Category: Ethics in Government

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Politics

The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed a retired AT&T worker, Mark Klein, who claims he actually observed AT&T diverting copies of pretty much all email–not just the foreign stuff to the National Security Agency.

In an interview Tuesday, he said the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T. Contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.

He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing “peering links,” or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data – the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s text – per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government’s warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.

How did it work?

The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One copy fed into the secret room. The other proceeded to its destination, he said.

“This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style,” he said. “The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T’s customers but everybody’s.”

I urge you to contact your representatives i Congress and the Senate (I’ve written to mine) and tell them NOT to allow any amnesty for telecom companies that illegally turned over data to the government.

It as a crime when Google and Yahoo helped send a Chinese activist to jail by giving their records to the Chinese government and it’s a crime that AT&T turned over our e-mails to an agency not authorized to see them.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

Not a good day for news.

In Pakistan, Musharaf has declared a “state of emergency” akin to martial law, apparently because he’s worried that the courts would rule he was not a qualified candidate in the recent presidential election because he kept his post as head of the military.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez–who can sometimes be a very class act, as when he offered heating assistance to Boston’s poor a few years ago–is also trying to grab more power. I don’t like it when the culprit is on the left any more than when it comes from the right.

Meanwhile, the Mexican state of Tabasco is appealing for aid after massive flooding that left 500,000 homeless and 80,000 trapped.

And two key liberal democratic US Senators, Feinstein and Schumer, say they’ll support Mukasey’s nomination as Attorney General even though he wont repudiate waterboarding (and then the Democrats wonder why I turn down their fund appeals). Leahy at least is strong enough to say he will vote no.

About the only bright spot is Guatemala’s surprise rejection of the military strongman who was expected to win the presidency.

All this in today’s five minutes of news headlines from Democracy Now. And where is the mainstream US news?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

Ralph Nader is suing the Democratic Party, claiming a deliberate attempt to force him off the 04 ballot in multiple states and to bankrupt him in the process.

According to one of Nader’s lawyers, Carl Mayer, interviewed in Democracy Now, the Dems pretty much admit it:

Robert Brandon, who’s one of the defendants, and he’s a consultant to the Democratic Party. And he held a meeting at the Democratic Convention in 2004 with Moffett, Holtzman and a group of other high-ranking Democrats, and they said, our purpose is to keep Nader off the ballot. And they went, and they proceeded to do it, spending millions of dollars.

And when will the US woke up to the idea that the 2-party system isn’t working here. Most other democracies abandoned it long ago, if they ever used it. Multiparty parliamentary democracies have a lot of advantages, IMHO.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, General Commentary, Peace and War, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

Forgive me if I can’t work up too much sympathy for Justice Clarence Thomas. I didn’t find him credible during his confirmation hearings with his “poor, pitiful me” bit, and I don’t find him credible now, as I read about his new book.

And I always found it incredibly distasteful that he had the chutzpah to claim that being asked some questions about allegations of grossly unsuitable behavior–sexual harassment of an employee, in fact–was in the same category as a lynching. Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you get lynched if people ask you some tough questions. Questions that you still haven’t really ever answered in a meaningful way.

Thurgood Marshall, a man who truly deserved the term “Honorable” in front of his name, with a distinguished career not only as a jurist but earlier, as a lawyer, must be throwing up. (Marshall, you may not know, was one of the attorneys who argued the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. And Thomas inherited his seat on the Court.)

Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post cites a large pile of evidence that Thomas does not have clean hands in the Anita Hill matter–and cites his own words from the book to prove that he’s still just as angry, arrogant, and completely clueless as ever.

This is his own words about actually getting confirmed:

“Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”

Sorry, Clarence, but you’re way off base. The Senate had the right and the duty to ask questions, and should have asked a lot harder ones about your views of the Constitution. Maybe if they had, we wouldn’t have been stuck with an extremist like you.

And if today’s Congress was more willing to ask similarly hard questions, we might not be fighting an illegal and unprovoked war in Iraq, we might still have some standing in a world community that increasingly sees the U.S. as a “rogue state,” and we might have found out who actually won the last two Presidential elections, both of which are shrouded in a veil of mystery and deceit.

If Clarence Thomas wants to take his toys and go home, fine. But don’t look to me to agree that he’s been done wrong.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

Columnist Maggie Van Ostrand usually writes humor–good humor. I often send her columns to my humor list.

This week she showed a much more serious side: a penetrating column on political corruption, jumping off from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics annual list of Congress’s 22 biggest crooks (a list which includes Republicans and Democrats–including, to my surprise, John Murtha, D-Penn).

CREW has also formally requested an investigation of (quoting Van Ostrand)…

“Ignite! Learning,” a company founded and headed by Neil Bush, younger brother of the president. Neil Bush, CREW tells us, “has no education background, [and] is best known for his role in the failure of Silverado Savings and Loan, which cost taxpayers $1.6 billion.”

Quite a bit more about this in Van Ostrand’s article.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Social and Economic Justice

Journalist and political analyst Naomi Wolf, a trenchant critic of the bush Administration’s attack on civil liberties, has shown up with four Ss on her airplane boarding passes since 2002. Which means delays, searches, and a whole lot of annoyance, just to go about her speaking in support of her books.

She is eventually allowed to fly, since she’s actually on the “watch” rather than the actual “no-fly” list. But needless to say, she finds this frustrating.

And she looks further–to the way the Bush Administration uses this list as an instrument of social policy–to harass its obviously harmless critics such as herself. A chilling step toward totalitarianism, she believes–and I tend to agree.

So far, luckily, I haven’t gotten the dreaded four Ss. But I have noticed, as everyone has, how humiliating and unnecessarily inconvenient flying has become, and I, for one, don’t feel safer because “terrorists” can’t bring a water bottle on board. I was even prevented early one morning from bringing my lunch on a plane–leftover rice noodles and broccoli–because I’d made the mistake of putting it in a cottage cheese container! Yeah, my noodles were such a security risk that I had to choke down a few forkfulls at 5 a.m. and throw the rest away, so I was pretty hungry when I arrived.

Travel writer Christopher Eliott has suggested replacing this inane policy with making passengers prove the safety of their foods and drinks by eating or drinking some. That, apparently, is too much common sense.

My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts, ran Wolf’s full op-ed under the title “Kafka Revisited. This link is subscription-only, but you can see the article at Alternet.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

It’s been ten years since they were ordered to comply with basic accounting practices–and still, neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of Homeland Security–two of my least favorite government entities, as it turns out–can come close to passing an audit.

It’s downright embarrassing–and it has major consequences for the safety of our tax dollars.

An Associated Press review shows that the two departments’ financial records are so disorganized and inconsistent that they have repeatedly earned “disclaimer” opinions, meaning that they simply cannot be fully audited.

This is an open invitation to “waste, fraud, and abuse.” To squandering our money, in other words.

I’m old enough to remember the Reagan-era $800 toilet seats and $500 coffee makers.

Our tax dollars at work. It’s been decades.

Isn’t it time to say, enough is enough? Isn’t it time for the GAO to shut down these behemoth agencies, the same agencies that are so cavalier with our and Iraqi civil liberties, until they comply with at least the most basic standards about whee all the money is going?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

Am I the only one who finds it deeply ironic, after the Lincoln Bedroom scandal during her husband’s administration–essentially selling off sleepovers at the White House–that Hillary Clinton would raffle off a personal lunch to her contributors?

This is the e-mail I got last week (I deliberately waited to post it until after her deadline):

Dear Shel,

Let’s do lunch. Let’s talk, you and me — about whatever you’d like. Our hopes. Our goals. Our work. The weather. Maybe even politics.

I think it would be fun to have you over for lunch, at my table, in my home in Washington. You and I both know that we need a serious change of direction in this country. So let’s sit down for a meal and talk about exactly the best way to make that change a reality.

Of course, that change can’t happen if we don’t win. So I’m asking you today to demonstrate your commitment to real change by supporting my campaign with a contribution. We’re going to choose one supporter to come to my house in DC, along with a guest, to share lunch and talk. And if you contribute between now and midnight Friday, September 7, it could be you

It keeps going, but let’s cut to the bottom:

I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I’ll pick up the groceries before you get there. Let’s sit down and talk about how to change America!

Sincerely,

Hillary Rodham Clinton

A day later, this follow-up e-mail, from none other than Bill Clinton. Here’s a chunk of that one:

I hear you might be having lunch with Hillary — do you mind if I drop in?

I’ve met some of the greatest people of our time from every walk of life. But of all the people I have ever shared a table with, I still learn the most when I sit down to a meal with Hillary.

There’s no one smarter, no one better informed, and no one whose conversation I enjoy more. So if you have the chance to sit down and talk with Hillary — like you do right now — you don’t want to miss it. That’s why I’m going to join the two of you.

I know Hillary would be the best president, and you know she’s ready to change America. So why not help her win today? The campaign will choose one supporter to have lunch with Hillary and me — along with a guest — and if you make a contribution by midnight tonight, it might just be you.

Now let me get something straight: I would personally enjoy having a meal with the Clintons. They are two extremely intelligent policy wonks with a strong grasp of issues and the intellectual ability to explore them fully. They are also people who can demonstrate that they’ve had a big effect on the world. It would be fun to challenge them, to learn from them, and to push them to consider some additional slants. And to see if they could convince me to voter for Hillary even after she repeatedly sold out progressives, not just on Iraq but on the Patriot Act and other issues.

But…

Given the history here, this “invitation” leaves me feeling more than a little queasy.

And given her politics of appeasing the Bushies, I am not actually disposed to vote for her. Living in the safely Democratic state of Massachusetts, I have this luxury. If she is the candidate, I expect to vote for a third-party candidate.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International

No matter what your position on the Iraq war, I thought we could all agree that…

  • It’s a good idea to keep weapons out of the hands of insurgents
  • Fraud and corruption that costs taxpayers millions of dollars should be stamped out

    • Well, apparently the federal government doesn’t agree. A shocking AP article (as reprinted in the Santa Barbara News-Press) details severe repression against several whistleblowers who reported just such things in Iraq–ranging from demotion and harassment to 97 days in prison outside Baghdad!

    For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

    There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

    He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers – all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

    Shameful, absolutely shameful.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Politics

    Knowing that any entry in a Wiki can be changed by any reader, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of what I read on Wikipedia. Still, I find that Google often points me to Wikipedia articles, and most of the time, they seem pretty authoritative and accurate (if I’m at all suspicious, I verify with other sources, and it usually checks out).

    Now it turns out I was right to be suspicious. Virgil Griffith, a grad student at CalTech, invented a system to track the IP addresses of people who change Wikipedia entries–and the results are scary. While the majority of changes are innocuous–correcting typos and that sort of thing, a number of well-known entities have deliberately distorted facts. A few among many examples:

    According to the Wired article (one of several from mainstream news sources, including BBC and ABC),

    Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

    The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization’s net address has made.

    So who’s been playing fast and loose with the truth?

  • The CIA edited entries about Iranian President Ahmadinejad
  • Diebold, the voting machine company, removed incriminating material about its machines and faulty election results
  • Someone at a Democratic Party computer edited the entry about Rush Limbaugh to call him Limbaugh “idiotic,” “racist”, and a “bigot”–and about his audience, “Most of them are legally retarded.”
  • Microsoft listed its MSN as a “major competitor” to Google, whle adding deprecating material to Apple’s entry
  • Wal-Mart toned down criticism of its labor policies
  • Even the Vatican removed passages about Sinn Fein’s Gerry Addams that linked him to a 1971 murder.

    • Needless to say, this raises a lot of ethical questions. As a start, it would seem logical that Wikipedia should keep a running, public list of any IP addresses that altered a particular entry–right on that page. And also, perhaps, each page could display its history, so that previous versions would be visible and readers could draw their own conclusions.

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