Earlier today, we learned that (thanks to Antonin Scalia) the word “suspicion” no longer means what it used to mean.

Now we learn that “protected” doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

As Josh Gerstein reports, the judge in the Thomas Drake case has agreed to let the government protect unclassified information using the Classified Information Procedures Act. But as Drake’s lawyers make clear, the process of substitution is making unclassified information look classified.

Defense lawyers contend the prosecutions proposed substitutions would be obvious to jurors, despite Bennett’s ruling that they they should be “seamless.” Prosecutors say some of the changes will be seamless but others cannot be because they pertain to handwritten notes that can’t be modified without jurors noticing.

Defense lawyers also say that if jurors are aware of the changes, they’ll conclude that the information Drake is accused of mishandling is worthy of being treated as national secrets. “This will signal to the jury that the Court and the government believe information in the document was so potentially damaging to national security that it had to be withheld from the public — the very fact they must decide,” defense attorney Deborah Boardman wrote in a filing Monday.

Most interesting, though, is the Defense observation that one of the documents the government will introduce at trial defines “protected” differently than the government is defining it to claim it must be substituted under CIPA.

The defense has briefed its position on the Court’s decision to impose substitutions for relevant, unclassified information that the government deems “protected,” and we will not reiterate our arguments here. However, we thought the Court should be aware of the fact that NSA, in its employee Security Agreements, defines the term “protected information” in the following manner: “information obtained as a result of my relationship with NSA which is classified or in the process of a classification determination pursuant to the standards of the Executive Order 12958.” Thus, according to an NSA document, which will be a government exhibit in this case, “protected information” is “classified” information. However, the government has led the Court to believe that “protected information” is unclassified information that NSA claims deserves protection. NSA cannot have it both ways. [my emphasis]

That might make sense if language worked the way it’s supposed to. But it appears we’ve entered that stage of late Empire where words don’t mean what they used to mean anymore.

DOD has announced that prosecutors have recommended charges against KSM and the other alleged 9/11 plotters.

The Department of Defense announced today the office of military commissions prosecutors have sworn charges against five individuals detained at Guantanamo Bay:  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.

The prosecutors have recommended that the charges against all five of the accused be referred as capital.  Capital charges may only be pursued with the convening authority’s approval.  Under rules governing military commissions, the accused will have the right to counsel learned in applicable law relating to capital cases.

The charges allege that the five accused were responsible for the planning and execution of the attacks on New York, Washington D.C. and Shanksville, Pa. that occurred on September 11, 2001.  Those attacks resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.

The charges are allegations that the accused committed offenses that are chargeable under the Military Commissions Act of 2009, 10 U.S.C. §§ 948a, et seq. There are eight charges common to all five of the accused: conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, hijacking aircraft, and terrorism.  The accused are presumed innocent and may be convicted only if their guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

These charges go beyond what is necessary to establish that the 9/11 co-conspirators may be lawfully detained under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, as informed by the laws of war — an issue that each Guantanamo detainee may challenge in a habeas petition in federal court.

In accordance with the Military Commissions Act of 2009, the sworn charges will be forwarded to the Convening Authority, Bruce MacDonald.  The convening authority will make an independent determination as to whether to refer some, all, or none of the charges for trial by military commission.  If the convening authority decides to refer the case to trial, he will designate commission panel members (jurors).  The chief trial judge of the Military Commissions Trial Judiciary would then assign a military judge to the case.

How many times have we faced this stage already? How many times over could we have prosecuted KSM already if we had just used existing, rather than Kangaroo, courts? How many more years will it take to determine whether KSM can plead guilty so as to martyr himself?

SCOTUS has just ruled unanimously that John Ashcroft can’t be sued by Abdullah al-Kidd for using a material witness warrant to incarcerate him. The 8 justices (Elena Kagan recused herself) all agree there was no law explicitly prohibiting this kind of abuse of material witness warrants, so Ashcroft has immunity from suit.

Where the decision gets interesting is in the justices’ various statements about whether material witness warrants are valid under the Fourth Amendment. The court’s swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, basically invited a constitutional challenge of the material witness warrants themselves.

The scope of the statute’s lawful authorization is uncertain. For example, a law-abiding citizen might observe a crime during the days or weeks before a scheduled flight abroad. It is unclear whether those facts alone might allow police to obtain a material witness warrant on the ground that it “may become impracticable” to secure the person’s presence by subpoena. Ibid. The question becomes more difficult if one further assumes the traveler would be willing to testify if asked; and more difficult still if one supposes that authorities delay obtaining or executing the warrant until the traveler has arrived at the airport. These possibilities resemble the facts in this case. See ante, at 2.

In considering these issues, it is important to bear in mind that the Material Witness Statute might not provide for the issuance of warrants within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment’s Warrant Clause. The typical arrest warrant is based on probable cause that the arrestee has committed a crime; but that is not the standard for the issuance of warrants under the Material Witness Statute. See ante, at 11 (reserving the possibility that probable cause for purposes of the Fourth Amendment’s Warrant Clause means “only probable cause to suspect a violation of law”). If material witness warrants do not qualify as “Warrants” under the Fourth Amendment, then material witness arrests might still be governed by the Fourth Amendment’s separate reasonableness requirement for seizures of the person. See United States v. Watson, 423 U. S. 411 (1976). Given the difficulty of these issues, the Court is correct to address only the legal theory put before it, without further exploring when material witness ar-rests might be consistent with statutory and constitutional requirements.

Mind you, he remains coy about what he thinks about the material witness warrants, as his language makes clear: “uncertain,” “might,” “unclear,” “more difficult,” “more difficult,” “possibilities,” “might not,” “might.”  Of note, though, he neither endorses a rather crazy argument Antonin Scalia makes (joined by the usual suspects)–that witnesses to a crime may now be considered suspects of a sort–nor Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s trashing (joined by Sotomayor and Breyer but not Kennedy) of that claim.

Here’s Scalia’s assertion:

Needless to say, warrantless, “suspicionless intrusions pursuant to a general scheme,” id., at 47, are far removed from the facts of this case. A warrant issued by a neutral Magistrate Judge authorized al-Kidd’s arrest. The affidavit accompanying the warrant application (as al-Kidd concedes) gave individualized reasons to believe that he was a material witness and that he would soon disappear.The existence of a judicial warrant based on individualized suspicion takes this case outside the domain of not only our special-needs and administrative-search cases, but of Edmond as well.

A warrant based on individualized suspicion in fact grants more protection against the malevolent and the incompetent than existed in most of our cases eschewing inquiries into intent.

Here’s Ginsburg’s response:

The Court thrice states that the material witness warrant for al-Kidd’s arrest was “based on individualized suspicion.” Ante, at 6, 8. The word “suspicion,” however, ordinarily indicates that the person suspected has engaged in wrongdoing. See Black’s Law Dictionary 1585 (9th ed. 2009) (defining “reasonable suspicion” to mean “[a] particularized and objective basis, supported by specific and articulable facts, for suspecting a person of criminal activity”). Material witness status does not “involv[e] suspicion, or lack of suspicion,” of the individual so identified. See Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U. S. 419, 424–425 (2004).This Court’s decisions, until today, have uniformly used the term “individualized suspicion” to mean “individualized suspicion of wrong-doing.”

[12 cases–many of them the ones used to authorized warrantless wiretaps–cited]

The Court’s suggestion that the term “individualized suspicion” is more commonly associated with “know[ing] something about [a] crime” or “throwing . . . a surprise birthday party” than with criminal suspects, ante, at 6, n. 2 (internal quotation marks omitted), is hardly credible. The import of the term in legal argot is not genuinely debatable. When the evening news reports that a murder “suspect” is on the loose, the viewer is meant to be on the lookout for the perpetrator, not the witness. Ashcroft understood the term as lawyers commonly do: He spoke of detaining material witnesses as a means to “tak[e] suspected terrorists off the street.” App. 41 (internal quotation marks omitted).

And here’s Scalia’s retort to that:

JUSTICE GINSBURG suggests that our use of the word “suspicion” is peculiar because that word “ordinarily” means “that the person suspected has engaged in wrongdoing.” Post, at 3, n. 2 (opinion concurring in judgment). We disagree. No usage of the word is more common and idiomatic than a statement such as “I have a suspicion he knows something about the crime,” or even “I have a suspicion she is throwing me a surprise birthday party.” The many cases cited by JUSTICE GINSBURG, post, at 3, n. 2, which use the neutral word “suspicion” in connection with wrongdoing, prove nothing except that searches and seizures for reasons other than suspected wrongdoing are rare.

In other words, Scalia wants to broaden the Fourth Amendment to sanction searches (and arrests) of people suspected of knowing something or doing something (throwing a birthday party!), rather than just those suspected of doing something illegal.

Not only does Scalia’s novel interpretation of the word “suspicion” pre-empt future challenge to material witness warrants’ constitutionality, but it also lays a novel groundwork for sanctioning all the domestic surveillance the government has been conducting. After all, the government is wiretapping (or tracking the geolocation of) people who may or may not have committed a crime, but are suspected solely of talking to or hanging out in the vicinity of a suspected terrorist.

And because Kennedy didn’t tip his hand in either direction, that’s the kind of interpretation the government will use–no doubt in its secret interpretations of the laws–to claim it can surveill even those of us suspected of no crime.

Because suspicion doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

On the first news day after the holiday weekend reporting on Lockheed Martin, WSJ reports that the US is moving towards making cyberattacks an act of war.

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

And they’re building into this policy an assumption that the biggest attacks must have state sponsorship.

Pentagon officials believe the most-sophisticated computer attacks require the resources of a government. For instance, the weapons used in a major technological assault, such as taking down a power grid, would likely have been developed with state support, Pentagon officials say.

This new policy won’t be subject to intelligence manipulation at all, nosiree!

The next time someone wants to invent a casus belli against Iran, they can just point to a particularly successful hack and (ignoring all questions about appropriate retaliation for Stuxnet…) claim the Iranians have done it and say it, like evidence of WMD, is classified.

They already presumably fabricated one Laptop of Death for Iran, why not another?

And then, declaring ourselves incompetent to retaliate via cyberspace (Stuxnet notwithstanding), they’ll have their excuse to roll out the war machine.

As first started leaking last week, Lockheed Martin seems to have been hacked.

Last weekend was bad for a very large U. S. defense contractor that uses SecureID tokens from RSA to provide two-factor authentication for remote VPN access to their corporate networks. Late on Sunday all remote access to the internal corporate network was disabled. All workers were told was that it would be down for at least a week. Folks who regularly telecommute were asked to come into nearby offices to work. Then earlier today (Wednesday) came word that everybody with RSA SecureID tokens would be getting new tokens over the next several weeks. Also, everybody on the network (over 100,000 people) would be asked to reset their passwords, which means admin files have probably been compromised.

What seems to have happened is hackers used information gotten in the RSA Data Security hack to try to break Lockheed’s own security–basically, Lockheed noticed that hackers were trying to use the keys they stole in March to open a bunch of locks at Lockheed. Lockheed appears to have discovered the effort and in response, started shutting down remote access on parts of its network.

Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s No. 1 supplier, is experiencing a major disruption to its computer systems that could be related to a problem with network security, a defense official and two sources familiar with the issue said on Thursday.

Lockheed, the biggest provider of information technology to the U.S. government, is grappling with “major internal computer network problems,” said one of the sources who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

[snip]

The slowdown began on Sunday after security experts for the company detected an intrusion to the network, according to technology blogger Robert Cringely. He said it involved the use of SecurID tokens that employees use to access Lockheed’s internal network from outside its firewall,

[snip]

Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, and a consultant to Lockheed, said the company monitored every node on its vast global computer network from a large operations center in a Maryland suburb near Washington, D.C.

“If it sees signs that the network is being compromised by outsiders it will shut down whole sectors of the network to protect information,” Thompson said.

He said Lockheed had advanced networking monitoring tools that gave it a “much better understanding of their systems’ status than most other organizations, including the Department of Defense.”

In other words, Lockheed may have prevented a much bigger breach into their own systems. But the assumption of many is that other companies might not have noticed what Lockheed did. Stories on this hack all feature a list of other defense contractors–like Boeing and Raytheon and Northrup Grumman–who “decline to comment,” which might mean they’re scrambling to address the same problem Lockheed is, only trying to do so without all the bad PR.

Now, most observers of this hack have suggested that the hackers–who might work for a state actors or some other sophisticated crime group–were after Lockheed’s war toy information (which partly explains why you’d ask Lockheed’s aerospace competitors if they’d been hacked too). But remember that Lockheed does a lot for the government besides build planes. Of particular note, they’re a huge NSA contractor. Maybe the hackers were after info on jet fighters, or maybe they were after the data and data collection programs our own government hides from its own citizens.

Which is all a reminder that, amidst the sound and fury directed at WikiLeaks (which after all shared important information with citizens who deserved to know it), there’s a whole lot more hacking we don’t learn the results of, hacking that either might result in others adopting our lethal technologies, or in third parties stealing the data we’re not even allowed to know.

Now, granted, Lockheed has far far better security than DOD’s SIPRNet does. At least they’re trying to protect their data. But it’s not clear they–or their counterparts–are entirely successful.

Slightly over a week after McClatchy focused new attention on evidence that Bruce Ivins may not have been able to produce the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks, and just days after Jerrold Nadler called attention to the FBI’s obfuscations about the technical data McClatchy used, the LAT has decided to ignore such technical problems with the FBI’s case and return to claims that Ivins must be the killer because he was mentally unstable.

Of note, much of the LAT story fleshes out the Shrinks-4-Hire report, complete with names, a detailed description of how Bruce Ivins’ mother tried to abort Ivins by bouncing down the stairs, and descriptions from his psychiatrists.

Ivins grew up in Lebanon, Ohio, a small town 30 miles northeast of Cincinnati. His parents had planned the arrivals of their first two children, both sons, but by late 1945 the couple had no desire to add to the family. In conversations with a sister-in-law, Mary Ivins described how she tried to abort the unwanted third pregnancy:

Over and over, she descended a series of steps by bouncing with a thud on her buttocks.

Bruce Ivins, born April 22, 1946, would eventually hear the story himself.

[snip]

A psychiatrist who treated him in the late 1990s, Dr. David Irwin, confided to a therapist that Ivins was the “scariest” patient he had ever known.

It’s as if someone leaked the LAT an unredacted copy of the report in an effort to drown out increasing focus on the many problems with the case. And it’s as if the LAT simply used that as a template for their story, without consulting the information released since the Shrinks-4-Hire was completed that poses problems for it: not the National Academy of Sciences report and the McClatchy stories raising key technical questions about the case, and not Noah Shachtman’s story raising doubts about the FBI’s claim no one else could have accessed Ivins’ anthrax.

I guess some people tied to the anthrax case believe if you keep repeating the story, “Bruce Ivins stalked women, so he must have tried to kill Patrick Leahy” enough times, people will continue to believe it.

I actually wasn’t going to post this video. I haven’t lived in Grand Rapids all that long (so it’s really not my place to criticize this video), but the video misses some of the real funkiness of the art and buildings even in the streets that were filmed.

But it’s getting some play on other blogs and, well, it does show some of the streets and parks where I walk my dog, so I felt obliged.

So here’s the story: this video is meant as a snub to Newsweek, which back in January named Grand Rapids (with Flint and Detroit) as one of Michigan’s three top-ten dyingest cities in the country. So now Newsweek, seeing how a bunch of Grand Rapidians will parade the streets to prove Newsweek wrong, has sheepishly apologized.

To the Grand Rapids crowd:First off, we LOVEyour YouTube LipDub. We’re big fans, and are inspired by your love of the city you call home.

But so you know what was up with the list you’re responding to, we want you to know it was done by a website called mainstreet.com–not by Newsweek (it was unfortunately picked up on the Newsweek web site as part of a content sharing deal)–and it uses a methodology that our current editorial team doesn’t endorse and wouldn’t have employed. It certainly doesn’t reflect our view of Grand Rapids.

They should have just asked my dog. He loves Grand Rapids. He’s very urbane and so loves to strut through all these city streets, plus he’s figured out a place (that appears in the video) where he can jump in the river when it’s hot.

Steven Aftergood linked to this colloquy on the PATRIOT Act which reveals a lot about Ron Wyden and Mark Udall’s efforts to force the government to admit how it’s suveilling Americans. The colloquy basically puts not just the agreement, but the circumstances that went into the agreement, into the Congressional record.

After some Senatorial blathering (mostly Wyden and Udall talking about how swell DiFi is for making this agreement), DiFi starts the colloquy by describing a meeting the night before (that is, on Wednesday night) between her, Wyden, Udall, Jeff Merkley, and Sheldon Whitehouse.

Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I wish to thank both Senator Wyden and Senator Udall for their comments. We did have a meeting last night. We did discuss this thoroughly. The decision was that we would enter into this colloquy, so I will begin it, if I may.

These Senators and I, along with the junior Senator from Oregon, Mr. Merkley, the Senator from Colorado, Mr. Mark Udall, and the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse met last night to discuss this amendment, the legal interpretation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provisions and how these provisions are implemented.

Note the presence of Merkley and Whitehouse, which I’ll return to.

DiFi then talks about how great the collection program in question is.

I very much appreciate the strong views Senator Wyden and Senator Udall have in this area, and I believe they are raising a serious and important point as to how exactly these authorities are carried out. I believe we are also all in agreement that these are important counterterrorism authorities and have contributed to the security of our Nation.

At which point Wyden interrupts and basically says (still speaking in Senate blather, mind you), “um, no.”

Mr. President, I have enormous respect for my special friend from California, the distinguished chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee. I have literally sat next to her for more than a decade. We agree on virtually all of these issues, but this is an area where we have had a difference of opinion.

Wyden and Udall basically both then repeat their warnings about how the government is doing something with PATRIOT not explicitly supported by the law. At which point DiFi pipes up to say, alright already, I’ve conceded you have a point but don’t talk about this here! Talk about it in my secret committee!

Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, if I may respond, I have agreed that these are important issues and that the Intelligence Committee, which is charged with carrying out oversight over the 16 various intelligence agencies of what is called the intelligence community, should be carried out forthrightly. I also believe the place to do it is in the Intelligence Committee itself.

At which point she lays out the terms of the agreement: the Senate Intelligence Committee will have a hearing on the secret law right after the Memorial Day break, and if the Committee agrees to make a fix, they will amend the Intelligence Authorization.

I have said to these distinguished Senators that it would be my intention to call together a hearing as soon as we come back from the Memorial Day break with the intelligence community agencies, the senior policymakers, and the Department of Justice to make sure the committee is comfortable with the FISA programs and to make changes if changes are needed. We will do that.

So it would be my intention to have these hearings completed before the committee considers the fiscal year 2012 intelligence authorization bill so that any amendments to FISA can be considered at that time.

The fact is, we do not usually have amendments to the intelligence authorization bill, but I believe the majority leader will do his best to secure a future commitment if such is needed for a vote on any amendment. I have not agreed to support any amendment because at this stage it is hypothetical, and we need to look very deeply into what these Senators have said and pointed out last night with specificity and get the response to it from the intelligence committee, have both sides hear it, and then make a decision that is based not only on civil liberties but also on the necessity to keep our country safe. I believe we can do that.

Note DiFi’s mention of “specificity,” which I’ll return to.

After DiFi finishes, Wyden pipes in to say that if the Intelligence Committee doesn’t decide to make a fix, then Harry Reid has promised that Wyden and Udall can introduce their amendment on a different bill, one DiFi doesn’t have control over.

Senator Udall and I have discussed this issue with Senator Reid. Senator Reid indicated to the chairwoman and myself and Senator Udall that we would have an opportunity through these hearings–and, of course, any amendments to the bill would be discussed on the intelligence authorization legislation, which is a matter that obviously has to be classified–but if we were not satisfied, if we were not satisfied through that process, we would have the ability to offer an amendment such as our original one on the Senate floor.

Of course, the chairwoman would still retain full rights to oppose it, but we would make sure if this issue of secret law wasn’t fixed and there wasn’t an improved process to make more transparent and more open the interpretation of the law–not what are called sources and methods which are so important to protect our people–we would have an opportunity, if it wasn’t corrected in the intelligence community, to come to the floor.

Senator Reid has just indicated to all of us that he would focus on giving us a vote if we believed it was needed on another bill–not the intelligence authorization–before September 30.

Udall then weighs in with some Senate blather thank yous that provide a few more details on the meeting.

I also wish to acknowledge the involvement of the Senator from New Mexico, who is presiding at this moment in time, and the Senator from Oregon, Mr. Merkley, and the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, who has been very involved in bringing this case to the attention of all of us.

The Senator from New Mexico, of course, is Udall’s cousin Tom. Apparently you even have to use Senate blather for family members.

Wyden comes back, restates the terms of the agreement (SSCI hearing, possible amendment, but if not, then an amendment in the full Senate). As part of that, he twice thanks–more Senate blather–Merkley, including this note.

Again, our thanks to the chairwoman and all of my colleagues on the floor, including Senator Merkley, who is not a member of the committee and knows an incredible amount about it and certainly showed that last night in our discussions and was very helpful.

At which point Merkley makes this speech (plus some Senate blather).

It was William Pitt in England who commented that the wind and the rain can enter my house, but the King cannot.

It captured the spirit and understanding of the balance between personal privacy, personal freedoms, and issues of the Crown regarding maintenance of security. It was this foundation that came in for our fourth amendment of our Constitution that lays out clear standards for the protection of privacy and freedoms.

So as we have wrestled with the standard set out in the PATRIOT Act, a standard that says the government may have access to records that are relevant to an investigation–now, that term is, on its face, quite broad and expansive, quite a low standard, if you will. But what happens when it is interpreted out of the sight of this Chamber, out of the sight of the American people? That is the issue my colleague has raised, and it is a very important issue.

I applaud the chair of the Intelligence Committee for laying out a process whereby we all can wrestle with this issue in an appropriate venue and have a path for amendments in the committee or possibly here on the floor of the Senate because I do think it is our constitutional responsibility to make sure the fourth amendment of the Constitution is protected, the privacy and freedoms of citizens are protected.

At which point DiFi officially declared the colloquy over.

So a couple of comments.

Make no mistake, not only did Wyden get this colloquy in the Senate record, but there appear to have been several threats hiding behind the Senate blather. DiFi has said she thinks the way to fix a secret law is to change it in a secret committee meeting. But Wyden et al have made it clear that if she doesn’t agree to fix it in her secret committee meeting, he will try to do so on the Senate floor.

And consider the role of Merkley here. He was at the meeting on Wednesday night, the only person present who is not a member of the Intelligence Committee (and who therefore did not attend the February 2 briefing that got Wyden all fired up about this). In his presence, the concerns about the program were discussed with some “specificity” (per DiFi’s description). As Wyden describes, Merkley was not only present at the meeting, but proved “he knows an incredible amount about” the problem. As part of the whole colloquy, Merkley suggests this problem is akin to letting the King enter your house, precisely what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

This is a key part of the threat, I suspect. Unlike Wyden and Udall, who learned of this problem via classified briefings, Merkley appears to have figured it out on his own. Which means he can speak openly about it if there is a full Senate debate about it.

Now that implicit threat may all get buried under Senate blather. But it appears the message to DiFi is that if she doesn’t fix this secret law in her secret committee, then there will be a public discussion about whatever crazy interpretation she is helping the Administration hide.

All of which sort of makes you wonder when DiFi first got briefed about this? Did the Administration brief the Gang of Four about it some time before it briefed the full committee in February?

In any case, I’m particularly interested in Whitehouse’s role in all of this. Partly, that’s because he’s increasingly the person other Senators (including, I believe, DiFi) look to for a read of what is acceptable or not. And Udall appears to suggest that Whitehouse had a key role in alerting him and Wyden to the problem. Yet he did not co-sponsor the legislation to fix the secret law.

So where is Whitehouse on the issue of this secret law?

No wonder the US Army was allegedly bested in the WikiLeaks leak by a Lady Gaga CD.

In addition to all the other gaping security problems with the classified network, there were apparently widely accessible SIPRNet computers with passwords written out on sticky notes on the computers.

A Guardian investigation focusing on soldiers who worked with Manning in Iraq has also discovered there was virtually no computer and intelligence security at Manning’s station in Iraq, Forward Operating Base Hammer. According to eyewitnesses, the security was so lax that many of the 300 soldiers on the base had access to the computer room where Manning worked, and passwords to access the intelligence computers were stuck on “sticky notes” on the laptop screens.

Rank and file soldiers would watch grisly “kill mission” footage as a kind of entertainment on computers with access to the sensitive network of US diplomatic and military communications known as SIPRNet.

Jacob Sullivan, 28, of Phoenix, Arizona, a former chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist, was stationed at FOB Hammer in Manning’s unit.

“A lot of different people worked from that building and in pretty much every room there was a SIPRNet computer attached to a private soldier or a specialist,” Sullivan said

“On the computers that I saw there was a [sticky label] either on the computer or next to the computer with the information to log on. I was never given permission to log on so I never used it but there were a lot of people who did.”

He added: “If you saw a laptop with a red wire coming out of it, you knew it was a SIPRNet. I would be there by myself and the laptops [would] be sitting there with passwords. Everyone would write their passwords down on sticky notes and set it by their computer. [There] wasn’t a lot of security going on so no wonder something like this transpired.”

Hey DOD? You gotta be trying to keep stuff secret if you’re going to claim it’s secret. If the password to get to the secrets is floating around on Post It notes, you really can’t argue that you were actively trying to keep this stuff secret.

As I’ve said repeatedly in discussions of the secret interpretations of the PATRIOT Act provisions that Ron Wyden and Mark Udall complained about, those interpretations probably claim the government can collect mass information on geolocation.

Julian Sanchez lays out why that is almost certainly the case in this worthwhile post. The three main points (there are several less crucial ones) are:

• The government has been using a hybrid approach–using a combination of pen registers and 2703(d) orders–to get geolocation data in criminal investigations with some support from courts; using pen registers with Section 215 orders could offer the same “hybrid” authorization
• The structure of Ron Wyden’s legislation aiming to rein in geolocation tracking starts with restrictions on FISA, which the criminal statute incorporates, but also includes explicit prohibitions on using pen registers and Section 215 to get geolocation information
• TruePosition’s LocInt service markets the ability to determine proximity, but doing so would rely on widespread collection of geolocation information

In other words, Sanchez lays out both the legal means we know the government has used to track geolocation, maps the legal means Wyden is attempting to use to curtail those legal means, and describes the technical necessity for widespread collection.

Which is a pretty compelling argument that the big rush to extend PATRIOT is about making sure this geolocation tracking doesn’t shut down over the Memorial Day weekend. So rest assured your government is tracking where you’re vacationing this weekend and with whom.