Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1030

An Incomplete History of Peter King Calling for the Prosecution of Journalists

Representative Peter King, former chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, spent the past 24 hours opining that the U.S. should prosecute Glenn Greenwald in relation to the NSA stories of last week.

Here's the key bit, which references a remark the legislator made earlier calling for the prosecution of journalists who publish leaked information:

KING: "Greenwald, not only did he disclose this information, he has said he has names of CIA agents and assets around the world and they're threatening to disclose that. The last time that was done we saw the murder of a station chief in Greece. No right is absolute. And even the press has certain restrictions..."

(Greenwald has denied King's specific claim.)

King added that the prosecution of journalists should be "very targeted, very selective, and certainly a very rare exception." So what's his threshold? Since this isn't the first time King has tried to get the DOJ to go after a journalist for doing his or her job, we have a bit of a clue. 

In 2006, the New York Times published a story on Swift — a secret monitoring program that targeted the finances of terrorist groups. The information sifted through by the government included the records of thousands of Americans. And Peter King was not happy. Soon after the story broke, he announced that he would advocate to "begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times - the reporters, the editors and the publisher," in relation to the publication of that story, as he told the Associated Press. And here he is on Fox News, saying much the same thing 

(That video, by the way, was flagged by Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski a few weeks ago) 

King went on a rampage again after Wikileaks became a thing, and in 2010 was repeatedly calling for the prosecution of Julian Assange. But Mediaite flagged an instance in which King went further, and once again advocated for the prosecution of the New York Times. This time, his explanation went all the way back to the Pentagon Papers: 

"Well, in my mind we should go after both. Let’s go after Assange first, but I called four years ago for prosecution of The New York Times when they disclosed the SWIFT program, which was absolutely essential to America’s anti-terrorist efforts. It caused great harm to the war against terrorism, yet The New York Times went ahead and put it on the front page, was totally irresponsible. Same what they did with FISA, and you know going back to the Pentagon Papers case, in that case I believe five of the judges said even though you cannot stop a newspaper from publishing this material, there’s no reason they cannot be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act. Justice White in particular said he would’ve had no problem at all prosecuting The New York Times. There is a difference between prior restraint and actual prosecution. Again, I think The New York Times acted disgracefully, irresponsibly, and it’s put American lives at risk."

Of course, King has often had some strong words for media reports he doesn't like before, stopping short of actually calling for journalists to be prosecuted. He wasn't too happy, for instance, with the Pulitzer-prize series of reports by the Associated Press on the NYPD's Muslim spying program. 

The Guardian responded to King's latest with a statement to the Huffington Post on Wednesday, noting that they were "surprised and disappointed" by his reaction. They added: 

"This is especially troubling in light of comments from Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General who stated: 'As long as I am attorney general, we will not prosecute any reporter for doing his or her job.,'"

As for Greenwald, the Guardian reporter responded more broadly to King's campaign to get him prosecuted with what looks like a reference to King's past support of the IRA: 

Only In America can a renowned and devoted terrorism supporter like Peter King be the arbiter of national security and treason.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 12, 2013

And on Wednesday night, after what he told The Atlantic Wire was a full 24 hours of travel as Edward Snowden re-emerged, Greenwald took to the airwaves to respond to questions about King's non-stop statements — twice:

       

Google Probably Found Iran's Pre-Election Phishing Scheme

Iran may have targeted tens of thousands of Iranians with a phishing scheme in the weeks leading up to Friday's elections, according to an announcement by Google on Wednesday. The tech company flagged a series of email campaigns that, due to their timing, seem "politically motivated." 

The "multiple email-based phishing campaigns" spotted by Google originate from Iran, and target Iranians. They posted a photo of one of the emails on their security blog: 

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Iran will elect the successor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday, so the timing of the scheme is pretty suspicious. 

Of course, this isn't the first time Google's spoken up about possible Iranian shenanigans: in 2011, the company discovered that a Dutch website certification company had been compromised, putting the Google accounts of many Iranians at risk. And as TechCrunch notes, it looks like whoever is behind the 2011 attack is the same group behind the recent scheme, too. And the bulk of the evidence suggests Iranian involvement or cooperation with the hacking group. 

In any case, Google obviously suggests using more of their products to protect against becoming the subjects of covert surveillance efforts, unless, of course, they're complying with an order to hand over your data. 

       

Sandra Bullock Might Hate Little Girls

Today in show business news: Sandra Bullock considers joining the Annie musical, Portlandia rides again, and Ethan Hawke made a smart business decision.

Curious word comes today that beloved bus driver Sandra Bullock is in talks to join Will Smith and weekend aficionado Quvenzhané Wallis in their new Annie movie. As Miss Hannigan. Isn't that weird? I mean, I'm not exactly opposed to it, who really cares who plays Miss Hannigan in this movie that will likely not be good because how often are remakes and/or movie musicals much good, but it will be a curious thing to see. Sandra Bullock singing! The Carol Burnett-y squawk-singing, sure, but still singing. I think it could be fun. And really who else was going to play the role? Was there some dream person any of you had in mind? Jessica Lange maybe? That would have been funny, but Jessica Lange's been in a bad way ever since she started thinking American Horror Story was real, so she's not available. Who else? Meryl Streep? Pssh, she's got Into the Woods. Maybe Emma Thompson? That could have worked. All these gals are older than Bullock, that's one thing. Though Carol Burnett was only a year older than Sandra Bullock is now when she was in the first movie. So it's all fine. Let's not get up in arms about this. It'll be an interesting little thing that happens and then we'll all move on. Let's focus our Sandra Bullock energy on hoping that The Heat and Gravity are as good as we all want them to be. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Good news! I think? Portlandia has been renewed by IFC for two more seasons. There's some slight hesitation about celebrating this because while Portlandia is a great show and Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are terrific on it, I worry that they might run out of material? They've broadened the scope some and it's worked out OK, but mostly they're satirizing a pretty particular bobo culture and I wouldn't want the jokes to get stale or anything. Obviously these folks know what they're doing so they probably won't drag it out longer than it should be, but... I dunno. We really should try to be more British about our TV comedy. Sparing. Less is more. All that. Anyway, yay more Portlandia! [Deadline]

You know how everyone's freaking out about how The Purge only cost $3 million and yet made a ton of money on opening weekend and is getting a sequel? Well did you ever wonder how the movie could be so cheap to make? Turns out they barely paid anyone and everyone just profits from the backend. Which it seems like they will, mightily. The Hollywood Reporter says that star Ethan Hawke might get "mid-seven figures." Which is a lotta clams! Whole lotta simoleons. Plenty'a bones. Why isn't everyone doing this? "Yeah I'll make this movie for a song but then when it does well, which it probably will because horror movies tend to do well, then you gotta give a buncha bucks." Seems like good business! Very savvy, Mr. Hawke. Very savvy indeed. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Courteney Cox is going to direct her first movie. It's going to star Seann William Scott and Kate Walsh and will be called Hello I Must Be Going. Which, hm, wasn't that just a movie? I'm guessing that title will change. The movie is about "a depressed man who heads back to his hometown to right some wrongs before committing suicide," which sounds like an interesting role for Scott, who I actually kinda like a dramatic actor. Walsh will play his sister. Sounds fine to me. Good luck, Ms. Cox. May it at least be better than Run Fatboy Run. Poor Schwimmer. [Deadline]

Ousted CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien has landed on her feet nicely. She's just joined the team at HBO's Real Sports, and signed a first-look deal for her production company at the network, where she will develop scripted fare and "long-form programming concepts." That second thing sounds a little ominous, but whatever. What sort of scripted show would you like to see from Soledad O'Brien? Maybe something like The Newsroom except all the women aren't neurotic flibbertigibbets who always have to be calmed down by a man, trembling birds that they are? That might be nice. Maybe do that, Soledad. Or, I dunno, make another Game of Thrones. [Deadline]

Here is a trailer for In a World, starring, written by, and directed by Lake Bell. It's about a second-generation voice over actress trying to make it big in the biz. Well, she's a voice over announcer, really. For movie trailers. It looks cute. Lots of funny people in it, from Ken Marino to Tig Notaro. Will see.

       

The Surveillance State Suffers a Surprise Legal Setback

The Electronic Frontier Foundation scored a remarkable — and remarkably timely — legal victory on Wednesday. The secret court at the center of the recent NSA surveillance revelations allowed the group's push for the release of a ruling on violations of Americans' Fourth Amendment rights to move forward.

In May, we reported on what was then a fairly sleepy issue, a distant node on the EFF's longstanding push to uncover how the NSA's intelligence-gathering systems conflicted with the Constitution. In July 2012, a letter from the Director of National Intelligence to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon revealed that a ruling by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) found Fourth Amendment violations in the government's surveillance.

In response, the EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the release of the ruling, an effort that was blocked by the Department of Justice. Justice, it's worth noting, both relies on the FISC for authorization to conduct intelligence sweeps and is not eager to have those sweeps made public. Justice said that the ruling was confidential, prompting EFF to sue. In response, the agency then said that it couldn't release even part of the ruling, due to FISC's rules.

So the EFF asked FISC if that was the case. On Wednesday, the court said: Nope, albeit in more legally appropriate language. "The Court disagrees with the Government," the decision reads, "that FISC Rule 62 prohibits the disclosure of the copies of the FISC opinion to EFF under FOIA."

In a phone interview with The Atlantic Wire, EFF staff attorney Mark Rumold explained what comes next.

"Now we go back to the regular district court in D.C., and we reopen the FOIA case, and we move forward," he said. "In their earlier arguments, [Justice] claimed that the only thing requiring them to withhold the opinion as a whole was the FISC's rules." Since the Freedom of Information Act requires the release of any information that can be segregated from classified data, Rumold said, "I think at this point they're going to have to release parts of the opinion."

(The speed with which this happened appears to have taken the EFF by surprise; Rumold indicates that they didn't even know that the court had a public docket until someone tweeted about it.)

Making this a substantial change from where the organization was in May — or even where it was last week. It's not clear if recent events prompted the response. It was, however, on June 7 — the day after the published leak of NSA's PRISM program — that the Department of Justice finally responded to the EFF's motion. Rumold suggested that it was Justice's "flimsy" argument that prompted the EFF's victory, but, as he noted, FISC "doesn't exist in a vacuum." After the Snowden leaks, the court faces a number of challenges aimed at revealing how it operates, including legislation introduced by eight senators on Tuesday. The EFF finds itself in the enviable position of being far ahead of the game in making a key decision public — and FISC in the happy position having passed the buck.

"Legislation requiring public disclosure of opinions by FISC is a vital component of reform going forward," Rumold said. What the group aims to do at this point is to ensure that details of the NSA and FISC's past behavior is also known. But most of all, Rumold said, the ruling sends a message to an administration that prides itself on the use of legislative and judicial authorization for its surveillance activity. With FISC acknowledging that the ruling can be made public, there's only branch of government still actively working to hide details of surveillance systems from Congress: Obama's.

Read the entire FISC decision below.

Photo: FISC presiding judge Reggie Walton is pictured during a non-secret 2007 case. (AP)

       

The End of the Legend of Jony Ive, Apple's Design God Who Never Was

[image error]Poor Jony Ive. The Apple senior vice president of design and supposed mastermind behind the latest update to the iPhone operating system has gotten all the blame for a flat new iOS 7 that nobody likes, and it might not be entirely his fault. After getting a standing ovation for his narration of the iOS introductory video during Monday afternoon's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, his image has receded in the tech nerd community from design god to iPhone dud. Among the blog posts invoking his name to talk about all the iOS's problems, there's also a requisite "Jony Ive Redesigns Things" Tumblr making fun of his style choices.

It wasn't all Ive's fault, though. "Many of the new icons were primarily designed by members of Apple's marketing and communications department, not the app design teams," sources tell The Next Web's Matthew Panzarino. "From what we've heard, SVP of Design Jony Ive (also now Apple's head of Human Interaction) brought the print and web marketing design team in to set the look and color palette of the stock app icons." Also, apparently, there wasn't much communication between the various teams working on different apps and icons.

So, yeah, Ive didn't singlehandedly design an "inconsistent" experience that some say chose "style over substance." But he did oversee the iOS reboot. The finger-pointing is fair: Last October, Ive replaced Scott Forestall, who got the blame for all the tacky skeuomorphism in Apple's design. Expectations were high for Ive to "save Apple." He had openly stated that skeuomorphism doesn't stand the test of time. But the design geeks — not just the Apple geeks — had faith in his taste. Here's Fast Company's John Pavlus before Monday's announcement: "What Sir Jonathan Ive is interested in, surely, is evolving iOS’s design to make it more of an ease and pleasure to use, not picking sides in some faddish war between 'flat' and 'not.'" But Ive didn't go that route:

you suddenly want what gets taken away. seeing iOS 7 makes me want to shove my hands into beach sand, stroke corduroy, smell rich mahogany.

— John Pavlus (@johnpavlus) June 10, 2013

       

Science: Your Legos Are Getting Angrier

Lego figurines are increasingly being designed to look full of "anger" and "disdain," according to a group of New Zealand researchers. But before you throw the building blocks out with the bathwater and lose all faith in humanity over a long-time childhood staple, there's a logical explanation for why Legos are bringing out the bad in people. And it involves Harry Potter.

The study comes from Christoph Bartneck and Mohamad Obaid from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and from Karolina Zawiesk, who works at the Industrial Research Institute for Automation in Poland. The three scientists studied, cataloged, and photographed over 3,600 Lego figurines that the Denmark-based Lego Company released between 1975 and 2010. The researchers showed the toy faces to study subjects and asked people to judge what kind of emotion they interpreted as emanating from the inanimate toys.

Turns out, the number of happy Lego faces got smaller as the Lego brand grew up:

The two most frequent expressionsare happiness and anger and the proportion of happy faces is decreasing over time.

The evidence of the study is perhaps best summarized in this graph, which shows the dominance of "happy" Lego faces waning: 

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Here's the full breakdown of Obaid, Bartneck, and Zawieska's six key clusters of Lego face emotion: 

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On a philosophical level, those results can be interpreted as a bit sad. After all, Legos are supposed to encourage fun, creativity, and excitement in the brains of elementary school engineers. So are the famously yellow — and famously simple-faced — figurines reflecting our own "fear" and "anger" back at us? Well, not exactly. 

The first thing you have to remember is that back in the 1970s, smiley faces were the only Lego faces that even existed. Case in point: this Lego Family from 1974....

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Or, as the blogger at Toys2Remember reminded us, sometimes Lego people didn't have faces at all, like this 1977 Rescue Lego set:

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The Astronaut Lego looks pretty happy next to this 1979 space radar truck:

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And look how happy these knights are from the 1980s castle set:

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They're almost as happy as the 1980s Starfire Lego dude:

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Those are definitely little smiley faces staring back at you, because for a long time in Lego world, smiley-faced figurines were all you could buy. So if you're researching reactions to faces over time, the introduction of not-smiley faces would inherently bring down the proportion of "happy" reactions from the study group. And the New Zealand study even notes that new faces weren't fully introduced until the 90s — and that introduction made their study more difficult to map:

Only in the early 90s did the LEGO company start to produce a greater variety of faces ...  This scatter makes it very difficult to create a model that would adequately represent the development of faces over time.

[image error]Plus, it's not like the Lego Company was trying to mimic life as super violent or angry. As the authors of the study note, there is no Lego D-Day, Lego Desert Storm, or Lego Seal Team Six. But there are toy sets inspired by Harry Potter and Star Wars, and you kinda need sad faces to tell those stories. "Often a good force is struggling with a bad one. May it be the goodknights against the skeleton warriors or the space police againstalien criminals," the study states, explaining the necessity for those angry faces. Basically, Lego Harry fighting Voldemort wouldn't be the same if both them were grinning wildly. Blame pop culture, not your disdainful old self.

Obaid, Bartneck, and Zawieska note that even though they're concerned with the number of "angry"-inducing faces being produced, there's still no hard evidence on how these not-smiley affect they children (and adults!) who play with them — if they do it all. And there are bigger concerns here, people; for starters: Lego hair. 

       

Belgian Awful: Ambassador's Prostitute Excuse Won't Help State's Coverup Case

The tabloid favorite amongst the brewing new State Department investigations isn't the alleged Baghdad drug-ring cover-up, or the alleged Honduras killings cover-up, or even the alleged cover-up of Hillary Clinton's security detail for an "endemic" solicitation of prostitutes. No, the sexiest of the Foggy Bottom probes — all of which State officials are trying to explain away — has to do with the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, who "routinely ditched" his own bodyguards to "solicit sexual favors" himself, including from minors. And now Mr. Ambassador is calling his prostitution allegations "baseless" because... he lives in "a beautiful park in Brussels."

Indeed, after CBS News' John Miller uncovered an October memo (and subsequent watered down drafts from the Inspector General's office) detailing the multiple State investigations on Monday, Ambassador Howard Gutman was outed by the New York Post a day later, forcing not only the White House and one of his State bosses to speak out, but forcing Gutman, who is married and has been in his post for four years, to issue this strange denial (emphasis ours):

I am angered and saddened by the baseless allegations that have appeared in the press and to watch the four years I have proudly served in Belgium smeared is devastating. I live on a beautiful park in Brussels that you walk through to get to many locations and at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity.

Gutman probably could have stopped after the first sentence of his statement. His neighborhood park is Brussels's Parc Royal Warandepark, where some of the alleged solicitations and ditching of security took place, as the New York Daily News reported. He isn't exactly wrong about it being nice, either — the royal park is bordered by the BOZAR musem and Parliament:

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Picturesque as the digs may be, according to a local report from 2010, the park is rumored to be a site of frequent homosexual and underage prostitution. And in 2009, RTL reported on prostitution arrests involving young boys and a policeman. 

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The Undersecretary of State for Management at the State Department, Patrick Kennedy, recently met with Gutman, CBS reports, but the ambassador was allowed to stay in his post. "In my current position, it is my responsibility to make sure the Department and all of our employees-no matter their rank-are held to the highest standard, and I have never once interfered, nor would I condone interfering, in any investigation," Kennedy said in a statement on Tuesday. Of the broader investigation leaks, an unnamed official at State got in touch with ABC News and "insisted that the investigations were not called off for political reasons. Instead, the official claimed, full investigations were done and in many cases there was insufficient evidence to warrant prosecutions or in-house discipline."

No charges were brought against Gutman or anyone else in the cases detailed in the memo. But if the investigations were indeed called off to avoid political embarrassment, that strategy has failed. Because nobody's stopping the tabloids and the Benghazi stalkers from having a field day with this one.

       

Bloomberg's Money Hunt on Pro-Gun Senators Could Backfire

The number-one rule in politics is "follow the money," which is why New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is fighting back against Democratic Senators over their gun votes by targeting their donors. On Wednesday, Bloomberg sent a letter to hunderds of high-rolling New York Democrats, asking them to choke off funds for the four Democratic Senators who helped block the major background-check bill earlier this year. The four Senators — Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota — have raised more than $2.2 million from New York state according to The New York Times, and all four voted with Republicans to filibuster a bill on universal background checks.

While the move might have some logic behind it, strategically, it could do more harm than good. What money those four Senators lose in New York dollars could easily be made up from pro-gun voters who would love nothing more than to stick it to the Big City's nanny-state mayor. Or even worse, from the Democratic perspective: Bloomberg's ploy could actually work to unseat these four Senators ... and replace them with "a 100 percent A-rated N.R.A. Republican."

Bloomberg being Bloomberg, of course, the mayor doesn't really care. As a politician who is used to playing by a different set of rules (and isn't facing his own re-election), he simply wants to make guns a key issue for the Democrats nationally, and pressure party leaders to keep everyone in line. And as a billionaire he also understands better than anyone that money talks in politics. On MSNBC this morning, Bloomberg defended his strategy by saying, "Going after these guys and saying not to give money to them is the way democracy should work."

The four targeted Senators seem happy for the attention. Pryor has already crafted an ad saying, "The mayor of New York City is running ads against me," which is the next best thing to an endorsement in Arkansas. And Begich said, "In Alaska, having a New York mayor tell us what to do? ... If anything, it might help me."

       

Snowden Speaks: 'I'm Neither Traitor Nor Hero. I'm an American.'

Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former defense contractor who leaked National Security Agency documents and has been labeled an American "traitor" on the lam, apparently hasn't even left the Chinese city from which he shared America's spying secrets, despite vanishing the day after his tell-all interview went public — and despite the reporters and investigators on the tail of a leaker and his lady. In fact, one local Hong Kong paper tracked him down, and there appears to be another tell-all on the way. "I'm neither traitor nor hero," Snowden tells The South China Morning Post in his first interview since The Guardian unmasked him. "I'm an American." The paper hasn't yet published the "more explosive details" it's promised, but seems to suggest Snowden is still "holed up in secret locations in Hong Kong."

[image error]Around lunchtime Monday, it seemed Snowden was about to fly the coop from where he'd been holed up in Hong Kong. He checked out of the $330-a-night Mira Hotel, to which the local press had tracked him based on the background of his video interview, then dropped even further off grid. There was talk of his fleeing to Iceland, and the Russians apparently offered to host him. But CBS News' Bob Orr reports this morning that there's no sign Snowden ever left Hong Hong — and that investigators actually have a pretty good idea where he may be. Local reports from Hong Kong suggest Snowden is still in town — perhaps, as The Guardian reports in a long profile of his going dark, in a safe house, seeking help from lawyers and human right groups. Who could control that safe house remains very much unclear. There are no signs Snowden has received support from Hong Kong's government... yet. But many U.S. officials no doubt want him extradited and thrown in jail.

For Snowden, staying underground and seeking out lawyers is probably his best strategy. He has 90 days to seek asylum or get a visa extension before he will be legally required to leave China. Snowden allegedly landed May 20, so he's still got the majority of his allotted time ahead of him, if he can avoid his many tails.

[image error]Meanwhile, back in Hawaii, his dancer girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, is starting to guard her identity a little closer after the world discovered her very revealing blog and Instagram accounts. The Washington Post reports she had no idea her boyfriend — her "man of mystery" — was going to leak top-secret documents from the NSA, at least according to her friends who are now coming out of the woodwork. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Mills' father said Snowden "always had strong convictions of right and wrong," but added he was still shocked when he heard about the leaks. 

Snowden, of course, expected all this. His last words in a week-long series of interviews with The Guardian belonged to Benjamin Franklin: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

       

Syrian Rebels Accused of Massacring Shiites

Although the Syrian government has been deemed guilty of numerous atrocities against its own people, the rebels trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad may have once again crossed the line themselves. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has been tracking daily reports of casualties in the country, says that at least 60 people were killed by rebel forces when they attacked a Shiite village near the border with Iraq. Official government sources described the attack as a "massacre" that included old people and children, though the rebels says they were battling pro-government soliders.

The nature of the deaths are unconfirmed, but rebels did admit to attacking the village of Halta and wresting it from government control. (As many as 10 rebels were also killed.) Tuesday's attack may have been retaliation for an attack by Shiite fighters from Halta who killed four rebels on Monday. 

While most of the civilian deaths in Syria have clearly been caused by Assad's forces, the United Nations has repeatedly warned that both sides are guilty of war crimes. From executions of unarmed prisoners to retaliatory attacks on villages that protect the opposition, no segment of Syrian society has been spared from the worst of the fighting. And as the war has dragged on, old sectarian rivalries have re-emerged, leading to numerous attacks and reprisals that have added even more chaos to the war.

According the United Nations, the war has killed more than 80,000 Syrians and displaced hundreds of thousands more across every region of the country.