Report Suggests Obama May Take Drones Away From The CIA

from the more-transparency-please dept

While much of the recent conversation here surrounding the United States' use of drones has centered on the fear of how they might be used domestically, there can be little doubt that their use is highly controversial around the world as well. In that arena, the questions that arise are more about transparency in their use, collateral damage, and whether or not there is even a legal argument for their application at all. As the pressure continues to mount, President Obama finally began to at least respond, suggesting in his most recent State of the Union address that he is seeking moves that will "ensure that not only our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remain consistent with our laws and systems of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world." Many of us who have paid attention to Obama's actions versus his promises when it comes to transparency may have rolled our eyes, but there may shortly be a move coming in which, in the case of drones at least, progress will actually be made.

Reports are circulating via senior U.S. officials as sources that the President is going to take the CIA drone program, one of two in the United States, and unify it with the Defense Department's drone program. If it does indeed happen, this move should not go under-appreciated by those of us who wish for more accountability and transparency when our government decides to kill people abroad. As The Daily Beast notes:

The move could potentially toughen the criteria for drone strikes, strengthen the program's accountability, and increase transparency. Currently, the government maintains parallel drone programs, one housed in the CIA and the other run by the Department of Defense. The proposed plan would unify the command and control structure of targeted killings and create a uniform set of rules and procedures. The CIA would maintain a role, but the military would have operational control over targeting. Lethal missions would take place under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which governs military operations, rather than Title 50, which sets out the legal authorities for intelligence activities and covert operations. “This is a big deal,” says one senior administration official who has been briefed on the plan. “It would be a pretty strong statement.”

While any move that occurs will be phased in gradually, the report suggests it will be completed within the President's second term. The likely pusher for this shift, oddly enough, is coming from John Brennan, newly appointed CIA Director, who also has headed up the administration's drone program since the start of his first term. Reportedly, Brennan wants to get back to gathering intelligence, the CIA's longstanding role prior to the September 11 attacks over a decade ago. For the President, the one who dramatically upped the ante with America's drone strikes from the previous administration, this would be a serious move. Why?

Perhaps most important is that the CIA’s program is “covert”—which is to say it is not only highly classified, it’s deniable under the law. That means the CIA, in theory, can lie about the existence of the program or about particular operations. The military’s targeted killing program, however, is “clandestine”—which means it is secret but not deniable.

The cynical may not see much in such a move, but it's an important step. I'll leave it to other arenas for any debate over whether we should be using drones in the war on terror at all, but I would at least hope that we could all agree that when America, the nation, decides we're going to kill people overseas, America, the nation, should demand that choice be scrutable.

Filed Under: cia, drones, military, president obama, secrecy

White House Turns Star Wars / Star Trek Mistake Into Funny Meme

from the own-the-mistake dept

As I've said before, you better have a sense of humor if you're going to be a politician. Not too long ago, the White House issued a direct response to a petition that America build a Death Star, for instance. The writer of that response proved he had his wookies in a row when it came to knowledge of the Star Wars universe. The President last week? Not so much.

President Barack Obama mixed Star Wars and Star Trek metaphors in response to a question from CNN's Chief White House Correspondent Jessica Yellin in the White House Briefing Room on Friday, saying he didn't have the power to "somehow do a Jedi mind meld with these folks and convince them to do what's right."

The internet, as you'd imagine, lost their collective Sith (editor: is this a typo? I think this is a typo.). Message boards went crazy over the revelation that President Obama couldn't keep the Vulcan mind meld and the Jedi mind trick square in that noggin of his... so how can we trust him with drone strikes. Okay, so it wasn't that big a deal, but you have to give his staff credit for being able to own a mistake, silly as it may be, and turn it into an opportunity for the administration. Rather than get defensive about the silly news item, or even just ignoring it, the White House owned the mistake and poked a little fun at themselves while still trying to get their point across.

But then I saw the White House's response to Obama's unwitting mash-up and I had to admire the cheekiness of it. By the end of the day the White House Twitter account had posted the following meme photo, which in one fell swoop owned the error, proved that the White House knew its stuff in regards to Star Wars and Star Trek, and informed those following the story of the issue that the President was discussing when he made the slip-up.

We must bring balance to the Force. #Sequester #JediMindMeld twitter.com/whitehouse/sta… — The White House (@whitehouse) March 1, 2013

In case you can't see the tweet embed above, here's the image separately. If you're not familiar with the details of the two franchises, the yellow outlined words are a classic Star Wars font, while the white letters are typical Star Trek. Ditto the statements that match with the proper fonts. It's a "melding" (if you will) of the two properties in an attempt to "own" the mistake and try to actually get some political leverage out of it by pointing people to the White House's position on the matter. I'm going to leave the politics of the statement waaaaaaaaaay over there (I'm pointing to a fictional place that eats political commentary) and just say that I like politicians that don't take themselves too seriously. For the White House to also take that mistake and turn it into their own meme, utilizing the hash tag that was making fun of them for their own purposes, is simply deft.

Filed Under: jedi mind meld, president obama, sense of humor, sequester, star trek, star wars

President Obama Does Take Some Challenging Questions, But Leaves Many Aside

from the too-bad dept

We already noted that President Obama did his Google Hangout today, and surprisingly admitted that patent trolls are a problem. It's worth noting that he did actually get some directly challenging questions, including about gun control, immigration and a lack of transparency (especially on drones). Oh, and also about whether or not we should still have a penny (President Obama: "I don't know!"). That last one was actually the most popular question that people voted on, as compiled by Derek Khanna over at Townhall.com.

President Obama more or less avoided the question about drones -- other than to insist that no drones had been used to target people in the US and that the rules were different elsewhere. He also continued to insist that his administration is the most transparent in history, thanks to things like the White House visitor logs being released publicly. That, of course, is just one small part of transparency, and it's clear that the administration is absolutely failing on a number of different transparency issues (and is notably horrible at responding to Freedom of Information Act requests).

What's disappointing, though, is that many of the other top questions in that list didn't get asked (including the question about copyright issues that we'd mentioned, despite being the 8th most popular question by votes). Obviously, there is only a limited amount of time, and I actually think that Obama did a reasonably good job in actually responding to the questions asked with a bit more depth than I expected. It still wasn't that deep, but it wasn't nearly as superficial as I expected. And, at the very least, it gave a chance for him to hear some pointed questions on these issues. Hopefully, he decides to do this more than once a year, so that some of these other questions can actually be asked.

As a side note, I saw some people complain about the final questions which were more "personal" in nature, though I didn't think it was that bad. Yes, perhaps you could argue that it took time away from some of those serious questions, but there is something to be said for at least allowing a bit of personality to come through in these discussions. I thought the most amusing part, though, was that when John Green (of Vlogbrothers and DFTBA Records) asked the President to help name his expected child, the President refused, joking that if they ruled against him it would upset the child for the rest of their life -- but then he did note that they should make sure the child "doesn't forget to be awesome" (which is what DFTBA stands for). Obviously, he was saving up something about DFTBA, but that was still a nice touch.

Filed Under: google hangout, president obama, questions, town hall

President Obama Admits That Patent Trolls Just Try To 'Extort' Money; Reform Needed

from the didn't-expect-that dept

As we noted yesterday, President Obama is holding a "Fireside Hangout" via Google Plus today. In a bit of a surprise turn, he took a question about patents and patent reforms, with a specific question about software patents. And, his response was surprising. He admitted that there was a problem, and that there were some companies who were clearly not doing anything other than trying to "extort" money from others. Furthermore, while he pointed to the patent reform bill that passed in 2011, he also admitted that it really only went "halfway" towards reforming the patent system as far as it needed to go. If you click on the video, this takes place around 43:30 in the video. He also used the question to address a few broader issues, including innovation, privacy, the internet and the rapid change of technology.

Question: High tech startups are an important engine of the American economy. When I go around and talk to other enterpreneurs, what I hear is that they're afraid that if they become successful, they're going to be targeted by patent trolls... What are you planning to do to limit the abuse of software patents?...

Obama: A couple years ago we began a process of patent reform. We actually passed some legislation that made progress on some of these issues. But it hasn't captured all the problems.

The folks that you're talking about are a classic example. They don't actually produce anything themselves. They're just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else's idea and see if they can extort some money out of them. Sometimes these things are challenging. Because we also want to make sure that patents are long enough, and that people's intellectual property is protected. We've got to balance that with making sure that they're not so long that innovation is reduced.

But I do think that our efforts at patent reform only went about halfway to where we need to go. What we need to do is pull together additional stakeholders and see if we can build some additional consensus on smarter patent laws.

This is true, by the way, across the board, when it comes to high tech issues. The technology is changing so fast, we want to protect privacy, we want to protect people's civil liberties. We want to make sure the internet stays open. I'm an ardent believer that what's powerful about the internet is its openness and the capacity for people to get out there and introduce a new idea with low barriers to entry. We also want to make sure that people's intellectual property is protected. Whether it's how we're dealing with copyright, how we're dealing with patents, how we're dealing with piracy issues. What we've tried to do is be an honest broker between the various stakeholders and to continue to refine it -- hopefully keeping up with the technology -- which doesn't mean that there won't be some problems that we still haven't identified and that we have to keep working on.

Some will reasonably be less impressed by the hedging at the end, but this is the first statement we've really seen that the administration believes that patent trolling is a problem (even to the point of referring to it as extortion). It's also the first we've heard from the administration that they only consider the last patent reform bill (the AIA) a "halfway" solution. To date, the administration had acted as if passing that was fixing everything.

Filed Under: patent reform, patent trolls, patents, president obama, software patents

Cybersecurity Executive Order Actually Respects Some Privacy; So Do We Actually Need CISPA Any More?

from the an-improvement dept

Exactly as predicted yesterday, President Obama talked about cybersecurity in last night's State of the Union address, including his plan to sign an executive order on cybersecurity. What's a bit surprising is that the executive order... is actually pretty reasonable. Unlike some earlier drafts, it appears that the White House actually took the privacy concerns fairly seriously. Most of the executive order focuses on the government sharing "threat info" with companies rather than with companies sharing info with the government. There is some support for companies sharing information back, but with some clear privacy standards. As always, how this works in practice will be more important than what's written down now.

That said, this raises a pretty big question: if this is in place, why do we need CISPA (or any other cybersecurity regulations). Well, to be clear, this doesn't raise that question -- that question has been out there all along. Our biggest concern with all of this talk about "cybersecurity" is that no one ever seems to explain why it's actually needed, other than vague threats of evil bogeymen hacking away at our computer systems. But they've never shown what current laws are a problem and what important information sharing is currently blocked because of existing laws. Furthermore, they haven't explained what the real risk we're facing is. The Hollywood inspired stories of evil hackers taking down airplanes make for nice visuals, but have little basis in truth. So now we have a document that lets the government helps companies if there is a real attack. Why do we need anything more?

CISPA, in particular, doesn't seem to add anything of value to what's already in the exec order, other than trying to free up companies from any possible liability when they hand over your info to government agencies based on vague standards concerning "threats" (and then those government agencies can then use that info for pretty much anything). So rather than focusing on legislation, why not watch how well things play out with this executive order in place?

Filed Under: cispa, cybersecurity, executive order, president obama

Would President Obama Answer A Question About The DMCA During His Google Hangout?

from the doubtful,-but... dept

If you haven't seen the news yet, President Obama is going to do a Google Hangout on Thursday in which he'll answer some presubmitted questions. The White House and YouTube have set up a ridiculously clumsy submission system, allowing people to submit questions by text or by video and then anyone can vote on them, though browsing the questions or even linking to any particular question appears to take a Herculean effort. That said, a few people have asked some questions about copyright (you can do a search on the submission page). One interesting one, comes from Public Knowledge, in which they directly ask him about fixing the problems with anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA, such as those we've been talking about concerning phone unlocking. That link above should allow you to vote for the question. You can also see the video of the question below. It would be nice to see that question get a lot of votes, and to see if the President would be willing to actually answer the question.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, mobile phones, president obama, questions, unlocking

Obama Signs 'Whistleblower Protection Act' The Same Day That Whistleblower Bradley Manning Is In Court

from the funny-how-that-works dept

We've discussed the Whistleblower Protection Act in the past. The bill provides somewhat greater protections for government employees who blow the whistle on government wrongdoing -- though it's not as strong as it could be. After a couple years of various Senators blocking the bill, it finally was approved and signed into law by Obama on Tuesday. Of course, it seems like there's a fair bit of irony that, as Obama signed the bill into law, one of the most famous whistleblowers out there, Bradley Manning, was in court to deal with the latest hearings for his actions. And, yes, I know that Manning's critics insist that he was no whistleblower, but it seems that the line here is very fine indeed. From Manning's statements, he clearly believed he was blowing the whistle on illegal activities by the US government. But he gets no protections at all. Instead, there's a decent chance he'll spend his life in jail.

Filed Under: bradley manning, president obama, whistleblower protection act, whistleblowers

President Obama Is Not Impressed With Your Right To Modify His Photos

from the copyfraud dept

You may have heard that, over the weekend, President Obama released a photo taken late last week with him and Olympic medal winning gymnast McKayla Maroney, doing the "not impressed" pose: If you're not up on your memes, you can catch up on the "McKayla Maroney is not impressed meme" here and here. The photo of the President doing the meme-tastic pose generated a ton of buzz, with the apparent story being that during her visit to the White House, the President pulled her aside and said "I pretty much do that face at least once a day."

Cute. And, of course, nice to have a President not so out of touch that he's unaware of internet memes.

Except... as lawyer Venkat Balasubramani quickly noted, the restrictions on use are somewhat questionable. Beneath the photo on the Flickr account, it states:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

This is, of course, not a new thing. In fact, we reported on this exact phrase on the White House Flickr feeds three years ago. As we noted at the time, there had been some controversy when the White House first started using Flickr in the early days of the Obama administration, as any Federal US government created work is automatically public domain. Yet, Flickr did not have a "public domain" license option. In response, Flickr actually created a special license to indicate that the work was a US government work. That license explicitly states that "anyone may, without restriction under U.S. copyright laws... create derivative works."

And yet, the White House is ignoring what that license says in claiming that the photograph "may not be manipulated in any way." That's clearly untrue under the law and a form of copyfraud, in that they are overclaiming rights.

But, in this case, it's especially ridiculous, since the entire reason the "McKayla is not impressed" meme became so popular was the memegeneration of putting her displeased face into various other images.

Filed Under: copyright, derivative works, mckayla maroney, memes, not impressed, president obama, public domain, white house

President Obama Signs 'Secret Directive' On Cybersecurity

from the it's-so-secure-it's-secret dept

While we're hearing that the Senate is likely to take up (though not pass) the Cybersecurity Act yet again either today or tomorrow, and the White House is still sitting on a cybersecurity "executive order," in the meantime it's being reported that President Obama has signed a "secret directive" to allow the military to "act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks." This is limited to the military, but that means we're talking about the NSA (which is a part of the Defense Department). Considering that it seems to view a stronger offensive effort (i.e., collecting all data) a key part of a strong "defense," this is worrisome.

The really troubling part in all of this is the really unnecessary level of secrecy. We keep being told scary bogeyman stories about online attacks without any evidence or proof. And now the President is signing a "secret" order allowing the military to do more in response? Without any real scrutiny, it's not difficult to see how these things expand unceasingly and are wide open for abuse. Given the NSA's track record here, it's inevitable that these efforts will be massively abused.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, military, nsa, president obama, secret directive

LEAKED! Here's The White House's Draft Cybersecurity Executive Order

from the vague-enough-for-ya? dept

Earlier this week, we wrote about how the White House was working on an executive order to act as a "stand in" for cybersecurity legislation that has so far failed to pass Congress (CISPA passed in the House, but a different effort, the Cybersecurity Act, failed in the Senate, and it would have been difficult to get the two houses aligned anyway). Last weekend Jason Miller from Federal News Radio wrote about a draft he saw... but failed to share the actual draft. We got our hands on a draft (and confirmed what it was with multiple sources) and wanted to share it, as these kinds of things deserve public scrutiny and discussion. It's embedded below. As expected, it does have elements of the Lieberman/Collins bill (to the extent that the White House actually can do things without legislation). It's also incredibly vague. The specific requirements for government agencies are left wide open to interpretation. For example, the State Dept. should engage other governments about protecting infrastructure. Well, duh. As expected, most stuff focuses on Homeland Security and its responsibilities to investigate a variety of different cybersecurity issues -- but, again, it's left pretty vague.

There is, as expected, plans concerning information sharing -- but again, they're left pretty empty on specifics. It talks about an "information exchange framework." Unfortunately, it does not appear to highlight privacy or civil liberties concerns in discussing the information sharing stuff. That seems like a pretty big problem. Homeland Security is tasked with coming up with a way to share information, pulling on some existing efforts, but nowhere do they call out how to make sure these information exchange programs don't lead to massive privacy violations, despite the President's earlier promises that any cybersecurity efforts would take into account privacy and civil liberties.

Separately, it lists out 16 critical infrastructure "sectors," but those can be interpreted really broadly, which is dangerous. We all understand how things like the electric grid, nuclear power plants, water facilities and such can be seen as critical infrastructure. But does "communications" include things like social networking? It's important that any plan be very, very specific about what sorts of things are critical infrastructure, so as to avoid sweeping up all sorts of things like internet services and opening them up to information "sharing" abuse efforts by the government. We all know there's plenty of evidence that when the government is given a loophole to spy on private communications, it figures out ways to drive fleets of trucks through that hole. Unfortunately, there's little indication that any of that has really been taken into consideration.

All that said, it is important to recognize that this is a draft, and it is not only subject to change, but there are indications that it is likely to change. But, seeing as this could have significant impact, it should be something that the public has a chance to weigh in on.

Honestly, looking this over, you get the sense that it's really designed to do one thing: scare those who fought against the various bills back to the table to compromise and get a bill out. It's no secret that the administration's overall preference is to get a law in place, rather than this executive order. That's been a failed effort so far, but you have to wonder if this is a ploy to scare those who opposed the Cybersecurity Act into thinking that if they don't approve some legislation, the exec order might be a bigger problem. There are way too many things left open ended in this draft, and while the administration can't go as far as Congress on many things, the open-ended nature of this order could certainly lead to problems for the industries who opposed previous efforts.

Either way, we'll have some more on this next week, but since we just got this and want to get it out there for comment, hopefully folks can spend some time this weekend discussing the (yes, once again, vague) particulars...

Filed Under: cispa, critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, cyberseuciryt act, executive order, homeland security, president obama, white house