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Boeing 737 MAX 9: The Comment Heard Around The World

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

If I had any doubts this last week whether I should post about Boeing’s quality problems, a comment posted in Leeham News on January 16 convinced me the topic needs more attention. I had goosebumps several times as I read it.

Kudos to Leeham News for maintaining a comment section; it’s not easy but it’s clearly needed.

I’m not screenshotting the entire comment, only enough to convince you this is something worth reading and understanding amid a sea of layoffs and a surge of AI implementation across nearly every industry. Imagine as you read it how this could be made worse by fewer well-educated personnel and less communication between humans.

Before you scroll further, read the article which spawned the comment:

“Unplanned” removal, installation inspection procedure at Boeing
https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing

This story was published ten days after Alaska Air’s flight 1282  departed Portland OR’s PDX airport for California only to lose a door minutes later. The Boeing 737 MAX 9 safely returned to PDX roughly 20 minutes after takeoff.

The original comment both parts 1 and 2 can be found directly below the article — use keyword “throwawayboeing” to find them using Ctrl-F in your browser as many more comments have appeared since the article was first published.

If Leeham News should crash from high traffic volume or a possible attack, you can find parts 1 and 2 along with the article at the Internet Archive (keep in mind the earliest archived versions of the article may not have the comments beneath them):

https://web.archive.org/web/20240122193511/https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/

An observer in my social media feed whose name I didn’t record noted that every little problem Boeing planes experience is now news. United Airlines discovering loose bolts on Boeing 737 aircraft reported only days after the Alaska Air door failure would and should have made the news; Alaska Air has also found more problems with bolts since then.

Google Trends suggests there’s some truth to the claim every Boeing problem is now news:

How many of the increased mentions are well-deserved snark is hard to say:

Well-deserved if dark. So dark. Mentions of new resources like Is My Plane A 737 MAX may also magnify Boeing’s problems in the media, but if there wasn’t a safety problem tools like this wouldn’t be seen as necessary.

Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness member Mark Warner (D-VA), and Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz (R-TX) are scheduled to meet today with Boeing’s CEO Dave Calhoun about the aerospace manufacturer’s ongoing quality crisis.

Calhoun already met last week with the heads of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Seems rather late after the crazy stones Boeing manifested by asking on January 5 for its 737 MAX 7 to be exempted from safety rules to allow the aircraft to fly.

Let’s hope the FAA and NTSB are focused on the quality problems at Boeing and not on the source of the comment above until the comment’s veracity is called into question. The First Amendment should protect just this kind of speech from corporate suppression given the absolute risk all passengers take when boarding a Boeing aircraft.

You’ll note the image used on the front page for this post is a Boeing 737 — but it’s a military craft. Boeing is a federal contractor. If workers can’t safely blow the whistle on manufacturing quality problems with aircraft our defense personnel and our elected officials rely on, purchased with our taxpayer dollars, what good is the First Amendment?

~ ~ ~

What all of this has to do with labor is fairly clear in the original article published in Leeham News. I can’t add more to what’s been written.

But all of this could be worse in time depending on how Boeing addresses solutions in concert with cost controls.

One thing the public should know more about is the impact AI will have in manufacturing environments, especially ones in which both adherence to specifications and safety are tightly linked.

Four days after the Alaska Air Boeing 737 Max 9 lost its door mid-air, there was a report about a vulnerability found in Bosch brand cordless, handheld pneumatic torque wrenches which are used in the automotive industry. The wrenches are programmed to ensure nuts are tightened to specification and operate using Wi-Fi.

What are the chances that similar vulnerabilities may exist or be introduced into aerospace manufacturing, compounded by the increasing amounts of AI used in automation?

Let’s say a certain aerospace manufacturer gets its shit together and fixes its corporate culture and procedures so that all parts are tracked and all actions and omissions are likewise accounted for and documented as it builds aircraft.

What could happen if the no-longer-missing bolts are over- or under-tightened because of a vulnerability like the one in Bosch’s Rexroth’s NXA015S-36V-B wrenches?

It’s not enough to analyze and remedy existing quality and safety problems; future problems must be anticipated at the same time.

~ ~ ~

Since I began drafting this post this morning, The Seattle Times has reported on Boeing’s door problem, mentioning the comment left at Leeham News. You’ll want to follow up with this story as aerospace manufacturing is journalist Dominic Gates beat; he’s covered other similar stories like the ongoing Boeing 737 challenge.

In fact, if you read the comments at Leeham News you’ll see Gates as well.

Yet another example of why well-moderated news sites’ comments can be important.

This is NOT an open post. Please stay on topic in comments.

Air Traffic: A Lesson on Pandemic Economics from the Airlines

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As yesterday’s presser and tweets make clear, Donald Trump is jonesing to reopen the economy in the United States. He’s doing that even as the airline industry is weighing whether to voluntarily shut down.

Thus far, according to NBC, Trump has opposed such a shutdown because he fears how the optics will affect his own political fortunes.

One point of tension as Trump tries to balance public and economic health has been air travel. He has repeatedly raised concerns in meetings about the optics of grounded planes and empty airports, according to two people familiar with the meetings. He’s argued that those images would look bad for him and could further drag down the economy, they said, while others have made the case for sharply curtailing air travel.

But according to the WSJ, airlines are considering shutting down voluntarily anyway. There are several reasons the airlines want to shut down (and would prefer to be ordered to do so).

The first and most obvious is that what flights are flying now are so empty they’re losing revenue.

On Monday, thousands of  flights were canceled, in some cases because planes weren’t full enough to justify the trip, with passengers numbering in the single digits. Some planes that did take off have been emptier than ever before. For example, a flight between New York’s LaGuardia Airport and Washington DC had just three passengers. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. canceled over 40% of scheduled flights Monday, according to Flightaware.com, a flight tracking site. Some airline officials expect planes to be even emptier as the week goes on.

[snip]

But in the past few days, according to some of these officials, the prospect of an eventual halt has increased for various reasons, including mounting red ink from flying nearly empty planes.

There’s a bit in the story about concerns on the part of flight crews and onerous efforts to adjust schedules to minimize the possibility that crews can infect each other.

But by far, the biggest reason the nation’s airlines may shut down, voluntarily or not, is that infections at a number of air-traffic control facilities have shut down “nearly a dozen” facilities, including towers at Chicago’s Midway and Las Vegas’ McCarran Airports.

Airlines are preparing for the possibility that contagion-driven staffing emergencies at air-traffic control facilities could force the issue, making it impossible to continue operating in parts of the country.

Airport towers at Chicago’s Midway International Airport and McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas remain closed after nearly a week of cleaning.

[snip]

A separate important factor is that Federal Aviation Administration officials fear that additional positive tests for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, among agency controllers and technicians who maintain their equipment could unravel the nation’s air-traffic control system. Nearly a dozen traffic-control facilities from New York to Chicago to Las Vegas have been temporarily closed to disinfect and clean them, with many more employees at home on self-quarantine while others are being investigated for potential contacts with infected workers.

So far, longstanding FAA contingency plans have managed to deal with the closures by imposing temporary flight restrictions, rerouting planes and shifting responsibilities among backup facilities and employees. Inside the agency, though, concern is growing that new employee infections, especially at key locations, could upend existing contingency options. In some cases, replacing controllers removed from their radar screens would be extremely difficult because it typically takes months of training to get them up to speed to do specific jobs.

Three days ago, traffic for the entire NYC area shut down briefly after a trainee who had been working at a Long Island air traffic control facility tested positive.

Flights into major New York City-area airports were briefly halted on Saturday, as the coronavirus continues to cause staffing issues at air-traffic control facilities around the country,  the Federal Aviation Administration said.

An air traffic controller-trainee based at a control center on Long Island tested positive for the virus, COVID-19, the FAA said. The trainee hadn’t been in the facility since March 17 but the agency is working with local health authorities to sanitize and clean affected areas. The center is operational, it said.

The FAA map of disruptions show the NYC area remains a problem.

This seems to offer an illustration that advisors can use to explain to Trump and his Fox News enablers why he may not be able to reopen the economy next week, and he seems headed to do. Aside from the fact that states and (unless Trump actually does use the Defense Production Act, which FEMA will only start using today) corporations can simply ignore him, there are critical functions of our economy that are proving unmanageable given the way infections can shut down key cogs of national and global systems. Until there’s testing and disinfecting regime that can ensure a single sick person doesn’t bring that network down, it’s not clear Trump has the ability to reopen the economy.

We would be better off, in my opinion, if Trump’s advisors had given him a list of things that had to happen — testing, medical equipment, and a screening regime like the ones used in Asia — before he could reopen the economy. Thus far, Trump’s efforts to meet those needs have been inadequate.

For now, however, he might look to the airlines’ inability to manage a relatively small number of infections among air traffic controllers, even during a time of sharply curtailed flights, to understand why it’s not as simple as saying we’ll just have to tolerate some illnesses.

Monday Morning: First, Same as the Last

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Hear that sound? Like so many sighs of resignation? Yup, it’s the first Monday of the new year, and with it, a plethora of shiny resolutions slowly breached and broken like WiFi-enabled toys.

One of my 2016 resolutions (which I hope will last more than a week) is a morning update here at emptywheel. Won’t be hot-urgent-newsy, just stuff worth scanning while you have a cup of joe. Let’s see if I can stick it out five days — then I’ll try another benchmark.

Droning on
Did you get or give a drone as a gift this holiday season? Better make sure it’s registered with the Federal Aviation Administration.

Twitter to bring back Politwoops
Among the stupid moves Twitter made last year was the decision to shut out Sunlight Foundation’s Politwoops platform. The tool archived politicians’ embarrassing tweets even if the tweets had been deleted. With the general election season now in full swing, voters need more accountability of candidates and elected officials, not less. Sunlight Foundation and the Open State Foundation negotiated with Twitter to restore the tool. Let’s hope it’s up and running well before the first caucuses — and let’s hope Twitter gets a grip on its business model, pronto.

You’d think by now Twitter would have figured out politicians’ tweeted gaffes are gasoline to their social media platform growth…

Microsoft spreads FUD about…Microsoft?
If you’re an oldster IT person like me, you recall the Halloween memo scandal of 1998, documenting Microsoft’s practice of promulgating fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about competing operating systems in order to gain and control Windows market share. For more than a decade, Microsoft relied on FUD to ensure near-ubiquity of Windows and Word software products. Now Microsoft is using FUD not to prevent customers from using other products, but to encourage migration from Windows 7 to Windows 10, to reduce possible state-sponsored attacks on Win 7 systems.

Personally, I think Microsoft has already been ridiculously ham-handed in its push for Win 10 upgrades before this latest FUD. If you are a Win 7 or Win 8 user, you’ve already seen attempts to migrate users embedded in recent security patches (read: crapware). I’ve had enough FUD for a lifetime — I’m already running open source operating systems Linux and Android on most of my devices. I would kill for an Android desktop or laptop (yoohoo, hint-hint, Android developers…).

And don’t even start with the “Buy Apple” routine. Given the large number of vulnerabilities, it’s only a matter of time before Mac OS and iOS attract the same level of attention from hackers as Windows. I’ll hold my AAPL stock as long as you insist on “Buy Apple,” however.

Consumer Electronics Show 2016 — now with biometric brassieres
CES 2016 opens this week in Las Vegas, and all I can think is: Are you fucking kidding me with this fresh Internet of Things stupidity? A biometric bra? What idiot dreamed this up?

Why not biometric jockstraps? I can only imagine the first response to biometric jockstraps: “No EMF radiation near my ‘nads!” Yeah, well the same thing applies to breasts. Didn’t anybody get the memo last year that 217 scientists have expressed concerns about EMF’s potential impact on human health, based on +2,000 peer-reviewed articles?

Or are businesses ignoring this science the same way petrochemical businesses have ignored climate change science?

Phew. There it is, the first checkmark of my 2016 resolutions. Happy first Monday to you. Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? Do tell.

Air Travel, Disrupted: Welcome to the New Normal

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[graphic: Live radar from 15-AUG-2015, via @FlightRadar24]

[graphic: Live radar from 15-AUG-2015, via @FlightRadar24]

Air travelers along the U.S. east coast experienced flight cancellations and delays this past Saturday, due to initially unspecified “technical issues” attributed to the air traffic control system.

Beginning some time late morning, hundreds of flights were affected by the problem. The FAA’s service was restored around 4:00 p.m. EDT, though it would take hours longer for the airlines to reschedule flights and flyers.

Although 492 flights were delayed and 476 flights were canceled, the FAA’s Twitter account did not mention the outage or mass flight disruptions until 4:06 p.m., when it said service had been restored.

In a tweet issued long after the outage began, the Federal Aviation Administration said, “The FAA is continuing its root cause analysis to determine what caused the problem and is working closely with the airlines to minimize impacts to travelers.”

The FAA’s Safety Briefing Twitter account made no mention at all of the outage, though it has advised of GPS system testing at various locations across the country.

Various news outlets were conflicted: airports were blamed, then the FAA blamed, and the public knew nothing at all except they were stuck for an indeterminate period.

Get used to this. There’s no sign FAA will change its communications methodology after several air travel disruptions this year alone “due to technical issues” or whatever catchy nondescript phrase airlines/airports/government chooses to use.

Is this acceptable? Hell no. Just read the last version of WaPo’s article about the outage; the lack of communication causes as much difficulty as the loss of service. How can travelers make alternative plans when they hear nothing at all about the underlying problem? They’re stuck wherever they are, held hostage by crappy practices if not policies.

It doesn’t help that the media is challenged covering what appears to be a technology problem. The Washington Post went back and forth as to the underlying cause. The final version of an article about this disruption is clean of any mentions of the FAA’s En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system, though earlier versions mention an upgrade to or component of that system as suspect. Read more →

Ancient History: December 2012 in the Dragnet

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PCLOB tells us that the FISA Court approved a new automated query system (versions appear to have been in development for years, and it replaced the automated alert system from 2009) in late 2012 that permitted all the 3-degree contact chains off all RAS-approved identifiers to be dumped into the corporate store at once where they can be combined with data collected under other authorities (presumably including both EO 12333 and FAA) for further analysis.

In 2012, the FISA court approved a new and automated method of performing queries, one that is associated with a new infrastructure implemented by the NSA to process its calling records. 68 The essence of this new process is that, instead of waiting for individual analysts to perform manual queries of particular selection terms that have been RAS approved, the NSA’ s database periodically perform s queries on all RAS – approved seed terms, up to three hops away from the approved seeds. The database places the results of these queries together in a repository called the “corporate store.”

The ultimate result of the automated query process is a repository, the corporate store, containing the records of all telephone calls that are within three “hops” of every currently approved selection term. 69 Authorized analysts looking to conduct intelligence analysis may then use the records in the corporate store, instead of searching the full repository of records.

According to the FISA court’s orders, records that have been moved into the corporate store may be searched by authorized personnel “for valid foreign intelligence purposes, without the requirement that those searches use only RAS – approved selection terms.” 71 Analysts therefore can query the records in the corporate store with terms that are not reasonably suspected of association with terrorism. They also are permitted to analyze records in the corporate store through means other than individual contact-chaining queries that begin with a single selection term: because the records in the corporate store all stem from RAS-approved queries , the agency is allowed to apply other analytic methods and techniques to the query results. 72 For instance, such calling records may be integrated with data acquired under other authorities for further analysis. The FISA court’s orders expressly state that the NSA may apply “the full range” of signals intelligence analytic tradecraft to the calling records that are responsive to a query, which includes every record in the corporate store.

(While I didn’t know the date, I have been pointing the extent to which corporate store data can be analyzed for some time, but thankfully the PCLOB report has finally led others to take notice.)

On December 27, 2012, Jeff Merkley gave a speech in support of his amendment to the FISA Amendments Act that would push to make FISC decisions public. It referenced both the backdoor loophole (which John Bates extended to NSA and CIA in 2011, was implemented in 2012, and affirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2012) and the language underlying the phone dragnet. Merkley suggested the government might use these secret interpretations to conduct wide open spying on Americans.

If it is possible that our intelligence agencies are using the law to collect and use the communications of Americans without a warrant, that is a problem. Of course, we cannot reach conclusions about that in this forum because this is an unclassified discussion.

My colleagues Senator Wyden and Senator Udall, who serve on Intelligence, have discussed the loophole in the current law that allows the potential of backdoor searches. This could allow the government to effectively use warrantless searches for law-abiding Americans. Senator Wyden has an amendment that relates to closing that loophole. Congress never intended the intelligence community to have a huge database to sift through without first getting a regular probable cause warrant, but because we do not have the details of exactly how this proceeds and we cannot debate in a public forum those details, then we are stuck with wrestling with the fact that we need to have the sorts of protections and efforts to close loopholes that Senator Wyden has put forward.

[snip]

Let me show an example of a passage. Here is a passage about what information can be collected: “ ….. reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation (other than a threat assessment) conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2),” and so on.

Let me stress these words: “relevant to an authorized investigation.”

There are ongoing investigations, multitude investigations about the conduct of individuals and groups around this planet, and one could make the argument that any information in the world helps frame an understanding of what these foreign groups are doing. So certainly there has been some FISA Court decision about what “relevant to an authorized investigation” means or what “tangible things” means. Is this a gateway that is thrown wide open to any level of spying on Americans or is it not? Read more →

The Intelligence Community’s Willful Ignorance about Americans Caught in 702 Surveillance

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Given the Intelligence Community’s reluctant and partial disclosures on the Section 702 (PRISM/FAA) collection, I want to return to a squabble from last fall, before Congress reauthorized FAA.

As you’ll recall, Ron Wyden tried to get the IC to disclose the number of Americans whose communication had been reviewed under Section 702. The IC dicked around long enough to ensure Wyden didn’t get an answer in time to make a political stink about it. When they finally gave him an answer, they said providing such a number would violate the privacy of Americans.

I defer to [the NSA Inspector General’s] conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA’s mission. He further stated that his office and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.

Ultimately, this statement seemed to be as much about resource allocation as anything else — the NSA and IC IGs would need more staff to accomplish the tast. (I must say, I do find it interesting the ICIG has time to investigate 375 leaks but not enough time to find out how many Americans are being spied on.)

But look at how closely the government is purportedly tracking US person data.

These procedures require that the acquisition of information is conducted, to the greatest extent reasonably feasible, to minimize the acquisition of information not relevant to the authorized foreign intelligence purpose.

Any inadvertently acquired communication of or concerning a U.S. person must be promptly destroyed if it is neither relevant to the authorized purpose nor evidence of a crime.

[snip]

Any information collected after a foreign target enters the U.S. –or prior to a discovery that any target erroneously believed to be foreign was in fact a U.S. person– must be promptly destroyed unless that information meets specific, limited criteria approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The dissemination of any information about U.S. persons is expressly prohibited unless it is necessary to understand foreign intelligence or assess its importance; is evidence of a crime; or indicates a threat of death or serious bodily harm.

Now, these passages ought to make people more worried about privacy than not. Stated clearly, it says the government believes it can collect and keep US person content if it deems that content “relevant” to the reason they collected the information.

Remember two things: this collection is not limited to use with terrorism; it can be used for espionage investigations, hacking, or any foreign intelligence purpose. And the government has already deemed every single one of our phone records to be “relevant” to an umbrella terror investigation, so the definition of relevance the government has developed in secret is unbelievably broad and persmissive.

That collection — the people whose content is reviewed and deemed relevant and kept — is the universe of people Wyden wanted to count. And the government is making decisions about the relevance of them in secret, but not tracking the process by which they do so.

Note too that the government can disseminate US person communications if “it is necessary to understand foreign intelligence.” This is not news (which is why it is so appalling that people were fighting over whether the government could listen to US person calls or read their emails). It is part of traditional FISA, too. (It was using that excuse that John Bolton was learning about what his rivals were negotiating with the North Koreans.) But given how much more information an analyst can access both because she is accessing all Internet activity and not just phone, but also because more associated communications are sucked up with a target, it means many more US persons’ communications might be disseminated. It’s not clear, by the way, such dissemination would exclude privileged conversations between lawyers and clients, or discussions between journalists and sources.

And this second group of people — the ones whose communications are being circulated — are counted.

Though we’re not allowed to know what those numbers are.

Here’s what the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz had to say about a statutorily required review of the 702 collection he recently completed (I think, but it’s not entirely clear, that Horowitz didn’t finish this review until after FAA was renewed last year — I know he didn’t finish it before the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees passed it out).

Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz of the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently issued a report examining the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008 (Act). Section 702 authorizes the targeting of non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States for the purpose of acquiring foreign intelligence information. The Act required that the Inspector General conduct a review of the Department’s role in this process and, in conjunction with this review, the OIG reviewed the number of disseminated FBI intelligence reports containing a reference to a U.S. person identity, the number of U.S. person identities subsequently disseminated in response to requests for identities not referred to by name or title in the original reporting, the number of targets later determined to be located in the United States, and whether communications of such targets were reviewed. See 50 U.S.C. 1881a(l)(2)(B) and (C). The OIG also reviewed the FBI’s compliance with the targeting and minimization procedures required under the Act.

The final report has been issued and delivered to the relevant Congressional oversight and intelligence committees, as well as leadership offices. Because the report is classified, its contents cannot be disclosed to the public.

In other words, the DOJ IG counted — because the law required him to — the following:

  • The number of US person-related communication that got disseminated in a first dissemination of intelligence 
  • The number of US persons whose identity identified in a follow-up on an original dissemination
  • The number of targets originally believed to be foreign who end up being US persons (note, the NSA conveniently doesn’t explain what the specific criteria are that would allow the government to keep these communications … I wonder why?)

But it did not count how many US persons’ communications were reviewed but not disseminated, many of which may be retained under the relevance standard.

In general, when the government chooses not to count things, there’s a reason it doesn’t want to.

Saxby Chambliss Reveals the Game

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In an article explaining why Dianne Feinstein is in no rush to hold a hearing on the massive dragnet sucking up your communication and mine, Saxby Chambliss is quoted as saying,

“We so rarely have open hearings,” Chambliss said.

Eleven days ago, Saxby offered this as proof there is no problem with a dragnet collection of all Americans’ phone records.

To my knowledge, we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information.

Congressional oversight in a democracy, ladies and gentlemen!

Wondering Wednesday: Suicide in Singapore, Drone Over Brooklyn, and Telco Tattlers

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Help me get over the hump and clue me in on a few things. I’ve been scratching my head wondering about these topics.

Suicide in Singapore — The recent “suicide” of a U.S. electronics engineer in Singapore looks fishy to me. It looked not-right to Financial Times as well; it appears no other domestic news outlet picked up this case for investigative reporting before FT. The deceased, who’d worked for a government research institute on a project related to Chinese telecom equipment company Huawei, is alleged to have hung himself, but two details about this case set off my hinky meter.

•  Every photo I’ve seen of engineer Shane Todd depicts a happy chap. Sure, depressed folks can hide their emotions, but comparing a photo of his family after his death to photos of him and you’ll see the difference. My gut tells me that if he was truly depressed, he should have looked more like his folks–flat, withdrawn, low affect. Perhaps meds could have messed with his head more than depression itself. But I’m not a psychologist or a pharmacologist, what do I know?

•  Among all the details of the case, it’s said the victim’s face postmortem was white when his body was discovered. This doesn’t strike me as consistent with hanging; there should have been lividity above the ligature. Conveniently, Singapore’s law enforcement cleaned everything up so quickly there was no chance to see the crime scene or the body as found. Law enforcement also snagged the victim’s laptop and all other work-related stored content, save for a hard drive that looked like a speaker. Everything he was working on “disappeared” except for the contents of that drive.

The engineer had been very concerned about technology he was working on and its possible transfer, which included gallium nitride transistors with potential for both commercial and military applications. After poking around for some time on gallium compounds used in various computing, communications and other technology, nothing screams at me as highly sensitive technology that might get someone “suicided.” But…as I went through abstracts, it seems odd there are a substantive number of Chinese researchers working in on GaN-based technologies.

Thought these two points in particular jar my senses, more than just these two points don’t sit well. Read the story at the link above and see for yourself. (Original FT link here.)

What do you make of this case? Suicide or no? Strategic technology or no? Read more →

It’s Hard to Summarize Opinions Pertaining to Two Purportedly Unrelated Laws

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Steven Aftergood relays the explanation of a senior intelligence official as to why the intelligence community can’t release even a teensy little bit of the FISA Court’s classified opinions.

“We tried,” a senior intelligence agency official said, but the rulings were hard to declassify. After redacting classified operational information and other sensitive details, no intelligible text of any consequence remained, according to this official.

The Department of Justice made a similar assertion years ago in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, stating that “Any legal discussion that may be contained in these materials would be inextricably intertwined with the operational details of the authorized surveillance.”

Aftergood’s source goes on to explain that they can’t just summarize the Court’s decisions, because … well, I don’t really understand this objection, but I suspect it has to do with some disagreement between the FISC and DOJ about the opinions that currently exist.

But the intelligence agency official said that unclassified summaries of surveillance court decisions were probably not a satisfactory alternative.  A summary written by the Department of Justice would not be a statement of the court’s opinion at all, the official said.  At best, it would represent the Administration’s own understanding of what the court had ruled, paraphrased for public release.

Aftergood holds out hope that a letter from Dianne Feinstein will provide sufficient independent direction to convince the Court to write their own summary.

Now, I’m interested in this for two reasons. First, consider what it means that the Administration and their complacent-overseer DiFi refused to let Jeff Merkley’s amendment–which would have called for summaries in some cases–pass. For starters, it would have shortened the time frame (two years have already passed since Lisa Monaco assured Senators she’d declassify opinions if only they confirmed her) it’d take to ask the Courts for a summary and get it. Additionally, it would have required the government admit if they could not, would not, declassify any teensy bit of the opinions on this secret law. That is, they’d have to finally admit there is secret law, which they’re denying right now.

I’m officially predicting that all this will be wrapped up a few short months after after the PATRIOT Act gets extended in 2015, forestalling the moment yet again when we confirm that the government is conducting massive surveillance on innocent Americans.

But then there’s the claim that they cannot summarize this themselves (suggesting, as I said, that there was no way DOJ could write a summary that the FISC would buy off on).

Frankly, I don’t buy that. Even John Yoo’s November 2, 2001 opinion authorizing the illegal wiretap program–a 21 page document redacted down to 183 words–communicates the main gist of the opinion:

FISA only provides a safe harbor for electronic surveillance and cannot restrict the President’s ability to engage in warrantless searches that protect the national security.

[snip]

FISA purports to be the exclusive statutory means for conducting electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence.

[snip]

Such a reading of FISA would be an unconstitutional infringement on the President’s Article II authorities.

[snip\

Thus, unless Congress made a clear statement in FISA that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area–which it has not–then the statute must be construed to avoid such a reading.

[snip]

…we do not believe that Congress may restrict the President’s inherent constitutional powers, which allow him to gather intelligence to defend the nation from direct attacks.

[snip]

…intelligence gathering in direct support of military operations does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures.

[snip]

A warrantless search can be constitutional “when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable.”

[snip]

…no governmental interest is more compelling than the security of the Nation.” Haig v. Agee. 453 US 280. 307 (1981)

Of course, in this case, the government is hiding the current interpretation of law. So rather than displaying the ugly shreds of our Constitution as it existed when Dick Cheney roamed the halls (though some of these opinions were written under the Bush Administration), the government is faced with revealing the ugly shreds of our Constitution as it exists. And 183 words, even in an opinion written by FISC, is probably sufficient to get some complacent people rather worried.

Then there’s the matter I noted the other day. In Merkley’s speech supporting his amendment, he focused on how Section 215 plays–apparently in conjunction with FAA (that’s why the government doesn’t want FAA debated at the same time as Section 215; because we might get “confused”)–particularly the passage that allows the government to get business records relevant to an investigation.

Let me show an example of a passage. Here is a passage about what information can be collected: “ ….. reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation (other than a threat assessment) conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2),” and so on.

Let me stress these words: “relevant to an authorized investigation.”

There are ongoing investigations, multitude investigations about the conduct of individuals and groups around this planet, and one could make the argument that any information in the world helps frame an understanding of what these foreign groups are doing. So certainly there has been some FISA Court decision about what “relevant to an authorized investigation” means or what “tangible things” means. Is this a gateway that is thrown wide open to any level of spying on Americans or is it not? Is it tightly constrained in understanding what this balance of the fourth amendment is? We do not know the answer to that. We should be able to know.

As I noted, Merkley professes not to know whether the “relevant to” provision of Section 215 has been used to gut probable cause in a way far more thorough than even John Yoo accomplished. But most of the co-sponsors of his Amendment do know.

And while I still think you’d be able to summarize even that, if the thing they’re trying to hide is that Section 215 has been grafted onto FAA so as to permit the government to access any tangible thing from anyone for whatever shoddy reason the government invents, I do get why it’d be hard to summarize that and still hide the fact that that’s what is now going on.

I guess they think it’d be confusing for us if their claims that there isn’t a massive program of government surveillance were proven to be utterly false.

Congress Finally Gets Around to Learning about Domestic Drones and Privacy

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After Congress has spent the last several years telling DOD and FAA to speed up the roll out of drones in domestic airspace, and partly in response to efforts (by Rand Paul, among others) to protect all of our privacy and other efforts (by Shelley Moore Capito) to protect farmers from observation by the EPA, someone finally thought to ask the Congressional Research Service about the Fourth Amendment implications of drones.

The analysis largely tracks what I wrote in this post: drones would be permitted to do simple observation, and would be permitted to do even more when operating close to a border. The big question about drones, though, is whether all the fancy technology they’ve got distinguishes them from the kind of naked eye surveillance a cop would be able to conduct.

Currently, UAVs carry high-megapixel cameras and thermal imaging, and will soon have the capacity to see through walls and ceilings. 98 These technologies are not generally available to the public, and under current jurisprudence, their use by law enforcement would probably constitute a search covered by the Fourth Amendment. However, the use of low-powered cameras or other unsophisticated technology to view people and objects in plain view while in their home might not trigger Fourth Amendment protections.

[snip]

The crucial question, then, is whether drones have the potential to be significantly more invasive than traditional surveillance technologies such as manned aircraft or low-powered cameras— technologies that have been upheld in previous cases. In this vein, some have asked whether using sophisticated digital platforms on a drone is any different from attaching the same instrument to a lamppost or traditional aircraft. 108 Read more →