Ideas for keeping your data safe from spyingby By RAPHAEL SATTER
LONDON (AP) -- Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA's sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed....
In 1998, after Osama bin Laden orchestrated the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, FBI agents were deployed to collect evidence so they could issue a warrant for his arrest. Twelve years later, Seal Team Six raided his Abbottabad compound, shot and killed him and his guards and then dumped his corpse into the sea.
The difference is that the U.S. is now waging a war on terror, and not a metaphorical war like LBJ's on poverty. This is a crucial distinction that has been lost amid the growing ruction over the National Security Agency surveillance programs. Another point lost amid the uproar is that the safety of citizens is the first—and in our view, the principal—obligation of government.
In our age of proliferating nuclear weapons and genetically engineered biotoxins, a country serious about self-preservation must detect potential threats and prevent attacks before they occur, not prosecute them as crimes after the fact. The architecture to protect civilians must therefore include signals intelligence, or surveillance, to obtain actionable information about the plans, actions and capabilities of the decentralized and lethal networks that are al Qaeda and its franchises.
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It has been instructive to watch liberals rediscover that the Constitution limits government power, at least on civil liberties. Too bad they show no such compunction about economic liberty. The ObamaCare mandate-tax that commands Americans to buy a private product is far more offensive to the Constitution than NSA reading the emails of terrorists overseas.
The regulatory agencies claim—and use—the power to seize property and control individual conduct. The very administration of the entitlement state depends on tracking (Social Security numbers), data-processing (Medicare benefits) and individual scrutiny (tax audits). The IRS knows far more about American citizens than the NSA does, and while there is much speculation about the potential for surveillance abuse, we now have real evidence of corruption at the IRS. So which is the greater scandal?
Libertarians at least claim that both national-security surveillance and economic compulsion are equally offensive, but even most of them concede that a core purpose of the state is to defend against foreign powers and their agents. The legitimacy of the American form of government, as the Constitution's preamble establishes, is to "insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty."
The more nuanced critics—those who don't invoke George III or the Stasi—argue that the U.S. is striking the wrong balance between tranquility and liberty. Or as President Obama has put it, that there is a "tradeoff" between security and freedom. More government power often does come at the expense of liberty, but in the case of data-mining this tradeoff is vanishingly small.
The Fourth Amendment restricts unreasonable searches on individuals but imposes few limits on collection and analysis, and technologies have no privacy rights. The NSA is screening the data system in general for conduct that threatens the security of the system, not targeting any particular individual or group using the system. The right comparison is a cop on a beat who patrols public spaces. He's not investigating a crime or enforcing a law; he's watching for suspicious behavior.
As the legal scholar Philip Bobbitt argued in his important 2008 book "Terror and Consent," antiterror methods ought to be "measured not only against the liberties these practices constrict, but also with respect to the liberties they may protect."
Data-mining is a tool to infer patterns and relationships, but you can't connect the dots without, well, dots. There really is safety in numbers. The de minimis costs to individuals of data-mining are worth the benefits for society at large, which include not being blown to smithereens on your morning commute.
Some commentators assert an abstract sense that the government has gone too far, but liberty cannot exist absent the basic conditions of security. A government that cannot ensure peace also cannot protect individual rights. Alexander Hamilton in the first installment of the Federalist notes that "the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty" and "their interest can never be separated." His famous disquisition about "energy in the executive" in Federalist 70 is that power vindicates "the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy."
Certainly data-mining could be abused, though leaker Edward Snowden has offered no such evidence, unlike the politicized IRS. But the risks of abuse must be measured in proportion to the damage they might prevent.
It should also be some comfort that two Presidents as distant in temperament and philosophy asGeorge W. Bush and Barack Obama both endorsed the NSA programs. And it's notable that in an era of hyper-partisanship on Capitol Hill, support for NSA's programs is bipartisan from the committees that have vetted them in detail.
It's true that President Obama and his Administration would be more believable in defending the NSA program if they showed more concern for limiting government intrusions in any sphere of life other than who you can marry. But it's also true that the NSA cannot be activated only when the sitting President is a favorite of certain TV anchors.
The Supreme Court that was aggressively adversarial against Mr. Bush's antiterror policies (Boumediene, for example, on habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees) reversed a lower court to dismiss an eavesdropping challenge only this February (Clapper v. Amnesty International). Internal controls including keystroke auditing, layers of lawyers, inspectors general and a special intelligence court also observe the NSA's activities.
If the law's controls on the use of surveillance information are abused, then the answer is to punish the abuser. This is another way that a proper IRS probe, complete with punishment for transgressors, would enhance public trust in NSA surveillance.
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As for Professor Bobbitt's liberty test, our view is that data-mining is justified to the extent it wards off far more illiberal and anti-democratic measures that might be imposed following another attack with mass casualties. Recall that the entire city of Boston was shut down for a day after the marathon bombs. In that sense the security advanced by surveillance enhances liberty. The two values are mutually dependent.
A version of this article appeared June 14, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Surveillance and Its Discontents.
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In a unanimous ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court correctly resolved one of the most important and complex disputes in a generation involving the intersection of science, law and commerce. The justices held that human DNA isolated from a chromosome cannot be patented because it is a product of nature.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, said “there would be considerable danger” in granting patents on natural phenomena because that approach would “inhibit future innovation” and “would be at odds with the very point of patents, which exist to promote creation.”
The court’s decision is a narrow one, recognizing the distinction the patent system must make between natural phenomena like DNA and the invention or discovery of “any new and useful ... composition of matter.” The court held that synthetic DNA that is created in a laboratory is new and distinct from DNA and therefore patentable.
Myriad Genetics, based in Utah, obtained broad patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes linked to a significant increase in the risk of breast and ovarian cancers in women. The company extracted these genes from the human body, then claimed that, by doing so, it had invented an isolated DNA markedly different from the native DNA. The United States patent office agreed with the claim.
The petitioners in the case — doctors, scientific researchers and women’s health organizations — argued that the isolated genes were not materially different from the genes before extraction, and that granting Myriad a patent on the genes would amount to giving the company a patent on nature, a monopoly position that could restrict testing, research and medical innovation by others.
Justice Thomas’s opinion agreed: While the company had found “important and useful” genes through its inquiries, Myriad did not “create or alter any of the genetic information encoded” in the genes, nor did it “create or alter the genetic structure of DNA.”
As Justice Thomas noted, “isolation is necessary to conduct genetic testing.” It was just this kind of testing that told the actress Angelina Jolie that she was at risk of breast cancer from a faulty gene inherited from her mother and persuaded her to undergo a double mastectomy.
Among the petitioners was Dr. Harry Ostrer, a researcher who had sent DNA samples to a lab at the University of Pennsylvania for testing. Myriad asserted that the lab’s testing infringed the company’s patents and got the lab to stop, since the patents gave the company the exclusive right to isolate someone’s BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Dr. Ostrer said after the court’s ruling that the price of the tests would come down and that the decision would have “an immediate impact on people’s health.”
Justice Thomas also said it was “important to note what is not implicated by this decision.” Not implicated are other, unchallenged Myriad patents on its screening and testing processes. The price of Myriad’s stock went up 10 percent in early trading after the court’s decision, an indication that Myriad is benefiting from its investment even as the court, properly, has safeguarded the ability of other researchers to work with the genes.
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Same-sex marriage is arriving across the world, all in a rush: The early arrivals were the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada. Now among others, there’s Uruguay, a dozen states in America, France, Britain — even serious proposals in Vietnam.
An armchair tourist can enjoy watching the contrasts in different cultural settings. In the United States the issue plays out along the familiar cultural fault lines that set the boundaries between Republicans and the Democrats, and after a long period where Angry White Males were able to hold the line against change, it has suddenly become apparent that there simply aren’t enough of them to stop it.
In France, as usual, the proposal became attached to the two centuries of argument as to whether the French Revolution of 1789 was or was not a good thing; so a million furious folk marched against gay marriage, as their forefathers rallied to defend the monarchy. But then, as now, all the prediction of dire consequences for society, the breakup of families, the end to civilization as we know it, is followed by — nothing. Belgium and Uruguay sail serenely on, social chaos not apparent. It just means that a good many more couples live an open, happy life.
In Britain, it has all been much more genteel: Whereas a million turned out in Paris, the same organizers could barely manage 2,000 in Trafalgar Square. The nearest to high drama that the Brits have provided has been two days and 89 speeches of debate in the House of Lords: on the scale of political theater, the equivalent of a Japanese Noh play.
One of the peculiar features of the House of Lords is that it continues officially to include clergy: 26 bishops of the Church of England. It’s an anomaly whose nearest parallel is in Iran. On this occasion, an unusual number of the bishops turned up to the debate: 14; their votes would not have displeased the ayatollahs in Qum. Before the Lords was an amendment put forward by a retired chief constable, Lord Dear, designed to stop the Equal Marriage Bill in its tracks. Nine of the bishops voted for this amendment, five abstained; none voted in favor of same-sex marriage.
In the end, it didn’t matter what the bishops did, because by a crushing majority (390 votes to 148), the Lords rejected the effort to derail the proposal. The day after, the church threw in the towel, recognizing that the nation had spoken in both houses of Parliament (The House of Commons passed a same-sex bill, 366 votes to 161, in May.)
All this threw a spotlight on the mess that the Church of England leadership has gotten itself into, and the disconnect between the bishops and the rest of the country, even from many in the church pews. Nationwide there is a majority in favor of same-sex marriage, and that percentage is not significantly lower among those who declare themselves to be churchgoers. Yet only one diocesan bishop, Nick Holtam, bishop of Salisbury, has declared that same-sex marriage is a good thing. The rest have hidden behind a statement commending traditional marriage prepared for the church’s theological think tank, the Faith and Order Commission.
The Church of England bishops have been caught between trying to conciliate noisy conservatives in the church and wanting to be nice to the gays, because (to episcopal surprise and alarm) gay people have ceased to lurk in the shadows and have entered mainstream society, demanding to be treated as ordinary human beings. Some are even clergy in same-sex partnerships.
The dilemma was captured in the performance of the archbishop of Canterbury during the Lords debate. A man normally characterized by shrewdness and sensitivity, he delivered an inept speech that began by saying how sad it was that the church had not supported equality for gay people in the past, and then went on to give some bizarre reasons as to why it would continue not supporting equality for them in the future. Having sort of hinted that his colleagues might be best not voting for Lord Dear’s amendment, he went on to vote for it himself.
Even more disastrous for the bishops is the rhetorical stance they have taken up in order to make their position on same-sex marriage seem less bigoted than it actually is. They insist that when Tony Blair’s Labour government introduced civil partnerships for same-sex couples, the bishops in the Lords were supportive of the introduction of civil partnerships. Read in detail the parliamentary proceedings at the time, and you will see that this claim has the plausibility of saying the dog ate their homework. But now they’re stuck with supporting civil partnerships, even for clergy, whom the Church of England ludicrously insists have to be celibate. (We are all waiting for the church to issue a code of conduct on exactly what this might mean: Which areas of the body should a clergy couple avoid mutually contacting, and how many inches away from them is O.K.?)
Then there are the liturgical implications. If civil partnerships are such a good thing, exhibiting often “stunning relationships,” as the archbishop of Canterbury said, shouldn’t they then be blessed in church? After all, the church blesses everything from battleships to pets. Why not same-sex couples?
Come on bishops, get down to it. Design a service for blessing civil partnerships. There will have to be separate wording, of course, for clergy couples, to lay down the which-bits-are-out-of-bounds rule, but otherwise, bring it on. Until you do, and until you all realize just how silly you are being about same-sex marriage, the church will go on losing out on one of the biggest pastoral opportunities any clergyperson can have: the happiest day of every couple’s life.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is fellow of St. Cross College and professor of the History of the Church, Oxford University. His latest book is “Silence: A Christian History.”
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In the two decades since the 1991 Persian Gulf war, medical researchers have struggled to explain a mysterious amalgam of problems in thousands of gulf war veterans, including joint pain, physical malaise and gastrointestinal disorders. In some medical circles, the symptoms were thought to be psychological, the result of combat stress.
But recent research is bolstering the view that the symptoms, known collectively as gulf war illness, are fundamentally biological in nature. In the latest example, researchers at Georgetown University say they have found neurological damage in gulf war veterans reporting symptoms of the disease.
Using magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of gulf war veterans before and after exercise, the researchers discovered evidence of damage in parts of their brains associated with heart rate and pain. Such damage was not evident in the control group, which included nonveterans and healthy veterans.
Such neurological damage, the researchers theorize, caused the veterans to be more sensitive to pain, to feel easily fatigued and to experience loss of short-term “working memory,” all symptoms associated with gulf war illness.
Their study, published by the online medical journal PLoS One on Friday, does not try to explain the causes of the damage. It also found different patterns of damage in two groups of veterans, indicating that the disease — if it is indeed a single ailment — takes different paths in different people.
But the authors said the findings, along with other recent research, may offer clues in developing treatments and diagnostic tests for the illness, which currently is diagnosed through self-reported symptoms and has no definitive treatment.
Two other studies released by Georgetown this year have also pointed to neurological damage in the brains of veterans reporting symptoms of gulf war illness, including one that showed abnormalities in the nerve cells linking parts of the brain involved in processing feelings of pain and fatigue.
The research makes clear that “gulf war illness is real,” said Rakib U. Rayhan, the principal author of the new study. “There is objective evidence that something is wrong in the brains of these veterans.”
Other experts offered more tempered views, noting that most of the subjects in the Georgetown study were self-selected and that their number was relatively small: 28 veterans and 10 nonveterans.
Dr. Drew A. Helmer, director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ War-Related Illness and Injury Study Center in New Jersey, called the Georgetown studies “very preliminary” but also “a very important step forward.”
But Dr. John Bailar, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago who led a group that studied gulf war illness in 1996, said the new study did not provide enough data to determine whether the veterans’ symptoms were linked to their deployments to Kuwait, or something entirely different.
“I am not questioning whether a substantial proportion of veterans of Desert Storm have symptoms related to their service,” Dr. Bailar said in an e-mail. “I am questioning whether those symptoms have any cause other than the stress of war itself.”
Studies by the Department of Veterans Affairs have estimated that as many as 250,000 of the nearly 700,000 service members who served in the Middle East in 1990 and 1991 have reported symptoms of gulf war illness, which is also known as chronic multisymptom illness.
Gulf war illness has been the source of much frustration and dispute practically since veterans first reported symptoms in the 1990s. Many veterans say that their complaints were initially dismissed as psychological. Many also believe that their problems are the result of exposure to nerve agents, pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals, but that the government has been slow, or unwilling, to pinpoint causes.
Even some government researchers have made that case. At a Congressional hearing in March, Dr. Steven S. Coughlin, an epidemiologist who once worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs, asserted that the department had systematically played down the neurological basis of gulf war illness. At the same hearing, a member of an advisory panel to the department said the agency still seemed guided by the view that symptoms of gulf war illness were stress-induced.
“This is a throwback to early speculation from the 1990s that there was no problem, or that veterans just had random, disconnected symptoms,” testified Dr. Lea Steele, a Baylor University epidemiologist who was a member of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses.
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(US President Barack Obama speaks during a LGBT (the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community) Pride Month celebration in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on June 13, 2013. “We’re reaching a turning point,” he said. AFP PHOTO / Saul LOEBSAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama was asked by the Houston LGBT Political Caucus if he would support a formal written policy banning federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. His response, according to a copy leaked more than a year ago to Metro Weekly, was one word: “Yes.”
Fast forward nearly a term and a half, and the man once dubbed “the first gay president” is quickly running out of time to follow through.
As the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) languishes in Congress, advocates are growing increasingly agitated with the president’s as yet unfulfilled pledge to extend workplace protections to LGBT Americans. The first version of ENDA was originally introduced in 1974, but has never made through Congress.
Rather than relying wholly on lawmakers to pass ENDA, advocates argue that the president should expand an existing executive order that already prohibits federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin—but not sexual orientation or identity. The order covers employers with federal contracts or subcontracts that exceed $10,000, or that would be expected to accumulate more than $10,000 in any 12-month period. Thus, this executive order would apply to a company like ExxonMobil, whose shareholders recently voted for the 14th year in a row toreject adding LGBT protections to the company’s equal employment opportunity policy.
“Companies like ExxonMobil and others, which receive millions of dollars every year in federal contracts paid for with taxpayer money, will only institute non-discrimination policies when forced to by the federal government,” said Heather Cronk, co-director of GetEQUAL, in an email to MSNBC. “Now is the time for President Obama to say, once and for all, that America is not a country that discriminates based on who you are or who you love.”
Following the ExxonMobil vote, calls for President Obama to act grew stronger. But the White House only withdrew further, telling Metro Weekly that there were no updates “regarding a hypothetical executive order.”
LGBT advocates were furious.
“The fact that [a spokesman] is calling the executive order ‘hypothetical’ is crazy,” said Cronk in a separate email to MSNBC. “Last year, they gathered a bunch of of LGBT organizations to talk about the executive order, and subsequently announced that they wouldn’t be signing it. Now it’s ‘hypothetical?’”
Cronk’s organization has since escalated its tactics, hoping the aggressive push will shed more light on the issue. At a fundraiser last week, GetEQUAL member Ellen Sturtz heckled Michelle Obama in what she described in an op-ed as a “spontaneous reaction” to the first lady’s remarks. And on Thursday, eight other activists affiliated with GetEQUAL were arrested outside House Speaker John Boehner’s office following a staged sit-in. The speaker said in April that he hadn’t “thought much about” ENDA, and that there are “ample laws already in place” to deal with workplace discrimination.
The arrests came shortly before President Obama reiterated his support for ENDA at a White House pride celebration. But advocates remain puzzled by the president’s reluctance to expand the existing non-discrimination executive order. Currently, federal contractors legally bound to comply with the order employ approximately 22% of all U.S. civilian workers, according the Center for American Progress. That means that nearly a quarter of the American workforce would be entitled to LGBT workplace protections, should Obama decide to sign.
“We’re looking to move from talk to action,” said Cronk on MSNBC Friday. “We’re looking for the president to pick up his pen, make sure that he’s not just talking, but moving us toward action, sign an executive order that would cover about 22% of the American workforce, get us about a quarter of the way there, and then show leadership for Congress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.”
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Siria: 18 periodistas muertos en eneroby Gabriela Garcia Calderon Orbe
Libertad de prensa en el mundo en 2013. Fuente: Reporteros sin Fronteras en Facebook