, meldt Webwereld's zustersite ComputerSweden.

Het wetsvoorstel is ge¯ntroduceerd in een poging om de Zweedse wetgeving te harmoniseren met de EU cybercrime richtlijn en om strafrechtelijke onderzoeken te vergemakkelijken.

Zowel de providers als juristen maken hekelen het plan, onder meer de isp Bahnhof, bekend van hun James Bond-achtige Pionen datacenter in een rotspartij, heeft bezwaar aangetekend tegen het voorstel.

Het plan schuurt op allerlei manieren met fundamentele grondrechten. Daarnaast is de integriteit van bedrijfsdata en werknemers in gevaar. Systeembeheerders worden gedwongen informanten bij het bedrijf waar ze werkzaam zijn.

Sysadmins in de spagaat''Dit zou in Nederland in elk geval niet kunnen, en het is een heel vreemde interpretatie van de cybercrime richtlijn. De vordering is bij een bedrijf, dat is de rechtspersoon die over de data gaat, niet bij deze of gene werknemer'', reageert ict-jurist Arnoud Engelfriet.

''Op deze manier zit je als persoon compleet in de spagaat tussen de politie en het bedrijf waar je werkt. Als je weigert ben je strafbaar, werk je mee dan deel je bedrijfsgeheimen en persoonsgegevens. Ik zie ook niet hoe dit arbeidsrechtelijk kan.''

De consultatiefase voor de Zweedse cybercrimewet is inmiddels afgelopen, nu is het wachten wat de regering met de feedback doet.

The disturbing world of the Deep Web, where contract killers and drug dealers ply their trade on the internet | Mail Online

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Sun, 13 Oct 2013 05:24

Dozens of 'hitmen' are available for hire through the 'Deep Web', or TorThey all offer their services for a price paid in mysterious currency BitcoinOne boasts: 'I always do my best to make it look like an accident or suicide'Others market services: 'The best place to put your problems is in a grave'By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 11:27 EST, 11 October 2013 | UPDATED: 12:39 EST, 11 October 2013

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Hiring a hitman has never been easier. Nor has purchasing cocaine or heroin, nor even viewing horrific child pornography.

Such purchases are now so easy, in fact, that they can all be done from the comfort of one's home at the click of a button... and there's almost nothing the police can do about it.

This worrying development of the criminal black market is down entirely to the Deep Web - a seething matrix of encrypted websites - also known as Tor - that allows users to surf beneath the everyday internet with complete anonymity.

Chilling: So for those looking to bump off a difficult acquaintance, all they have to do is enter the Dark Web and search 'hitman for hire', such as this one

Guns for hire: This site appears to offer the services of a team of former mercenaries from the french foreign Legion

The Deep Web has existed for more than a decade but came under the spotlight last month after police shutdown the Silk Road website - the online marketplace dubbed the 'eBay of drugs' - and arrested its creator.

But experts warn this has done next to nothing to stem the rising tide of such illicit online exchanges, which are already jostling to fill the gap now left in this unregulated virtual world.

So for those looking to bump off a difficult acquaintance, all they have to do is enter the Deep Web - known also as the 'Dark Web' or the 'Undernet' - and search 'hitman for hire'.

Place your bets: Some 'hitmen' seem to offer others the chance to profit from their killing by allowing users to bet on when a victim will die by putting money in a pool. The closest guess takes home the pot

Kill that ex you hate? This rather more rudimentary website offers to 'neutralist the ex you hate, your bully, a policeman that you have been in trouble with, a lawyer a small politician'

There they are presented with lists of willing assassins touting their wares to anyone who will pay.

And like The Silk Road, transactions are all made using the mysterious online currency Bitcoin. One site, whose name MailOnline has chosen not to publish, offers an assassination in the US or Canada for $10,000 and one in Europe for $12,000.

'I do not know anything about you, you do not know anything about me,' crows one self-styled assassin, according to The Daily Dot. 'The desired victim will pass away. No one will ever know why or who did this. On top of that I always give my best to make it look like an accident or suicide.'

THE DEEP WEB: WHAT IS TOR?Tor - short for The onion Router - is a seething matrix of encrypted websites that allows users to surf beneath the everyday internet with complete anonymity.

It uses numerous layers of security and encryption to render users anonymous online.

Normally, file sharing and internet browsing activity can be tracked by law enforcement through each user's unique IP address that can be traced back to an individual computer.

The Tor network on the Deep Web hides the IP address and the activity of the user.

Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, unable to be found or seen by traditional search engines - sites or pages don't exist until created as the result of a specific search.

An Internet search is like dragging a net across the surface of the sea - a great deal of information is caught, but a majority is deep and therefore missed.

'I have gained endless experience(s) in this [sic] 7 years,' he goes on. 'It has changed me a lot. I don't have any empathy for humans anymore.

'This makes me the perfect professional for taking care of your problems and makes me better than other hitmen. If you pay enough I'll do ANYTHING to the desired victim. If I say anything I mean anything.'

Many of the sites even use slogans and marketing techniques that, if it weren't for their macabre subject matter, could be as at home on the website of a legitimate retail website.

'The best place to put your problems is in a grave,' boasts one.

Some even seem to offer others the chance to profit from their killing by allowing users to bet on when a victim will die by putting money in a pool. The closest guess takes home the pot.

And while many appear every inch the cold-blooded killer one would expect from a gun-for-hire, there is also apparently the odd humanitarian hitman.

'Killing is in most cases wrong, yes,' writes one. 'However, as this is an inevitable direction in the technological evolution, I would rather see it in the hands of me than somebody else.'

'By providing it cheaply and accurately I hope that more immoral alternatives won't be profitable or trusted enough. This should primarily be a tool for retribution.'

Adding that murder should always be committed for 'good reason', he writes: 'Bad reasons include doctors for performing abortions and Justin Bieber for making annoying music.'

The Silk Road: The Deep Web has existed for more than a decade but came under the spotlight last month after police shutdown the Silk Road website - the online marketplace dubbed the 'eBay of drugs - and arrested its creator

Arrest: The Silk Road's creator, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested last month after allegedly hiring an undercover FBI agent to kill two people

The Silk Road's creator, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested last month after allegedly hiring an undercover FBI agent to murder a member of the site who was apparently blackmailing him. He allegedly also tried to have an employee killed who he thought might blow his identity to police.

Meanwhile, even as the Silk Road was trundling to a halt, already hundreds of other websites were springing up in its place, peddling anything from drugs to stolen identities, illegal weapons to sickening child pornography and even explosives.

In June it emerged one such site, called Atlantis, was even offering its wares in an advert posted on YouTube.

Looking like an advert for a well-funded Silicon Valley start-up, the slick promo video for Atlantis boasts that it is 'the world's best anonymous online drug marketplace'.

Dangerous drugs: A screengrab of of the Atlantis online marketplace shows some of the illegal drugs on offer, including heroin, cannabis, MDMA and LSD

It comes as the site's backers announced the launch of a 'big social media campaign' that seems intended to make a play for the market share of the better-known Silk Road.

But while experts say police are all but powerless to shut down websites selling illicit products, authorities claim they are making inroads in their bid to stifle the Deep Web's growth.

The U.S. federal government appears to have been forcing the shut down of pedophiles communities on the shady underbelly of the Internet by targeting sites hiding within the Deep Web.

August saw the arrest of Irishman Eric Eoin Marques, who the FBI has called 'the biggest facilitator of child pornography on the planet'.

Marques is accused of running Freedom Hosting, a web hosting service that operates on the anonymous Tor network. Forums on Freedom Hosting allegedly allowed pedophiles to anonymously share horrific child pornography and trade tips on how to sexually abuse children without getting caught.

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Africa: World Awaits Africa's Decision On Quitting ICC

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Source: AllAfrica News: Latest

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 06:03

At a special meeting of African leaders on Saturday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the International Criminal Court will face new scrutiny as Africa reviews its relationship with the court.

A Kenyan official has said Uganda is one of the countries leading the campaign that could further dismember the court's ranks if more African states follow Kenya out of ICC.

Although Kenya passed a motion to withdraw from the ICC, its Foreign Affairs minister, Amina Mohamed, has denied reports Kenya was calling on African countries to withdraw from the ICC en masse.

As the world awaits the outcome of the African leaders' special meeting in Addis Ababa tomorrow (Saturday), diplomatic sources indicate that there are quiet plans sponsored by Uganda and Kenya to urge AU member states, through a resolution, to withdraw from the Rome Statute.

But Uganda's Foreign Affairs ministry yesterday denied sponsoring any withdrawal plans but maintained its opposition to the ICC's trial of Kenyan leaders.

"I don't know about such plans but our position is clear and the president has repeatedly stated it," said Asuman Kiyingi, the state minister for Regional Affairs.

Early this month, while addressing the media at State lodge Nakasero, President Museveni said his government, that of Kenya and other African governments, were of the view the ICC was being misused by some groups. Museveni, who is opposed to the prosecution of Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto at the ICC for crimes against humanity, said Kenya's problems were not legal, but political.

Kenyatta and Ruto are alleged to have sponsored the country's 2007 post-election violence that led to the death of some 1,200 people and displaced more than 600,000. Kenyatta's trial is set to start in The Hague next month. Ruto is already on trial. Whereas Kenya's cooperation with the ICC was smooth, it changed after the two became the leaders of Kenya.

After the parliamentary resolution to pull out of the ICC, it is said that the country is persuading its allies to do the same. But Kenyan Minister Mohamed denies this.

She was quoted by the BBC as saying that it was quite naive to think that 34 countries would come together with the sole aim of moving out of the Rome Statute that established the ICC.

On Tuesday, it was reported that the AU Commission Chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told a visiting Security Council delegation that the case against the two should be deferred for one year.

"She cited the recent terrorist attack on Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall, saying the Kenyan leaders needed to focus their attention on the country's security and could not afford to be away at The Hague-based court for weeks at a time," the Voice of America reported.

Kenya has also proposed that the trial of President Kenyatta could be held via video link. Mohamed said Kenyatta had fully cooperated with the ICC, but the circumstances had changed since he won the presidency in March.

She told a news conference on Wednesday: "Are the circumstances different? Absolutely, totally, completely, different. Before, he wasn't the head of the state of the republic.

"Today he is the head of state of the republic. It is going to be the first time that a sovereign head is brought before any court of any kind, not just here but anywhere in the world."

North Korea warns of 'all-out war' as it refuses to sign pact with US - Telegraph

Capital police bust al-Qaedas drone project

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Source: The News International - Top stories

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 20:12

Parts of drone recovered from G-15 lab; successful test flight of spy plane in Margalla hills conducted

ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad Police and intelligence agencies, in a joint venture, have discovered a drone project, an invention of the al-Qaeda chapter in Pakistan, sources said on Friday, adding that the joint team of the Islamabad Police and intelligence agencies timely intervened and halted the al-Qaeda's ambitious project.

''Yes, the al-Qaeda Pakistan chapter had acquired drone technology and was in the final stages of implemeting the plan when intercepted,'' sources said.The Islamabad Police, during a recent raid in the Kashmir Housing Society in G-15 area, recovered a huge quantity of arms and ammunition. The house belonged to Professor Irtyaz Gilani, a graduate in electronic engineering from Ghulam Ishaq Khan (GIK) University who has also served in the Air Weapons Complex, Kamra. After leaving the job at Kamra, Irtyaz served as a lecturer at the International Islamic University, Islamabad, teaching electronics.

Gilani managed to dodge the raiding team and is still at large, intelligence agency sources said, while some other sources claimed that he had been held and shifted to an unknown place for thorough investigation. Police investigators have recovered evidence of his links with al-Qaeda. Evidence also suggested that Tanveer, a most wanted terrorist of al-Qaeda, had been staying at Gilani's place since January 2013 till the recovery of VBIED from Bhara Kahu.

During the raid, it was observed that the house was purposefully built, having a dedicated lab in the basement which was being used to develop the ambitious project. The police found the layout of drone technology, which they believe was acquired from different sources.

Investigations revealed that work on the drone project was underway for one-and-a-half years and considerable progress had been made. Small drones, which had already been tested, were also recovered from the lab in the house.

''Complete parts of a drone, including the airframe, wings and propelling motor, were also recovered which, if made operational, could carry a significant quantity of explosives to damage vital buildings and other sensitive installations,'' people engaged in the investigation of the case revealed.

''The al-Qaeda people had collected all parts of the spy plane from different sources and completed the assembling process in the basement laboratory in G-15 when the joint team swooped on them,'' the sources said.

''They conducted a successful test flight of the spy plane in the Margalla hills but the small drone could fly within a radius of only one kilometre,'' the sources disclosed. A large drone had almost been assembled and was to be tested before the law enforcing agencies raided the laboratory.

It is obvious that the al-Qaeda wants to target highly guarded complexes through these drones where ground access is impeded by the conventional security measures.

It is very important to remember that besides a few high-security buildings, there is no mechanism in place to guard against any aerial attack. Having realised the weakness, the al-Qaeda worked on this ambitious plan to give a surprise to the international law enforcement agencies, which has been averted, courtesy timely intervention by the police.

It is believed that Professor Irtyaz Gilani had been chosen for the task due to his qualification as well as work experience. It may be of value to remember that Ali Gondal, an employee of the AWC, was arrested in 2005 for planning an attack on Gen Pervez Musharraf. He had planted rockets in Rawalpindi; however, they malfunctioned leading to his arrest.

Ali Gondal is Tanveer's real brother and links of the troika indicate the presence of al-Qaeda in leading anti-state operations in Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Professor Irtyaz Gilani was working on a high-level post at the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, Kamra, having rich technical information about putting up drone aircraft, the investigation report said. But it was still a mystery from where he got parts of the drone, investigators said.

The investigation report claimed that Professor Irtyaz Gilani, Tanveer Gondal and Hammad Adil were directly involved in the brazen attack on the Minhas Airbase of Pakistan Air Force (PAF) at Kamra on August 16, 2012, adding that Professor Gilani provided technical information and inside position of vital installations and aircraft to Tanveer Gondal and Hammad Adil before and during the attack while Tanveer and Hammad provided logistical support to the attackers.

Law enforcement agencies are hunting for Tanveer, the wanted associate of Professor Irtyaz and an old member of al Qaeda.The police authorities confirmed the report.

Nonprofit sues IRS for releasing tax exempt application Watchdog.org

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Fri, 11 Oct 2013 18:50

By Mark Lisheron | Watchdog.org

Citizen Awareness Project, a conservative Denver, Colo. non-profit, is suing the Internal Revenue Service for releasing to a digital news site its pending application for tax exempt status.

UNDER FIRE: Citizens Awareness Project is suing the IRS for releasing its tax exempt status application to a digital news site.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Colorado, is the first from nine conservative 501(c)(4) organizations whose applications, while bottled up for months by the IRS, were copied to ProPublica in response to an open records request.

IRS officials admitted to ProPublica someone in its organization had erred in releasing the pending applications of the Citizen Awareness Project, Crossroads GPS '-- the heaviest hitting conservative non-profit involved in the 2012 presidential election '-- and others including A Better America Now, Americans for Responsible Leadership, America Is Not Stupid, Freedom Path and Rightchange.com II.

Rather than express contrition, IRS spokeswoman Michelle Eldridge issued a thinly veiled threat that the publisher of those documents could be jailed and fined, according to an account of the exchange published May 13 by ProPublica.

ProPublica published some of the applications after having redacted some of the financial information included in them.

The Citizens Awareness lawsuit contends the IRS violated federal law by disclosing confidential tax return information that might include the assets and liabilities of individuals involved with the group, their attorney, John Zakhem, told Watchdog.org Friday.

The group is asking that a jury give them $1,000 for each time the confidential information was disclosed or seen and asks for a punitive award for damages and legal fees.

Zakhem said, however, the primary purpose of the lawsuit was to determine who was ultimately responsible for the IRS' concerted effort to harass and impede conservative non-profits.

''We filed this suit to get some discovery, to hold these people accountable, to follow this as far up as it goes,'' Zakhem said Friday. ''What you have here is a Gestapo-like agency discriminating against particular groups to subjugate a political point of view.''

Watchdog.org late Friday morning contacted Dean Patterson in the office of Michelle Eldridge, head of national media relations for the IRS, asking for comment on the Citizen Awareness lawsuit.

We were still awaiting reply at the time of publication.

According to the lawsuit, Citizen Awareness filed a letter with the IRS Oct. 12, 2012, applying to become a tax exempt, 501(c)(4) non-profit. The IRS would not send a letter approving the application until July 25.

Less than two weeks after filing the application, the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit government watchdog group underwritten by liberal groups like the Omidyar Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Foundations, published a story about the group under the headline: Mysterious Colorado group has deep ties to GOP establishment.

The story outlined Citizen Awareness' effort to use $1 million in donations to defeat President Obama in 2012 and its roots in Republican advocacy in Colorado.

On Nov. 15, 2012, ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news site founded with liberal money from the Sandler Foundation and ongoing Open Society support, filed an open records request for the applications of 67 non-profits, according to its story.

Unlike its response to the applications themselves, the Cincinnati office of the IRS took just 13 days to provide documents on 31 of the 67 groups. Nine of the applications were pending.

The cover letter sent with the documents was signed by Cindy Thomas, manager of the Exempt Organizations Determination division of the IRS in Cincinnati. The same Cindy Thomas was recently accused of obstructing justice by Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee conducting the IRS targeting investigation.

Of these, ProPublica published redacted versions of six, including the Citizen Awareness application. On Dec. 17, Meghan Biss of the Exempt Organizations Determination division of the IRS in Washington, D.C. notified Citizen Awareness that the agency ''may'' have released its application to ProPublica, the lawsuit says.

That the IRS had released the application was confirmed on December 27 when a ProPublica reporter called to ask about it.

''What they were giving away were more than the names of individuals and their tax information,'' Zakhem said. ''What they did intentionally was give away private information beyond what is regularly called for. It was like giving away the secrets in your heart.''

In spite of IRS threats that ProPublica was exposing itself to felony charges, Richard Tofel, now the president of ProPublica, said there was an overriding First Amendment imperative to make the applications public.

The suit does not name ProPublica. Zakhem said he does not blame the news group for its editorial decision, although he said its stories contributed to a perception that what Citizen Awareness and other conservative groups were doing was less than honest and legal.

The responsibility lies squarely with IRS, Zakhem said.

''We've been damaged,'' he said. ''We're entitled to damages. But we are also entitled to find out and the public needs to find out who was responsible and how high up it goes.''

Contact Mark Lisheron at Mark@Watchdog.org

Please, feel free to "steal our stuff"! Just remember to credit Watchdog.org. Find out more

Obama cleaning house firing Nuclear general in string of General firings. Those who would not stand for Marshall Law?

How Many Women Are Not Admitting to Pew That They Watch Porn?

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Source: The XX Factor

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 04:27

Could bePhoto by CandyBox Images/Shutterstock

The explosion of porn across the Internet is a phenomenon greatly feared and woefully understudied. A new Pew Research Center report on the online viewing habits of 1,003 Americans is the latest attempt to mine a bit of actual data about the pervasiveness of Internet porn. Pew found that just 12 percent of U.S. adults who use the Internet say that they've leveraged it to watch adult videos. Among online video watchers, 25 percent of men and 8 percent of women admitted to checking out some adult programming.

Because the survey was conducted over the telephone, those low percentages ''may reflect a reluctance to report the behavior among some adults,'' Pew reasons. Nevertheless, the number of Internet users who cop to engaging in the activity has risen markedly in recent years. In 2009, just 7 percent of Internet users said they watched adult videos; in 2007, 6 percent said so; now it's 12 percent. Unsurprisingly, the percentage is rising as the dead-tree Playboy generation declines and the internet porn generation comes of age: Among people who use the internet'--about 15 percent of American adults still don't'--23 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds watch adult videos online, compared to 15 percent of 30-49-year-olds and 3 percent of internet users age 50-plus.

But the study's most interesting stat concerns a group of porn viewers still largely marginalized by the adult industry'--women. The percentage of female Internet video viewers claiming to watch porn online has grown exponentially over the past few years. In 2010, Pew reported that only 2 percent of female video viewers said they watched adult videos online. Today, 8 percent of those women admit to it. That's an incredible jump in three years' time. And if we think it's likely that more than 25 percent of male video viewers sometimes navigate into smuttier territory'--but are just reluctant to admit it over the phone'--then it stands to reason that women, who have been repeatedly told that porn is just for boys, would be particularly disincentivized to openly air the details of their online porn habits. Still, those who are invested in centering online porn as a male thing are unlikely to let these numbers get in the way. When XBIZ, an adult industry news publication, reported on Pew's findings today, it headlined its story: "Study Tracks Percentage of Men Watching Porn Online" and emphasized porn's "strong appeal for men" in discussing "the rise in online viewership."

'Martial law' declared by Democrat in Congress

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Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:51

A Democratic congresswoman from Texas has declared ''martial law'' is the solution to the current partial shutdown of the federal government.

The comments from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, took some listeners by surprise, since a common understanding of ''martial law'' would be of an authority '' a president or a military commander '' using military force to impose its will on an uncooperative people.

Think machine guns, tanks and jail cells.

It came up during Lee's speech on the House floor on Monday, when she was lamenting the plight of those left with uncertain futures because of the partial federal government shutdown brought on when Senate Democrats refused to consider compromises to a budget plan offered by House Republicans.

She said, ''Our economy is bigger than the European Union. That means countries like Spain, Germany, France, England, all those members who as well are our allies, but look to America '' how shameful it is for someone to be held, and if you will, tied up by their own individual personal interests.

''One would ask if the Founding Fathers, as imperfect as America was as she began, had come from the 13 colonies and various districts, and probably interests, and had held to those specialized interests, would we have created a nation that started out by saying we organize to create a more perfect union? Albeit that there were groups of populations that did not have dignity and justice and citizenship at that time, something that I could look back at in bitterness, but I do not, because this is the greatest nation in the world. But we are not showing ourselves that way.

''It is not the truth to suggest that there are not enough voters, members of Congress, that would vote right now today to open this government. It is something called a continuing resolution, but it's a bill that you put on the floor that has been passed already by Republicans and Democrats in the United States Senate. ''

She said, ''This is not an idea of anyone over another person. Republican and Democratic senators have already voted for this clean bill that we could vote on today. We have martial law. What that means '' and my colleagues know what it means '' is that you can put a bill on in just minutes.''

She accused Republicans of forcing people to decide ''amongst your children which ones to feed.''

At Washingtonsblog was the comment: ''The last time we heard Congress members use the phrase martial law was when Congressmen Brad Sherman and Paul Kanjorski, and Senator James Inhofe, all said that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned of martial law if the TARP banks bailouts weren't approved.''

A commenter suggested Jackson Lee was using it in the context of House rules that call for one day between announcing legislation and a vote:

''Instead, under 'martial law,' the leadership can file legislation with tens or hundreds of pages of fine print and move immediately to debate and [vote] on it, before members of Congress, the media, or the public have an opportunity to understand fully what provisions have been altered or inserted'...''

Critics noted that Jackson Lee wasn't exactly following the Constitution anyway, because she advocated for House approval of a spending bill from the Senate.

''Article I, Section 7, Clause I of the Constitution '... states, 'All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives,'' said one of the YouTube users who uploaded the video to share with Americans.

One other observer, who also loaded the footage onto YouTube, noted, ''Can someone please explain why the representative from Texas used this language?''

Related stories:Fed-chief pick means Obama to keep printing cash'Thuggery' sparks talk of impeachmentDemocratic congresswoman declares 'martial law'Obama seen as Chicken Little on default

Related commentary:

Shutdown message: Don't trust government by Joseph FarahDemocrats to America: We own the government! by Ann CoulterObama's a dictator '' what more evidence do we need? by Erik RushLet's make shutdown permanent by Robert RingerIs the tea party anti-government? by Chuck MorseConcern about runaway spending is 'anarchy'? by Larry ElderPrince Barry's scam by Mike Lester

VIDEO-BBC News - Syria chemical weapons monitors win Nobel Peace Prize

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Fri, 11 Oct 2013 13:03

11 October 2013Last updated at08:26 ETPlease turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

The OPCW had helped chemical weapons become "taboo", Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the body overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical arsenal, has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel Committee said it was in honour of the OPCW's "extensive work to eliminate chemical weapons".

The OPCW, based in The Hague, was established to enforce the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

OPCW director general Ahmet Uzumcu said the award was a "great honour" and would spur it on in its work.

He said the deployment of chemical weapons in Syria had been a "tragic reminder that there remains much work to be done".

The OPCW recently sent inspectors to oversee the dismantling of Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons.

It is the first time OPCW inspectors have worked in an active war zone.

The watchdog picks up a gold medal and 8m Swedish kronor ($1.25m; £780,000) as winner of the most coveted of the Nobel honours.

Continue reading the main storyAnalysisThe OPCW has been working to rid the world of chemical weapons for the past 16 years. For the most part, this task has been laborious and unheralded.

A staff of about 500, working from its headquarters at The Hague, is charged with making sure that the 189 signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention are abiding by its terms.

But it is only in recent weeks, following the use of chemical weapons in Syria, that the OPCW has become a household name.

It is facing its biggest challenge ever - to verify and destroy Syria's entire chemical weapons programme by the middle of next year. The Nobel committee clearly feels it needs all the support it can get.

It is not uncommon for organisations to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It has happened 24 times since 1901. Non-proliferation has been an occasional theme, with campaigners for nuclear disarmament and against land mines among those recognised.

'Vindication'Announcing the award in Oslo, Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said it wanted to recognise the OPCW's "extensive work".

"The conventions and the work of the OPCW have defined the use of chemical weapons as a taboo under international law," he said.

"Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons."

The OPCW's Ahmet Uzumcu said the organisation had been working "with quiet determination to rid the world of these heinous weapons", away from the spotlight, for the past 16 years.

He said the Syria mission was the first time the OPCW had worked to such a short timeframe and in an ongoing conflict, and that it was "conscious of the enormous trust" placed on it by the international community.

Praising the commitment of his staff and the support of member states, he said the Nobel Peace Prize would "spur us to untiring effort, even stronger commitment and greater dedication" to bring about a world free of chemical weapons".

The OPCW is made up of 189 member states and the principal role of its 500-strong staff is to monitor and destroy all existing chemical weapons.

It draws on a network of some of the best laboratories and scientists in the world to help it in its work, the BBC's science correspondent Pallab Ghosh says.

The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention has contributed to the destruction of nearly 80% of the world's chemical weapons stockpile.

Syria is expected to sign the treaty in the coming days.

French President Francois Hollande said the Nobel prize was a "vindication" of the international efforts in Syria and pledged continued support for the OPCW's work there and elsewhere.

Notable omissionThere were a record 259 nominees for this year's Peace Prize, but the list remains a secret.

Pakistani schoolgirl campaigner Malala Yousafzai and gynaecologist Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo had been tipped as favourites to take the award.

Continue reading the main storyOPCWBorn out of the Chemical Weapons Convention signed by nations in 1993Convention entered into force in 1997, allowing OPCW to start its workWithin 10 years, inspectors had destroyed 25,000 tonnes of weaponsBy 2013, about 80% of world's declared stockpile had been destroyedThousands of tonnes remain in the possession of the US and RussiaOthers who had been listed as contenders were Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), the US soldier convicted of giving classified documents to Wikileaks and Maggie Gobran, an Egyptian computer scientist who abandoned her academic career to become a Coptic Christian nun and founded the charity Stephen's Children.

But an hour before Friday's announcement, NRK reported the award would go to the OPCW.

The European Union won the prize in 2012 in recognition of its contribution to peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.

Previous Nobel Peace Prize laureates include anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, US President Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Nobel Committee has in the past publicly regretted never awarding the prize to Mahatma Gandhi, the pacifist leader of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule, even though he was nominated five times.

VIDEO-International Day of the Girl

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Archived Version

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 20:12

The video is also available with closed captioning on YouTube.

When many of the world's 850 million girls go to sleep tonight, they will dream about futures that sadly ''tragically''are nearly impossible for them to achieve.

In too many countries, the promise of the next generation of girls is at risk. In too many communities, the contributions of girls are not valued, their well-being is not protected, and their aspirations are not taken seriously.

As the father of two daughters, I know that is unacceptable. Supporting the rights of girls is the moral and just thing to do. And as someone who sits today in the same chair where extraordinary women like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, and Madeleine Albright sat before me, I know that it's also the smart thing to do. Investing in girls is a critical part of our duty to promote prosperity, security, and peace around the world. Empowered girls grow up to be empowered women. They grow up to be empowered mothers, leaders, and innovators. They grow up to move their communities forward and make the world a better place.

I am proud of the accomplishments of my own daughters and my wife. I want all girls to have the same opportunities they had to get a good education, pursue their passions in a safe environment, and achieve their full potential.

Thanks to a number of global partnerships and programs led by the State Department, like TechGirls and NeXXt Scholars '' and great USAID programs like Safe Schools '' we have made important progress. Today, more and more girls are enrolling in school in Afghanistan, and fewer and fewer girls are victims of female genital mutilation in Africa. But our work is far from over.

Every year, the International Day of the Girl is a chance for us to reaffirm our commitment to girls' rights, to celebrate their value to society, and to address the unique challenges they still face. It is a call to action for everyone to build on the progress we have made on global women's rights. If we heed that call, if we keep faith with the enormous potential and promise of young women, the dreams of our daughters will one day be just as viable as the dreams of our sons.

PRN: 2013/1254

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VIDEO-Pentagon unit held 'phony' ceremonies for MIAs, using planes that can't fly - Investigations

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Archived Version

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 13:24

Petty Officer 1st Class Barry Hirayama / U.S. Navy

A joint service honor guard escorts a transfer case during an "arrival ceremony" at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu on April 27, 2012. The Defense Department has acknowledged that human remains were not in fact arriving on that day. The ceremonies are held by the Pentagon's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.

By Bill DedmanInvestigative Reporter, NBC News

HONOLULU '-- A unit of the U.S. Department of Defense has been holding so-called "arrival ceremonies" for seven years, with an honor guard carrying flag-draped coffins off of a cargo plane as though they held the remains of missing American service men and women returning that day from old battlefields.

After NBC News raised questions about the arrival ceremonies, the Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday that no honored dead were in fact arriving, and that the planes used in the ceremonies often couldn't even fly but were towed into position.

The solemn ceremonies at a military base in Hawaii are a sign of the nation's commitment to returning and identifying its fallen warriors. The ceremonies have been attended by veterans and families of MIAs, led to believe that they were witnessing the return of Americans killed in World War II, Vietnam and Korea.

The ceremonies also have been known, at least among some of the military and civilian staff here, as The Big Lie.

Photos behind the scenes show that the flag-draped boxes had not just arrived on military planes, but ended their day where they began it: at the same lab where the human remains have been waiting for analysis.

The Pentagon insisted that the flag-draped cases do contain human remains recently recovered, just not ones that arrived that day. It said its staff "treat the remains with the utmost of care, attention, integrity, and above all, honor." The Pentagon statement did not explain why the rituals were called "arrival ceremonies" if no one was arriving, or why the public had been told that remains removed that morning from the lab were about to go to the lab to "begin the identification process." (Read the full Pentagon statement.)

From now on, the Pentagon said, the ceremonies will be re-branded as "honors ceremonies," expressly described as symbolic honors for bodies previously recovered.

"The name changed because they've already arrived, technically," said Army Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith, public affairs officer for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), whose mission is to return and identify the 83,000 missing service men and women from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The agency is identifying the dead at a rate of fewer than 80 per year, at a cost of more than $1 million per identification. Bodies now wait in the JPAC lab an average of 11 years before being identified, according to an internal report released this year.

What the audience seesHere's what the public has seen at the ceremonies, usually held about four times a year.

A C-17 military transport aircraft was parked, its ramp down, outside hangar 35 at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. At precisely 9 a.m., after generals and other dignitaries were introduced, a military chaplain offered a prayer, the audience sang "The Star-Spangled Banner," and a Marine bugler played "Taps." Then a military honor guard in dress uniforms carried flag-draped transfer cases, which look like coffins, down the ramp and across in front of the audience. The cases were placed in the back of blue buses and driven away.

The emcee, reading from an official script, thanked the audience for "welcoming them home." The script continued, "After removal from the aircraft, the remains will be taken to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's Central Identification Laboratory. There, JPAC scientists will begin the identification process."

The Defense Department has used the arrival ceremonies as publicity tools, posting videos of the "arrival" on its website, on YouTube and on Facebook. A video of one of the ceremonies is shown below, and others are online here and here. The videos sometimes say explicitly that "the remains returned to U.S. soil on the C-17," and other videos leave the viewer to draw that conclusion.

A video posted online by the Department of Defense shows the JPAC "arrival ceremony" of Vietnam and World War II vets at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii on December 9, 2011. Similar videos have been posted throughout the past seven years. The Pentagon has acknowledged that no one was actually arriving at any of the ceremonies, and that the planes they were carried from often could not fly. The Pentagon said its script for the ceremonies had been "misinterpreted."

A peek backstageHere's what actually happened, according to eyewitness accounts and photographs taken behind the scenes at one of the ceremonies.

Before 6 a.m., the members of the honor guard assembled at the loading dock behind the JPAC headquarters on the base. They loaded the transfer cases, which had been stacked outside the door to the lab, and the buses drove to the hangar.

The C-17 had been towed into position outside hangar 35. The honor guard loaded the transfer cases into the belly of the plane, then practiced walking them through the empty hangar. Then the honor guard returned to the plane, and waited.

At nearly 9 a.m., the public was allowed in: invited politicians, media, families of the missing and veterans. Employees from JPAC were bused over to fill out the crowd.

Then the show began, with tears and salutes as the remains were marched to the buses, then driven off to the lab to "begin the identification process."

'A very pissed-off citizen'Jesse Baker, an Air Force veteran of World War II and Korea living in Honolulu, said he has been to more than 50 of these ceremonies. He told NBC News that he's always been under the impression that the plane had just arrived carrying recovered remains.

"If I have been fooled, I am going to be a very pissed-off citizen, because I've been going for years," Baker said. "And I know a lot of guys who are going to be pissed off. ... They're out there honoring warriors."

Baker tried to make sense of why America's Department of Defense would work so hard to trick him and other veterans. "That's disturbing. I don't know when they stopped being honest and switched over to this Mickey Mouse, but whoever did it, I hope they find him a new job somewhere."

One leading figure in the MIA/POW field said she has known for years about the charade. The head of the largest group of families of missing service men and women, Ann Mills-Griffiths, is a staunch defender of JPAC, but she told NBC that she has warned Pentagon officials and JPAC repeatedly that they should stop holding "those phony arrival ceremonies."

But Mills-Griffiths, the chairman of the National League of POW/MIA Families, said she had never told any family members that the ceremonies were phony, because she supported JPAC's mission, if not the way it was carrying it out.

'Static aircraft'On Wednesday, after NBC submitted questions, the Pentagon acknowledged that the airplanes were often towed out of maintenance hangars for the ceremonies and could not have just flown in. "Many times, static aircraft are used for the ceremonies, as operational requirements dictate flight schedules and aircraft availability," said a Department of Defense spokesperson, Navy Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost.

The Pentagon said its own words, used since 2006, had led to the ceremonies being "misinterpreted" as arrivals.

"Based on how media announcements and ceremony remarks are currently written, it is understandable how these 'arrival' ceremonies might be misinterpreted, leading one to believe the ceremonies are 'dignified transfer ceremonies,' which they are not." She said the Pentagon is reviewing its procedures and is committed to conducting all recovery operations honorably.

NBC asked about another discrepancy: Current and former JPAC employees said that the emcee often announces that the remains were from specific countries where JPAC staff had not recently recovered remains. The Pentagon statement said that the correct country is always announced, but that it may have been a few months since the remains were recovered. And occasionally, it said, there has been no JPAC mission to a country, but the remains have been turned over by those countries and are still deserving of a "symbolic tribute."

An emotional ceremonyOther veterans, a former POW's wife, even the bagpiper at the ceremonies '-- all told NBC they had assumed the arrival ceremony meant that soldiers' remains were actually arriving. They said they found the ceremony to be moving.

"It was a very humbling experience for me," said bagpiper Alan Miyamura. "The thing that I remember most vividly is the silence. ... It meant respect and a feeling that these soldiers are welcomed home."

The ceremony "makes me very proud that our country does such a thing," said Carole Hickerson, whose first husband was a POW in the Vietnam War. She helped design the black POW/MIA flag. "You don't know how important a funeral is until you don't have one."

'Acutely dysfunctional'After NBC News requested permission to attend an arrival ceremony in July, JPAC canceled the ceremony. It hasn't held any ceremonies since April, scheduling and canceling them repeatedly.

The Pentagon spokesperson said the commander of JPAC, Army Maj. Gen. Kelly K. McKeague, authorized in April the renaming of the ceremonies "to more accurately reflect the purpose of these events." However, public affairs staff at JPAC, which organized the events, continued to call them "arrival ceremonies" on into the summer, and until Wednesday they were still identified that way on the agency's website. (That page of the JPAC website was renamed to "honors ceremonies" on Wednesday.) The Pentagon would not answer when asked when Gen. McKeague and other military officers became aware that the public was being misled.

Rick Stone

Before the "arrival ceremony" on April 27, 2012, the transfer cases began their day stacked outside the JPAC lab. JPAC employee Rick Stone photographed them there and followed as they were driven to the ceremony on the blue bus with the honor guard.

NBC asked on Oct. 3 to interview Gen. McKeague as well as the scientific director and head of the laboratory, Dr. Thomas Holland, and Johnie Webb, who directs the ceremonies as deputy to the commander for external relations and legislative affairs. McKeague and Webb did not respond to an email from NBC. Holland replied briefly, saying, "I hope you get permission" for the interview. "I have no control over ceremonies."

Several investigations of JPAC are under way, in Congress and inside the Pentagon. An internal report called the agency "acutely dysfunctional," and a Government Accountability Office report said the effort to identify missing and unknown service men and women has been undermined by squabbling between agencies.

Rick Stone

After the ceremony, the transfer cases were right back where they began the day, outside the JPAC lab. The audience was told that remains in the cases were being taken to the lab to begin the process of identification.

Photos behind the scenesPhotographs were taken before and after at an arrival ceremony in April 2012 by Rick Stone, a former police chief who was the deputy chief in JPAC's World War II investigations branch. (Photographs are allowed on the base, according to the JPAC public affairs office, in any area where there is no sign specifically forbidding them.) When remains are brought back by JPAC staff, Stone said, they arrive from the airport in a plastic box in an employee's private vehicle, with no ceremony.

On Aug. 1, NBC reported that Stone's requests to disinter bodies of war dead for identification had been denied even when he had been able to narrow the possible identities to only a few, or even just one, possible match among the MIAs.

Stone said he supports the honorable mission of JPAC, but began to see the "arrival ceremonies" as symbolic of the way JPAC focused on public relations while it keeps information from the families of missing warriors.

"It's an open fraud inside JPAC," he said of the arrival ceremonies. "But it's more than just the arrival ceremony. The fraud is really their inability to bring closure to more families. Our noble mission is to go find some of these kids, and this thing is so fouled up we don't even recognize the mission."

YOU CAN HELP: Do you have documents or information about the Pentagon's effort to identify MIAs? Send to bill.dedman@nbcuni.com.