 Actual State Department seal Today's New York Times reports:
South Korean prosecutors indicted a social media and freedom of speech activist this week for reposting messages from the North Korean government's Twitter account.
It seems the U.S. State Department takes tweets and blogs just as seriously. I represent a State Department 23-year-veteran for the Foreign Service, Peter Van Buren, where the State Department monitors his personal Internet activity on his home computer during his private time. Peter Van Buren wrote a book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, which is highly critical of gross reconstruction fraud in Iraq.
 Not actual State Department seal. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user orphum)A month before the publication of his book, Mr. Van Buren began to experience a series of adverse personnel actions, which are ongoing today. The State Department tried a variety of different tactics to censor Mr. Van Buren's book and prevent him from promoting it. After vague references to ethics rules failed, it tried threats of criminal action. After those failed, it started coming down on his blogs (which had been posted since April 2011 without criticism) and LIVE media appearances, saying they needed to be pre-cleared.
Sounds familiar in light of South Korea's recent attempts at censorship. South Korea brought the recent charges under its National Security Law – which bans "acts that benefit the enemy" but fails to specify what those acts are.
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Not actual State Department seal. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user orphum)With war maybe on its way in Iran, problems in Syria and Iraq, never mind troubles everywhere else abroad, what does your Department of State have time to focus on? This blog apparently.
Not to suggest State is overstaffed, but somehow in managing all those international thingies they also have time to demand that I remove the State Department Seal from a blog post. The post, linked here, used the Seal as part of a satirical/parody memo from Hillary to the media, instructing them on how the Department wants them to not tell the truth about events in Iraq. No sentient being could have confused that blog post with an actual State Department memo.
 If you want to see the offensive blog post, click here. If you want to see a real State Department memo, go troll through the 250,000 documents on Wikileaks. I shouldn’t post a link to Wikileaks on this blog, or I’ll get in trouble again with the nancy boys who run Diplomatic Security. Read’in is hard work, and they still are sorting out a “link” from a “leak.”
If you’d like to read the State Department’s email to me demanding I remove the Seal from my blog, here it is.
There is, as always, precedent. In 2005 the George W. Bush White House demanded that The Onion stop using George’s seal. So, um, right on State, you’re in lock step with the White House on this issue, albeit seven years late.
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 Courtesy of Fotopedia user jamesdale10The Obama administration recently continued its campaign against so-called "leakers," who are more often than not whistleblowers, with the indictment of a record-breaking sixth person under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information.
Obama's abhorrence for "leaks" apparently only applies to disclosures that expose embarrassing or negative aspects of the administration. At an online town hall - sponsored by adjust-your-privacy-expectations-downward Google – Obama defended the CIA's supposedly covert drone program:
“I want to make sure that people understand that drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” Obama replied. “For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.”
The perception that “we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly,” Obama said, is incorrect. “This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases and so on.”
“I think that we have to be judicious in how we use drones,” Obama added.
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According to the reports in today's Washington Post, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pushed out career analyst Heather Kiriakou, wife to John Kiriakou, the former CIA employee who has the dubious distinction of being the sixth person in history charged under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information. WaPo reports that spouses working at an intelligence agency creates a difficult situation for the agency:
The case created an unusual security dilemma for the CIA, turning on whether the career of a senior analyst should continue even when her husband faces charges that he breached his agreement to protect the agency’s secrets.
In actuality, spouses working in the intelligence community is far from an unusual situation, and the ruining of Ms. Kiriakou's career – who the WaPo reports was forced to resign while on maternity leave – is an all too typical consequence for whistleblowers.
Former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) employee John Dullahan (whose security clearance was pulled for socializing with Soviets in 1985) and National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake (who was the fourth person charged under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information) both had spouses who worked at NSA. In Dullahan's case, his wife worked at DIA as a supervisor with access to Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.
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 Courtesy of Flickr user publik15Yesterday, John Kiriakou, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, gained the dubious distinction of being the SIXTH person charged in the Obama administration's record-breaking war on whistleblowers:
The Justice Department on Monday charged a former Central Intelligence Agency officer with disclosing classified information to journalists about the capture and brutal interrogation of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah . . .
Worse, in Kiriakou's case, the Obama Justice Department appears to be covering for one of the most abhorrent crimes of the Bush administration – torture. Despite the flowery rhetoric that got him elected, Obama has a dismal record on accountability for Bush-era wrongdoing:
Criminal prosecutions for officials who authorized or conducted torture and warrantless surveillance: 0
Criminal prosecutions for so-called "leakers," who are more often than not whistleblowers: 6
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Oh thank G-d. This is a great example of the Supreme Court conforming the law to new technology. The High Court ruled UNANIMOUSLY that the police must obtain a valid search warrant before using a GPS (global positioning system) device to track criminal suspects.
For those of you who saw the oral argument, the words "Big Brother" came up six times. It is hugely significant (says the attorney whose clients have been electronically surveilled) that courts hear these cases and that they not be shut down by the "state secrets privilege" – the reason the legal cases on warrantless wiretapping have all been halted.
Obviously, the broader issue is how technology has impacted our reasonable expectation of privacy in today's world. But this is a good start.
Scalia wrote the opinion. Key quote:
We hold that the government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a "search,"
under the Fourth Amendment, meaning it's unconstitutional – a word out of vogue these days.
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Today's Baltimore Sun has a front-page article describing the surreal battle National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowers Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe, and former Congressional staffer Diane Roark are fighting to recoup property the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took from them back in 2007 in connection with a retaliatory criminal investigation, which culminated in the collapsed Espionage Act prosecution of Drake.
You've probably never heard of a 41(g) Motion to Reclaim Property. That's because, under normal circumstances, at the conclusion of a criminal case - especially a flop as spectacular as the Drake case - the government simply returns property. Instead, NSA has decided to claim that it found information classified beyond top secret on Wiebe's computer. Reminder: Wiebe received immunity from prosecution in 2010 and the government dropped all felony counts against Drake, who pleaded to a misdemeanor of Unauthorized Use of a Government Computer - an offense not involving classified information.
Nonetheless, NSA is stubbornly sticking to the same kind of dubious claims of secrecy that caused the Drake case to crumble. Grow up, NSA. You lost.
News outlets from the Baltimore Sun to Politico to the Carroll County Times have written at length about what should be an uneventful, routine motion. If the information on Wiebe's computer was legitimately classified, the Justice Department surely would have used it in the prosecution against Drake.
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