Jts5665

Here’s part two of the ABC Catalyst documentary Heart of the Matter, which examines the iffy science behind The Lipid Hypothesis. This episode examines the problems with statins … and it’s so well done, I tweeted the producer and suggested she avoid dark alleys for awhile.

The show was immediately blasted by statin-pushers who warned that people may be frightened into giving up their statins – and DIE AS A RESULT!

Yes, if people stopped taking statins, that could be disastrous … for the pharmaceutical companies.  After all, we’re not just talking about $30 billion in profits from statins; we’re also talking about lord-only-knows how many prescriptions for painkillers, diabetes medications, memory-loss treatments and erectile-dysfunction pills that doctors hand out to treat the side-effects of taking statins.

I’ve seen those effects up close and personal.  My mom ended up taking painkillers for the joint and muscle pains she experienced while on statins — two drugs for one non-existent problem.  (Her cholesterol was a whopping 220 or thereabouts.)  Her doctor, of course, never connected the muscle pain to the statins.  I did, after reading Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s terrific book The Great Cholesterol Con.

My dad, who was on a high dose of Lipitor for two decades, started having occasional episodes of profound confusion and temporary memory loss in his early 60s (not much older than I am now), became increasingly confused in his late 60s, and was diagnosed with full-blown Alzheimer’s by age 72.  I can’t prove the Lipitor caused his condition, but knowing what I know now, let’s just say I don’t think we’re looking at a coincidence.  As far as I’m concerned, that @#$%ing drug robbed him of the chance to enjoy his retirement, work on his golf game, travel with my mom, see my girls grow up, etc.

Fortunately, we’ve been seeing more media articles about these “wonder drugs” over the past few years, as I’ve reported in previous posts.  Here’s a quote from an article in the Pacific Standard:

Dr. Greg Burns (not his real name) is a 72-year-old retired radiologist living in Connecticut. Until early last year, he ran with his dog at canine agility meets, skied, ice skated and played 18 holes of golf. He is now unable to walk and is taking a course of medication that will postpone, by a few months, his death.

Burns’ rapid decline began in December 2007 when he suffered a short-acting stroke from which he fully recovered.

His cholesterol level was elevated and so as a preventative measure his doctor prescribed a 20mg daily dose of Crestor, a cholesterol-lowering drug in the “statin” class. Statin drugs are designed to inhibit cholesterol synthesis, and about 20 million people are taking statins, most for life.

A few months after beginning Crestor, Burns developed muscle cramps. He was assured by his doctors that these were not serious side effects of taking the drug. But in December 2008 when tests showed that his creatine phosphokinase — an enzyme that is released into the blood stream when muscle cells are damaged — was elevated, Dr. Burns stopped taking Crestor. When his enzyme levels returned to normal, he began taking Pravachol, another statin drug. He quickly developed weakness in his lower legs and a right foot drop. In January 2010, following an extensive neurological exam, Dr. Kevin Felice at The Hospital for Special Care in New Britain, Conn., diagnosed Burns as having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

And another quote from TIME magazine:

Doctors say the majority of current statin users are healthy people who don’t have heart disease but who, like Segal, simply have high cholesterol. Use among this group, known as the primary prevention population, has made these drugs one of the world’s best-selling classes.

But Segal’s statin ended up preventing her from living a heart-healthy lifestyle. A month after she started taking the drug, she suffered muscle pain so severe, she had to stop all physical activity and was unable to sleep at night. Although her husband, who was worried about her risk of heart attack, pleaded with her to stay on the drug, she discontinued using it. The muscle pain receded. “My husband was scared for me. Doctors scare you. But I was in so much pain, I told him I would have rather died than stay on them,” says Segal.

That grim situation could have been avoided, researchers say. An estimated 12 million American women are routinely prescribed statins, which carry a risk of serious side effects. Yet there is little evidence that they prevent heart disease in women.

Even the FDA is finally admitting statins can have nasty side-effects:

Federal health officials on Tuesday added new safety alerts to the prescribing information for statins, the cholesterol-reducing medications that are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, citing rare risks of memory loss, diabetes and muscle pain.

It is the first time that the Food and Drug Administration has officially linked statin use with cognitive problems like forgetfulness and confusion, although some patients have reported such problems for years.

Those are newspaper and magazine articles.  I’m not sure how many people have read them.  Like it or not, a lot of people get most of their information from their television sets.  That’s why I’m delighted to see a TV network taking a shot at statins.  Now let’s hope some U.S. networks do likewise – but with all the pharmaceutical ads on TV these days, I’m not holding my breath.

In a heartbreaking Wall Street Journal editorial, Edie Littlefield Sunby, a stage-four cancer survivor, details how ObamaCare cost her the health insurance Obama repeatedly promised she could keep, and how ObamaCare's alternative plans don't cover the doctors and facilities that have kept her alive. In response to her story, White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer fired off a dismissive tweet that basically blames her for picking the wrong insurance:

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The Real Reason That The Cancer Patient Writing In Today’s Wall Street Journal Lost Her Insurance http://t.co/b4Dx1Jq2ts via @TPHealth

— Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) November 4, 2013

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The story linked in the White House tweet is a rapid response piece from the left-wing Think Progress (which is part of John Podesta's Center for American Progress -- a group dedicated to spinning the media).

According to the cold, robotic spin of Think Progress, because ObamaCare had absolutely nothing to do with it, it is only a coincidence that Sundby lost a health plan that she not only loved, but which kept her alive.

Pfeiffer's tweet is just a repackaging of the White House's attack on the millions of Americans who have already lost the insurance Obama repeatedly promised they could keep. You see, just like all of them, Ms. Sunby isn't a victim of ObamaCare; she is really a victim of her own idiocy for buying such a shady, dubious, junk plan in the first place.

This is the world in which we now find ourselves -- one where our government, Democrats, and their media allies steamroll cancer patients victimized by ObamaCare with heartless spin, lies, and propaganda -- all in the hopes of it being good enough to keep the media at bay.

We are seeing the real face and the black heart of  the "Soylent Green Liberals" -- those who are willing to grind up a few million innocent people to serve their cold concept of a  "greater good."

 

 

 Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC       

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You may recall the farce in the UK that is the story of the nine-hour detention of Glenn Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, while he was held over while flying through Heathrow to get from Berlin to Brazil. Miranda's devices were seized under an anti-terrorism law, which can only be used to deal with terrorism. Even though many have admitted it was really just to send a message to Greenwald and other reporters, many UK officials have maintained that the detention was fully justified, despite no evidence to support that. Even the author of the law that was used to stop Miranda has argued that it was not intended for such uses.

However, last week in court, the UK laid out its case, as presented by Scotland Yard -- and they actually are going to try to claim that Miranda's actions -- carrying some of Snowden's encrypted documents -- is a form of both espionage and terrorism.

Intelligence indicates that Miranda is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security," according to the document.

"We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material the release of which would endanger people's lives," the document continued. "Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism..."

Read that again and let it sink in. UK officials are arguing that if you have any material which, if disclosed, might "influence a government," you are, by definition, a terrorist. That makes a very large number of people terrorists. By this definition, basically any whistleblower is a terrorist. Anyone with embarrassing, but factual, information about a government official might be deemed a terrorist as well. Something is very broken if that's considered the actual standard in the law.

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IT BEGINS: Dem calls for law to require all doctors to treat MedicaidMedicare patients...


(Top headline, 1st story, link)

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As of 2003, consumers have had the right to change providers while keeping their wireless number. Since 2007, consumers have also had the right to "unlock" their wireless device. But the Librarian of Congress recently made a bureaucratic ruling eliminating consumers' right to use their own device after their contract expires.

Unlocking is a simple technique where a patch is installed on the phone. Essentially, it lets a phone be used on a different phone carrier. This technology, while lawful in other countries and acknowledged by market experts as beneficial, is now illegal for Americans. This ruling hurts consumers, hinders competition, and stifles innovation and makes millions of average Americans felons punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

Overall, it’s a classic example of crony-capitalism, where a few market dominant companies, each with significant lobbying assets (two of which are in top 10 in lobbying dollars in D.C.), succeeded in changing the “law” for their own pecuniary benefit, thereby creating higher barriers to entry for their competitors. 

When the Librarian’s ruling made unlocking illegal, the digital generation responded (both young and old alike) and created a White House petition on this issue. Sina Khanifar and I advocated heavily for consumers. Within a month, 114,000 people signed the White House petition (created by Sina) to reverse this incredible ruling. It was the first petition to meet the new 100,000 threshold for a response. As a response, under mass pressure on March 4, 2013, the White House formally reversed their position and endorsed unlocking.

This action cascaded into support across the right from Freedomworks, R Street, Tea Party Nation, Young Americans for Liberty, National College Republicans, Consumers Advocacy, the Competitive Carriers Association, and scholars from Mercatus and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Today, no group can be found in favor of the ruling, even those that lobbied for it; it has become politically toxic.

But today, after five bills were introduced, Congress has essentially failed to act. One bill, H.R.1123, introduced by Chairman Goodlatte, would kick the can down the road by temporarily reversing the Librarian of Congress' decision and then allowing the Librarian to rule once again. Entrepreneurs have been clear in expressing that such a policy would create uncertainty on what is legal year-to-year and deter investment.

Merely allowing the Librarian of Congress to rule all over again, as H.R. 1123 does, is better than nothing, but it is not an acceptable permanent solution. As FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai explains:

Let’s fix this problem permanently. We don’t need to have the exact same debate every three years, like an extended version of the movie Groundhog Day. I can assure you that the case for criminalizing cellphone unlocking isn’t going to get any stronger with time.

Today, a number of conservative groups, including Generation Opportunity, R Street, Cascade Policy Institute, Harbour League, and Let Freedom Ring wrote to Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Reid, insisting that they bring up and vote without delay on H.R. 1123, a stop-gap measure, and then get to work on the permanent solution:

We the undersigned organizations and individuals urge Congress to seriously and substantively address the concerns of millions of Americans on cellphone unlocking.

Our contention is simple: given the enormous benefits that phone unlocking provides to the consumer, phone unlocking should be made permanently lawful for the consumer to use, industry to develop, and marketers to sell.

Signatories of the letter, members of the mass campaign on unlocking, and other groups and companies have all endorsed the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 (H.R. 1892); whereas, Goodlatte’s legislation to allow the Librarian to rule all over again has received no outside support.

H.R. 1892 is the true conservative solution: it restores the free market, provides legal certainty, and is a small part in dealing with the epidemic of federal over-criminalization. The coalition letter concludes its endorsement of H.R. 1892 with:

This is a basic issue of property rights. If you own your own phone, it is your right to switch carriers, install your own software, and call whomever you choose. If nothing is done, new and innovative technological solutions will increasingly fall under the control of the Librarian of Congress, setting harmful precedence for the future of the wireless market.

This critical issue affects millions of Americans and ultimately the future of the wireless market, hence why many have called fixing this issue “the most important change in mobile policy in nine years.” This legislation will restore competition to the mobile market, leading to more innovation and lower prices for consumers.

It’s imperative that Congress act now because:

• Every day that Congress fails to act, our service members get sent abroad and have to choose between breaking the law to unlock their phone or not being able to use their device.
• Every day that Congress fails to act, millions of Americans commit felonies punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fines.
• Every day that Congress fails to act, international travelers pay higher prices for using their phones abroad.
• Every day that Congress fails to act, we continue to inhibit the free market and harm competition which ultimately drives up costs for all consumers.

If you see your Member of Congress, ask them: “Why does Congress delegate these decisions to a quasi-regulatory agent? Isn’t it time to put the Librarian of Congress back to his task of managing the nation’s preeminent library rather than deciding what technologies to ban?”

Derek Khanna (@DerekKhanna) previously worked for the House Republican Study Committee and for Senator Scott Brown (R-MA). He spearheaded the national grassroots campaign on cell phone unlocking. He has spoken widely including at the Conservative Political Action Conference and at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

Julian Sanchez

Just in time for Halloween, the Senate Intelligence Committee has produced fig-leaf legislation that entrenches indiscriminate collection of Americans’ phone and Internet records, but dressed it up in the costume of a surveillance reform bill designed to ban such collection. The “FISA Improvements Act” does contain some mild but generally positive transparency measures—somewhat ironically, given that the bill itself was marked up in secret. But the main provision deals with the NSA’s controversial bulk phone records program. According to the extraordinarily misleading press release, the law:

Prohibits the collection of bulk communication records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act except under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the bill

This is almost precisely backwards. In fact, the bill for the first time explicitly authorizes, and therefore entrenches in statute, the bulk collection of communications records, subject to more or less the same rules already imposed by the FISA Court. It endorses, rather than prohibits, what the NSA is already doing. Moreover, it imposes those restrictions only with respect to bulk collection of communications records—which is dangerous, because it signals to the FISA Court that Congress implicitly endorses the use of Section 215 to collect other records in bulk without comparable restrictions. (The key phrase “acquisition in bulk,” incidentally, does not appear to be given any concrete definition.) 

Perhaps most troubling, the bill contains a section stipulating that bulk orders for communcations records may not acquire the contents of any communications. That sounds good, right? The problem is, under canons of judicial interpretation, a narrow and explicit prohibition on getting content under bulk orders for communications records could easily be read to imply that content can be acquired via non-bulk orders, or even via bulk orders for other types of records. At present, it is not clear whether the statute allows for the acquisition of contents under 215, but there are strong arguments it does not—though, of course, I’d argue the Constitution would forbid this even if the statute didn’t. Under this law, though, a clever Justice Department lawyer could plausibly argue that a prohibition on content collection under one very specific type of 215 order would be senseless and redundant unless Congress intended for content to be accessible under 215 orders generally—and Courts generally have to interpret the law in a way that avoids making any provision redundant.

This is not at all a hypothetical concern. In 2006, Congress amended Section 215 to add special “protections” for educational and medical records. What Congress didn’t know is that, because those records are already protected under other federal laws, and 215 contained no language explicitly overriding those statutes, the Justice Department had determined that 215 simply could not be used to access those types of records—an interpretation that was reversed after the “protections” were added. Congress, in other words, inadvertently expanded the scope of 215 while trying to limit it—a fact that was discovered only later, when a report by the Inspector General revealed the unintended consequences of the amendment.

This bill bears out the prediction Sen. Ron Wyden made in his keynote speech at our recent NSA conference:

[W]e know in the months ahead we will be up against a “business-as-usual brigade” – made up of influential members of the government’s intelligence leadership, their allies in thinktanks and academia, retired government officials, and sympathetic legislators. Their game plan? Try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince the Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting. Their end game is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin-deep.

The business-as-usual brigade have resigned themselves to the inevitability of some kind of NSA reform—but they’re clearly hoping some cosmetic changes, falsely billed as a “prohibition” on bulk collection, along with a few mild transparency tweaks, will preempt any more substantive reform. It’s an ingenious costume, but most assuredly more trick than treat.

You can now download Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings for only 1.26$ here.

Here's the blurb:

Widely acclaimed for his work completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, Brandon Sanderson now begins a grand cycle of his own, one every bit as ambitious and immersive.

Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.

It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them.

One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.

Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.

Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar’s niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan’s motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war.

The result of over ten years of planning, writing, and world-building, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making.

Speak again the ancient oaths,

Life before death.

Strength before weakness.

Journey before Destination.

and return to men the Shards they once bore.

The Knights Radiant must stand again.

Despite Dianne Feinstein's supposed "conversion" earlier this week about the NSA being out of control with its spying, and the associated performance of NSA folks claiming that they were screwed, it's quickly become apparent that this was all pure theater to make people think that real reform might be coming. Feinstein claimed she was shocked about this and called for a full investigation... and yet, just two days later, she held a markup of her planned "reform" bill for the collection of intelligence by the NSA (and held the markup in secret -- because nothing says "let's increase transparency of the NSA" like keeping the debates and votes secret). That bill was moved out of committee today by a vote of 11 to 4, leading Feinstein to release the bill with a bunch of misleading claptrap designed to make people think it's real reform. It even confused some folks who know this stuff into thinking, after a quick first pass, that it "banned" the bulk data collection. And you might think that's the case because her description says:

• Prohibits the collection of bulk communication records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act except under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the bill;
• Establishes criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for intentional unauthorized access to data acquired under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the United States;
• Prohibits the bulk collection of the content of communications under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act;

Reading that, you might think it actually banned the bulk data collection that's been reported on, but it does not. That "except under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the bill" just takes the highly questionable reasoning of the FISA Court in approving the bulk data collection and makes that the "exception." In other words, it does exactly the opposite of what Feinstein claims. Rather than banning bulk data collection, it legalizes it. That third point on the "content" is just a red herring -- the same red herring that Feinstein and others have been waving about wildly for months, pretending people are upset about the collection of actual recordings, rather than the collection of metadata. She's wrong. People are upset about the collection of metadata, which this legalizes.

Even more ridiculous, the focus (both in the marketing and the bill itself) on collection of content "under Section 215" is another red herring, since it appears that much of that collection actually happens under other programs anyway. So this doesn't change a damn thing.

Other supposed "changes" in the bill -- including limiting who can perform queries on the data, how many "hops" they can analyze and how long they can retain the data, all match with current practice and don't change a thing. Even though James Clapper and Keith Alexander more or less seemed to concede at yesterday's House hearing that they'd be okay with cutting back on the data retention from five to three years, this bill keeps it at five. There are a few other minor changes, but this bill is almost entirely as expected, simply codifying the status quo, even though Feinstein has insisted that it was legal all along. The one minor "concession" which many had expected -- having a third party at the FISA Court who could fight for civil liberties -- is watered down. Rather than an actual adversarial setup, with this person representing civil liberties, it's set up as an appointed "amicus cureia" or "friend of the court," where they basically just advise the court on the issue.

This bill is a farce, and made even more farcical by the misleading way in which Feinstein has presented it, pretending it bans bulk data collection when it actually legalizes it.

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Obviously, the whole Obamacare implementation is in disarray.  Some of this I expected -- the policy cancellations -- and some of it I did not -- the horrendous systems implementation.  But I actually thought that most of this would be swept under the rug by a willing media.

What I really expected was for the true shock to come next fall.  And I think it is still coming.  I believe that despite rate increases, insurers are likely being overly optimistic about how much adverse selection and cost control issues they are going to have.  As a result, I expected, and still expect, huge premium increases in the fall of 2014.

Why?  The main benefit of Obamacare is for people who cannot afford health insurance but want it, and for people who are very sick and have lost their insurance.   Obamacare is a terrible plan as implemented because it futzes with virtually everything in the health care system when a more limited plan could have achieved the same humanitarian coverage goals.

Anyway, one reason Obamacare is so comprehensive is that it is based on a goal of cost control for the whole system.  Unfortunately, most all of its cost control goals are faulty.  From Megan McArdle, in an amazing article covering a huge range of Obamacare issues:

But I think it’s also clearly true that the majority of the public did not understand this. In 2008, the Barack Obama campaign told them that their premiums would go down under the new health-care law. And the law’s supporters believed it.

Q. Obama says his plan will save $2,500 annually for my family. How?

A. Through a combination of developing efficiencies in the system, expanding coverage to all Americans, and picking up the cost of some high-cost cases. Specifically:

-- Health IT investment, which will reduce unnecessary and wasteful spending in the health care system. Examples include extra hospital stays because of preventable medical errors and duplicative diagnostic tests;

-- Improving prevention and management of chronic conditions;

-- Increasing insurance industry competition and reining in the abusive practices of monopoly insurance and drug companies;

-- Providing reinsurance for catastrophic cases, which will reduce insurance premiums; and

-- Ensuring every American has health coverage, which will reduce spending on the “uncompensated” care of uninsured people who end up in emergency rooms and whose care is picked up by institutions and then passed through higher charges to insured individuals.

The part about reinsurance was always nonsense; unless it’s subsidized, reinsurance doesn’t save money for the system, though it may reduce the risk that an individual company will go broke. But the rest of it all sounded entirely plausible; I heard many smart wonks make most of these arguments in 2008 and 2009. However, it’s fair to say that by the time the law passed, the debate had pretty well established that few to none of them were true. “We all knew” that preventive care doesn’t save money, electronic medical records don’t save money, reducing uncompensated care saves very little money, and “reining in the abusive practices” of insurance companies was likely to raise premiums, not lower them, because those “abuses” mostly consist of refusing to cover very sick people.

The result?  Many of these things that supposedly reduced costs actually increase them.  So if you think the shock is high now, wait until next fall.  We will see:

• Rates going up
• Less choice, as insurers pull out of many local markets
• Narrowing of doctors networks, and reduced choice in doctors
• Companies dropping health care and dumping workers (and retirees if they can get away with it) into the exchanges and Medicare.

UPDATE: WH Knew in 2010 That 93 Million Would Lose Health Plans Under ObamaCare...


(First column, 5th story, link)

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This whole morning, while all these stories of the NSA hacking directly into Google and Yahoo's network have been popping up, I've been at the Inbox Love conference, all about the future of email. The "keynote" that just concluded, was Ladar Levison from Lavabit (with an assist from Mike Janke from Silent Circle), talking about the just announced Dark Mail Alliance, between Lavabit and Silent Circle -- the other "security" focused communications company who shut down its email offering after Lavabit was forced to shut down. Levison joked that they went with "Dark Mail" because "Black Mail" might have negative connotations. Perhaps just as interesting, Levison is going to be releasing the Lavabit source code (and doing a Kickstarter project to support this), with the hope that many others can set up their own secure email using Lavabit's code, combined with the new Dark Mail Alliance secure technology which will be available next year.

As noted, the Alliance is working on trying to create truly secure and surveillance-proof email. Of course, nothing is ever 100% surveillance proof -- and both members of the alliance have previously claimed that it was almost impossible to do surveillance-proof email. However, they're claiming they've had a "breakthrough" that will help.

The newly developed technology has been designed to look just like ordinary email, with an interface that includes all the usual folders—inbox, sent mail, and drafts. But where it differs is that it will automatically deploy peer-to-peer encryption, so that users of the Dark Mail technology will be able to communicate securely. The encryption, based on a Silent Circle instant messaging protocol called SCIMP, will apply to both content and metadata of the message and attachments. And the secret keys generated to encrypt the communications will be ephemeral, meaning they are deleted after each exchange of messages.

For the NSA and similar surveillance agencies across the world, it will sound like a nightmare. The technology will thwart attempts to sift emails directly from Internet cables as part of so-called “upstream” collection programs and limit the ability to collect messages directly from Internet companies through court orders. Covertly monitoring encrypted Dark Mail emails would likely have to be done by deploying Trojan spyware on a targeted user. If every email provider in the world adopted this technology for all their users, it would render dragnet interception of email messages and email metadata virtually impossible.

Importantly, they're not asking everyone to just trust them to be secure -- even though both companies have the right pedigree to deserve some level of trust. Instead, they're going to release the source code for public scrutiny and audits, and they're hoping that other email providers will join the alliance.

At the conference, Levison recounted much of what's happened over the last few months (with quite a bit of humor), joking about how he tried to be "nice" in giving the feds Lavabit's private keys printed out, by noting that he included line numbers to help (leaving unsaid that this would make OCR'ing the keys even more difficult). He also admitted that giving them the paper version was really just a way to buy time to shut down Lavabit.

Janke came up on stage to talk about the importance of changing the 40-year-old architecture of email, because it's just not designed for secure communications. The hope is that as many other email providers as possible will join the Alliance and that this new setup becomes the de facto standard for end-to-end secure email, which is where Levison's open sourcing of his code gets more interesting. In theory, if it all works out, it could be a lot easier for lots of companies to set up their own "dark mail" email providers.

Either way, I would imagine that this development can't make the NSA all that happy.

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So I guess the Left has hit on its favored meme in response to the millions of insurance cancellations.  From Obama to Valerie Jarrett to any number of bloggers, the explanation is that the cancelled policies were "sub-standard".  We may have thought we liked them, but it turns out we were wrong.  Deluded in fact.

These folks -- despite not knowing my income, my net worth, my health situation, my age, my family size, my number and age of kids, my risk adversity, my degree of hypochondria, my preventative care habits, my diet, my lifestyle, my personal preferences and priorities, or any details about my insurance policy that I spend many hours analyzing and cross-comparing -- have decided they know better than I what health insurance I should want.

My plan was not substandard.  I graduated magna cum laude in engineering from Princeton and was first in my class at Harvard Business School.  I spent hours shopping for my coverage and was fully satisfied with my resulting policy.  Many of the aspects of my policy that cause Obama to call it "sub-standard" -- lack of mental health care, lack of pediatric dental care, lack of maternity care, lack of free contraception, a higher than average deductible -- were my preferences.  I got what I wanted.

More expensive, more highly featured products are not necessarily "better".  A Mercedes is not necessarily the best car choice for a middle class buyer just because it has more features than his Taurus.  Would Obama tell that person his Taurus is "sub-standard" and force him to pay for a Mercedes? If not, why the hell is doing the exact same thing but with health insurance OK?

From his speech today, via Bryan Preston

When Obama came to that section of his speech when the line usually falls, he went with a new spin. If you’ve lost your healthcare thanks to his law, he wants you to know that you were just “under-insured.” Because he says so.

“One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured but also the under-insured,” he said.

“If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law, and our really liked that plan, you are able to keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office.”

“But ever since the law was passed, if insurers decided to cancel or downgrade these substandard plans, what we said, under the law, is you have got to replace them with quality, comprehensive coverage,” he said, “because, that, too, was a central premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning.”

Update:  ugh

Update #2:  Yesterday I said the time seemed right for the Left to pick a meme to explain the insurance cancellations and then give the media its marching orders.  David Firestone of the NYT has gotten the memo

The so-called cancellation letters waved around at yesterday’s hearing were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that they didn’t include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage of other serious conditions.

Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.

“Some people like to drive a Ford, not a Ferrari,” said Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “And some people like to drink out of a red Solo cup, not a crystal stem. You’re taking away their choice.”

Luckily, a comprehensive and affordable insurance policy is no longer a Ferrari; it is now a basic right. In the face of absurd comments and analogies like this one, Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country will be far better off.

So you see the talking points as the media gets their orders.  1.  All policies that were cancelled were sub-standard.  2.  People will be better off with more expensive policies, even if they are too dumb to konw it.

My policy was perfectly fine.  I was not tricked.  I am willing to bet I am at least as smart as David Firestone.  I am positive I am smarter than Barrack Obama.  And yet my policy was cancelled.

I thought this is a great description of what Obama really meant

And folks, the opponents of my plan are trying to scare you. But if you like your health insurance the way it is, and if I like your health insurance the way it is, then you can keep it.

Seriously, this is how Jay Carney explains it

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday said President Obama's claim that all Americans could keep their health insurance plans under the new health law deserved a “fuller explanation,” acknowledging millions of consumers would not keep their current coverage.

After the passage of Obamacare, the president has repeatedly insisted that if any individual likes their health care plan, they could “keep it.”

Carney on Tuesday added a crucial caveat to that promise, saying Americans could keep their insurance if the plan is “still available.”

This is absolutely absurd.  The whole meaning of the "If you like your health insurance..." promise was that the government would not ban your current policy, that the program was simply about adding options for the uninsured, not reducing options for the insured.  Now Carney was saying, as if we all should have known, that what Obama meant was that you can keep your policy as long as we don't ban it.

 

 

In the classic 1946 book “Economics in One Lesson,” Henry Hazlitt writes in the first chapter:

The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Let me propose a corollary, which is that the whole of politics can be reduced to a single lesson and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence:

The art of politics consists in looking only at the immediate effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy only for a favored special interest group while ignoring the consequences of that policy on all other groups and the community as a whole.

While on the topic of the “art of politics,” let me feature a great quote from Ed Crane (via Don Boudreaux):

There are two types of human beings: people who want to interfere in the way other people live their lives, and people who are content to mind their own business. Which type of people do you think go in to politics?

Taken together, these two insights into the “art of politics” explain why political outcomes usually make us worse off, and why the role of government should be as limited as possible.

1. Political outcomes, almost by definition, make the country and economy as a whole worse off, because of the disproportionate influence of well-funded, special interest groups who invest resources to “bribe” short-sighted politicians to pass legislation that generate short-term benefits for small concentrated groups, but at a much greater expense/cost to the community as a whole.

2. As Don Boudreaux comments, “Politics attracts, with a kind of socio-supermagnetism, people with unusually bloated egos and excessively high opinions of themselves – high opinions that assure them (falsely, to be sure) that they are not only competent but also entitled to lord it over lesser folk. Politics is the natural occupation of people who, not content to tend to their own affairs, itch to control also the affairs of others.”

So you start with a political process that is distorted against the general interest of society to begin with, and is almost guaranteed to produce outcomes that lower our national standard of living, and then we elect “egotistical, arrogant, and officious buttinskies” (to quote Don) to control that distorted political process. That’s a recipe that almost guarantees political outcomes that make us all worse off.

Via Bloomberg

The health-care law eliminates “substandard policies that don’t provide minimum services,” said Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, in response to the cancellations. The “80-plus percent” of Americans with employer plans or covered by government programs are unaffected.

I chose my policy very carefully, and don't think it is "sub-standard" because it does not include pediatric dental care for two people in their fifties.  This is the worst consumer dis-empowerment that I can remember in my lifetime.

And I totally agree with this

Now an effective levy of several thousand dollars on the small fraction of middle class Americans who buy on the individual market is not history’s great injustice. But neither does it seem like the soundest or most politically stable public policy arrangement. And to dig back into the position where I do strong disagree with Cohn’s perspective, what makes this setup potentially more perverse is that it raises rates most sharply on precisely those Americans who up until now were doing roughly what we should want more health insurance purchasers to do: Economizing, comparison shopping, avoiding paying for coverage they don’t need, and buying a level of insurance that covers them in the event of a true disaster while giving them a reason not to overspend on everyday health expenses.

If we want health inflation to stay low and health care costs to be less of an anchor on advancement, we should want more Americans making $50,000 or $60,000 or $70,000 to spend less upfront on health insurance, rather than using regulatory pressure to induce them to spend more. And seen in that light, the potential problem with Obamacare’s regulation-driven “rate shock” isn’t that it doesn’t let everyone keep their pre-existing plans. It’s that it cancels plans, and raises rates, for people who were doing their part to keep all of our costs low.

With my high deductibles, I am actually out shopping every day on health care prices and I can tell you from my experience that if everyone did so, we would see a reversal of health care inflation.  More here

We are going to cancel the health care policies of millions of middle class Americans, then raise their rates, and then give half of them taxpayer subsidies so it seems like they got a rate cut.

Industry experts like Larry Levitt, of the Kaiser Family Foundation, say the insurance companies have no choice. "What we're seeing now is reality coming into play," he said.

Obamacare forces them to drop many of their plans that don't meet the law's 10 minimum standards, including maternity care, emergency visits, mental health treatment and even pediatric dental care.

That means consumers have to sign on to new plans even if they don't want or need the more generous coverage. Industry experts say about half the people getting the letters will pay more -- and half will pay less, thanks to taxpayer subsidies. Levitt said, "The winners outnumber the losers here, but because of all the website problems, it's hard to find out who the winners are because they don't even know it themselves."

Millions of middle class people who were independent and paid for their own health insurance will soon be wards of the state.

 

Dianne Feinstein, the NSA's biggest defender in the Senate (which is ridiculous since she's also in charge of "oversight") has finally had enough. It's not because she finally understands how crazy it is that the NSA is spying on every American, including all of her constituents in California. It's not because she finally realized that the NSA specifically avoided letting her know about their widespread abuses. No, it's because she just found out that the NSA also spies on important people, like political leaders around the globe. It seems that has finally ticked off Feinstein, who has released a scathing statement about the latest revelations:

“Unlike NSA’s collection of phone records under a court order, it is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was not satisfactorily informed. Therefore our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased.

“With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of U.S. allies—including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany—let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed.

“Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers. The president should be required to approve any collection of this sort.

There are so many different possible reactions to this. Let's go to list form to go through a few:

1. Most people seem a hell of a lot less concerned about spying on political leaders than the public. After all, you kind of expect espionage to target foreign leaders. It seems incredibly elitist for Feinstein to show concern about spying on political leaders, and not the public. It shows how she views the public as opposed to people on her level of political power. One of them doesn't matter. The other gets privacy.
2. For all the bluster and anger from Feinstein about this, the Senate Intelligence Committee's mandate is only about intelligence activities that touch on US persons, so it's not even clear that she has any power over their activities strictly in foreign countries targeting foreign individuals. Why she seems to have expected the NSA to let her know about that when the NSA itself has been pretty explicit that avoids telling Congress about anything it can reasonably avoid telling them.
3. Feinstein has referred to Ed Snowden's leak as "an act of treason." Now that they've revealed something that she believes is improper and deserving of much greater scrutiny, is she willing to revisit that statement?
4. Given that Feinstein has been angrily banging the drum for months about how her oversight of the intelligence community shows that everything's great, and there's no risk of rogue activity -- yet now she's finally admitting that perhaps the oversight isn't particularly comprehensive, is she willing to admit that her earlier statements are reasonably considered hogwash and discredited? She even says in her statement: "Congress needs to know exactly what our intelligence community is doing. To that end, the committee will initiate a major review into all intelligence collection programs." And yet she's been claiming that oversight has been more than enough for years?
5. The cynical viewpoint: Feinstein knows the USA Freedom Act is coming out Tuesday, and that it has tremendous political momentum. Sooner or later she was going to have to admit that NSA surveillance was going to be curbed. Did she just happen to choose this latest bit of news for a bit of political theater to join the "time to fix the NSA" crowd?

There are plenty of other things that could be added to the list, but the whole situation seems fairly ridiculous considering about whom we're talking.

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Nancy Pelosi’s flippant remark to “pass the bill first, then find out what’s in it,” has led Americans to the discovery that ObamaCare is indeed a “nightmare,” fraught with bureaucratic tangles, the risk to personal privacy, and the real possibility that, when all is said and done, many will have a health insurance card, but no actual health care.

The free market, apparently, will have none of that, however, as America’s entrepreneurial spirit in real health care marketplaces is moving forward, with doctors and patients negotiating health care outside of government interference.

MediBid, for example, is a website that offers Healthcare Savings Account (HSA) and self-pay patients access to doctors who will provide them with quality medical care and direct cash pricing. The site also provides doctors with access to self-pay patients, allowing them to avoid insurance companies who underpay, and then only after months following the actual treatment or surgery.

Ralph Weber, MediBid’s president and CEO, opened the global marketplace for healthcare in January of 2010 after living in Canada and witnessing the need for a free market in the healthcare industry in a place where healthcare is rationed by the government.

On MediBid, patients can create a free, private profile, and then pay a one-request fee of $25 or $4.95 per month for a year of unlimited medical requests. Patients can then make a medical request for the type of treatment or surgery they need, and physicians and facilities are matched to patients who can proceed to collect bids from them.

Weber provided some insight into how MediBid can work for Americans who decide not to sign up for ObamaCare.

“A lot of procedures are a lot more affordable than big insurance companies want us to think they are,” Weber told KATU in Oregon. “If someone chooses to be uninsured next year, the individual penalty is $95 or up to 1% of your income. I think some people will choose to remain uninsured and shop for care as they go.”

One patient, George Law from Chicago, said that health insurance is simply not affordable for him. He requested a colonoscopy on MediBid and doctors around the country “bid” to perform it.

Dr. Scott Gibson of Oregon won the bid, charging cash customers about $800 for a colonoscopy, a great deal compared to the $3,500 Law would have to pay in Chicago.

“You might say come on, you can actually travel from Chicago to Oregon, rent a car, stay in a hotel and pay for your medical services?” said Law. “Not only did I come out ahead, it was less than half the price [of having the procedure done in Chicago].”

According to Dr. Gibson, the huge price difference is related to where the service is performed.

“Hospitals have high overheads, so they tend to charge more,” he said.

Paul Freeman also drove 600 miles from his home in Texhoma, Oklahoma last year to save himself, and his employer, thousands of dollars on his surgery.

According to postbulletin.com, Freeman’s insurer covered his travel costs and the bill for his treatment because a medical center in Oklahoma City could remove the loose cartilage in his knee for about 70 percent less than a hospital near Freeman’s home. Without the change in location for his surgery, Freeman would have paid about $5,000 out of pocket.

“You immediately think, ‘Oh, they’re going to take me into a butcher shop and it’s going to be real scary,’” Freeman, 53, said. Instead, however, he noted he had a “wonderful experience.” 

MediBid claims it can save the average customer 50 percent on services. However, the savings are realized because patients using MediBid need to check out a doctor’s background on their own and are responsible for getting test results, such as X-rays, blood test lab reports, etc. to the doctor performing the service.

“We waste an enormous amount of money in this country by overpaying for health care,” states John Goodman, an economist and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis. “The only way to get rid of waste is to have people compete in a real marketplace.”

A move toward more free market healthcare delivery means patients need to change their outlook on how their medical care is delivered to them, and do more of the footwork themselves. In the free market, special treatments and surgeries are directed by patients themselves, just like a kitchen renovation or an engine overhaul. Customers investigate service providers who can do the job, get references, and find the best person for the best price.

With ObamaCare being the disaster it is, it looks like any big government takeover of healthcare is going to create more work and greater risk for Americans. Perhaps it’s better to take matters into our own hands so we know what we’re getting.

 

(Don Boudreaux)

In this post at Free Advice Bob Murphy quotes Paul Krugman’s (favorable) description of Keynesian economics as offering policy-makers a simple solution to fix the problem of the Great Depression.  Krugman is correct that Keynesians

basically said “Push this button”– increase G, and all will be well.

Commenting on this post, Daniel Kuehn counters that

Austrians have a button to push too: abolish central banks.

It just happens to be a dumb button whereas Keynesians have a useful button.

My goal here is not to challenge Daniel’s allegation that abolishing central banks is a “dumb button.”  George Selgin, my colleague Larry White, and other scholars vastly more knowledgeable than I (and than most people, including Paul Krugman and Daniel Kuehn) about monetary theory and about the history of money and banking can explain why central banks, far from being necessary, are harmful.

My point, instead, is to challenge the notion that abolishing central banks, or any other call to reduce government’s influence on the economy – any call to increase the freedom of consumers and producers to bargain and exchange with each other on mutually agreeable terms, constrained only by the basic common-law rules of property, contract, and tort and the resulting economic competition that arises – is akin to the Keynesian call to increase government spending.

The Keynesian call to increase government spending – or, more generally, almost all calls for government intervention, such as that to increase wages by commanding wages to rise through minimum-wage legislation – is indeed a simple button.  ”This simple action,” the promise goes, “will bring economic betterment.”  Consideration of the vast underlying microstructure of the economy, of unintended consequences, and of necessary tradeoffs hidden from the theorist by his or her mathematical models are mostly ignored.  ”Increase G and Y will rise.  Voila!  We social engineers – having constructed a simple model in our papers and textbooks – are convinced that the real world is as simple and mechanical as are our impressive models.”  Such a belief, however, is the height of simple-mindedness.  It reflects a profound underestimation of the complexity of reality (not to mention an unjustified faith in the motives and capacities of politicians and other government officials).

But calls to “let the market handle it” are in fact calls to rely upon a deep and vast and iterative process for diagnosing and experimenting in many ways with steps to improve matters.

I take this opportunity to stroke my vanity by pasting below, in full, this post from March 17, 2006, on this very matter.

“‘Let the market handle it! Let the market handle it!’ Don’t you tire of muttering this simplistic formula?” So ended an e-mail that I received from a reader.

It’s true that all of us sometimes are tempted to avoid thinking hard about complex issues and, instead, to fall back lazily upon simplistic mantras. We should guard against this weakness, in ourselves and in others.

At the same time, though, we shouldn’t confuse consistency with simplicity. The two are different. Just because I instruct my eight-year-old son to be always truthful does not mean that I’m a simpleton offering simplistic advice; it means, instead, that truthfulness is a virtue that should be pursued consistently — even if in a handful of instances my son might be made better off by telling a lie.

I admit that my proposed solution for many public-policy problems is to say “Let the market handle it.” But this response is neither naive nor lazy. It’s realistic. It reflects my understanding that almost any problem you name — rebuilding the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast, providing excellent education for children, reducing traffic congestion on highways — is most likely to be dealt with efficiently, fairly and effectively by the market rather than by government.

Saying “Let the market handle it” is to reject a one-size-fits-all, centralized rule of experts. It is to endorse an unfathomably complex arrangement for dealing with the issue at hand. Recommending the market over government intervention is to recognize that neither he who recommends the market nor anyone else possesses sufficient information and knowledge to determine, or even to foresee, what particular methods are best for dealing with the problem.

To recommend the market, in fact, is to recommend letting millions of creative people, each with different perspectives and different bits of knowledge and insights, each voluntarily contribute his own ideas and efforts toward dealing with the problem. It is to recommend not a single solution but, instead, a decentralized process that calls forth many competing experiments and, then, discovers the solutions that work best under the circumstances.

To recommend the market is to understand, or at least to cooperate with, the wisdom of James Buchanan’s important insight that “order is defined in the process of its emergence.”  It is to understand, at some level, Vernon Smith’s awareness that “ecological rationality” is greater than individual or “constructivist” rationality.

This process is flexible and it encourages creativity. It also denies to anyone the power to unilaterally impose his own vision on others.

In brief, to advise “Let the market handle it” is a shorthand way of saying, “I have no simplistic plan for dealing with this problem; indeed, I reject all simplistic plans. Only a competitive, decentralized institution interlaced with dependable feedback loops — the market — can be relied upon to discover and implement a sufficiently detailed way to handle the problem in question.”

None of this is to say that getting the government out of the way is sufficient to create peace and prosperity. Markets require a rule of law to ensure that, among other blessings, property rights are secure and exchangeable. At their best, governments can help to protect our rights. Markets also require a culture in which commerce flourishes.

Unfortunately, no recipe exists to create the legal institutions and commercial culture required by capitalism. If these prerequisites are absent, there can be no market to handle any problem. So saying “Let the market handle it” is not the same as saying “All will be just dandy if only the government gets out of the way.”

But when these prerequisite institutions are mostly in place, as they are in the United States and other developed countries, markets are amazingly creative and reliable. Calling on markets to deal with problems is then the wisest course.

Alas, though, foolishness frequently triumphs over wisdom. People too often suppose that large social problems can be solved only by deciding ahead of time which particular group of people and procedures hold the key to the solution.

While declaring “Let the government handle it” comes across as a solution, it’s no such thing. Instead, it is merely a sign of a simple and baseless faith — a simple and baseless faith that people invested with power will not abuse that power; that political appointees possess or will find better answers than will millions of people pursuing solutions in their own ways, and staking their own resources and reputations on their efforts; that only those ‘solutions’ that are spelled out in statutes and regulations and that have officials paid to implement them are true solutions.

So yes, show me a problem and I’ll likely respond “Let the market handle it.” I’ll respond this way because I know that not only is my own meager knowledge and effort never up to the task of solving big problems but that not even the Einsteins or Krugmans or Bushes amongst us can know the best solution to any social problem.

Solutions to complex social problems require as many creative minds as possible — and this is precisely what the market delivers.

WASH TIMES TO SUE OVER SEIZURE OF REPORTER'S NOTES...


(First column, 10th story, link)

---

(Don Boudreaux)

I had the pleasure of attending a talk that Cato’s president emeritus, Ed Crane, delivered this evening on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus.  Ed said many wise things – but his single best line of the evening, in my opinion, is this one:

There are two types of human beings: people who want to interfere in the way other people live their lives, and people who are content to mind their own business.  Which type of people do you think go in to politics?

The answer is as obvious as the question is important.

Politics is the domain of busybodies.  Politics attracts, with a kind of socio-supermagnetism, people with unusually bloated egos and excessively high opinions of themselves – high opinions that assure them (falsely, to be sure) that they are not only competent but also entitled to lord it over lesser folk.  Politics is the natural occupation of people who, not content to tend to their own affairs, itch to control also the affairs of others.  The ranks of politicians swell with egotistical, arrogant, and officious buttinskies who are constitutionally immune to any sense of humility or decent regard for the privacy and personal preferences of others.  Politics is the home of intolerant bosses – petit fuhrers – sure of their own superiority and confident of the incapacity of ordinary men and women to survive without being leashed and led by those to whom heaven, in its incontestable wisdom, has given political power.

(Don Boudreaux)

Suppose that a group of wily, greedy, shameless, and often duplicitous criminal masterminds – call them Goons – exist who routinely prey on Innocent people.  These predators, these Goons – while seldom resorting to outright violence – are forever conning Innocent people out of money, colluding with each other to strip Innocent people of opportunities, and generally making life unpleasant and insecure for the great majority of us Innocent and gentle folk.

And unfortunately, most of us Innocents are helpless to avoid the predations of the Goons.  We are doomed by our very innocence, gullibility, and poor and limited information to be victimized repeatedly.  The more intelligent and forward-thinking of us Innocents conclude that our only salvation from Goons lies in some collective arrangement through which we organize ourselves into a force to counter these terrible people who are so skilled and clever at preying upon our vulnerabilities.

So….

Why does anyone suppose that these goony predators who exhibit enormous skill and no hesitation to further their own narrow and greedy purposes at the great expense of countless Innocent people will not be the very people who infiltrate the institutions that we Innocents establish to protect ourselves from them?  What makes the allegedly more intelligent and forward-thinking of us Innocents confident that our creation of concentrated power for the purpose of fending off the Goons will not be captured by the very Goons from whom we seek protection?

If each of us Innocents is too dim-witted, too ill-informed, or too weak-willed to avoid being victimized by Goons, why will each of us Innocents, when called upon to choose from our ranks – and to bestow special privileges and powers upon – battalions of fellow Innocents to protect us, choose wisely?  How will we identify those other Innocents who can be trusted to have the mental acuity and wherewithal to work together effectively to form an effective protective force against the Goons?  Do such Innocents even exist?  Will not our enemies the Goons attempt with much success to disguise themselves as especially trustworthy Innocents and, in doing so, gain disproportionate position and rank in the collective institutions that we Innocents innocently established to protect ourselves against the Goons?

Might it even be the case that some would-be Goons – unable without access to any great concentrations of power to prey as they desire upon us Innocents – themselves stir up hysteria and tell horror stories about imaginary predations of Goons, their hope being that the resulting fear among Innocents will prompt us Innocents to create and trust the very concentrations of power that the clever Goons realize they can then hijack and deploy for their own purposes of becoming truly effective predators?

What are the answers to these innocent questions?

This is quite an incredible story that's unfolding about a new opportunity for a Constitutional challenge to the FISA Amendments Act, which has enabled broad NSA surveillance. If you haven't been following the details (and even if you haven't been following all of this closely), the details may be a bit confusing, so we'll try to go piece by piece through the history here to explain the events leading up to a new Constitutional challenge being placed on the law, which the Supreme Court had previously effectively wiped out -- in large part due to false information presented by the Solicitor General, who now appears to be not at all happy the intelligence community led him to lie to the Supreme Court. And it may have all unravelled because of Dianne Feinstein's gloating and bragging about how important the FISA Amendments Act is.

First up: the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) was passed in 2008, after Congress claimed that the intelligence community was hamstrung in important areas of surveillance. Much of the debate over the law was focused on the fact that it gave telcos retroactive immunity for anything illegal they might have done regarding President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, which was only revealed by the NY Times a few years earlier. But, even more important than that was that the FAA more or less authorized continued warrantless wiretapping by the intelligence community. In 2011, the FAA was up for renewal. Some in the Senate sought to use the distraction (that year) over the "debt ceiling" to sneak through an early renewal with no debate, and Senator Ron Wyden put a hold on it, demanding more answers about how many Americans were being spied on. He eventually lifted the hold in exchange for a one-year extension and a promised debate over the FAA.

Fast forward to the end of last year, with the FAA set to expire yet again, and Senate Intelligence Committee boss Dianne Feinstein, who had originally made that "deal" with Wyden, tried very hard to avoid having any debate. Eventually, at the very end of December, she allowed a brief debate, in which she showed up up to insist that the FAA had to be renewed or we'd all be at risk. As we noted at the time, her reasoning was somewhat laughable, where she held up a pretend piece of paper with a supposed "classified" reason for why the FAA was so important. Remember that speech, because it's going to become quite important a little later on in this story.

Parallel to all of this, there was a legal fight making its way through the courts, brought by the ACLU to challenge the Constitutionality of the FAA. The big question was whether or not the courts could be convinced that the ACLU had "standing" to sue, since it couldn't prove that it had been spied on directly. Eventually, in a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court said that the ACLU had no standing. Of course, the key thing that had concerned the Justices the most was the simple question: if the program is secret, then could anyone ever challenge the Constitutionality of the program?

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who argued the case on behalf of the government, told the Supreme Court that of course people could have standing to challenge the law, and that the government would be required to inform defendants in cases where such information was used that it was collected under the FAA. This point is what pushed the Supreme Court over the edge to rule against the ACLU. As they noted in the majority decision:

...if the Government intends to use or disclose information obtained or derived from a §1881a acquisition in judicial or administrative proceedings, it must provide advance notice of its intent, and the affected person may challenge the lawfulness of the acquisition.... Thus, if the Government were to prosecute one of respondent-attorney’s foreign clients using §1881a-authorized surveillance, the Government would be required to make a disclosure.... In such a situation, unlike in the present case, it would at least be clear that the Government had acquired the foreign client’s communications using §1881a-authorized surveillance.

Okay, now the law has been in place since 2008. If what Verrilli said was true, then, um, shouldn't there have been some cases between now and then where the FAA-enabled wiretapping was used? And if that's true, then it should have been disclosed in the various cases. Except, there is no case on record where it had been disclosed.

Right, so now we jump back to Feinstein's grandstanding about why we need to keep the FAA. In her speech on the floor, she announced that the FAA was necessary in a long list of cases:

"I've asked the staff to compile arrests that have been made in the last four years in America on terrorist plots that have been stopped. And there are 100 arrests that have been made since 2009 and 2012. There have been 16 individuals arrest just this year alone. Let me quickly just review what these plots were. And some of them come right from this program. The counterterrorism come and the information came right from this program. And again, if Members want to see that they can go and look in a classified manner.

[proceeds to list out eight "examples" of terrorism arrests -- two with names, six are just general descriptions of plots]

... and it goes on and on and on. So this has worked. And you know, as the years go on, the intelligence becomes the way to prevent these attacks. Now that the FBI has geared up a national security unit, they've employed 10,000 people and information gained through programs like this, through other sources as well, is able to be used to prevent plots from happening. So in four years 100 arrests to prevent something from happening in the United States, some of which comes from this program. So I think it's a vital program.

The lawyers for the defendants in the two named cases suddenly recognized an issue. They were named in this list, but at no point had they been told that evidence was gathered under this program. So they asked. And... the government refused to tell them the details. The NY Times took notice of this, pointing out that either Feinstein lied in her Senate statement or Verrilli lied to the Supreme Court:

In a prosecution in Federal District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., against two brothers accused of plotting to bomb targets in New York, the government has said it plans to use information gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, which authorized individual warrants. But prosecutors have refused to say whether the government obtained those individual warrants based on information derived from the 2008 law, which allows programmatic surveillance.

Prosecutors in Chicago have taken the same approach in a prosecution of teenager accused of plotting to blow up a bar.

To his credit, it appears that once this all became clear, Verrilli had a crisis of conscience, suggesting that he did not knowingly lie to the Supreme Court, but honestly believed that the DOJ would reveal its use of these programs in cases. From that new NY Times piece by Charlie Savage, it's reported that Verrilli was pretty angry about being misled and demanded some answers:

As a result, Mr. Verrilli sought an explanation from national security lawyers about why they had not flagged the issue when vetting his Supreme Court briefs and helping him practice for the arguments, according to officials.

The national security lawyers explained that it was a misunderstanding, the officials said. Because the rules on wiretapping warrants in foreign intelligence cases are different from the rules in ordinary criminal investigations, they said, the division has long used a narrow understanding of what “derived from” means in terms of when it must disclose specifics to defendants.

Either way, Verrilli followed through on this, and apparently kicked off a major "internal debate" over whether or not there was "any persuasive legal basis for failing to clearly notify defendants that they faced evidence linked to the 2008 warrantless surveillance law, thereby preventing them from knowing that they had an opportunity to argue that it derived from an unconstitutional search." According to the article, Verrilli "argued that withholding disclosure from defendants could not be justified legally." Eventually, even the NSA and FBI's lawyers and James Clapper's office agreed. The decision was made to start revealing this information going forward.

However, they also agreed to reveal to at least one defendant that the FAA was used to collect evidence against them, and that this had not been revealed. Of course, this means they get to cherry pick the "right" case.

The ACLU, however, is not waiting around. Almost immediately, it filed a case about this, arguing that the government had illegally hidden this information in response to a FOIA request. It seems like that may be the most obvious procedural way of re-raising this question, as I have no idea if there's some way for the ACLU to directly petition the Supreme Court to reopen the case, noting that the key piece of information the Justices relied on to make their ruling was false (though, apparently, from a Solicitor General who had been misled by prosecutors).

Now, to wrap this all up, we bring it back around to Feinstein's speech in the Senate. Remember, the whole point of her speech was to directly argue for the reapproval of the FAA. And while she equivocated a few times in describing what programs were responsible for the arrests, she clearly made references to "this program" working. However, when the lawyers for one of the defendants named by Feinstein asked the Senate Intelligence Committee for some clarification, Morgan Frankel, a Senate Intelligence Committee lawyer, responded by arguing that Feinstein wasn't actually referring to the FAA program. Seriously.

Notwithstanding that she was speaking in support of reauthorization of Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Senator Feinstein did not state, and she did not mean to state, that FAA surveillance was used in any or all of the nine cases she enumerated, including Mr. Daoud's case, in which terrorist plots had been stopped. Rather, the nine cases the Chairman sumamrized were drawn from a list of 100 arrests arising out of foiled terrorism plots in the United States between 2009 and 2012 compiled by the staff from FBI press releases and other public sources.

[....] To summarize, nothing in Senator Feinstein's remarks was intended to convey any view that FAA authorities were used or were not used in Mr. Daoud's case or in any of the other cases specifically named. Rather, her purpose in reviewing several recent terrorism arrests was to refute the "view by some that this country no longer needs to fear attack." Thus, because Senator Feinstein was neither relying on, nor attempting to convey, any information about the use or non-use of FAA authorities in any of the nine cases, there are no "assessments, reports, and other information" in the Committee's possession to which Senator Feinstein referred in her comments, pertaining to FAA surveillance with respect to Mr. Daoud's case.

Did you get that? So, what they're now saying is that Senator Feinstein went to the floor of the Senate to argue strongly in favor of renewing the FAA, and she named a bunch of cases, clearly stating that this program was necessary because of those cases -- but she didn't mean to imply that it was ever actually used in any of those cases. And, in the meantime, we now find out that even in cases where it has been used, no one's been told about it, despite the law requiring defendants to be told -- and the Solicitor General telling the Supreme Court they would be told.

So, it appears that both Verrilli and the Supreme Court got duped by the intelligence community, while Feinstein clearly misled the Senate and the American public by pretending that the FAA had been used to stop terrorism, but when called on it, now pretends she meant no such thing. Thankfully, however, her attempt at misleading the public by bragging about these arrests may have now (finally) kicked off the legal rationale for a case to prove that the FAA is, in fact, unconstitutional.

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