Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Monday, November 11, 2013
Veterans struggle in an economy rigged to benefit the top 1%
It's Veterans Day, which means honoring sacrifice ... and leaving a lot of the story out. We don't talk so much on Veterans Day about how to avoid creating new generations of wounded and struggling veterans. We don't talk so much about the problems today's veterans face that could be changed through policy, if only our politicians could be pushed into abandoning the austerity agenda. Let's review a few of those:
- Republican-controlled states that have rejected Medicaid expansion are denying health care to thousands of veterans. One in 10 veterans doesn't have health insurance.
- House Republicans passed a bill that would kick 170,000 veterans off of food stamps.
- The unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans remains high. Republicans have shown no interest in job creation.
- Hundreds of thousands of veterans are homeless; disproportionately so.
Of course, what's happening to veterans is more broadly symptomatic of a broken economy and a Republican party bent on making it worse for those at the bottom. All the rhetoric about honoring veterans may translate into a few programs to try to improve their lot. But not enough to counter the more general policy assault on poor people, working-class people, middle-class people—basically everyone but rich people.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
.@ATT @ATTCustomerCare CIA pays AT&T to spy on phone data
"The report Thursday of a CIA-AT&T operation exposes a whole new layer of state-corporate spying on the people of the United States and the world.
Details of the operation, first published by the New York Times, make clear that AT&T, the largest US telecommunications provider, is allowing the CIA to sift through its vast call database, not in response to any subpoena or court order, but rather as part of a voluntary contract under which the company is being paid more than $10 million a year by the intelligence agency.
In addition to its millions of customers, the company also handles connections between long distance carriers and local telephone networks all over the world, with tens of billions of minutes of voice calls per year passing through its facilities around the globe.
The CIA-AT&T operation duplicates some of the massive data-mining and domestic spying operations carried out by the National Security Agency, details of which have been exposed in recent months through documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The Times report cited a "senior intelligence official" who argued that this overlap was justified because the CIA requires "a certain speed, agility and tactical responsiveness that differs from other agencies. The need to act without delay is often best met when the CIA has developed its own capabilities to lawfully acquire necessary foreign intelligence information."
Acting "without delay" in the CIA's case increasingly involves launching drone missile attacks to assassinate perceived enemies of Washington, while killing significant numbers of innocent civilians.
AT&T issued a statement Thursday acknowledging that it is paid by the government to provide information, while refusing to comment on the report that it had concluded such a deal with the CIA.
"In all cases, wherever any governmental entity anywhere seeks information from us, we ensure that the request and our response are lawful and proper," the company said.
This self-serving claim notwithstanding, there is every indication that the CIA-AT&T operation, like its counterparts being directed by the NSA, is being conducted in flagrant violation of international law and the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The CIA's access to metadata covering tens of millions of Americans who are customers of AT&T also suggests a violation of US statutes barring the agency from conducting domestic spying operations. In what amounts to less than a fig leaf to cover such violations, unnamed US officials said that when the company provides records of international calls that involve US phones "it does not disclose the identity of the Americans and 'masks' several digits of their phone numbers."
Citing these unnamed officials, the Times adds, however, that "the agency can refer such masked numbers to the FBI, which can issue an administrative subpoena requiring AT&T to provide the uncensored data. The bureau handles any domestic investigation, but sometimes shares with the CIA the information about the American participant in those calls."
The Washington Post cited other legal concerns raised by the program. It points out that by law, "Every telecom operator is governed by regulations on CPNI, or customer proprietary network information," which it is required to protect from third parties. The information AT&T handed over to the CIA falls under this regulation.
Given the absence of a court order or a subpoena, "This suggests that AT&T may have stepped out of bounds when it entered into its deal with the CIA and began providing details of US-based phone numbers."
The latest revelations, coming on top of the exposure of massive spying on European citizens as well as the tapping of the personal phones of leaders such as Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, will have reverberations across the Atlantic. European regulators and politicians have vowed to subject a bid by AT&T to acquire the European cell phone provider Vodafone to tight scrutiny.
AT&T, Verizon and other telecom companies have a long record of close collaboration in the US government's illegal domestic spying operations.
Under the Bush administration, a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) established through documents obtained by a former AT&T technician that the company allowed the NSA to set up secret offices inside its facilities, giving it direct access to the "switches" through which phone calls and Internet data are routed.
So egregious was the participation of the telecoms in the Bush administration's illegal domestic spying operations that the government was compelled to seek legislation (the FISA Amendments Act) granting them retroactive immunity against any legal actions—a measure which, along with expanded spying powers, then US senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama supported.
Some five years later, this collaboration involves not only the telecoms but Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, YouTube and Apple as well as thousands of other technology, finance and manufacturing firms, which are rewarded with both government funds and access to classified information. Under its Corporate Partner Access Program, revealed in a document released by Snowden last August, the NSA, after obtaining orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, paid out $278 million last year to pay for access to "high volume circuit and packet-switched networks."
Far from defending the constitutional rights of their customers, these companies have proven willing accomplices in the establishment of a police-state surveillance system whose real purpose is not to combat terrorism, but to amass information on the general population with the aim of protecting the banks, corporations and super-rich.
On Tuesday, the US Senate Intelligence Committee, meeting in a closed session, voted 13-to-2 to approve a measure providing annual funding for the NSA and other US intelligence agencies. Thanks to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, it is now known that this so-called "black budget" amounted to $52.6 billion in 2013, including $10.8 billion for the NSA alone.
In this year's annual funding measure, the Senate committee includes something extra. According to a press release issued by the panel, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 provides for "important measures to protect against insider threats by adding necessary funds to deploy information technology detection systems across the Intelligence Community." It empowers the Director of National Intelligence "to improve the government's process to investigate (and reinvestigate) individuals with security clearances to access classified information."
In other words, the response of the Democratic leadership in the US Senate to the public outrage generated by Edward Snowden's revelations of the police-state spying by the NSA is to promote a crackdown and witch-hunt within the US intelligence agencies, aimed at preventing anyone else from exposing criminal state conspiracies to the people of the US and the world."
rest at http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/11/08/nsat-n08.html
Report: IRS refunded $4B to identity thieves
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds last year to people using stolen identities, with some of the money going to addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland, according to an inspector general's report released Thursday.
The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai.
In the U.S., more fraudulent returns went to Miami than any other city. Other top destinations were Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston.
The IRS has stepped up efforts to fight identity theft, but thieves are getting more aggressive, said the report by J. Russell George, Treasury's inspector general for tax administration. Last year, the IRS stopped more than $12 billion in fraudulent refunds from going to identity thieves, compared with $8 billion the year before.
"Identity theft continues to be a serious problem with devastating consequences for taxpayers and an enormous impact on tax administration," George said in a statement. The fraud "erodes taxpayer confidence in the federal tax system."
Thieves often steal Social Security numbers from people who don't have to file tax returns, including the young, the old and people who have died, the report said. In other cases, thieves use stolen Social Security numbers to file fraudulent tax returns before the legitimate taxpayer files.
The IRS, which takes pride in issuing quick refunds, often sends them out before employers are required to file forms documenting wages, the report said.
"The constantly evolving tactics used by scammers to commit identity theft continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing the IRS, and we take this issue very seriously," the IRS said in a statement. "The IRS has a comprehensive and aggressive identity theft strategy that focuses on preventing refund fraud, investigating these crimes and assisting taxpayers victimized by it."
Despite budget cuts, the agency said, agents have resolved more than 565,000 cases of identity theft this year, three times the number of cases resolved at the same time last year.
A separate report by George said the number of identity theft victims is on the rise as thieves get more aggressive.
Through June, the IRS identified 1.6 million victims who had their identities stolen during this year's tax filing season, the report said. That compares with 1.2 million victims in 2012.
Many of these people didn't realize they were victims until they submitted their returns only to learn from the IRS that someone else had already used their Social Security number to file and claim a refund.
The IRS does a good job of eventually identifying the proper owner of Social Security numbers, but the process can be lengthy, the report said. For cases closed between August 2011 and July 2012, it took an average of 312 days to resolve the case and issue a proper refund, the report said.
The IRS said it has resolved most of this year's identity theft cases within 120 days.
Last year, the IRS issued 1.1 million refunds to people using stolen Social Security numbers, the inspector general's report said. Those refunds totaled $3.6 billion. By comparison, the IRS issued $5.2 billion in refunds to people who stole Social Security numbers in 2011, the report said.
Additionally, the IRS issued 141,000 refunds last year to people using stolen taxpayer identification numbers, which are typically used by foreign citizens who earn money in the U.S. Those refunds totaled $385 million, the report said.
Florida is a big target of identity theft in part because of the large number of older residents living there. Older and younger people can be targets for identity theft because many don't meet the income requirements to file a federal tax return.
