Credibility Crunch for Tech Companies Over Prism
By AMIR EFRATI, SHIRA OVIDE and EVELYN M. RUSLI
With Silicon Valley’s credibility in protecting consumer privacy on the line, many of the largest Web companies on Friday emphasized they aren’t giving the U.S. government a direct pipe into their networks as part of a secret program to monitor foreign nationals.
But the denials of involvement by Google Inc., GOOG +1.75% Microsoft Corp. MSFT +2.03% and others, which come at the same time the Obama administration confirmed the existence of such a program, raised questions about how data is ending up in the hands of the government.
The issues are especially acute for companies who make their business by collecting and processing customers’ most personal data and secrets.
Google CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a blog post that the company doesn’t give U.S. government investigators “open-ended access” to its network and hadn’t “joined” a program known as Prism and run by the National Security Agency.
The executives said Google only hands over data based on legally-authorized requests that it reviews individually.
Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations
The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows
• Q&A with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I do not expect to see home again’
The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.
Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations – the NSA.
Whistleblower’s NSA warning: ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’
The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens.
William Binney, an award-winning mathematician and noted NSA whistleblower, says the collection dates back to when the super-secret agency began domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I believe they’ve been collecting data about all domestic calls since October 2001,” said Mr. Binney, who worked at NSA for more than 30 years. “That’s more than a billion calls a day.”
He called his figures “back of the envelope” estimates, adding that they include emails as well as telephone calls.
Mr. Binney, who left the agency in October 2001, said the data were collected under a highly classified NSA program code-named “Stellar Wind,” which was part of the warrantless domestic wiretapping effort — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — launched on orders from President George W. Bush.
Fed study: Tax hikes, not spending cuts, are slowing the recovery
June 7, 2013 | 3:00 pm
Why is the Obama recovery the weakest recovery since the Great Depression? According to a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, it is not because the federal government failed to borrow and spend too little during the height of the economic downturn.
In fact, the San Francisco Fed reports that “federal fiscal policy was unusually expansionary during the Great Recession” thanks largely to the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. As a consequence, federal government saving in the recession fell faster—that is, the deficit grew faster—than our historical norm would predict.”
The San Francisco Fed does note that after the recovery began “fiscal policy sharply reversed course” and has since been “much more contractionary than normal.” But in total “federal fiscal policy has been a modest headwind to economic growth so far in the recovery, but no more so than usual given the weak pace of growth.”
Cincinnati IRS staffer: D.C. showed interest in Tea Party cases
By Bernie Becker – 06/07/13 07:45 PM ET
An IRS staffer in Cincinnati told congressional investigators that a Washington official was the driving force behind the targeting of Tea Party organizations in 2010, and showed unprecedented interest in those groups’ tax-exempt applications.
Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati staffer, said that she started receiving applications from Tea Party groups to sift through in April, 2010. Hofacre’s handling of those cases, she said, was highly influenced by Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington.
Hofacre said that she integrated questions from Hull into her follow-ups with Tea Party groups, and that Hull had to approve the letters seeking more information that she sent out to those organizations. That process, she said, was both unusual and “demeaning.”
“One of the criteria is to work independently and do research and make decisions based on your experience and education,” Hofacre said, according to transcripts reviewed by The Hill. “Whereas in this case, I had no autonomy at all through the process.”
“I thought it was over the top,” she added, in interviews held by investigators in both parties from the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees. “I am not sure where it came from, but it was a bit unusual.”
Ruling puts $160M in affordable housing funds out of Christie’s reach for budget balancing
Friday, June 7, 2013 Last updated: Friday June 7, 2013, 11:29 PM
BY ANTHONY CAMPISI
STATE HO– USE BUREAU
The Record
Governor Christie will not be able to use up to $160 million in affordable-housing funds to balance the state’s budget after an appeals panel on Friday ordered new protections on the money. The new rules, if they stand, mean the administration most likely won’t see any of the money before June 30, the end of the fiscal year.
Though small in the context of the state’s $31.7 billion budget, the funds have become increasingly important because tax revenues earlier this year were lower than expected, giving the Christie administration a narrow margin to balance the budget. The New Jersey Constitution requires that the state end the fiscal year in the black.
Opponents of Christie’s plan to seize the funds, which are used by towns to finance projects for low-income and disabled New Jerseyans, say it could put construction of thousands of housing units at risk even as residents struggle to rebuild homes destroyed by Superstorm Sandy.
Letter: Planning Board meetings on Valley are on a ‘slippery slope’
Friday June 7, 2013, 11:25 AM
The Ridgewood News
Planning Board meetings on Valley are on a ‘slippery slope’
To the editor:
I am a 26-year Ridgewood resident and a regular attendee at Planning Board meetings addressing Valley Hospital’s persistent and increasingly aggressive expansion plans. I have lost track of the many concessions that have been made to Valley Hospital over the past 26 years.
This current proposal is the most grandiose of all. If Valley’s plans are approved, the hospital’s above-ground facilities will more than double in size to almost one million square feet. Phase One construction alone will last for six years. Ridgewood will gain a skyline with the tallest structure climbing 94 feet into the sky with parts of that building only 40 feet from the property line of Ben Franklin Middle School. Children currently in elementary school will face potential construction-related noise, traffic and air quality issues as they attend Ben Franklin. Children not yet born will face the same issues as they attend Travell School.
I started this letter while attending Planning Board meetings exploring traffic, construction, environmental and other issues. I wonder why we are getting into so many details without addressing the basic question of whether this project makes sense for the village – and yes the question is whether it makes sense for the village, not whether it makes sense for Valley Hospital.
I ask if it is relevant at this point in the proceedings if truckloads rumbling through the village’s streets can be reduced to 8,000? Is it relevant if Bergen County will widen Linwood and Van Dien avenues to address traffic worries? Is it relevant if a proposed traffic crossing island is truly safe for our children? Is it relevant if excavation and related water table disruption present undue risk to residential homes and to Ben Franklin? If the construction project is approved, these details will undoubtedly be vetted as specific building site plans are filed.
I am dismayed by the slippery slope of Planning Board meetings that are debating these details. These discussions imply, in my opinion, that the goal is to try to determine a tolerable scope for the project.
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Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies
June 6, 2013, at 8:02 PM
Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.
Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about the NSA’s domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted independently, repeatedly said that “domestic collection” does not mean that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it refers only to the origin of the data.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that U.S. credit card companies had also provided customer information. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies because, they said, doing so would provide U.S. enemies with a list of companies to avoid. They declined to confirm the list of participants in an internet monitoring program revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, but both confirmed that the program existed.
“The idea is to create a mosaic. We get a tip. We vet it. Then we mine the data for intelligence,” one of the officials said.
Catholic Archbishop: Wake Up! Religious Liberty at Risk in USA
June 8, 2013 – 10:02 AM
By Terence P. Jeffrey
(CNSNews.com) – Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles J. Chaput is calling on Americans to wake up and recognize that the Founding Fathers’ vision of religious freedom is now threatened by the federal government.
“The day when Americans could take the Founders’ understanding of religious freedom as a given is over,” said the archbishop. “We need to wake up.”
Chaput, who leads the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, pointed to Obamacare’s sterilzation-contraception-abortifacient regulation as one example. The regulation, issued by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, requires almost all health-care plans in the United States to provide coverage for sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to all women of reproductive age–even if the person or employer providing the insurance coverage and even if the female beneficiaries themselves do not want the coverage and believe it is morally wrong and violates their religious beliefs.
Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance
Government lawyers are trying to keep buried a classified court finding that a domestic spying program went too far.
—By David Corn | Fri Jun. 7, 2013 12:22 PM PDT
In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications, the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.
This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week’s disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens that he believed was improper. He and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), another intelligence committee member, raised only vague warnings about this data collection, because they could not reveal the details of the classified program that concerned them. But in July 2012, Wyden was able to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:
* On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
* I believe that the government’s implementation of Section 702 of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.
Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans
By Michael Isikoff
National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News
The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.
At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.
Residents again question Mayor Paul Aronsohn’s handling of public meetings
June 8,2013
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ , Mayor Paul Aronsohn’s handling of public meetings has continued to come under scrutiny from residents .
Marcia Ringel Co-chair , The Preserve Graydon Coalition in her letter to the Ridgewood News has become the latest to point out disprepencies in the way Village “public” meetings are run with her comment ,”Mayor Paul Aronsohn knew about the meeting, he told only selected individuals about it. This did not include the public at large,” https://www.northjersey.com/news/opinions/210576851_Letter__Public_meeting_anything_but_public.html
In December the Ridgewood blog reprinted an article by DARIUS AMOS of the Ridgewood News ,https://theridgewoodblog.net/ridgewood-residents-claim-village-hall-violated-new-jerseys-open-public-meetings-act/ where it was reported that Deputy Mayor Albert Pucciarelli invited approximately 10 members of the public to his information session, held Nov. 27 at Village Hall. The invitees included members of the Preserve Graydon Coalition, a grassroots group that has spoken against Option 1, as well as some members of the Ridgewood professional staff.No other member of the Village Council was invited to the session .
Long time resident Ellie Gruber pointed out the the gatherings violated New Jersey’s Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA).
Readers at the time said that either Mr. Pucciarelli was unaware of the law or sought to circumvent it. Neither is acceptable.
And predicted , “Look for more of Mrs. Walsh and Mr. Riche being excluded from “informal” Council meetings in the future. I am very skeptical of the Aronsohn/Hauck/Pucciarelli axis as they seem to be moving and voting as a block. Mr. Aronshon is an unapologetic political operator while his partners are political neophytes. This gives way to much influence to a politician about whom we should all be skeptical.”
If you ad some of the recent antics by the Aronsohn/Hauck/Pucciarelli axis toward both Councilmen Richie and Councilwomen Walsh , and Councilwomen Hauck inability to understand that she must recuse herself from discussions involving Valley hospital perhaps a sitdown with Village attorney Matt Rogers is in line for this ethically challenged group.
Letter: Valley expansion will negatively impact village life
Friday June 7, 2013, 11:19 AM
The Ridgewood News
Valley expansion will negatively impact village life
To the editor:
For the last several weeks, Valley Hospital’s hired experts have been presenting their sales pitches before the Planning Board. Unfortunately, little has changed since the Village Council unanimously voted down Valley’s expansion plans in 2011.
Indeed, the hospital still aims to build a regional medical center of unprecedented size, nearly doubling its current bulk, in a neighborhood of three schools, single-family homes and playing fields. Buildings will tower 94 feet above us, dump trucks will make thousands of trips, and 300,000 gallons of groundwater per day will be pumped, likely into the flood-prone Ho-Ho-Kus Brook, near Graydon. This project will take many years to complete. Yes, it is dejà-vu all over again.
Traffic and safety are major concerns. While there are many dangerous intersections in Ridgewood, only one is traversed by hundreds of children every single day, and that is the intersection of Linwood and N. Van Dien, precisely where Valley hopes to build a multi-level parking garage. Hospital officials would like us to believe that trucks and heavy machinery will have no effect on our children or the neighborhood, as plans to add a lane to Linwood Avenue, with a bus turnout, have been discussed. And just in case your child doesn’t quite make it across the street, a traffic “refuge” island will be built to accommodate her.
Few of us are comforted by the image of a child stuck in the middle of Linwood Avenue as trucks and impatient drivers whiz by. Anyone who believes that traffic lights will always be obeyed doesn’t understand the culture of children. Our crossing guards are reliable, but their hours are limited (they are not present during sports activities), and they work alone.
Updated Emergency Planning Guide for Village Residents – Flood Preparations
The Ridgewood Office of Emergency Management (OEM) just published an Emergency Planning Guide for 2013 – the first update of this critical resource in nearly 15 years.
The Emergency Planning Guide is designed to provide residents with basic emergency preparedness information, including tools and checklists that will assist families in preparing for different types of emergencies. It will also help residents to stay informed before, during and after disasters.
Click Here for your copy of the Ridgewood Emergency Planning Guide.
“The Emergency Planning Guide is a must-have resource for all Ridgewood residents and businesses,” explained Mayor Paul Aronsohn. “As we have learned from Super Storm Sandy and other recent storms, you can never be too prepared for a disaster.”
“I applaud our OEM leadership for its proactive approach,” Aronsohn continued.
For the first time, the Emergency Planning Guide is available electronically for viewing and downloading on the Ridgewood OEM website (https://oem.ridgewoodnj.net) as well as the main Village of Ridgewood website (www.ridgewoodnj.net).
The new Emergency Planning Guide was specifically designed as a PDF document to take advantage of current technology. A limited number of hard copies will also be printed at a later date.
According to OEM Coordinator Jeremy Kleiman, “In the past, we would print and mail a copy of the booklet to all village residents and businesses, which is expensive. Budget constraints made us re-think how we communicate emergency preparedness information to the public. We decided to make the Emergency Planning Guide an electronic document to save costs and also to leverage current technology. Residents who are registered to receive E-Notices from the village will receive the document by email.”
OEM asks all residents to register for E-Notices to receive routine information, such as the Emergency Planning Guide, as well as emergency alerts. Please register by visiting either www.ridgewoodnj.net and clicking on the “E-Notices” link, or https://oem.ridgewoodnj.net and clicking on the “Swift911 Notification” icon. Either link will take residents to the same registration portal.
For those residents who do not register for E-Notices or are unable to receive information by email, a limited number of hard copies of the Emergency Planning Guide will be printed at a later date. Ridgewood Councilman Tom Riche is leading a fundraising effort to secure donations that will cover the cost of printing the booklets. Contributions may be made payable to Ridgewood Emergency Planning Guide, c/o Finance Office, Ridgewood Village Hall, 131 N. Maple Ave., Ridgewood, NJ 07451.
