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Yet Another “Lady Gaga” Exposure Forces DOD to Wipe Drone Control Computers

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On Friday, Wired broke the news that the DOD suffered yet another breach because they continue to leave computers exposed to outside storage systems. (h/t WO) In this case, the Ground Control Stations they use to control drones got infected with a keylogger virus.

But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.

Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.

After a virus was introduced into computers in Iraq three years ago via thumb drive, DOD claimed it had prohibited the use of any removable media with their computers. But then Bradley Manning allegedly removed hundreds of thousands of classified cables from SIPRNet using a Lady Gaga CD. Rather than making all computers inaccessible to removable media at that point, DOD left 12% of their computers vulnerable, deploying a buddy-system to prevent people from taking files inappropriately; but human buddy systems don’t necessarily prevent the transmission of viruses.

The good news is that the Host-Based Security System implemented in response to Wikileaks discovered the virus–two weeks ago.

But here’s the other interesting wrinkle. To get rid of these viruses, techs have resorted to wiping the hard drives of the targeting computers.

In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.

Given what little we know about the Anwar al-Awlaki assassination (which, as Wired points out, happened after the virus had knowingly infected these computers), this should not affect the computers that ten days ago killed two US citizens with no due process. The Newsweek story describing the CIA’s targeting process says that targeting is done in VA, not NV, where the virus hit.

But particularly given the questions about Samir Khan’s death, consider if that weren’t the case. That would mean a key piece of evidence about whether or not the US knowingly executed an American engaging in speech might be completely eliminated, wiped clean to fix a predictable virus.

That’s not the only risk, of course. We’ve talked before about how long it’ll take for Iran or Mexican drug cartels to hack our armed drones. If this virus were passed via deliberate hack, rather than sloppiness, then we might be one step closer to that eventuality.

All because DOD continues to refuse to take simple steps to secure their computers.

Did Thomas Drake Get iJustice?

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There’s an interesting discussion at the end of Josh Gerstein’s article on the Drake plea agreement. He points out that after Judge Bennett ruled that the government needed more descriptive substitutions for some of its exhibits, DOJ did not appeal the decision.

Experts said it was unlikely that Bennett’s rulings accounted entirely for the government’s sudden willingness to accept a sharply reduced charge. In a court filing Friday, prosecutors said “the government respectfully disagrees with the Court’s rulings” regarding what information Drake was entitled to use in his defense.

“In light of the Court’s ruling, which would mean that highly classified information would appear, without substitution, in exhibits made publicly available, the NSA has concluded that such disclosure would harm national security,” prosecutors wrote.

In cases involving classified evidence, the government has the right to pursue a pre-trial appeal challenging a judge’s rulings about what evidence the defense can present and any “substitutions” used to camouflage secret information.

Despite its disagreement with Bennett, who was appointed to the bench by Bush, the Justice Department did not challenge the judge’s rulings and instead commenced jury selection for the trial.

He also describes Jesselyn Radack, who in her role at Government Accountability Project, had supported Drake in his whistleblower stance, saying,

Radack told reporters that when [prosecutor William] Welch initiated plea talks a week ago he said he was doing so at [DOJ Criminal Division head Lanny] Breuer’s urging. She attributed the government’s flexible stance in part to sympathetic media coverage Drake received in recent weeks from The New Yorker and “60 Minutes,” among others.

Now, I have no idea whether Radack was close enough to the DOJ side of things to be able to judge their motivation. But I am struck that Lanny Breuer instructed Welch to seek a plea deal. And if Radack’s timing is correct, then DOJ started seeking a plea deal on the same day that Bennett ruled on the CIPA substitutions, but before DOJ actually withdrew its exhibits.

Radack attributes DOJ’s changed stance to reporters’ coverage of Drake’s case (ironically, in fact, to New Yorker and 60 Minutes pieces that almost certainly contained far more classified information in them than Drake was alleged to have kept).

But POGO’s Danielle Brian recalls that she raised Drake’s treatment with President Obama back in March.

I knew my topic was likely to be sensitive. I began by thanking the President for his strong support of whistleblower protections, and noted that it was not for lack of effort on the part of the White House that the legislation didn’t pass at the end of the last Congress.

I noted, however, that the current aggressive prosecution of national security whistleblowers is undermining this legacy. That we need to create safe channels for disclosure of wrongdoing in national security agencies. That we need to work harder to shrink the amount of over-classified materials that unnecessarily prompt leak prosecutions.The President shifted in his seat and leaned forward. He said he wanted to engage on this topic because this may be where we have some differences. He said he doesn’t want to protect the people who leak to the media war plans that could impact the troops. He differentiated these leaks from those whistleblowers exposing a contractor getting paid for work they are not performing. I was careful not to interrupt the President, but waited until he was done. I pointed out that few, if any, in our community would disagree with his distinction—but that in reality the current prosecutions are not of those high-level officials who regularly leak to the press to advance their policy agendas. Instead, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is prosecuting exactly the kind of whistleblower he described, for example one from the National Security Agency.

The President then did something that I think was remarkable. He said this is an incredibly difficult area and he wants to work through how to do a better job in handling it.

And Brian also mentioned something I thought of, too: Thomas Drake’s chance encounter with Eric Holder at the Apple store where he works.

Former National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas Drake, who is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act for allegedly “retaining” allegedly “classified” information (deemed so AFTER the evidence was seized from his house and subject to a Forced Classification Review), was busy at work at the Apple Store.  Attorney General Eric Holder was at the iPhone table.

Drake said,

Attorney General Holder [Holder looks up]–I’m Thomas Drake, the former National Security Agency official who’s been in the news.

Holder looked directly at him. Drake then asked,

Do you know why they have come after me?

Holder answered,

Yes, I do.

Drake asked,

But do you know the rest of the story?

Holder looked away, and then just left the store with his small entourage, including his security detail.

That encounter appears to have happened in late May.

Mind you, it shouldn’t take personal encounters like this for the Administration to realize it was going to look really stupid trying to convict a guy for keeping two unclassified documents in his email archive. But in the same way that it took PJ Crowley asking the President about Bradley Manning, did it take Thomas Drake asking Eric Holder about his own case to make that case to the Administration?

The Army’s “Sticky Note” SIPRNet Security

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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.

If Only They Had Listened to Thomas Drake, They Might Have Prevented CableGate

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I’m in the process of reading all the Siobhan Gorman stories for which Thomas Drake might have served as an anonymous source. And one of the ten or so articles for which he’s a possible source exposes the NSA’s failure on an issue at the heart of Bradley Manning’s ability to allegedly leak three major databases to WikiLeaks: adequate user authentication on the network.

The Drake indictment claims that Thomas Drake served as a source for “many” of the Siobhan Gorman articles she wrote about NSA between February 27, 2006 and November 28, 2007.

Thereafter, between on or about February 27, 2006 and on or about November 28, 2007, Reporter A published a series of newspaper articles about NSA, including articles that contained SIGINT information. Defendant DRAKE served as a source for many of these newspaper articles, including articles that contained SIGINT information.

One of her articles from that period, published July 2, 2006, describes how the delay in implementing a new encryption management system for NSA and DOD computers exposed those networks to hackers.

A National Security Agency program to protect secrets at the Defense Department and intelligence and other agencies is seven years behind schedule, triggering concerns that the data will be increasingly vulnerable to theft, according to intelligence officials and unclassified internal NSA documents obtained by The Sun.

[snip]

Encryption, which is an electronic lock, is among the most important of security tools, scrambling sensitive information so that it can ride securely in communications over the Internet or phone lines, and requiring a key to decipher.

Powerful encryption is necessary for protecting information that is beamed from soldiers on the battlefield or that guards data in computers at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters.

One of the three big things DOD claims it is doing to respond to WikiLeaks is to introduce smart cards for user credentials on SIPRNet.

DoD has begun to issue a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based identity credential on a hardened smart card. This is very similar to the Common Access Card (CAC) we use on our unclassified network. We will complete issuing 500,000 cards to our SIPRNet users, along with card readers and software, by the end of 2012. This will provide very strong identification of the person accessing the network and requesting data. It will both deter bad behavior and require absolute identification of who is accessing data and managing that access.

In conjunction with this, all DoD organizations will configure their SIPRNet-based systems to use the PKI credentials to strongly authenticate end-users who are accessing information in the system. This provides the link between end users and the specific data they can access – not just network access. This should, based on our experience on the unclassified networks, be straightforward.

Which is precisely the kind of challenge one of Gorman’s named sources in the article addresses.

And as the demand grows for “smart” identification cards with computer chips that verify the card holder’s identity, so does the need for sophisticated ways to manage who is being assigned cards, so that the cards do not end up in the wrong hands, said Stephen Kent, a chief scientist at BBN Technologies who has chaired government panels on information security.

Now, we have no way of knowing whether Drake was one of the 18 sources Gorman used for the article. But a number of her sources seem to compare this clusterfuck with that of Trailblazer–the program Drake and others submitted an Inspector General’s complaint on.

Like other major NSA efforts – such as the failed Trailblazer program to rapidly sift out threat information, and the troubled Groundbreaker program aimed at upgrading the agency’s computer networks – an ever-changing game plan has caused many of the project’s problems, current and former senior intelligence officials said.

Following that passage, Gorman cites a “former senior intelligence official”–the description (the indictment alleges) Drake asked Gorman to use when she cited him.

One former senior intelligence official said that the NSA had unrealistic expectations from the start and repeatedly opted for delays to try to perfect the program. That left the government with aging security protections in the quest for security nirvana, the official said.

“NSA often will say, `Well, this is not totally secure, so you can’t use it,’ when the only alternative is nothing,” the former official said. “My worry is this push for perfect security is the enemy of good security.

And managing the implementation of a new key system sure sounds like something that the “Senior Change Leader” of NSA might be involved with.

Interestingly, the initial deadlines predicted in Gorman’s article–2012–seem to roughly match the deadlines DOD now gives for its smart cards (as well as the insider threat detection, the deadline for which Obama is trying to push back further, though that may be a different issue).

Again, all that’s not proof that Thomas Drake was warning in 2006 that if NSA didn’t fix its management problems, something like CableGate would happen (as well as the widespread hacking we know to be happening).

But 18 people were warning of it back in 2006.

Which is, I guess, DOJ feels the need to prosecute whistleblowers, to cover up embarrassing lapses like this.

Whitewash Investigation on Detainee Abuse Is Why We Need WikiLeaks

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The Nation has a long study on the Army’s Detainee Abuse Task Force, which one of its members described as a “whitewash.”

Jon Renaud, a retired Army Warrant Officer who headed the task force as the Special Agent in Charge for the first half of 2005, now says of the DATF, “It didn’t accomplish anything—it was a whitewash.” Neither he nor his fellow agents could recall a single case they investigated that actually advanced to a court-martial hearing, known as an Article 32.

“These investigations needed to take place,” said Renaud, a Bronze Star recipient who retired in 2009 after twenty years in the military. “But they needed to be staffed and resourced with the same level of resources that they gave the Abu Ghraib case.” He noted that the Army assigned a general and staff to conduct a comprehensive investigation of Abu Ghraib. “That was a single case,” he said, “and we had hundreds of others for six people.”

In addition to the many details of abuses ultimately ignored in Iraq, the Nation’s story demonstrates why we need something like WikiLeaks. After all, not only should there be some kind of public accountability for abuses like this (that should be as accessible and widely reviewed as the Taguba Report), citizens ought to be able search for more information.

But DOD claims the DATF never existed.

Requests to the Army for information about the origins, mission and track record of the DATF were refused, and a FOIA request to CID was denied with this claim: “No documents of the kind you described could be located. No official ‘Detainee Abuse Task Force’ was ever established by the USACIDC.” After a lengthy appeals process, during which we provided several samples of DATF communications on DATF letterhead, this finding was reaffirmed: CID “never created an official ‘Detainee Abuse Task Force,'” the denial letter read. “Individual criminal investigation units may have set up informal, ad hoc task forces while deployed to emphasize detainee abuse investigations. In turn, they may have labeled certain investigations as being subject to a ‘Detainee Abuse Task Force.'” But “there was no official organization for such a task force.”

[snip]

Angela Birt, the Operations Officer who oversaw CID’s felony investigations across Iraq during 2005, including the DATF, expressed disbelief at the military’s response. According to Birt, the DATF did not receive an official unit designator; “there was no heraldry behind it,” she said. “But to say it didn’t exist in the terms that they said in the letter? Wow, that’s really embarrassing for them,” said Birt.

“To say, ‘You never existed,'” Renaud said, “It’s insulting. It’s insulting to the agents that worked on it.

“I have to assume they just don’t want to release the cases,” he went on, “because if anybody actually got ahold of all the cases [and] read over them, they would obviously see huge holes.”

In fact, one of the Nation’s sources noted that the military kept reopening the cases the ACLU was FOIAing.

Renaud explained that his superiors at Fort Belvoir sent him weekly e-mails containing an itemized list of cases they were ordering reopened. He also separately received a list of cases about which the ACLU had filed FOIA requests. And he began to notice a correlation.

“I challenged folks on this. I said, ‘Hey, are we reopening these cases because we’re going to work them? Or are we reopening them to play hide the ball because we don’t want to release them?'”

“We did discuss the potential that they were just sending these back because as long as they’re open, they’re not subject to FOIA,” said Birt. “The rule with [the] Crimes Records Center is: if a case is open, they will not honor a FOIA request because it might jeopardize open and valid investigative pursuits.”

So it’s not just DATF DOD was hiding from FOIA, it was the cases themselves (in a tactic the government appears to be repeating more generally).

The military, if asked, would probably deny that it issued orders not to investigate instances of Iraqi-on-Iraq torture. But, because of Wikileaks, we know they did issue that order.

This is the impact of Frago 242. A frago is a “fragmentary order” which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, “only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ”.

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

The military, if asked, would probably deny knowing that the US turned detainees over to the Iraqi Wolf Brigade to be tortured. But, because of WikiLeaks, we know that did happen.

In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for “further questioning”. Typical entries read: “All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning” (from 29 November 2004) and “The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning” (30 November 2004).

The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films : “US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing,” while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.

[snip]

The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects. The then interior minister in charge of them was alleged to have been a former member of the Shia Badr militia.

And if it weren’t for WikiLeaks, we would know little about the multiple times our government bullied other countries to drop investigations of rendition and torture (one I’m certain we’ll see repeated when the President visits Poland later this month).

Without such transparency, the Nation study makes clear, there will be no accountability for the systematic flouting of US and international law.

But note the irony. As the Nation describes, none of the hundreds of abuse cases–not the ones that involved electrocution, not the ones that involved rape, not the ones that involved mock execution–resulted in a court-martial. But not only has the military charged Bradley Manning, but they have alleged that his actions–and not the torture and not the cover-up of torture–bring discredit on the armed forces.

Like SSCI, HPSCI Requires DNI to Close Gaping Security Holes … by 2013

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Steven Aftergood has the House intelligence report online and–as he points out–it contains a requirement that the intelligence community close one of the gaping holes in network security highlighted by the WikiLeaks case. The deadline? 2013.

SEC. 402. INSIDER THREAT DETECTION PROGRAM.

(a) Initial Operating Capability.–Not later than October 1, 2012, the Director of National Intelligence shall establish an initial operating capability for an effective automated insider threat detection program for the information resources in each element of the intelligence community in order to detect unauthorized access to, or use or transmission of, classified intelligence.

(b) Full Operating Capability.–Not later than October 1, 2013, the Director of National Intelligence shall ensure the program described in subsection (a) has reached full operating capability.

(c) Report.–Not later than December 1, 2011, the Director of National Intelligence shall submit to the congressional intelligence committees a report on the resources required to implement the insider threat detection program referred to in subsection (a) and any other issues related to such implementation the Director considers appropriate to include in the report.

(d) Information Resources Defined.–In this section, the term “information resources” means networks, systems, workstations, servers, routers, applications, databases, websites, online collaboration environments, and any other information resources in an element of the intelligence community designated by the Director of National Intelligence.

This is precisely what the Senate Intelligence Committee is also mandating. As I pointed out earlier, this seems to simply take DOD’s own lackadaisical deadline and make it a requirement.

In other words, if closing this security gap a year and a half after the leaks are alleged to have occurred is too tough, then they can go ahead and take another year or so to close the barn door.

Though to be fair, this deadline may come directly from the lackadaisical DOD, as the deadlines given here seem to match those DOD aspires to hit.

Now, maybe it’s considered unpatriotic to note that our intelligence community–and its congressional overseers–are tolerating pretty shoddy levels of security all while insisting that they takes leaks seriously.

But seriously: if our government is going to claim that leaks are as urgent as it does, if it’s going to continue to pretend that secrets are, you know, really secret, then it really ought to at least pretend to show urgency on responding to the gaping technical issues that will not only protect against leakers, but also provide better cybersecurity and protect against spies. Aspiring to fix those issues years after the fact really doesn’t cut it.

Ah well! Bin Laden is dead. Who else might want our secrets?

Bradley Manning Protest: White House Bans Journalist for Doing Journalism

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To a degree, this reminds me of the Joshua Claus moment, when DOD banned reporters like Carol Rosenberg and Michelle Shephard because they uttered the name “Joshua Claus” in their coverage of his testimony in Omar Khadr’s trial. (Shephard had interviewed him previously, so they were basically asking her to forget information she had gathered independently to be able to cover Gitmo.)

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

The Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times – pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.

She was part of a “print pool” – a limited number of journalists at an event who represent their bigger hoard colleagues – which White House press officials still refer to quaintly as “pen and pad” reporting.

As with coverage of Omar Khadr’s trial, the Obama Administration seems to be demanding that journalists abdicate their jobs and their instincts to play by the rules.

But the event reminds me of something else: how the White House asked (and persuaded) all the big US outlets to suppress the widely discussed news that Raymond Davis was a spy, even while publications overseas and dirty fucking hippie bloggers were reporting on it.

As the account of Marinucci’s treatment makes clear, the rules they want to enforce on pool reporting basically put her at a disadvantage to everyone else in the room who had and used a cell phone video.

Carla cannot do her job to the best of her ability if she can’t use all the tools available to her as a journalist. The public still sees the videos posted by protesters and other St. Regis attendees, because the technology is ubiquitous. But the Obama Administration apparently wants to give the distinct advantage to citizen witnesses at the expense of professionals.

While there’s a bit of professional snobbery here, it is entirely justified. The White House bizarrely imagines it can manage Obama’s image by imposing rules on journalists it can’t impose on others. Not only does that not do a damn thing to prevent videos like this from getting out. It profoundly corrupts the role of journalists, imposing requirements that ensure they offer only a highly scripted and obviously false view of an event.

It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.

Illegal Wiretap Leak Probe Dropped

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According to Josh Gerstein, DOJ decided not to charge anyone in the illegal wiretap leak probe.

The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times – disclosures that Bush vehemently denounced as a breach of national security.

[snip]

The Justice Department would not discuss the current status of the probe, which began in late 2005 after the Times story was published with a formal leak complaint from the National Security Agency. However, [Thomas] Tamm’s attorney, Paul Kemp, told POLITICO he and his client were informed “seven or eight months ago” that the investigation into Tamm was over.

The information was relayed during a meeting with the prosecutor handling the case, William Welch, Kemp said. The Justice Department recently issued Tamm a letter confirming that the probe had concluded, the defense attorney said.

Prosecutors also appear to have lost interest in a former National Security Agency official who also publicly acknowledged being a source for the Times on the warrantless wiretapping story, Russell Tice. An attorney for Tice, Joshua Dratel, said it has been several years since prosecutors contacted him about the investigation.

Gerstein discusses the possibility that the investigation was dropped because it was found to be illegal.

“What leaps out to me is the fact that the program was arguably illegal, so while that does not provide a legal defense or immunity to the leaker, from a practical jury-appeal standpoint, which a seasoned prosecutor should consider, how appealing is the case going to be if they’re prosecuting government attorneys for disclosing the program but … the people who were doing the wiretapping don’t get prosecuted?” asked [Peter] Zeidenberg, who was a prosecutor on the leak-related case against Bush White House aide Lewis Libby. “How would you like to be the prosecutor to get up there and make that argument?”

Note, Vaughn Walker’s decision against the government in the al-Haramain case was just over a year ago, so it may be that his decision provided a big disincentive to the government to pursue the case.

Of course, that raises the possibility that the same might be true for Bradley Manning. Granted, his case will not be judged by a jury of civilians; he will have a military jury. Still, as more and more documents he allegedly leak reveal our government’s knowing cover-up that it was detaining innocent people and abetting Iraqi torture, it may make it a lot less palatable to argue against Manning.

Obama Pretends the Bob Woodward Law Doesn’t Exist

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Yesterday, Michael Whitney pointed out how irresponsible it was for the ultimate commander of all the people who will decide Bradley Manning’s innocence or guilt to state publicly, before his trial, that “he broke the law.” But there was something else wrong with it. As transcribed by the UK Friends of Bradley Manning, Obama said,

OBAMA: So people can have philosophical views [about Bradley Manning] but I can’t conduct diplomacy on an open source [basis]… That’s not how the world works.

And if you’re in the military… And I have to abide by certain rules of classified information. If I were to release material I weren’t allowed to, I’d be breaking the law.

We’re a nation of laws! We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

[Q: Didn’t he release evidence of war crimes?]

OBAMA: What he did was he dumped…

[Q: Isn’t that just the same thing as what Daniel Ellsberg did?]

OBAMA: No it wasn’t the same thing. Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way. [my emphasis]

But of course, Presidents (and some Vice Presidents) actually don’t have to “abide by certain rules of classified information.” As explained by John Rizzo in the context of the Obama Administration’s leaks to Bob Woodward, they can and do insta-declassify stuff for their own political purposes all the time. They can do it to make the President look important; they can do it to lie us into an illegal war; they can do it to ruin the career of someone who might expose the earlier lies. (Steven Aftergood and Eugene Fidell explain the legal reason this is true for the Politico.)

The way secrecy in this country works is insidious not just because the government prevents citizens from learning the things we as citizens need to know to exercise democracy, but also because the President and other classification authorities can wield secrecy as an instrument of power, choosing to release information they otherwise claim is top secret when it serves their political purpose. As I pointed out last year, this power even extends to information about whether or not the President has approved assassinating an American citizen.

Less than a month ago, the Obama Administration told a judge they didn’t have to–couldn’t–tell a judge their basis for killing a US citizen. Instead, they invoked state secrets, claiming (among other things) they couldn’t even confirm or deny whether they had targeted Anwar al-Awlaki for assassination.

Yet this came after one after another Obama Administration official leaked the news that al-Awlaki had been targeted, and after they had obliquely confirmed that he was. The Administration can leak news of this targeting all it wants, apparently, but when a US citizen attempts to get protection under the law, then it becomes a state secret.

There’s a lot of other reasons why this President’s claim that “we are a nation of laws!” is utterly laughable, from his Administration’s refusal to prosecute torture or bank fraud to its efforts to prevent former officials from doing time for breaking the law.

We are not, anymore, a nation of laws. The Constitutional Professor President has institutionalized the efforts W and Cheney made to make sure that remains true.

But one of the ways our lawlessness most disproportionately works against the citizens of this country is the government’s abuse of secrecy.

Manning Protesters Sing to Obama: “We Paid Our Dues; Where’s Our Change?”

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Protestors sang their displeasure to Pres. Obama at a Bay Area fundraiser. (via yfrog)

At today’s presidential fundraiser in San Francisco, several attendees sang a song to Obama protesting Bradley Manning’s treatment. (From the White House pool report)

Mr. Obama was in the middle of his remarks when a woman in a white suit stood up and said, Mr. President we wrote you a song. POTUS tried to get her to wait until later, but she persisted and the table of 10 broke into a song that pointed out they’d just spent $5,000 donating to his campaign and went on to protest the treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning.

The woman stayed standing as they sang. Mr. Obama looked to Ms. Pelosi and asked, Nancy did you do this? Ms. Pelosi had a look on her face, as she stared at the singing group, that definitely said she did not.

[snip]

The 10 singers then passed around 8.5×11 signs that said “Free Bradley Manning” or had a photo of him.

Then the woman in the white suit stripped off her jacket to reveal a black T-shirt that said Free Bradley Manning, with an image of him.

“We paid our dues. Where’s our change?” they sang.

USSS and WH staff had moved near the table at this point. The woman was escorted out. Two others left on their own. (The rest stayed and applauded at the end of POTUS’s speech.)

“That was a nice song,” a displeased Mr. Obama said.

“Now where was I?” POTUS asked.

As was indicated by that song, “Over the last 2 and a half years, change turned out to be tougher than we expected,” POTUS said.

Also, WTF? Why is Obama’s first instinct to blame Pelosi for this? Granted, Pelosi often takes stands in support of political prisoners, but to suggest a master fundraiser like Pelosi would embarrass the President at a fundraiser like this is just a real misunderstanding of her. (Even if it were only a lame attempt at deflection/humor, it is disrespectful and a tad dishonest.)

Not to mention the suggestion that people, particularly in liberal San Francisco, might not have the free will to craft a protest on their own.

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