Court Keeps White House Spy Docs Secret: Via Threat Level.

A federal appellate panel on Tuesday blocked a court order requiring disclosure of e-mail between the White House, Justice Department, National Security Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence — communications that paved the way for new spy legislation.

The 2008 messages were a precursor to legislation that year to kill litigation against the nation’s carriers for funneling Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a California judge who ordered disclosure of those e-mails and the names of telco company lobbyists who pushed for the legislation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group in San Francisco, sought the e-mail and lobbyist information under a Freedom of Information Act claim. [ Read more ... ]

High Value Data Sets in the Wild: Via CDT - Center for Democracy & Technology..

Friday marked the first set of deadlines for agencies set by the Open Government Directive - and the White House has delivered the first set of data sets from agencies. The new data sets represent all cabinet-level departments, from tire safety ratings to workplace injury data.
 
It's hard to decide what a "high value data set" is, exactly. For some, data about contracts is most important, or information about FOIA requests. Maybe for the agency employees, the menu in the cafeteria is the most useful data set. It does look like there are a number of very useful data sets here and we are interested to see what people do with the National Treasures data set. Of course, there are some data sets that are clearly high value to the public. [ Read more ... ]

White House calls for IT boost to fight terrorism: Via Computerworld Data Mining News.

Better technology needed to 'connect the dots' on terror-related data, says Obama report

The White House report on the failed bombing attempt of a U.S airliner on Christmas Day highlights the challenges U.S intelligence agencies face in correlating terrorism-related information gathered from multiple databases and sources.

The review, released yesterday, identified an overall failure by intelligence agencies to "connect the dots," despite having enough information at their disposal to have potentially disrupted the botched attack.

The problem, according to the report, was not a lack of information sharing between government agencies but a failure by the intelligence community to "identity, correlate and fuse into a coherent story all of the discrete pieces of intelligence held by the U.S. government."

In listing the various causes for this failure, the report noted that information technology within the counter-terrorism community "did not sufficiently enable the correlation of data that would have enabled analysts to highlight the relevant threat information." [ Read more ... ]

Obama Appoints Former Microsoft Security Chief New Cyber Security Czar: Via Threat Level.

It took seven months but President Obama has finally found someone to take the cybersecurity czar job no one wanted.

Howard Schmidt,  a former Microsoft security executive and a one-time cybersecurity adviser to President George W. Bush, has been appointed to the position of cybersecurity coordinator, according to a White House announcement on Tuesday.

Schmidt served as vice chair, and then chair, of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and as Special Adviser for Cyberspace Security for the White House from December 2001 until May 2003, when he reportedly left the position out of frustration that the government wasn’t making cybersecurity a priority. After leaving the White House, he became chief information security officer at eBay. [ Read more ... ]

Schmidt tapped as White House cybersecurity coordinator: Via Computerworld Security News.

Seven months after he announced the creation of a White House cybersecurity coordinator, President Obama has selected industry veteran Howard Schmidt for the job, an administration official confirmed Monday night.

The official told CSOonline.com that the White House will make the announcement today.

"Cybersecurity is critical to both our national security and economic competitiveness, and the president wanted to ensure that the cybersecurity coordinator had the right mix of public and private sector experience," the official said. "After an extensive search, the president chose Schmidt because of his unique background and skill sets."

Schmidt has a long history in the IT security sector and has served in the White House before as vice chairman of the president's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. [ Read more ... ]

22 Million E-mails Missing From Bush White House Found: Via Threat Level.

White House computer technicians have found 22 million e-mails that were believed to have been lost during President George W. Bush’s administration, according to the Associated Press.

The discovery was announced Monday by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President (EOP) in 2007 for the e-mails. [ Read more ... ]

White House Takes Another Step Toward Greater Transparency: Via EFF.org Updates.

The Obama Administration today issued its long-awaited Open Government Directive (OGD), a blueprint for transparency that the President promised on January 21, his first full day in office. The OGD is “intended to direct executive departments and agencies to take specific actions to implement the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration” the President spoke of as he took office, and it is hopefully the first of many concrete steps that will be taken to alter the entrenched culture of secrecy that pervades the federal government.

The OGD imposes four broad mandates on the federal bureaucracy: [ Read more ... ]

Court Silences CIA Operative Despite Yellowcake Scandal: Via Threat Level.

Valerie Plame Wilson cannot publicize details of her work as a CIA operative, even though a government official already outed her as an agent in an attempt to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, a federal appeals court says.

Plame Wilson, who served as chief of the unit responsible for weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq, argued that confidentiality agreements she signed to win her employment more than two decades ago should be nullified. The CIA has prohibited her from discussing her pre-2002 employment in her 2007 memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

She maintained the confidentiality agreement should be set aside because government officials leaked to the press that she was an agent. Also, as part of a battle to obtain retirement benefits, her 20-year-employment status became part of the congressional record.

Given that she has been revealed as a operative, the First Amendment allows her to sidestep her confidentiality agreement, she argued.

But the appeals court, in siding with a lower court and a CIA review board prohibiting her from describing her work prior to 2002, said the nation’s national security could be compromised (.pdf) by the disclosures she’d planned in her book. In addition, the court said, it was irrelevant whether it was widely known that she was working under cover. [ Read more ... ]

Tucker Carlson and the right's perpetual self-victimhood: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below)

The number one rule of American politics:  the greatest, most insatiable need of the standard conservative is to turn themselves into oppressed little victims.  In The Daily Beast today, Tucker Carlson devotes his entire column to complaining that Obama is "bullying" Fox News, absurdly claiming that the White House and liberals are trying "to use government power to muzzle opinions they don't agree with."  Needless to say, Carlson doesn't say a word about the endless -- and far worse -- attacks by the Bush White House on a whole array of media outlets, ones that went far beyond mere criticisms.  

But far more delusional is Carlson's central complaint:  that "the press decide[d] to go along with all of this" -- meaning Obama's criticisms of Fox.  He echoes the typical, woe-is-us conservative whine:  "Why is the press corps giving the White House a pass for behavior it would never have tolerated from other administrations? [ Read more ... ]

CIA Directors conclude CIA shouldn't be investigated for murder: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below)

In a truly shocking development being treated as major news, seven former CIA Directors -- including all three who served under George W. Bush -- jointly concluded that the CIA should not be criminally investigated for torture deaths, and they have written a letter to President Obama (.pdf) expressing that view.  Do leaders of organizations in general ever believe that their organizations and its members should be criminally investigated and possibly prosecuted for acts carried out on behalf of that organization, and do CIA Directors specifically ever believe that about the CIA?  Has a CIA Director ever advocated that CIA agents be criminally investigated for illegal intelligence activities?

But what's most notable about this letter is that it is not addressed to the individual charged with making decisions about whether an individual should be prosecuted:  namely, the Attorney General of the U.S.  Instead, it is addressed to the President himself, and they "urge [him] to exercise [his] authority to reverse Attorney General's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations."  What so-called "authority" are they talking about? [ Read more ... ]

WT EXCLUSIVE: White House collects Web users' data without notice: Via Washington Times.

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information. [ Read more ... ]

White House Probably Violated Federal Records Act in Lost E-Mails - Via CDT - PolicyBeta:

The Washington Post reported today that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is investigating a 473 day gap in White House e-mail storage.

The White House response suggest that they just don’t have a good system in place to preserve e-mail

This should be of great concern considering the fact that the courts ruled 13 years ago that an electronic copy of e-mail needs to be preserved. [ Read more ... ]

White House Secrecy On Wiretaps Described - washingtonpost.com: No more than four Justice Department officials had access to details of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program when the department deemed portions of it illegal, following a pattern of poor consultation that helped create a "legal mess," a former Justice official told Congress yesterday.

Jack L. Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the White House so tightly restricted access to the National Security Agency's program that even the attorney general and the NSA's general counsel were partly in the dark. [ Read more ... ]

ACLU Calls On Congress to Hold Administration in Contempt, Calls Latest Missed Spy Deadline Outrageous: Washington, DC –Today, after the White House missed its second deadline to respond to congressional subpoenas for information on the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, the American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to hold the Bush administration accountable. The new compliance date was set by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) after both the House and Senate passed the administration’s sweeping changes to the very law it circumvented with the domestic spying program – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The ACLU is asking Senator Leahy and the Committee to vote to hold the White House in contempt upon Congress’ return in September. [ Read more ... ]

White House Manual Details How to Deal With Protesters - washingtonpost.com:Not that they're worried or anything. But the White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn't want any.

A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential advance staffers extensive instructions in the art of "deterring potential protestors" from President Bush's public appearances around the country. [ Read more ... ]

The White House Crowd Control Manual: quizzicus writes "The Washington Post writes today about a sensitive White House document detailing how to screen for, silence, and remove protesters who show up at the President's public appearances. Obtained by an ACLU subpoena in the Rank v. Jenkins case, the Presidential Advance Manual (PDF) is dated October 2002. It lays out strategies such as searching audience members at the door for hidden protest material, [ Read more ... ]

Notes Detail Pressure on Ashcroft Over Spying: WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — Notes taken by Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I. say that Attorney General John Ashcroft was “barely articulate,” “feeble” and “clearly stressed” shortly after a hospital-room meeting in March 2004 in which two top White House aides tried to persuade him to sign an extension for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

Mr. Mueller’s notes, based on a visit to Mr. Ashcroft’s room and released Thursday by the House Judiciary Committee, provide a fuller picture of the events surrounding a March 10, 2004, confrontation over the surveillance program. They go beyond the account that Mr. Mueller gave the committee in July and reinforce an account by James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general who testified in May.

In providing corroboration for Mr. Comey’s version of events, Mr. Mueller’s typewritten entries served to rebut the suggestion of some Bush administration officials who have privately dismissed Mr. Comey’s account of the hospital standoff as an overwrought and one-sided description. [ Read more ... ]

Reported Decline in Surveillance Spurred Quick Law - New York Times: WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.

The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.

It was a surprising victory for the politically weakened White House on an issue that had plodded along in Congress for months without a clear sign of urgency or resolution. [ Read more ... ]

A Spy Chief's Political Education: Last Thursday evening, during the frantic endgame of a White House push to broaden its eavesdropping authorities, Democratic leaders from the House and the Senate gathered in the Capitol office of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, for a conference call with Mike McConnell, the nation’s top intelligence official.

Mr. McConnell was acting as the Bush administration’s chief negotiator for the measure, and the Democrats were furious to learn that he had rejected their latest proposal. They questioned whether Mr. McConnell had succumbed to pressure from the White House and Republican lawmakers. He denied those accusations, but admitted that intense pressure from Congressional leaders of both parties had taken a toll.

“I’ve spent 40 years of my life in this business, and I’ve been shot at during war,” Mr. McConnell responded, according to people who participated in the conference call. “I’ve never felt so much pressure in my life.” [ Read more ... ]

As the President Plays the Fear Card, Gonzales' Shoe Looks Likelier to Drop: "Between the tussle over subpoenas, the possibility of contempt or perjury charges, and criticism from both parties over no less than three separate scandals, it's no surprise that the press has begun to tack on 'embattled' to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' name.

And the Hill's restlessness over the AG and his programs may also be the reason President Bush is now going on the offensive, trying to preemptively smear Congress as al Qaeda enablers if they don't gut FISA, the law that for 30 years has balanced the need to spy with the need for judicial oversight.

And, the background of one particular scandal — that involving the National Security Agency's no-warrant wiretapping — is especially illustrative of just how dangerous, how unexpectedly dangerous, the activity at issue may be to American civil liberties.

Let us review. [ Read more ... ]

Oversight Committee Fine with Spying Showdown Explanation: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales satisfied the head of a powerful House oversight committee Thursday with his explanation of why he and then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card rushed to then Attorney General John Ashcroft's bed in the intensive care unit in 2004 to try to get him to re-approve a warrantless, domestic surveillance program, according to the Associated Press.' [ Read more ... ]

SJC Gives WH More Time on Wiretapping Subpoenas - TPMmuckraker July 18, 2007 11:05 AM: "Sometimes comity is possible, even when it comes to oversight on potentially illegal surveillance programs.

Today was the deadline set by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the White House to respond to a subpoena for documents establishing the origins and scope of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program. But yesterday, White House counsel Fred Fielding -- who's locked in subpoena battles with the committee and its House counterpart over the U.S. attorney scandal -- wrote to chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and asked for more time to dig through 'a wide range of materials' possibly relevant to the subpoena. Leahy agreed, citing his willingness to 'accommodate reasonable requests.' [ Read more ... ]

House Panel Issues New Subpoenas for RNC E-Mails: " The House Judiciary Committee last week issued new subpoenas targeting e-mails from Republican National Committee accounts that discuss the firings of at least eight U.S. Attorneys, a political brannigan that has bloomed into a legal showdown between Congress and the White House over executive branch secrecy.

The Bush administration last week asserted executive privilege in rejecting a separate set of Congressional subpoenas that sought information related to the attorney firings. Sara Taylor, a former Bush aide, refused to answer questions about the matter during a recent Senate hearing. And former White House counsel Harriet Miers didn't even show up for her scheduled hearing on Thursday. [ Read more ... ]

ACLU Sues Former White House Staffer: "The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Gregory Jenkins, a former White House staffer who planned public eventsfor President Bush and came up with a policy to stop anti-Bush demonstrators from getting close to the president. The ACLU contends that Jenkins 'unlawfully excluded individuals perceived to be critical of the administration,' thereby 'cleansing' public forums of dissent. [ Read more ... ]

White House Is Subpoenaed on Wiretapping - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, June 27 -- The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Justice Department after what the panel's chairman called "stonewalling of the worst kind" of efforts to investigate the National Security Agency's policy of wiretapping without warrants.

The move put Senate Democrats squarely on a course they had until now avoided, setting the stage for a showdown with the Bush administration over one of the most contentious issues arising from the White House's campaign against terrorism.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said the subpoenas seek documents that could shed light on the administration's legal justification for the wiretapping and on disputes within the government over its legality. [ Read more ... ]