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What does Prism tell us about privacy protection?
by Zoe Kleinman, Technology reporter
BBC News (June 10 2013)
Both international governments and the world’s biggest tech companies are in crisis following the leaking of documents that suggest the US government was able to access detailed records of individual smartphone and internet activity, via a scheme called Prism.
Last night Ed Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical worker for the CIA, revealed himself to be the source of the leaks in an interview with the Guardian news website.
US director of national intelligence James Clapper described the leaks as “extremely damaging” to national security, but Mr Snowden said he had acted because he found the extent of US surveillance “horrifying”.
What could the US government see?
According to the documents revealed by Ed Snowden, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has access on a massive scale to individual chat logs, stored data, voice traffic, file transfers and social networking data of individuals.
The US government confirmed it did request millions of phone records from US company Verizon, which included call duration, location and the phone numbers of both parties on individual calls.
According to the documents, Prism also enabled “backdoor” access to the servers of nine major technology companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
These servers would process and store a vast amount of information, including private posts on social media, web chats and internet searches.
All the companies named have denied their involvement, and it is unknown how Prism actually works.
Some experts question its true powers, with digital forensics professor Peter Sommer telling the BBC the access may be more akin to a “catflap” than a “backdoor”.
“The spooks may be allowed to use these firms’ servers but only in respect of a named target”, he said.
“Or they may get a court order and the firm will provide them with material on a hard-drive or similar”.
What about data-protection laws?
Different countries have different laws regarding data protection, but these tend to aim to regulate what data companies can hold about their customers, what they can do with it and how long they can keep it for – rather than government activity.
Most individual company privacy policies will include a clause suggesting they will share information if legally obliged – and include careful wording about other monitoring.
Facebook’s privacy policy, for example, states: “We use the information [uploaded by users] to prevent potentially illegal activities”.
Are we all being watched?
The ways in which individual governments monitor citizen activity is notoriously secretive in the interests of national security, and officials generally argue that preventing terrorism over-rides protecting privacy.
“You can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience”, said US President Barack Obama, defending US surveillance tactics on Sunday.
Speaking to the BBC UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said that “law abiding citizens” in Britain would “never be aware of all the things … agencies are doing to stop your identity being stolen or to stop a terrorist blowing you up”.
Does it make a difference which country you live in?
User data (such as emails and social media activity) is often not stored in the same country as the users themselves – Facebook for example has a clause in its privacy policy saying that all users must consent to their data being “transferred to and stored in” the US.
The US Patriot Act of 2001 gave American authorities new powers over European data stored in this way.
This method of storage is part of cloud computing, in which both storage and processing is carried out away from the individual’s own PC.
“Most cloud providers, and certainly the market leaders, fall within the US jurisdiction either because they are US companies or conduct systematic business in the US”, Axel Arnbak, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law, told CBS News last year after conducting a study into cloud computing, higher education and the act.
“In particular, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments (FISA) Act makes it easy for US authorities to circumvent local government institutions and mandate direct and easy access to cloud data belonging to non-Americans living outside the US, with little or no transparency obligations for such practices – not even the number of actual requests”.
Are other governments involved?
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has so far refused to confirm or deny whether British government surveillance department GCHQ has had access to Prism but is expected to give a statement to Parliament today.
It is not known whether other governments around the world have been either aware of or involved in the use of Prism, which is reported to have been established in 2007.
In a statement, the EU Justice Commission said it was “concerned” about the consequences of Prism for EU citizens and was “seeking more details” from the US authorities.
“Where the rights of an EU citizen in a Member State are concerned, it is for a national judge to determine whether data can be lawfully transmitted in accordance with legal requirements (be they national, EU or international)”, said a spokesperson for Justice Commissioner Vivane Reding.
What does this mean for internet use?
William Hague insists that law-abiding citizens have nothing to worry about, and there is no legal way of “opting out” of monitoring activity carried out in the name of national or global security.
However privacy concerns about information uploaded to the internet have been around for almost as long as the internet itself, and campaign group Privacy International says the reported existence of Prism confirms its “worst fears and suspicions”.
“Since many of the world’s leading technology companies are based in the US, essentially anyone who participates in our interconnected world and uses popular services like Google or Skype can have their privacy violated through the Prism programme”, says Privacy International on its website.
“The US government can have access to much of the world’s data, by default, with no recourse”.
Edward Snowden, the source of the leaked documents, said he had acted over concerns about privacy.
“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded”, he told the Guardian.
What data could Prism possibly access? What kind of data which could be collected?
Some Microsoft sites collect email address, name, home or work address, or telephone numbers. Some services require sign-in with email and password. Microsoft also receives information sent by web-browsers on sites visited, together with IP address, referring site address and time of visit. The company also uses cookies to provide more information about pages views
Yahoo collects personal information when users sign up for products or services including name, address, birth date, post code and occupation. It also records information from users’ computers, including IP addresses.
Personal details are required for sign-up to Google accounts, including name, email address and phone number. Google email – Gmail – stores email contacts and email threads for each account, which have a ten gibabit capacity. Search queries, IP addresses, telephone log information and cookies which uniquely identify each account are also stored. Chat conversations are also collected unless a user selects ‘off the record’ option.
Facebook requires personal information on sign-up, such as name, email address, date of birth and gender. It also collects status updates, photos or videos shared, wall posts, comments on others posts, messages and chat conversations. Friends’ names, and the email details of those friends who have provided addresses on their profiles, are also recorded. Tagging information about users from friends is recorded, and GPS or other location information is also stored.
Paltalk is an instant chat, voice and video messaging service. Users must provide contact information including email address. The company employs cookies to track user behaviour, with the aim of delivering targeted advertising.
YouTube is owned by Google and the company applies the same data collection methods. Users logged in via their Google accounts will have their YouTube searches, playlists and subscriptions to other users’ accounts recorded.
Skype is part of Microsoft, and its instant messaging service replaced Microsoft’s Messenger this year. Users submit personal data including name, username, address when signing up. Further profile information such as age, gender and preferred language are also recorded as options. Contacts lists are stored, as is location information from mobile devices. Instant messages, voicemail and video messages are generally stored by Skype for between thirty and ninety days, though users can opt to preserve their instant messaging history for longer.
AOL collects personal information for users signing up or registering for its products and services, but its privacy policy states that users who do not make themselves known to the company by these methods are “generally anonymous”.
Users signing up for Apple ID’s – required for services such as iTunes , or to register products – must submit personal data including name, address, email address and phone number. The company also collects information about the people who Apple users share content with, including their names and and email addresses.
How surveillance came to light
5 June: The Guardian reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, under a top-secret court order
6 June: The Guardian and the Washington Post report the NSA and the FBI are tapping into US internet companies to track online communication, in a scheme known as Prism
7 June: The Guardian reports President Obama has asked intelligence agencies to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks
7 June: President Obama defends the programmes, saying they are closely overseen by Congress and the courts
8 June: US director of national intelligence James Clapper calls the leaks “literally gut-wrenching”
9 June: The Guardian names former CIA technical worker Edward Snowden as the source of the leaks
Related Stories
US surveillance leak source revealed
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22836378
Obama defends mass surveillance
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22820711
Just how much do the spooks know?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22811580
US spy chief defends surveillance
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22809541
US confirms phone records collection
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22793851
BBC (c) 2013 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more:
Just Shut Up or Die
by Butler Shaffer
LewRockwell.com (June 12 2013)
Doctor Murnau: A crowd is easier to control than an individual. A crowd has a common purpose. The purpose of the individual is always in question.
– From the movie Kafka (1991)
My recent book, The Wizards of Ozymandias (2012), was dedicated “To the memory and spirit of Sophie and Hans Scholl and the White Rose, who reminded us what it means to be civilized”. These young people – most in their teens or early twenties – lived in Nazi Germany and, fearing for the future of their country, took it upon themselves to write – and publicly distribute – leaflets critical of the government. They apparently operated from the premise that what transpired in their country was any of their business. They were soon found out, arrested on February 18 1943, found guilty of “treason” on February 22, by the People’s Court, and summarily beheaded that same day.
Modern-day voices of fascism, American style, have been urging the same kind of “due process” for such individuals as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and now Edward Snowden, who have had the “arrogance” – in the words of a few of their critics – to do what members of the White Rose did in the early 1940s: to make public the wrongdoings of the American government including such intelligence agencies as the NSA. Political, legal, and media hacks have been stumbling over one another to get in front of network cameras to denounce these men, and to demand the same kind of swift punishment as was meted out to the Scholls and other White Rose members. This vicious reaction has been so void of intellectual reflection as to lead some of the babblers to insist that Assange be tried for “treason”, overlooking the technical detail that Assange is not even an American, but an Australian! But in an age of a presumed worldwide American empire, such a matter can be overlooked, along with all the other moral, legal, and constitutional niceties that have been dumped into the memory hole.
The bankruptcy that is driving this campaign against truth-telling is shown by some of the content of the attacks on the accused: “Mr Snowden doesn’t even have a high-school diploma!” Well, what more needs to be said? The unstated presumption, here, is that this man hadn’t even completed his government-school conditioning in the unquestioned power of the state. Had he graduated from high-school and gone on to college and graduate school, his conditioning in the statist mindset might have been completed. He might even have received a PhD or JD degree that would have allowed him to ascend to the upper heights of the establishment pyramid, from whence – like his accusers – he would not risk his position amongst other elitists.
If his lack of a diploma is not enough to condemn this young man, consider this: he had contributed $500 to the Ron Paul political campaign! Now the entire libertarian movement can be smeared as “traitorous”. It is those who continue to ask questions about the legitimacy – or even the legality – of governmental behavior that undermine authority. If individuals are troubled by what the state is doing, they should confine their complaints to government officials! Speak truth to power, but never to the powerless! “Truth”, as Mark Twain reminded us, “is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” If you object to the corruption of the Mafia, take the matter up with your godfather! If you are critical of the corruption, violence, looting, wars, and other actions of the government, write a letter to your congressman – who has helped to create these conditions – and ask him to do something about it. Had the Scholls and other White Rose members addressed their complaints to the Gestapo, all problems would have been corrected, right? Right?
Messrs Manning, Assange, and Snowden apparently took literally the message that has been plastered on public buildings, subways, airports, and billboards: “if you see something, say something”. What the “something” is, and to whom your report is to be made, are never indicated, but the reaction of the hacks is clear: don’t have that “something” be critical of the state or its owners!
Perhaps the most lackwitted condemnation of Mr Snowden is found in the last resort to which all statists eventually come: the public opinion poll. More Americans condemn this man than support him. The Barrabas factor; turning to the well-conditioned mob, whose members probably did graduate from high-school, for the final verdict, has long served the interests of state power. Even now, idolaters of state power are hoping that the rest of us will remain firm in our conditioning, and join in their lynch-mob frenzy.
My judgments of other people have always rested on the nature of their actions, their demonstrations of character, and never on pedigree (however certified). Those whose behavior is grounded in respect for the inviolability of the life and property of others, who live peaceably with their neighbors, and who do not presume to use force to accomplish their purposes; impress me more than do people who can, without a break in meter, recite all the socially-correct bromides about peace, love, respect for others; but then resort to governmental coercion to resolve problems before them.
Those establishment defenders who condemn the Bradley Mannings, Julian Assanges, and Edward Snowdens, have yet to present an indictment that extends beyond the fact that these courageous men have spoken truths that embarrass the institutional power structure. Such consequences may be disruptive of the special interests of the establishment, but how ordinary people are harmed in the process is never explained. Snowden has revealed how the government has insisted on having access to every private piece of information regarding every American. If this is true, and if it serves any valid purpose of the state to have such power, how can it be wrong for Americans to be made aware of this fact? If the state is entitled to know everything about us, why aren’t we entitled to know all the details of state action?
The hacks’ thoughtless reaction to these revelations is the familiar one: it will help our enemies. But who are the “enemies” who might benefit from knowing the details of the state’s surveillance, wiretapping, e-mail snooping, DNA and medical records, and other attributes of “Big Brother”? In this regard, the hacks have unwittingly confirmed the insights of that noted 1950s social philosopher, Pogo Possum when he advised that “we have met the enemy, and they is us”. You and I are the foe most feared by those who keep their power over us through our state-induced fears, ignorance, and belief in their necessity.
As Western Civilization is swept into the dust-bin of history, it is crucial for us to ask: what will replace it? What values, moral principles, economic understanding, and social practices will prevail in the future? You will not hear these questions asked by any of the establishment hacks – who will confine themselves to refashioning statism in a “new and improved” package. The hacks are as bankrupt as the dying culture to whose withering tentacles of power they so desperately cling. They will continue to entertain us with trivia from the lives of the political sinners, but will not explore either the causes of, or the alternatives to, what brought down our freer and more prosperous culture. They will not engage in such depths of inquiry for one reason: their minds do not work in any transcendent, principled manner. It is power, and power alone, that both impresses and motivates them.
As more soldiers die from suicide than from combat; as other soldiers earn medals while killing hundreds or even thousands of Afghan and Pakistani civilians with drones they control from facilities outside Las Vegas; as the police-state continues to metastasize; as the looting of the citizenry continues to benefit corporate-state interests who pay little, if any, taxes; and as the general material, spiritual, and socially-supportive nature of a decent society continues its decline, it is evident that all of mankind – including Americans – will need to engage in some highly-focused, principled, long-term thinking if we (that is, ourselves, children and grandchildren, and species) are to survive this collective madness.
Manning, Assange, and Snowden have challenged each of us: will we, as the hacks and their owners continue to insist, do as we have been trained to do, namely, mind our own business and do as we are told by those in authority? Or shall we, like these courageous men – and the White Rose members before them – have the individualized “arrogance” to believe that the fate of mankind is our business, and that we have a responsibility to act, with focused and peaceful energy, to help extricate ourselves from the collective arrogance of power that is destroying us?
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Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918 to 1938 (1997), Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival (1985), and Boundaries of Order (2009). His latest book is The Wizards of Ozymandias (2012)
Send him e-mail: http://lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer272.html
Copyright (c) 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
One American Who Isn’t For Sale
by Robert Scheer
Truthdig (June 11 2013)
So it’s true, as filmmaker Michael Moore once warned us, the Carlyle Group is Big Brother. That’s the $176 billion private equity firm that once employed former President George H W Bush, his Secretary of State James A Baker III and a host of political luminaries that would put any other list of America’s ruling elite to shame. Plenty of Democrats too, including former President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff Mack McLarty and Arthur Levitt, the man Clinton appointed to head the SEC during the creation of the housing bust.
It is also the firm that owns Booz Allen Hamilton Inc, which, thanks to the revelations of one of its employees, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, we now know collects and stores much of the government’s immense PRISM database spying on the lives of this nation’s citizenry. This is systematic snooping through the telephone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of Americans conducted by Snowden and others in Booz Allen’s employ who had the highest access to our most private personal data while working at a for-profit company.
Our data is their commerce, and ever since 9/11, observing us has become mega lucrative. “Booz Allen Hamilton”, The New York Times reported Sunday, “has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States”. The word “serving” might be pushing it here, since 98 percent of the firm’s revenue of $5.8 billion last year came from the taxpayers, who are the same folks being spied upon.
Heck, Booz Allen knows all about those taxpayers, since back in 1998, during the Clinton presidency, the firm was hired to “modernize” the IRS. “We made some very dramatic changes in the way the IRS is organized”, Booz Allen’s CEO claimed at the time. How perfect: Make tax collection more efficient and less painful, so the suckers might not notice when you scoop up the loot at the other end.
Of course, to those swinging through the revolving door between the government and its defense contractors, it must be difficult to draw a distinction between their changing roles. James R Clapper, the chief intelligence official in the Obama administration, who is now investigating this security lapse, was himself a top Booz Allen executive. And it should be of little surprise that John M McConnell, currently vice chairman of Booz Allen, was previously the chief intelligence official in the George W Bush administration. It’s crony capitalism at its patriotic best.
“The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors”, Danielle Brian, executive director of the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, told the Times. “This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters”.
Brian points out that the for-profit folks spying on us also get to grant high level government security clearances. Those private sector employees are then entrusted to work in the most secretive sectors of the government’s national security apparatus, including at the National Security Agency. It’s good work if you can get it. In January, the Defense Department granted Booz Allen a five-year, $5.6 billion deal assigning its private sector employees in key positions to advise Pentagon personnel on crafting military policy. Maybe they can find some new conventional wars to fight just in case the one against terrorism loses its profitability.
That could happen now that the American public has been alerted to the fact that in the grand design of that war, it is the ordinary American citizen, even when shopping on the Internet, who gets to play enemy. That reality is what seems to have turned Snowden, like others before him, into a courageous whistle-blower. He signed up for training with the Army Special Forces to go fight in Iraq because he bought the Bush administration’s line that it was a war “to help free people from oppression”. That misplaced idealism collided with the observation that “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone”, Snowden told the British newspaper The Guardian.
Still, he continued to serve the government, both with the CIA and then at the NSA, where he worked as a Booz Allen contractor. There he witnessed a part of the sordid story that he chose to share with his fellow Americans. As he explained to The Guardian:
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything … If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.
The folks at Booz Allen, and its parent company the Carlyle Group, love that world as a fabulous profit center, and it is truly inspiring that there are still folks like Snowden whom they can’t buy.
(c) 2013 Truthdig
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Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
Click here to check out Robert Scheer’s new book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street: http://www.indiebound.org/book/1568584342?aff=Truthdig
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_american_who_isnt_for_sale_20130611/
Inside the NSA’s Ultra-Secret China Hacking Group
Deep within the National Security Agency, an elite, rarely discussed team of hackers and spies is targeting America’s enemies abroad.
by Matthew M Aid
Foreign Policy (June 10 2013)
This weekend, US President Barack Obama sat down for a series of meetings with China’s newly appointed leader, Xi Jinping. We know that the two leaders spoke at length about the topic du jour – cyber-espionage – a subject that has long frustrated officials in Washington and is now front and center with the revelations of sweeping US data mining. The media has focused at length on China’s aggressive attempts to electronically steal US military and commercial secrets, but Xi pushed back at the “shirt-sleeves” summit, noting that China, too, was the recipient of cyber-espionage. But what Obama probably neglected to mention is that he has his own hacker army, and it has burrowed its way deep, deep into China’s networks.
When the agenda for the meeting at the Sunnylands estate outside Palm Springs, California, was agreed to several months ago, both parties agreed that it would be a nice opportunity for President Xi, who assumed his post in March, to discuss a wide range of security and economic issues of concern to both countries. According to diplomatic sources, the issue of cybersecurity was not one of the key topics {1} to be discussed at the summit. Sino-American economic relations, climate change, and the growing threat posed by North Korea were supposed to dominate the discussions.
Then, two weeks ago, White House officials leaked to the press that Obama intended to raise privately with Xi the highly contentious issue of China’s widespread use of computer hacking to steal US government, military, and commercial secrets. According to a Chinese diplomat in Washington who spoke in confidence, Beijing was furious about the sudden elevation of cybersecurity and Chinese espionage on the meeting’s agenda. According to a diplomatic source in Washington, the Chinese government was even angrier that the White House leaked the new agenda item to the press before Washington bothered to tell Beijing about it.
So the Chinese began to hit back. Senior Chinese officials have publicly accused the US government of hypocrisy and have alleged that Washington is also actively engaged in cyber-espionage. When the latest allegation of Chinese cyber-espionage was leveled in late May in a front-page Washington Post article {2}, which alleged that hackers employed by the Chinese military had stolen the blueprints of over three dozen American weapons systems, the Chinese government’s top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, shot back {3} that Beijing possessed “mountains of data” showing that the United States has engaged in widespread hacking designed to steal Chinese government secrets. This weekend’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM and Verizon metadata collection from a 29-year-old former CIA undercover operative named Edward J Snowden, who is now living in Hong Kong, only add fuel to Beijing’s position.
But Washington never publicly responded to Huang’s allegation, and nobody in the US media seems to have bothered to ask the White House if there is a modicum of truth to the Chinese charges.
It turns out that the Chinese government’s allegations are essentially correct. According to a number of confidential sources, a highly secretive unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), the US government’s huge electronic eavesdropping organization, called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for almost fifteen years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside the People’s Republic of China.
Hidden away inside the massive NSA headquarters complex at Fort Meade, Maryland, in a large suite of offices segregated from the rest of the agency, TAO is a mystery to many NSA employees. Relatively few NSA officials have complete access to information about TAO because of the extraordinary sensitivity of its operations, and it requires a special security clearance to gain access to the unit’s work spaces inside the NSA operations complex. The door leading to its ultramodern operations center is protected by armed guards, an imposing steel door that can only be entered by entering the correct six-digit code into a keypad, and a retinal scanner to ensure that only those individuals specially cleared for access get through the door.
According to former NSA officials interviewed for this article, TAO’s mission is simple. It collects intelligence information on foreign targets by surreptitiously hacking into their computers and telecommunications systems, cracking passwords, compromising the computer security systems protecting the targeted computer, stealing the data stored on computer hard drives, and then copying all the messages and data traffic passing within the targeted email and text-messaging systems. The technical term of art used by NSA to describe these operations is computer network exploitation (CNE).
TAO is also responsible for developing the information that would allow the United States to destroy or damage foreign computer and telecommunications systems with a cyberattack if so directed by the president. The organization responsible for conducting such a cyberattack is US Cyber Command (Cybercom), whose headquarters is located at Fort Meade and whose chief is the director of the NSA, General Keith Alexander.
Commanded since April of this year by Robert Joyce {4}, who formerly was the deputy director of the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate (responsible for protecting the US government’s communications and computer systems), TAO, sources say, is now the largest and arguably the most important component of the NSA’s huge Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) Directorate, consisting of over 1,000 military and civilian computer hackers, intelligence analysts, targeting specialists, computer hardware and software designers, and electrical engineers.
The sanctum sanctorum of TAO is its ultramodern operations center at Fort Meade called the Remote Operations Center (ROC), which is where the unit’s 600 or so military and civilian computer hackers (they themselves CNE operators) work in rotating shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
These operators spend their days (or nights) searching the ether for computers systems and supporting telecommunications networks being utilized by, for example, foreign terrorists to pass messages to their members or sympathizers. Once these computers have been identified and located, the computer hackers working in the ROC break into the targeted computer systems electronically using special software designed by TAO’s own corps of software designers and engineers specifically for this purpose, download the contents of the computers’ hard drives, and place software implants or other devices called “buggies” inside the computers’ operating systems, which allows TAO intercept operators at Fort Meade to continuously monitor the email and/or text-messaging traffic coming in and out of the computers or hand-held devices.
TAO’s work would not be possible without the team of gifted computer scientists and software engineers belonging to the Data Network Technologies Branch, who develop the sophisticated computer software that allows the unit’s operators to perform their intelligence collection mission. A separate unit within TAO called the Telecommunications Network Technologies Branch (TNT) develops the techniques that allow TAO’s hackers to covertly gain access to targeted computer systems and telecommunications networks without being detected. Meanwhile, TAO’s Mission Infrastructure Technologies Branch develops and builds the sensitive computer and telecommunications monitoring hardware and support infrastructure that keeps the effort up and running.
TAO even has its own small clandestine intelligence-gathering unit called the Access Technologies Operations Branch, which includes personnel seconded by the CIA and the FBI, who perform what are described as “off-net operations”, which is a polite way of saying that they arrange for CIA agents to surreptitiously plant eavesdropping devices on computers and/or telecommunications systems overseas so that TAO’s hackers can remotely access them from Fort Meade.
It is important to note that TAO is not supposed to work against domestic targets in the United States or its possessions. This is the responsibility of the FBI, which is the sole US intelligence agency chartered for domestic telecommunications surveillance. But in light of information about wider {5} NSA snooping {6}, one has to prudently be concerned about whether TAO is able to perform its mission of collecting foreign intelligence without accessing communications originating in or transiting through the United States.
Since its creation in 1997, TAO has garnered a reputation for producing some of the best intelligence available to the US intelligence community not only about China, but also on foreign terrorist groups, espionage activities being conducted against the United States by foreign governments, ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction developments around the globe, and the latest political, military, and economic developments around the globe.
According to a former NSA official, by 2007 TAO’s 600 intercept operators were secretly tapping into thousands of foreign computer systems and accessing password-protected computer hard drives and emails of targets around the world. As detailed in my 2009 history of NSA, The Secret Sentry {7}, this highly classified intercept program, known at the time as Stumpcursor, proved to be critically important during the US Army’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq, where it was credited with single-handedly identifying and locating over 100 Iraqi and al Qaeda insurgent cells in and around Baghdad. That same year, sources report that TAO was given an award for producing particularly important intelligence information about whether Iran was trying to build an atomic bomb.
By the time Obama became president of the United States in January 2009, TAO had become something akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community. “It’s become an industry unto itself”, a former NSA official said of TAO at the time. “They go places and get things that nobody else in the IC [intelligence community] can”.
Given the nature and extraordinary political sensitivity of its work, it will come as no surprise that TAO has always been, and remains, extraordinarily publicity shy. Everything about TAO is classified top secret codeword, even within the hypersecretive NSA. Its name has appeared in print only a few times over the past decade, and the handful of reporters who have dared inquire about it have been politely but very firmly warned by senior US intelligence officials not to describe its work for fear that it might compromise its ongoing efforts. According to a senior US defense official who is familiar with TAO’s work, “The agency believes that the less people know about them [TAO] the better”.
The word among NSA officials is that if you want to get promoted or recognized, get a transfer to TAO as soon as you can. The current head of the NSA’s SIGINT Directorate, Teresa Shea, 54, got her current job in large part because of the work she did as chief of TAO in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the unit earned plaudits for its ability to collect extremely hard-to-come-by information during the latter part of George W Bush’s administration. We do not know what the information was, but sources suggest that it must have been pretty important to propel Shea to her position today. But according to a recently retired NSA official, TAO “is the place to be right now”.
There’s no question that TAO has continued to grow in size and importance since Obama took office in 2009, which is indicative of its outsized role. In recent years, TAO’s collection operations have expanded from Fort Meade to some of the agency’s most important listening posts in the United States. There are now mini-TAO units operating at the huge NSA SIGINT intercept and processing centers at NSA Hawaii at Wahiawa on the island of Oahu; NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Georgia; and NSA Texas at the Medina Annex outside San Antonio, Texas; and within the huge NSA listening post at Buckley Air Force Base outside Denver.
The problem is that TAO has become so large and produces so much valuable intelligence information that it has become virtually impossible to hide it anymore. The Chinese government is certainly aware of TAO’s activities. The “mountains of data” statement by China’s top Internet official, Huang Chengqing, is clearly an implied threat by Beijing to release this data. Thus it is unlikely that President Obama pressed President Xi too hard at the Sunnydale summit on the question of China’s cyber-espionage activities. As any high-stakes poker player knows, you can only press your luck so far when the guy on the other side of the table knows what cards you have in your hand.
Links:
{3} http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/05/us-china-usa-hacking-idUSBRE95404L20130605
{4} http://www.matthewaid.com/post/51875378172/new-top-leadership-at-nsas-cyber-espionage-unit
{6} http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server-collection-facebook-google
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/10/inside_the_nsa_s_ultra_secret_china_hacking_group?
Class of 2013
All Dressed Up and No Place to Work
Lynn Stuart Parramore {1}
Alternet (June 10 2013)
As members of the class of 2013 stepped on stage to receive their diplomas, the unemployment rate in America stood at 7.6 percent {3} – a bit better than the past four years, but that ain’t saying much. Before the financial crisis, students graduating in 2007 faced a much rosier jobless rate of only 4.7 percent. The fact of the matter is that the past four years of high unemployment numbers represent the worst economy the country has suffered in seventy years, and young adults are shouldering a hefty part of the burden.
When you look at the specific numbers for Millennials, things look even bleaker. As of April, the jobless rate for workers under age 25 was an alarming 16.2 percent. A study by the think tank Demos {3} found that eighteen- to 34-year-olds make up 45 percent of those who can’t find work. That’s a lot of stifled human potential.
In a paper, The Class of 2013 {4}, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute showed that young people are not searching in vain for jobs because they lack the appropriate skills or the right education, as many pundits would have it. Rather, they can’t find work because of the weak demand for goods and services. It’s actually very simple: when a company can’t sell its goods and services because customers don’t have enough money to spend, it can’t hire more workers. You can be Super-Skilled Super Student, and if the economy isn’t humming, you’ll have trouble landing a job.
The EPI study also found that young people aren’t able to “shelter in school” and wait out the bad economy: the Great Recession didn’t make much of an impact on enrollment rates at college and universities. It also found that the wages of college grads between 2000 and 2012, adjusted wages for inflation, fell 8.5 percent.
“I’m starting to feel numb”, said Karen S, who is trying to find a job while ringing up groceries at a Whole Foods in Manhattan. The 24-year-old from Queens graduated in 2012 with a degree in broadcasting. “I did well in my classes, and I looked forward to putting my knowledge and skills to use. Instead I ask, ‘Would you like a bag today?’”
Like Karen, many recent graduates are forced to take McJobs. EPI researchers found that their chances of getting employer-provided health insurance or pensions are fading fast. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of college grads receiving pension coverage from their employer plummeted from 41.5 percent to just 27.2 percent. Many graduates find that when they do get a job, there’s no real opportunity for advancement. They’re stuck on a treadmill.
An increasing chorus of voices warns that college has become a bad investment, but the numbers don’t support that theory. Young people who hold a bachelor’s degrees have about half the unemployment rate {5} of those with only a high school diploma. When college grads have difficulty finding a job, it tends to worsen the problem for those with less education because they are forced to take less skilled positions, which squeezes out high school grads, and on down the line. It’s a chain reaction.
Humanities-bashing has become all the rage as critics point to lower salaries {6} for those majors when compared to majors like engineering, and unclear job paths. Florida governor Rick Scott is among a group of right-leaning politicians aiming to use the employment crisis as an opportunity to defund the humanities altogether: “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education, then I’m going to take that money to create jobs”, he told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.” Leon Wieseltier, an editor at The New Republic, suggested in an address to Brandeis University {7} that the anti-humanities crew may be more worried about what those students learn to think about than what sort of job they get, calling “a commitment to the humanities as nothing less than an act of intellectual defiance, of cultural dissidence”.
Regardless of whether you think it would be more helpful to the state of Florida to have more anthropologists, or, say, more bankers, it is a fact that only 27 percent of college grads {8} actually take jobs directly related to their major. Good jobs in the modern economy are often complex and require multiple skills and bases of knowledge, which suggests that more interdisciplinary majors might be better suited to the job market that the siloed majors of traditional univeristy departments.
Defenders of the humanities emphasize that in an increasingly global world, the knowledge of history, literature, and the ability to communicate effectively are highly valuable. Damon Horowitz, director of engineering for Google, spoke at a 2011 Stanford University conference and went so far as to urge students to quit their technology jobs and get a PhD in the humanities {9}. According to Horowitz, understanding how humans communicate, how their cultures develop, and how their history unfolds is as vital to a global company like Google as technical skills. (Where was he when I graduated??)
The battle over the humanities aside, it’s clear that college graduates need to find jobs, and better ones when they do. According to the EPI study, the surest way to help young workers is to support policies that help boost the overall employment rate, like fiscal relief to states, investments in infrastructure, an expanded social safety net, and – how’s this for an idea? – direct job creation programs.
The stakes are enormously high. The young people graduating today will feel the effects of the bad job market for decades to come. The Demos study found that if we simply continue to add jobs at the 2012 average rate, it would be 2022 before the country recovers to full employment and restores decent opportunities for those Americans who are just starting out. In the meantime, a whole generation of bright and capable young people is getting left behind. They are forming opinions of whether or not America is a place where a young person has a fair shot of creating a fulfilling life with meaningful work, and these attidudes will shape the country’s future.
Links:
{1} http://www.alternet.org/authors/lynn-stuart-parramore
{2} http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
{3} http://www.demos.org/publication/stuck-young-americas-persistent-jobs-crisis
{4} http://www.epi.org/publication/class-of-2013-graduates-job-prospects/
{6} http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013/majors-that-pay-you-back
http://www.alternet.org/education/college-graduates-and-unemployment
Lighting the Fuse
by James Howard Kunstler
Clusterfuck Nation – Blog (June 10 2013)
At first glance, the growth of the super snooper state revealed this weekend – like one of those giant, hidden funguses that spreads for miles under the forests of upper Michigan – is a striking discovery. But I maintain that there is an inverse correlation between the technical abilities of the government to harvest data and their competence to use it for anything. The salient trend in our government is to become more inept, ineffectual, impotent, and feckless, no matter how big the compost heaps of sheer information it manages to pile up.
For spying on your own citizens, the Nazis and the Soviets were way ahead of us using technology no more elegant than phone bugs and filing cabinets. Our immersive techno-narcissism vests too much awe in computer magic itself. What would hurt much more – and work much better – is if Americans become a nation of snitches. That’s a possibility, of course, but I attach a low percentage to it because it requires a respect for authority that is just absent here now, and has been eroding steadily for decades, really ever since Jack Kennedy was gunned down.
Ironically, Barack Obama got where he did because he pretended to be the reincarnation of JFK – a young, dynamic change agent – and it took years to discover that he was a mere bundle of platitudes wrapped in a banana leaf of good intentions, stamped with a sell-by date that, alas, has now passed. His piled-up troubles seem more a matter of inattention than intent – especially his failure to apply the rule of law in banking – and his recent televised attempts to explain himself give off the demoralized vibe of somebody just sadly going through the motions.
Anyway, events are in the driver’s seat, not government officials. We’re in the Koyaanisqatsi zone now – everything is out-of-balance from our financial operations to our geopolitical relations to the state of nature around the planet. Too many stresses have built at too many stress-points and a palpable fear judders through the wireless waves that something has to break. Oddly, political cracks appeared this month in two of the least-expected places: Sweden and Turkey. WTF? I wonder a little now if the revelations of Edward J Snowdon about the American Security apparatus will bring on a wave of street protests in Washington DC on the Fourth of July. Maybe I’m just channeling my own dim memories of 1969, but this historical moment has a similar tingle. We know that the amalgamated gun nuts are already planning what they’ve advertised as an “armed march” across the nation’s capital. Frankly, I’m kind of glad that they’re doing this. The government needs to be reminded that there are already enough small arms loose in America to temper its cloddish excesses. The time is ripe for others to join in a larger Fourth of July demonstration.
Most satisfying would be a Washington march by college loan debt slaves terminating in a bonfire of the loan contracts on the Ellipse. I keep waiting for the “magic moment” when millions of these poor swindled young grads will send the message thundering through Facebook and Twitter that they are done paying the inflated price for their useless degrees in “marketing” and “gender studies”. Aren’t you amazed that it hasn’t happened yet? (Although the default rate is rising so fast that a general renunciation may be accomplished without public fanfare.)
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if the US government goes after Mr Snowdon, who is currently on the lam in Hong Kong which, some of you may remember, belongs to China. Does that ever have the potential for a world-class embarrassment? There’s less than a month before America’s big annual birthday party, just enough time for this story to build to an explosive climax. The government will surely have to make some kind of move before than. Given its recent tendencies to over-reach on everything, the government could easily screw the pooch on this. The 29-year-old Snowdon has the look and demeanor of an all-American hero and it will be interesting to see the reaction if and when federal agents haul him off a plane in handcuffs. What’s more, Snowdon made a clear, concise, and eloquent statement explaining his actions: “The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong”, he said.
You couldn’t put it plainer than that.
Edward J Snowdon, NSA whistleblower
http://kunstler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Snowdon-300×164.jpg
_____
James Howard Kunstler is one of the world’s loudest critics of suburban sprawl and the impending fossil fuel shortage. Kunstler’s nonfiction series on suburban sprawl, new urbanism and the end of the cheap oil era includes: The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere and The Long Emergency. His latest novel, World Made By Hand is a fictional account of the issues raised in The Long Emergency. He is also the author of eight other novels.
The Collapse of the Hourly Wage
Another Sign of the Buckling Economy
by Mike Whitney
CounterPunch (June 10 2013)
If we care about building a fast growing economy that provides opportunity for every American, then we must enact policies that build it from the middle out, not the top down. Tax the wealthy and corporations–and invest that money in the middle class as we once did in this country. Those polices won’t just be great for the middle class, they’ll be great for the poor, for businesses large and small, and the rich.
- Nick Hanauer, “A one percenter tells the truth about job creators”, Hullabaloo {1}
US workers are getting squeezed like never before. Hourly pay for nonfarm workers (you and me) fell at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the first three months of the year. This represents the biggest decline in wages on record. Factory workers took an even bigger hit. They saw their wages plunge by nearly seven percent in the same period. These grim figures were released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in their quarterly Productivity and Costs Report. The report was ignored by virtually all the mainstream media, and for good reason, it shows that the recovery is largely a mirage created by tub-thumping media pundits and their miscreant corporate bosses.
Last week’s news on wages was followed by even bleaker data on US manufacturing (which dipped into contraction in May) and a tepid unemployment report where nearly all of the jobs created were execrable part-time, low-paying service sector positions that provide neither benefits, pensions, health care nor sufficient income to feed and clothe oneself. Wall Street reacted to the wretched job’s report in predictable fashion, by buying up everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor of the NYSE. The Dow Jones ended Friday up 207 points while the S&P and the NASDAQ catapulted higher.
Falling wages, lackluster hiring and a slowdown in manufacturing have to be seen in the broader context of record-high corporate profits, ever-widening inequality, and steadily-shrinking budget deficits. Corporate earnings have consistently beat estimates despite weaker revenues mainly because cost cutting CEOs have trimmed their workforce wherever possible and slashed expenses to the bone. Meanwhile, all the gains from increased productivity have gone to management, which means labor no longer has sufficient income to sustain demand. See charts {2}.
So, while US workers are busy mopping tables at Denny’s or cleaning bedpans at the local retirement center for minimum wage, US companies are rolling in clover. Take a look at this from the Wall Street Journal:
American companies are keeping a record cash pile. US nonfinancial corporations held $1.78 trillion in cash and other liquid assets in the first quarter of the year, up $46 billion from the end of 2012, the Federal Reserve said on Thursday. {3}
US corporations have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. But they know what they DON’T want to do with it. They don’t want to invest in a sinking economy where demand is weak, unemployment is high, and 47 million people are scraping by on food stamps. Oh no, they don’t want that at all. They don’t want to recycle their hard-earned lucre into Obama’s black hole economy when they can double or triple their dough via stock buybacks. The beauty of buybacks is that they goose share prices higher while adding absolutely zilch to production. Swapping paper assets is just another way for the uber-rich to skim more cream off the top. Check this out from Traders Magazine:
Companies authorize buybacks and carry them out from time to time through brokerages as a way to reduce outstanding stock and increase per-share earnings. US firms have announced about $275 billion of repurchases this quarter, the highest total in more than five years, Jeffrey Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial Holdings Inc (LPLA), wrote in a report this week. {4}
The rich are getting richer, but none of the wealth is trickling down to the wage slaves below. In fact, things are getting worse for working people all the time. Did you know that wages, as a share of gross domestic product GDP are at a record low? In the booming 1970s, wages accounted for more than fifty percent of GDP. Now that figure has dwindled to less than 44 percent and is on track to drop even further. Of course, everyone knows why wages are flatlining. It’s because all the money is flowing upwards to the Scotch-guzzling bankers and their shifty plutocrat friends. As University of California (Berkeley) economics professor Emmanuel Saez discovered in his research on inequality, 65 percent of the country’s income growth between 2002 to 2007 went to the top one percent of households.
Surprisingly, it’s gotten worse since the recession ended. According to the Pew Research Center the top seven percent of US households increased their wealth by 28 percent from 2009 to 2011, while the bottom 93 percent saw their wealth slashed by four percent. So, while the moneybags one percenters at the top of the fiscal foodchain have recouped all their losses from the financial crisis, (thanks to QE3) working people are still facing the same problems they’ve faced for the last five years; droopy paychecks, soaring unemployment, and government cutbacks that suck the life’s-blood out of the economy. All of these are going to get worse as the sequester tightens its grip in the second half of 2013. This is from the New York Times:
In the last three months, the federal work force has shrunk by about 45,000 positions, including 14,000 in May alone. In part, that is because federal offices have gone on hiring freezes and taken other steps to wrench down their spending.
Tens of thousands of federal workers are also seeing their hours cut through mandatory furloughs and bans on overtime … expect those furloughs to take a significant bite out of income and consumer spending. Come July, for instance, the Pentagon is going to start to furlough 680,000 civilian workers – out of about 800,000 total – for up to eleven days each.
Sequestration is having an impact on private businesses as well, even if it is harder to see given the way the recovery continues to chug along. Millions of their customers have less money to spend. {5}
Still think the sequester’s not going bite?
Think again. Falling wages are the unavoidable result of government deficit reduction policy which keeps unemployment needlessly high. The administration’s obsession with budget cutting has pushed wages below 2012 levels when worker pay grew by a measly 1.9 percent year-over-year barely keeping pace with the rate of inflation.
While the sequester accounts for less than 50,000 lost jobs (so far), the sum is much higher when one adds the 750,000 public sector jobs (mostly state and local) that were cut during the recession. Had Obama provided desperately needed fiscal aid to the states during the worst part of the slump, most of these jobs could have been saved which would have boosted tax revenues, increased activity, and turbo-charged GDP. Instead, Obama chose to follow the advice of his nincompoop deficit hawk advisors who see high unemployment as an opportunity to crush organized labor and reduce living standards across the board. Here’s more from Andre Damon at the World Socialist Web Site:
Since June 2009, the public sector as a whole has eliminated 737,000 jobs, nearly half of which have been in state and local education.
The millions of people who remain out of work are having any remaining government assistance taken away from them. Two million people had their unemployment benefits cut back by up to twenty percent due to the “sequester” budget cuts. Many have been cut from rolls altogether as a result of cuts in states throughout the country.
The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes those working part-time for economic reasons, remained essentially unchanged at 13.8 percent, meaning that 22 million people in the US are either unemployed or underemployed …
The May jobs report points to the fact that there has been no economic recovery for working people in the United States: millions remain unemployed, and millions more have left the labor force because no jobs are available. Wages, which have plunged in real terms since 2008, remain stagnant, while government assistance for the poor and unemployed is being slashed. {6}
The weakest recovery in US history is about to get weaker still. According to the CBO, fiscal deficits will drop 1.4 percent per year for the next three years, which means that GDP will sputter-along at a pathetic one percent during that same timeframe. Less fiscal stimulus, means higher unemployment, sluggish growth, and more grinding hardship for working stiffs.
Obama is implementing the Reagan’s “strangle the beast” agenda, albeit with greater skill and eloquence than his mentor.
Links:
{1} http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-1-percenter-tells-truth-about-job.html
{3} “Vital Signs Chart: Companies Holding Record Cash Pile”, Wall Street Journal)
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/06/07/vital-signs-chart-companies-holding-record-cash-pile/
{4} “Goldman Sachs Buyback Orders Reach Highest Level of Year”, Traders Magazine
http://www.tradersmagazine.com/news/goldman-sachs-stock-buyback-orders-hit-record-111224-1.html
{5} “The Sequester Starts to Show”, New York Times
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/the-sequester-starts-to-show/
{6} “Anemic US jobs report points to ongoing slump”, World Socialist Web Site
http://wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/08/econ-m08.html
_____
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Whitney’s story on how the banks targeted blacks for toxic subprime mortgages appears in the May issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/10/the-collapse-of-the-hourly-wage/
Half Lives
Why the Part-time Economy Is Bad for Everyone
by Lynn Stuart Parramore {1}
AlterNet (June 07 2013)
Why is a whole job getting harder to find every day in America?
Ever since the financial crash, a growing number of people have been forced to take part-time gigs when what they really want is something increasingly out of reach: solid, full-time employment. Between late 2007 and May 2013, the number of part-timers jumped from 24.7 million to 27.5 million. A 2013 Gallup poll {2} shows that one in every five workers is now part-time. Some folks, like students, may work part-time because they want to. Nothing wrong with that. But involuntary part-time employment is not a choice, it’s a burden. Often it means substandard jobs with crazy schedules that don’t pay nearly enough. According to the Labor Department, as many as a third of all part-timers fall into the involuntary category.
There are signs that their ranks are likely to swell.
Part-Time Nation
Employers have found a new excuse to drop full-time employees to part-time status: the Affordable Care Act. Diane Stafford of the Kansas City Star {3} looks at a trend called the “Obamadodge”, in which bosses around the country, including Regal Entertainment Group, franchise owners of Five Guys, Applebee’s and Denny’s, and the owner of Papa John’s pizza chain, have announced plans to side-step new requirements that businesses with over fifty full-time-equivalent employees offer their full-time workers access to a qualified healthcare plan or pay a penalty.
The healthcare law defines a full-time employee as anyone working more than thirty hours a week, so the boss simply cuts workers’ hours and hires additional part-time staff to make up the difference. Stafford notes that as many as 2.3 million workers across the country are at high risk of having their hours slashed to below the thirty-hour mark.
Another rising trend is employers changing part-time workers’ schedules from week to week. According to a New York Times report {4}, this manuever is becoming commonplace in the American retail and hospitality industries. Bosses use sophisticated software to track the flow of customers and purchasing patterns in stores, which allows managers to assign just enough employees to handle the anticipated demand. Instead of five- or six-hour shifts, workers get two- or three-hour shifts. They are often called in at the last minute, and have no way of predicting which days they’ll be working.
At Jamba Juice, for example, employers at Manhattan’s popular smoothie shop use weather forecasts and temperature checks to make micro-adjustments to weekly schedules. If the weather tomorrow is hot, the boss knows that more customers are likely to come in for a cool drink, so more employees will be called in for certain shifts. The managers of clothing stores use different variables to estimate shopping patterns. As with so many trends that negatively impact workers, Walmart is cited as a pioneer in the heavy reliance on part-time workers and the penalizing of those who have difficulty adjusting schedules.
The Times notes that according to a 2011 survey by the City University of New York, half of retail workers in New York City were part-time, and only ten percent of part-timers had a set schedule week to week. One out of five said they had to be available for call-in shifts either all or most of the time. Obviously, single mothers and others who can’t shift schedules at the drop of a hat, like students trying to take classes, suffer miserably under the new paradigm. And there’s little chance of working more than one part-time job if your schedule is in constant flux.
The Price of Part-time
Part-time workers are far more likely to be paid minimum wage than full-time workers, thirteen percent vs two percent {5}. As they struggle to make ends meet, many will – if they can - take on multiple part-time jobs to compensate for indadequate hours and pay. Involuntary part-time employment stigmatizes workers, attacking their self-esteem and diminishing their expectations for the future. It disproportionately impacts women, younger workers and minorities. Forced part-time workers share far less than full-timers in America’s economic gains. Their purchasing power drops, as does their standard of living. Companies tend to invest less in training part-time employees, treating them like replacable widgets. They get less work experience, which makes it harder for them to transition to higher paying jobs down the line.
In the past, research on employment usually focused on only two categories of people: the employed and the unemployed. But in the last decade or so, more studies have devoted attention to the plight of the forced part-time worker and the underemployed. The findings are alarming.
The American Psychological Association reports a variety of ailments associated with underemployment {6}, including depression, anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms, low subjective well-being and poor self-esteem. Researchers have found that full-time work is critical not only to the mental well-being of workers, but to their physical health as well. An increase in chronic disease {7} is but one of the ways that forced part-time workers suffer.
The story of Stacy H is typical. She was fired from her job as an educator after twelve years and found part-time employment at a university center. Working thirty hours a week, her rate of pay was actually higher than her previous full-time job, but when she factored in the loss of benefits, including paid time off and employer subsidized health insurance, her net earning had dropped.
Stacy lives in Massachusetts, and since health insurance is mandated, she chose the family plan with the lowest premium. Even so, coming up with nearly $1,000 per month is a stretch, and her family earns too much to qualify for any subsidized plans. Her plan has a high deductible, so Stacy’s family gets hit with medical expenses they’d never had to pay in the past. “My recent followup to my PCP to check on my blood pressure after my annual physical in February will only be partially covered by our plan”, wrote Stacy in an email. “I can only imagine what our out-of-pocket expense will be for my son’s cardiology checkup. Wonder why my blood pressure is elevated …”
As Stacy’s case shows, involuntary part-time employment not only hurts individuals, it puts a strain on families and can lead to negative effects on children, including increased stress, substance abuse, impaired relationships and a host of other ills. Communities suffer, too, as a result of the growing income inequalities that increased part-time employment tends to produce. People feel a keener sense of unfairness, despair and various kinds of tensions that fray the bonds between neighbors.
On a macroeconomic level, plenty of negative effects pile up when people face the kind of insecurity that forced part-time work often brings. They may squirrel away every penny to cover surprise medical expenses, for example, which hinders the whole economy. Econ 101 tells us that when people don’t have money to spend, businesses can’t sell products and services. Part-time workers become increasingly dependent on public services, which strains state and municipal budgets.
What To Do?
The involuntary part-time trend is ultimately bad for the economy as a whole, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Many economists who follow the neoclassical school that has dominated the national conversation since the 1980s pretend that the trend is natural and inevitable, and that any intervention is useless or worse. The truth is that economic systems don’t operate by immutable “laws” like gravity. Economics is not like physics. Human beings work together and make decisions that shape our economic destiny. We can make good decisions and bad decisions.
We can decide to fund job training and support labor unions that are able to bargain for things like advanced notification of schedules and other protections. We can focus on job creation rather than misguided deficit reduction and austerity. We can support research on the effects, both social and economic, of increased involuntary part-time employment, and enact policies that discourage companies from shifting the burden of market fluctuations onto the backs of workers. We can expand, rather than constrict, the social safety net, and move towards single payer healthcare. We can demand benefits for part-time workers.
Or we can move increasingly to a paradigm of gross inequality, indentured servitude, monopolistic conditions, a decimated middle-class, increased poverty, and social unrest.
Let’s not kid ourselves: We need a robust political movement that is keenly focused on reversing these trends as well as a fundamental shift in the way we approach economic questions. We need to remember that what’s good for workers is good for the economy, and that you can’t built a solid economic foundation – or a stable society – on permanent job insecurity.
Links:
{1} http://www.alternet.org/authors/lynn-stuart-parramore
{2} http://www.gallup.com/poll/161063/payroll-population-rate-falls-further-february.aspx
{3} http://www.kansascity.com/2013/06/04/4272394/involuntary-part-time-jobs-are.html
{5} http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm
{6} http://www.apa.org/about/gr/issues/socioeconomic/unemployment.aspx
Another Phony Jobs Report
From A Government That Lies About Everything
by Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy (June 07 2013)
The payroll jobs report for May released today continues the fantasy.
Goods producing jobs declined, with manufacturing losing another 4,000 jobs, but the New Economy produced 179,000 service jobs.
Are these jobs the high-powered, high-wage “innovation jobs” that economists promised would be our reward from Globalism. I’m afraid not.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs created are the usual lowly paid
non-exportable domestic service jobs – the jobs of a third world country.
Retail trade accounts for 27,700 of the jobs.
Wholesale trade accounts for 7,900 jobs.
Ambulatory health care services accounts for 15,300 of the jobs.
Waitresses and bartenders account for 38,100 of the jobs.
Local government accounts for 13,000 of the jobs.
Amusements, gambling, and recreation account for 12,500 of the jobs.
Temporary help services provided 25,600 jobs.
Business support services provided 4,300 jobs.
Services to buildings and dwellings provided 6,400 jobs.
Accounting and bookkeeping services provided 3,100 jobs.
Architectural and engineering services provided 4,900 jobs.
Computer systems design and related provided 6,000 jobs (most likely filled by H-1B work visas).
Management and technical consulting services provided 3,200 jobs.
For a decade this has been the jobs profile of “the world’s most powerful economy”. It is the profile of third world India forty years ago. The jobs that made the US the dominant economy have been moved off shore by corporations threatened by Wall Street with takeovers if they did not increase their profits.
The easiest way for corporations to increase profits is to take advantage of cheap labor in countries with massive quantities of unemployed labor.
So, if we believe the BLS report, and the reported new jobs are not simply a product of faulty season adjustments and a faulty birth-death model, why is the financial press happy that the US economy can only create third world jobs? Why was the stock market up on the news that the US economy has created 179,000 third world jobs? Would rational markets be up on such discouraging news?
But are the jobs really there?
With retail sales going nowhere, why 35,600 new jobs in wholesale and retail trade?
With real median incomes declining, why 38,100 more waitresses and bartenders? For every month as long as I can remember the BLS reports numerous new jobs in waitresses and bartenders, despite the long-term decline in real median income.
In the May jobs report, where are the jobs for the vast number of new college graduates?
The US now has more hotel maids, bartenders, and waitresses than it has manufacturing workers. The US has twice as many people employed in government than in manufacturing.
The services of maids, bartenders, waitresses, and government cannot be exported. Therefore, the US trade deficit remains large and without exports to reduce it, a crisis in itself.
What the BLS jobs reports have been telling us for many years is that the US economy is in crisis, in a death-spiral. Yet, not a handful of economists’ voices have been raised.
Today president obama’s economist said that the notch upward in the unemployment rate was because the economic outlook was so good that more people were encouraged to enter the labor market than there were new jobs available.
The conclusion is inescapable: The same government that lies about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes, and so on, also lies about jobs, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, rigs every financial and commodity market, pretends that terrorism is such a threat that the US Constitution must be set aside and that Americans are safer without the protection of habeas corpus and due process.
It is amazing how rare terrorism is, especially with Washington in the second decade of trying to stir up terrorism by invading countries on totally false pretenses, murdering citizens of countries, such as Pakistan and Yemen with drones, and supporting Israel’s never-ending murder and dispossession of the Palestinians.
After such massive provocations from Washington, one would think that the world would be ablaze with terrorism. But it isn’t.
As there is so little terrorism, Washington and its presstitute media call those who resist Washington’s invasion of their countries “terrorists”. Everyone who resists Washington’s military aggression is a terrorist. Just ask the New York Times, Fox News, or any neoconservative. Or, for that matter, the Bilderbergs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and Homeland Security, the Gestapo organization that now defines all American dissenters to be “domestic extremists”.
Washington’s claim that Americans have “freedom and democracy” is the sickest joke in human history.
In 21st century America, defendants have no more rights than the accused in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. The FBI now shoots suspects brought in for questioning in the back of the head even before the suspect is arrested: http://lewrockwell.com/spl5/fbi-executed-my-boy.html
Long before Bradley Manning’s trial the presstitutes have convicted the accused based on lies leaked by the prosecutors. Consider Bradley Manning. After three years of detention, including one year of torture, he is brought to a rigged trial as a national security danger. All that Bradley Manning did was to comply with the Military Code and report war crimes. As his corrupt superiors did not want to know, he complied with his duty, apparently, by going public.
Now he is being made an example. The message is clear: Support Washington’s war crimes or be destroyed.
The Amerika that exists today has more in common with Nazi Germany than with the America in which I grew up. The young don’t know any different. But those my age realize that we have lost our country. America no longer exists.
_____
Dr Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.
A print edition of The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism is forthcoming from Clarity Press. An ebook version of How The Economy Was Lost is available from CounterPunch.
Copyright (c) 2012 PaulCraigRoberts.org. All rights reserved.
Open Borders and the Tragedy of Open Access Commons
by Herman Daly
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (June 03 2013)
“Open borders” refers to a policy of unlimited or free immigration. I argue here that it is a bad policy. If you are poor and your country provides no social safety net, you move to one that does. If you are rich and your country makes you pay your taxes, you move (or at least move your money) to one that doesn’t. Thus safety nets, and public goods in general, disappear as they become both overloaded and underfunded. That is the “world without borders”, and without community. That is the tragedy of open access commons.
Some will think that I am attacking a straw man, because, they will say, no sensible person really advocates open borders. They simply advocate, it will be said, “more generous levels of immigration, and a reasonable amnesty for existing illegal immigrants”. I agree that some form of strictly conditional amnesty is indeed necessary as the lesser evil, given the impasse created by past non-enforcement of our immigration laws. Deporting twelve million long-settled residents is too drastic and would create more injustices than it would rectify. But unless we enforce immigration laws in the future there will soon be need for another amnesty (the first, often forgotten, was in 1986), and then another – a de facto open-borders policy. Nevertheless, the policy of open borders should be fairly discussed, not only because some people explicitly advocate it, but also because many others implicitly accept it by virtue of their unwillingness to face the alternative.
Immigration is a divisive issue. A good unifying point to begin a discussion is to recognize that every country in the world has a policy of limiting immigration. Emigration is often considered a human right, but immigration requires the permission of the receiving country. Some countries allow many legal immigrants. Others allow few. As the World Bank reported in its Global Bilateral Migration Database:
The United States remains the most important migrant destination in the world, home to one fifth of the world’s migrants and the top destination for migrants from no less than sixty sending countries. Migration to Western Europe remains largely from elsewhere in Europe.
There are also arguments about the emigration side of open borders – even if emigration is a human right, is it unconditional? Might “brain-drain” emigrants have some obligation to contribute something to the community that educated and invested in them, before they emigrate to greener pastures?
Immigrants are people, and deserve to be well treated; immigration is a policy, and deserves reasoned discussion in the public interest. It seems that neither expectation is fulfilled, perhaps partly because the world has moved from largely empty to quite full {1} in only one lifetime. What could work in the world of two billion people into which I was born, no longer works in today’s world of seven billion. In addition to people, the exploding populations of cars, buildings, livestock, ships, refrigerators, cell phones, and even corn stalks and soybean plants, contribute to a world full of “dissipative structures” {2} that, like human bodies, require not only space but also a metabolic flow of natural resources beginning with depletion and ending with pollution. This growing entropic throughput already exceeds ecological capacities {3} of regeneration and absorption, degrading the life-support capacity of the ecosphere.
The US is indeed a “country of immigrants”, although for American Indians this frequent refrain reflects a less positive historical experience than it does for European settlers. Nor does the term resonate positively with those African Americans whose recent ancestors were brought here as involuntary immigrants. Many Americans, including me, think that heirs of slavery deserve priority in the US job market (including job training) over new immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. Likewise for the many Americans of all races living in poverty. Some other Americans, unfortunately, seem to feel that if we can’t have slaves, then the next best thing is abundant cheap labor, guaranteed by unemployment.
We have in the US a strong cheap-labor lobby that uses immigration (especially illegal immigration) to force down wages and break labor unions, as well as weaken labor safety standards. This is less the fault of the immigrants than of our own elite employing class and pandering politicians. The immigration issue in the US is largely an internal class battle between labor and capital, with immigrants as pawns in the conflict. Class division is more basic than the racial and ethnic divide in current US immigration politics, although the latter is not absent. Progressives in the US, with their admirable historical focus on racial justice, have been slow to see the increasing dominance of the class issue in immigration. The Wall Street Journal, the Chamber of Commerce, and big corporations in general, do not mind seeing the class question submerged by racial and ethnic politics favoring easy immigration as a cheap-labor supplement to off-shoring. It feeds the myth that we are a classless society, even as it contributes to increasing income inequality. Also, given the closeness of recent elections, a bit of ethnic pandering can be politically decisive.
The US is also a country of law, or at least strives to be. Illegal immigration falls outside the rule of law, and renders moot all democratic policy deliberations about balancing interests for the common good. It is hardly democratic to refuse to enforce democratically enacted laws, even though difficult individual cases arise, as with any law. Humane provisions for difficult cases must be worked out, for example, children brought here illegally by their parents twenty years ago. We have judges to deal with difficult cases, as well as statutes of limitation regarding the time period within which certain laws must be enforced, and this principle could be applied to immigration laws.
Which democratically enacted laws will the open-borders lobby not enforce next? How about laws against financial fraud? We have apparently already quit enforcing those, partly abetted by globalization and foreign tax havens as well as too big to fail or jail banks. Acceptance of illegal immigration is only one part of the broader trend toward impunity, and while impunity for banksters is arguably worse than for illegal immigrants and their employers, the latter still plays a part in undermining the general respect for law.
What would an “open borders” policy mean for Bhutan, sandwiched between the world’s two most populous nations?
http://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/Bhutan_Map-e1370289330242.jpg
Surely our immigration laws could be improved. Indeed, the 1995 US Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, made a good start, but was ignored for reasons already suggested. Her commission called for lower legal immigration quotas, stricter family reunification criteria, and enhanced border control, as well as stricter sanctions against employers of illegal immigrants. The last embraced the caveat that ethnic profiling would likely result without a secure national identification system, since employers are not able to adjudicate false documents. A secure identification system would of course make it easier to identify illegal immigrants and is often opposed by open-borders advocates and libertarians. The present Congress should build on the good work of the Jordan Commission, but they seem to have forgotten it.
Would open borders be good for Japan, or Germany, or Greece, or for an independent Catalonia, if that should come about? Do any political parties in member countries advocate open borders for the European Union with respect to the rest of the world? Should the areas of the Amazon reserved for indigenous people be open to free immigration? Should Bhutan, bordered by the world’s two most populous countries and trying to preserve its culture and ecosystems, declare a policy of open borders?
In developed countries immigration boosters are especially interested in opening borders to young workers to help cover social security shortfalls resulting from the older age structure caused by slower natural population growth. The cheap-labor lobby is joined by the cheap-retirement lobby. Apparently the immigrants are expected to die or go home as soon as they reach retirement age and would start receiving rather than paying into social security. Also, while working they are expected to boost fertility and population growth sufficiently to postpone the necessity of raising the retirement age or lowering benefits. Population growth is expected, indeed required, to continue indefinitely.
In addition to the cheap-labor and cheap-retirement lobbies, advocacy of open borders comes both from the politically correct faction of left-wing economists, and from the libertarian faction of right-wing economists. The former consider any limits on total number of immigrants as “thinly disguised racism”. All evil is reduced to racism, often “in disguise”. The libertarian economists label any restriction on immigration as a “market distortion”, their synonym for regulation. We already have open borders for capital (as well as goods), so that open borders for labor would complete the global integration agenda – deregulation taken to the limit. This is not “free trade” or reasonable recognition of interdependence among many separate trading economies, as embodied in the 1945 Bretton Woods Treaty. Rather it is a single global economy tightly integrated on the principle of absolute, not comparative, advantage. It is being imposed top-down by transnational corporations via the undemocratic World Trade Organization.
Net immigration is the overwhelming cause of US population growth. How big should the US population be? We are currently the third most populous country in the world. Do we aspire to overtake China and India? What numbers define a “more generous immigration policy”, and exactly who is being generous to whom, and at whose expense? Our elite is being generous to itself at the expense of both the US working class and of immigrants.
Any limitation of the number of new immigrants still requires selectivity and enforcement of immigration laws. It requires saying “no” to many worthy applicants, which is difficult, and is why some humanitarians are tempted to favor open borders. It is easier to pretend that unlimited “economic” growth can support an unlimited population, including immigrants. Never mind that growth in the US has, at the margin, become uneconomic {4}, increasing social and environmental costs faster than benefits. The idea of a steady-state economy {5} goes out the window, and customary growth-mania is reaffirmed.
If the US could just set an example of how a country can live justly and sustainably within its ecological limits (that is, in a steady-state economy), that would be a splendid contribution to the rest of the world. We are far from setting such an example – indeed we are not even trying.
_____
URLs in this post:
{1} has moved from largely empty to quite full: http://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Daly_SciAmerican_FullWorldEconomics.pdf
{2} dissipative structures: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/DISSIP_STRUC.html
{3} throughput already exceeds ecological capacities: http://footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
{4} uneconomic: http://steadystate.org/two-meanings/
{5} steady-state economy: http://steadystate.org/discover/definition/
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http://steadystate.org/open-borders-and-the-tragedy-of-open-access-commons/
