Democracy Now! Daily Digest - A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Friday, March 21, 2014

Democracy Now! Daily Digest - A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Friday, March 21, 2014
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As Wells Fargo is Accused of Fabricating Foreclosure Papers, Will Banks Keep Escaping Prosecution?
A new internal report says the Justice Department massively overstated its successes in targeting mortgage fraud while in fact ranking it as a low priority for investigation. The Justice Department’s inspector general says despite playing a central role in the nation’s financial crisis, mortgage fraud was deemed either a low priority or not a priority at all. This comes as a recently revealed internal Wells Fargo document appears to guide lawyers step by step on how to fabricate missing documents to foreclose on homeowners. Wells Fargo is the country’s largest mortgage servicer and services some nine million home loans.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A new internal report says the Justice Department massively overstated its successes in targeting mortgage fraud while in fact ranking it as a low priority for investigation. The Justice Department’s inspector general says despite playing a central role in the nation’s financial crisis, mortgage fraud was deemed either a low priority or not a priority at all. In one instance, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed to have filed lawsuits on behalf of homeowner victims for losses totaling more than $1 billion, but the actual amount was 91 percent less, around $95 million.
This comes as a recently revealed internal Wells Fargo document appears to guide lawyers step by step on how to fabricate missing documents to foreclose on homeowners. Wells Fargo is the country’s largest mortgage servicer and services some nine million home loans.
AMY GOODMAN: State and federal regulators are now focusing on the allegations in the lawsuit brought by Linda Tirelli, who joins us now. She’s an attorney representing clients being foreclosed on by Wells Fargo. Earlier this month, she discovered the Wells Fargo manual on how to produce missing documents to foreclose on homeowners. She’s a partner at the Garvey, Tirelli & Cushner law firm in White Plains, New York.
In Minneapolis, we’re joined by Kevin Whelan, campaign director for the Home Defenders League, a national movement of underwater homeowners and allies who organize to keep people in their homes and demand accountability.
Wells Fargo declined Democracy Now!'s interview request, saying they're in a, quote, "quiet period" pending the announcement of their quarterly earnings.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Linda Tirelli, let’s begin with you.
LINDA TIRELLI: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe this manual, how you got it and what it reveals?
LINDA TIRELLI: Absolutely. The manual that I have, it’s actually entitled the "Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Foreclosure Attorney [Procedure] Manual, Version 1." And it says on it that it’s last published 2/24/2012. Mind you, the national mortgage settlement agreement was announced a week prior, on 2/19/2012.
The way I obtained it, it was actually sitting right there on the Internet, of all things. A colleague of mine, through a Max Gardner’s Bankruptcy Boot Camp, which I am a member, an active member, gave it to me and said, "Hey, I found this online, and I know you’re doing a lot of Wells Fargo cases. Maybe you can use this."
Reading it, my jaw just dropped. As I see it, it’s clearly outlining procedures, not just for the $12-an-hour robo-signers that we’ve heard about all these years, but for the lawyers, who need to be held accountable to a much higher degree. It’s the manual for the lawyers to actually fabricate documents, as I see it, and request that documents that are lacking be fabricated by Wells Fargo. It’s absolutely appalling.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you know, we’ve had on Democracy Now! a couple of times the Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, Arthur Schack, who raised a campaign over—not only over the robo-signers in many cases that he had before his court, but also over the bank officials and the attorneys who participated in this fraud. And there have been several judges in different parts of the country who have raised these issues. How do you think this advances the whole issue of going after—of having the smoking gun to go after these companies?
LINDA TIRELLI: Well, I think that judges cannot make determinations based on suspicion. OK? This is the first and only internal document that I’m aware of that clearly outlines the fraud. And that’s how I put it in my allegations to the court. And we are very, very fortunate in New York to have a number of proactive judges who get it, but unfortunately, they’re few and far between across the country. My hope is that judges as wonderful as Arthur Schack and as great as many of our federal judges—I do appear mostly in federal courts—that they will be proactive, they will take this seriously and start to question Wells Fargo on their procedures.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to read a bit from the Wells Fargo document. In this section called Note Endorsement, it says, quote, "If the blank endorsement is in the file for an original state, execute the endorsement, send the original document to the attorney, and complete the Z02 step." Can you explain what this means?
LINDA TIRELLI: Sure. I take that to mean that if there is actually an endorsement that exists, they need to endorse it. But as the party in—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And by "endorsement," you mean?
LINDA TIRELLI: Sign it over.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh.
LINDA TIRELLI: OK. But the question is: Do they have the authority to sign it over? Is it an authorized endorsement? Who’s signing it over? As the lawyer, I would need to know that before proceeding with a foreclosure. If it’s a document that needs to—if it was a note that needed to be endorsed, under a pooling and servicing agreement, which is followed by every securitized trust—and most of these loans, let’s face it, are owned by securitized trusts in some form or another—they should have been endorsed long before the foreclosure was ever started, at the time that it was actually acquired by the trust, or allegedly acquired by the trust.
AMY GOODMAN: So this manual talks about how to fabricate a document—
LINDA TIRELLI: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: —that you don’t have, that you need.
LINDA TIRELLI: That’s how I’m reading it.
AMY GOODMAN: That Wells Fargo would need.
LINDA TIRELLI: Exactly. That’s—
AMY GOODMAN: To foreclose on the house.
LINDA TIRELLI: Exactly right. That’s exactly how I’m reading it. I’m reading it to say that it’s not just, when there is a blank endorsement, fill in the blank. But sometimes when there—there’s actually a procedure in here, as I read it, for when there’s no endorsement, OK? Go ahead and endorse the note. Just request that the note be endorsed. And that’s what we call, in our area of law, a "tada endorsement." The bank produces a copy of a note, just for example, that has no endorsement on it, and then when we ask about it and say, "Gee, this note is not endorsed to your client. How is it that you’re—you know, you’re bringing foreclosure?" and they say, "Oh, here, use this version. Tada! Now we have an endorsement." And it’s always a rubber stamp, that you or I could go to Staples and purchase for $9.95.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You also, one of your cases, came across a document which was purportedly from an official of Washington Mutual Bank in 2010, but Washington Mutual didn’t exist in 2010, because it had collapsed back in 2008.
LINDA TIRELLI: 2008, that’s right. That document was signed by Mr. John Kennerty in—who works for Wells Fargo, or worked for Wells Fargo at the time. And in this procedure manual, there’s actually a procedure for obtaining what’s called an assignment of mortgage, OK? So, basically, as I’m reading this procedure, it’s saying, "Gee, if you need an assignment, the attorney should request it through the document department, and then, magically, one will appear for you." And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. The people that work for Wells Fargo in these various departments, when they receive a request from an attorney, they take that as permission to actually sign something, without doing any research whatsoever. How is it, as you point out, we had anything assigned from in a company that ceased to exist two years prior? It just simply makes no sense. That document’s fabricated. And in that particular case, I will point out, the judge actually deemed that document to be a fraudulent document on record.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember when Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur was standing on the floor of the House and telling homeowners, "Stay in their homes and demand that they produce the note. Produce the note." I wanted to go to Eric Schneiderman. Last May, the New York attorney—the New York attorney general announced plans to sue Bank of America and Wells Fargo for violating the terms of a settlement aimed at curbing foreclosure abuses. The $26 billion settlement was reached in 2012 between five major banks and 49 attorneys general. It provided basic protections for homeowners, such as requiring banks to notify them about missing documents within a certain time period. But Schneiderman said the banks had violated the terms of the settlement with impunity. At the news conference in May, he lifted a massive sheaf of papers to show the hundreds of complaints issued by homeowners against the banks.
ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN: Two of the participating servicers, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, have flagrantly violated their obligations under the settlement. I’ve sent a letter to the monitoring committee, the body that oversees the implementation of the national mortgage servicing settlement, notifying them of my intention to sue both Wells Fargo and Bank of America for noncompliance with servicing standards spelled out in the settlement. This enforcement action, which is the first taken under the settlement, is based on 339 individual complaints from New Yorkers against these two banks in just the last six months
AMY GOODMAN: Linda Tirelli, can you explain what happened with this case?
LINDA TIRELLI: Yes. Well, first of all, I want to point out, and very much to Mr. Schneiderman’s credit, within four hours of the New York Post writing the article exposing this documents, within four hours, I received not only a phone call, but an email from Attorney Schneiderman’s office, and we had a long discussion about it. I also received the phone call and an email from the New York State Division of Financial Services. So I’m hoping that they are now launching new investigations.
Basically, to put—as I understand Mr. Schneiderman’s point, Wells Fargo was signing off on the national mortgage settlement agreement out of one side of its mouth. Out of the other side, they were republishing their manual to say, "Hey, we’re going to continue business as usual. All right? Throw some money at it. It’s done. Quiet down the homeowners. We’ll just continue business as usual." And that’s what we’re seeing. That’s exactly what we’re seeing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Kevin Whelan, from the Home Defenders League, can you put this in a national context of the mortgage crisis? Here we are now, six years into the home mortgage crisis that crashed the entire economy.
KEVIN WHELAN: Absolutely. Thanks you for having me, very much, today. We hear, every time there is an uptick in real estate prices in some parts of the country, that the foreclosure crisis or the mortgage crisis is over. And certainly, Wells Fargo and the big banks are back to making record profits and feel like everything is great. But foreclosures are still tearing apart many communities, particularly communities of color that were targeted for predatory and subprime lending. And one in five American homeowners is still underwater, meaning they owe more on their house than the house is currently worth.
So we’ve made the banks whole without effectively curbing their abusive practices to give homeowners the runaround, to use falsified documents and to rush toward foreclosure when there’s a perfectly good way to reach a different settlement. And they’ve not done enough to make homeowners whole, including doing principal reduction that they promised to do under
settlements.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you respond to this latest news about the attorney general—the office making a low priority or no priority at all going after these mortgage lenders?
KEVIN WHELAN: Yeah, absolutely. The news is no surprise to people that have been fighting foreclosure in communities around the country. We work with 25 community groups in our at-large organization, so people can come find us at HomeDefendersLeague.org and get on a phone call and learn how to start a petition and fight for their homes. And people have been, you know, in cases all over the place, trying to stave off foreclosure.
We had a family in New Jersey last month, Paulette McQueen and her 86-year-old mom, who had missed one mortgage payment in 2010, went to Wells Fargo the next month with both checks in hand, and Wells Fargo wouldn’t take their money and started a three-year campaign to take their house. That was only resolved when people in 13 cities delivered petitions to Wells Fargo’s offices around the country. And they finally got a call back and are going to work out a solution to be able to stay in their home. It was a whole week before a sheriff’s sale.
So, it’s—you know, families that are facing this know both that the housing crisis isn’t over and that nothing has happened that’s on a deep enough or broad enough scale to make the banks fearful or sorry for either the harm they’ve done, or change their behavior in fundamental ways.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, there are some localities, some local governments, that have tried—intervened themselves in trying to beat back the crisis of people being kicked out of their homes. Could you talk about some of those examples?
KEVIN WHELAN: Yeah, there—one thing that’s—we know there’s something to it, because the banks, led by Wells Fargo, are especially panicked and angry about the solution. But in Richmond, California—I think you had the mayor of Richmond, Gayle McLaughlin, on the show before—has been a city that’s led the way—and many more are going to follow—to enact principal reduction, meaning resetting loans to their current market value on the local level. And this is exciting because, while these federal agencies, like the Justice Department, are too often captive of the big banks, people can use democracy and win on the local level sometimes.
The concept for this particular program is that cities would work with other investors to buy the loans at their fair market value on the secondary market, which is pennies on the dollar of what these underwater loans are worth, and help refinance homeowners into new loans that have equity. And this is a concept that has gotten started in Richmond, but people are meeting even today in different cities around the country to spread this. And I think, not so much because it would cost them money as because it’s a chance for people to use the rule of law and democracy to impact the economy and impact banks’ behavior, banks like Wells Fargo have sued, unsuccessfully, and made all kinds of threats about redlining communities in order to try to stop it. People can go to FightingForeclosures.org and learn more about that particular plan and get involved in that campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Whelan, you’ve been arrested outside of Attorney General Eric Holder—outside the Justice Department, demanding more action. And yet, Linda Tirelli, we have this latest news that as—that the attorney general claimed to have filed lawsuits on behalf of homeowner victims for losses totaling more than a billion dollars. In fact, it was 91 percent less than this, at $95 million. What do you think should happen? Who gets prosecuted here, and who is let go free?
LINDA TIRELLI: I think that at this point, let’s face it, we’re never going to see a perp walk, as much as we’d like to see one, because this is illegal activity that we’re talking about. At the very least, I think now this document gives the New York attorney general free access to every attorney who’s ever followed this manual and hold them accountable, because it is illegal. And we are held, as attorneys, to a much higher standard. We have to do a certain amount of due diligence, and we cannot knowingly produce false documents and submit them into a court of law. Our entire judicial process is based on integrity. This document, as I read it, OK, is going to bypass the integrity of the entire system, and it becomes now the civil procedure rules according to Wells Fargo. And that’s the rules they’re willing to play by.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And more importantly, the author of that document, right, who approved that document for all these lawyers to use.
LINDA TIRELLI: Exactly right, exactly right. And I want to point out that I actually introduced this document—
AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.
LINDA TIRELLI: —in a motion to reopen discovery after a trial, and my hope is that we will get discovery and get someone to a deposition table and get the answer to that.
AMY GOODMAN: Before Eric Holder was attorney general, he was a senior partner at Covington & Burling. Among the banks they represented, the four largest: Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.
LINDA TIRELLI: No shock there.
AMY GOODMAN: Linda Tirelli, attorney representing clients being foreclosed on; Kevin Whelan of Home Defenders League, thanks so much for joining us.
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Scott Olsen, U.S. Vet Nearly Killed by Police Beanbag at Occupy Oakland, Settles Lawsuit with City
Scott Olsen survived two tours in Iraq but almost died when he was hit with a police projectile at an Occupy Oakland protest in 2011. He was hospitalized in critical condition with a fractured skull, a broken neck vertebrae and brain swelling. At the time of the shooting, Olsen was wearing fatigues and a Veterans for Peace T-shirt. Moments after he was shot, police fired a bright flash grenade at a group of Occupy protesters who attempted to help treat him. Soon after that, protesters carried Olsen away as blood streamed down his face. Scott was later released from the hospital and sued the Oakland Police Department. He announced today on Democracy Now! he had reached a seven-figure settlement.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to a Democracy Now! exclusive. In a minute we’ll be joined by Scott Olsen, a former marine who served two tours in the Iraq War only to be critically wounded when he was shot in the head by a police projectile during a protest in 2011 at Occupy Oakland. He was hospitalized in critical condition with a fractured skull, a broken neck vertebrae and brain swelling. At the time of the shooting, Olsen was wearing fatigues and a Veterans for Peace T-shirt. Moments after he was shot, police fired a bright flash grenade at a group of Occupy protesters who attempted to help treat him. Soon after that, protesters carried Olsen away as blood streamed down his face. Video of the incident went viral.
PROTESTER 1: Medic!
PROTESTER 2: We need a medic! Medic! Medic!
PROTESTER 3: What happened? What happened?
PROTESTER 2: He got [bleep] shot!
PROTESTER 3: What’s your name? What’s your name?
PROTESTER 2: What’s your name?
PROTESTER 4: Dude, wake up!
PROTESTER 3: What’s your name?
PROTESTER 4: What’s your name?
PROTESTER 5: Can you say anything?
PROTESTER 3: Medic!
PROTESTERS: Medic!
PROTESTER 3: Whoa! [bleep]! Hey, back up! Back up! Back up!
AMY GOODMAN: Protests condemning the police use of force were held around the country. The incident galvanized the Occupy movement in Oakland. Within a week, a general strike temporarily shut down the Oakland ports.
Scott Olsen was later released from the hospital and sued the Oakland Police Department. Today, he’s joining us from Berkeley to announce a settlement in his case.
Scott Olsen, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the lawsuit and the settlement that you have now reached?
SCOTT OLSEN: Yes. We—earlier in this week, we reached a settlement with the city of Oakland. And, you know, it was a long process. It took two-and-a-half years almost to get to this point. And we’re going to announce further details at a press conference later in the morning in Oakland, but I’m happy with the way this lawsuit has turned out. It has been a very stressful experience having to deal with it. So, for that reason alone, I’m happy that it’s over.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, Scott, you had originally said when you filed the lawsuit that you were intent on bringing it to trial, because you wanted to have the facts come out. Your decision to agree to a settlement and why you felt it was best to do it at this point?
SCOTT OLSEN: Well, going to trial would have meant even more stress, and it would have taken a lot more time. It could have taken an extra year or two. And, you know, that’s kind of just a reality I had to deal with. And yeah, I—part of me does wish we had gone to trial, but this is what’s going to work out for me better, I think, and hopefully for pushing forward for change in Oakland police policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott, I know in your news conference you’re going to announce more details, but can you share with us what the settlement is with the Oakland police?
SCOTT OLSEN: No, we’re saving the amounts of the settlement for our press conference. But, you know, whatever the amount is, it’s certainly not enough to make up for a part of my brain that is dead and will forever be dead. And—but it will hopefully—or, it will be enough for me to make it easier to get by from day to day, especially since I’m looking at having more likely to have further medical problems down the road in 20, 30 or more years.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Scott, you’re the last of several people who sued the Oakland police as a result of police abuse during that period of time. Do you get a sense that there’s a real determination to change policies by the Oakland officials?
SCOTT OLSEN: Well, I think that having these lawsuits could be enough to bring some accountability to the police. And as far as I know, I’m the last outstanding case from Occupy with police brutality in Oakland. And, you know, it’s important that they need to know that if they use these weapons, the beanbags and the CS flashbangs, and they use them against a crowd-control policy that they’ve already agreed to, and they blatantly violate that, then they shouldn’t be allowed to use these weapons at all, if they can’t play by the rules that they’ve been given.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott, what is the extent of the injury to your brain, and how will it impact you in the future?
SCOTT OLSEN: Well, there’s—there’s a portion of my left frontal lobe which is dead. And, you know, that manifests itself in different like cognitive problems—fatigue, memory, planning and things like this. So, it’s—it made it very difficult when I tried to return to employment, and it makes that unrealistic for me. And, you know, it’s very—I’m at a much greater risk of, down the line, developing dementia, Alzheimer’s or other cognitive issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott, in the settlement, can you give us a sense of the range? Are we talking seven figures? Are we talking in the millions?
SCOTT OLSEN: Yes, it’s seven figures.
AMY GOODMAN: And are—is there any deal you have made with the police around their behavior and changes in how they deal with people in protests?
SCOTT OLSEN: No, no deal has been made, but we are going to put pressure on or work with the police for—you know, our first step is to disallow the use of the weapons that they attacked me with. The beanbags and the flashbangs were both key in what happened to me. They used the flashbangs, and they are designed to cause panic. They are designed to cause people to scatter. Now, you can’t safely fire beanbags into a crowd after you deploy those flashbangs. You can’t hit the target, because people are going to be running.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you know what you were hit by?
SCOTT OLSEN: I was hit with a beanbag round, which is fired out of a shotgun. And it’s like a nylon sock with 40 grams of lead pellets. And it was from about a distance of about 15 feet.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Scott, we want to thank you so much for being with us, and we will cover your news conference later today. Where are you holding it?
SCOTT OLSEN: It’s at Oscar Grant Plaza in front of Oakland City Hall at 10:00 a.m.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Olsen, former marine who served two tours in the Iraq War, was critically wounded after being shot—not in Iraq, but shot in the head by a police projectile at Occupy Oakland, hospitalized in critical condition with fractured skull, broken neck vertebrae, brain swelling, member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Thanks so much for joining us. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
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As Surveillance Costs Fall, Could the NSA Gain Ability to Record & Replay Every Call, Everywhere?
The latest disclosures from Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency is recording every single phone call made in an undisclosed foreign country. A surveillance system called MYSTIC stores the billions of phone conversations for up to 30 days. Agents are able to rewind and review any conversation within the previous month using a tool codenamed RETRO. One senior manager for the program compared it to a time machine. We speak to Ashkan Soltani, who co-wrote the Washington Post exposé on MYSTIC and has closely studied the cost of surveillance. He has co-written a series of other exposés for the Post that revealed how the NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking and how the NSA secretly broke into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The latest disclosures from Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency is recording every single phone call made in an undisclosed foreign country. A surveillance system called "MYSTIC" stores billions of phone conversations for up to 30 days. Agents are able to rewind and review any conversation within the previous month using a tool codenamed RETRO. One senior manager for the program compared it to a time machine. Michelle Richardson of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the MYSTIC program.
MICHELLE RICHARDSON: Well, we’re concerned this is another example of U.S. government overreach and that instead of really targeting its very powerful surveillance authorities on terrorists and spies, that they’re doing this bulk collection that sweeps up a lot of innocent people. So if they’re targeting an entire country’s phone calls, collecting and recording all of them and searching through them later, that doesn’t violate just the privacy of the people in that country, but the Americans that communicate with them.
AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post broke the story Tuesday. The paper said it withheld details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed at the request of the U.S. government. The paper also revealed last year’s secret intelligence budget named five more countries for which the MYSTIC program provides "comprehensive metadata access and content," with a sixth expected to be in place by last October.
Our first guest today is independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, who co-wrote the Washington Post piece. He has also co-written a series of other exposés for the Post that revealed how the NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking and how the NSA secretly broke into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.
Ashkan Soltani, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out what you found? One hundred percent of the calls in a particular country are being recorded by the NSA?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: That’s right. So our reporting demonstrates the NSA’s capability in at least one country to capture the entire communications. And this is not targeted communications; this is communications in bulk. So people’s conversations to, from and inside the country are able—are available to the NSA to be kind of retroactively accessed, so they can later go back in time and say who was talking to whom or particularly—look up particular conversations of interest.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, your article seemed to indicate that the biggest problem the agency had was its storage capacity, its ability—how to mine this information, just because of the sheer volume involved. Could you talk about that?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: Yeah, that’s actually been a common thread in most of the stories that we’ve come out with, including the data center one. We previously covered the NSA’s accessing of address books. This is like who—the address books in your phone. And an often kind of—or a common theme is that the NSA hits up on technology barriers, so limits to storage, limits to bandwidth, limits to processing power. And that’s when we see the information in the slides that we have.
And that’s really telling, since it highlights a kind of a larger problem, which is that the limitations are not legal or policy restrictions, right? The limitations are technical restrictions. And as technical capacity goes up, I think the NSA will be kind of growing these programs. We’re already aware of one large data center being built in Utah, which will have kind of a very large capacity to store this type of communication. And again, we’re going to need to look to legal restrictions to kind of minimize this collection, rather than technical ones.
AMY GOODMAN: Ashkan, how does the conversation go with the U.S. government and The Washington Post when they make their case for you not identifying the country that is 100 percent monitored, all the phone calls?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: I can’t get too into the details, but typically there’s a conversation on both sides, of kind of—the editors, the writers, the government all kind of weigh in on what they think is and isn’t important to cover. We felt that kind of our representation, our highlighting the existence of this program—and it is an ongoing program; it’s in place still—we wanted to raise the policy implications or policy issues associated with bulk content collection, without necessarily blowing a capability that the government currently has.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, were you able to tell to what degree the NSA needed cooperation or complicity by the telecommunications companies that were actually providing this telephone service?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: Again, I can’t—I can’t kind of get into the how and the where. I can say, again, it’s comprehensive access in at least one country.
AMY GOODMAN: At least one country, explain that.
ASHKAN SOLTANI: So, we—so, the documents we had were from last year, and they indicated a system up and running. And they would kind of go from, you know, earlier coverage to 100 percent, once—when we saw the documents. But they hinted at the expansion of this program in at least one other place by October 2013, October of last year. And there was kind of hints in the documents and in the budget documents that this capacity would be growing to other places as soon as the technical capacity was there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, during his recent TED Talk, Edward Snowden referenced you by name and talked about your work on the cost of surveillance.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: There is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights. Now, that hasn’t happened since the government’s surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that’s why we’re in the problem that we’re in today.
But there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology. I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world—and win. And I think that’s something that we need to take hope from and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts, but to ordinary citizens around the world. Journalism is not a crime. Communication is not a crime.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ashkan Soltani, your response to Edward Snowden?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: So, he was highlighting a paper that we wrote, I co-authored with Kevin Bankston, looking at the Supreme Court U.S. v. Jones decision. It was a landmark privacy decision where they found that 28 days of continuous surveillance, location surveillance, of an individual violated the Fourth Amendment. They actually kind of hung it on a particularity with regards to the access of the vehicle, but there was multiple concurring opinions of kind of describing this—the problem with mass prolonged surveillance. And so, what we tried to do, we tried to kind of figure out what was the—what was the hook.
There was a following—following that decision, there was a hearing in which, I think, Rep. Dowdy [sic] kind of went through a line of questioning, and saying, "Well, why do we need Fourth Amendment protections around location surveillance? Do I need—you know, is there—do I need a warrant? Do I need kind of probable cause to go and follow someone around on the street? Do I need to do so if I’m a police officer? Do I need to—do I need a warrant to follow them around by car, by air, etc.?" And the answer to this is, no, you do not, right? You can—a police officer can decide to follow you. He can decide to spend his time following you on the street, and to do his job. And I think the key of that assumption is that the police officer would find it worth his time to follow you. He would be not following someone else that might be kind of more likely to be a suspect, and he would be, you know, spending his own precious time doing it.
Technology has changed that. So what we looked at is we tried to highlight, in terms of just dollars, what would it cost to follow around someone on foot, traditionally, covertly, and what would—and how has technology changed that calculus. And so, for example, if a police officer wants to follow you around on foot, his average—an average salary of a police officer comes down to something like $50 with benefits, including kind of overtime and all this kind of stuff. And if he wanted to do so, or if they—if the police wanted follow you around covertly, they’d need five or so agents, in what’s known as a "floating box formation," so people could swap in and swap out and you wouldn’t know who’s following you. That’s somewhere on the order of $250 an hour to follow an individual throughout the day, right? And there’s like human limits to that, but let’s just, for the sake of argument, take that as a base number.
Now we compare that to what we know around what telephone providers, or telcos, charge the government for location tracking using your cellphone or using a GPS device. And that comes down to somewhere—to like $10 an hour, down to even four cents an hour, for an entire month, to track someone on Sprint’s network. So the government can pay a flat rate to Sprint, and it comes down to something around four cents a month to—for cents an hour to track an individual. That’s very different than $250 an hour to track an individual. And as such, the calculus is orders of magnitude less, right? They have orders of magnitude less barriers to be able to track you on the street, and therefore they’re more likely to do so.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, in other words, the cost-benefit analysis of a total police state, where people are following you around, is just too prohibitively expensive, but now, with technology, the cost-benefit has been reduced dramatically.
ASHKAN SOLTANI: Yeah. I mean, an example that we use at the very end of the paper is, right after the Supreme Court decision, an FBI official kind of announced that they had to request permission to turn on 3,000 devices that were in the field, so that they could go get them. Right after this decision, they had to disable those devices, and they needed permission to turn on those devices, they needed—from the courts, in order to go retrieve them. What’s interesting about that is that it indicates that, at that point in time, there was at least 3,000 devices in the field that they needed to go collect. And if you do the math, again, 3,000 kind of simultaneous targets would require somewhere on the order of 15,000 individuals full-time tracking those—the location of those targets. The FBI currently has something like 13,000 field agents that would be doing this work. And assuming that they did nothing else—they didn’t sleep, they didn’t shower, they didn’t—they did only surveillance, there would still not be enough FBI agents to surveil 3,000 people simultaneously. And I think that’s kind of the outcome, is, well, the technology allows a much greater capacity to do surveillance in bulk at a much lower cost, and so we’re going to just do it, because the technology can, and not kind of have a bigger policy debate of what is the right balance, right? How many agents should we have per person, per capita?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to link to your piece in The Yale Law Journal at democracynow.org. I wanted to turn to Deputy Director of National Security Agency Rick Ledgett, who gave a response to Snowden’s on-stage, virtual appearance at TED earlier in the week. Ledgett insisted the NSA believes in a right to privacy.
RICK LEDGETT: And we devote an inordinate amount of time and pressure—inordinate and appropriate, actually, I should say, amount of time and effort in order to ensure that we—that we protect that privacy—and beyond that, the privacy of citizens around the world. It’s not just Americans. You know, several—several things come into play here. First, we’re all on the same network. My communications—I’m a user of a particular Internet email service that is the number one email service of choice by terrorists around the world, number one, and so I’m there right beside them in email space in the Internet. And so, we need to be able to pick that apart and find the information that’s relevant. In doing so, we’re going to necessarily encounter Americans and innocent foreign citizens who are just going about their business, and so we have procedures in place that shreds that out, that says, "OK, when you find that—not if you find it, when you find it, because you’re certain to find it—here’s how you protect that." These are called minimization procedures. They’re approved by the attorney general and constitutionally based. And so, we protect those. And then, for people—you know, citizens of the world who are going about their lawful business on a day-to-day basis, the president, in his 17 January speech, laid out some additional protections that we are providing to them. So I think, absolutely, folks do have a right to privacy.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the deputy director of the National Security Agency, Rick Ledgett, giving a TED Talk, actually, from Fort Meade, Maryland, in response to Edward Snowden’s TED Talk earlier this week. Your response to this, Ashkan Soltani?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: Well, the fact that he gave a TED Talk is amazing on a number of levels. But going to the kind of substance of his—of his speech there, one thing to realize is, in fact, yes, the NSA does employ minimization procedures when they encounter U.S. persons’ information. For example, in bulk surveillance, if they are to discover that voice communications or email communications belong to an American, and they determine that it is not of foreign intelligence or other kind of national security interests—right, so they could be under counterterrorism, counternarcotics—I think in that speech he describes human trafficking, he describes, you know, money laundering. There’s a number of kind of missions that the data could become useful for. But if it’s determined that it’s a U.S. person and it’s not viable to any of those broad missions, then there is minimization in place.
I think what the tension is, what the kind of disconnect is, that the—that kind of that minimization happens on access to the data, but not on collection, right? So in our—in our story, we describe bulk collection or bulk kind of storage of entire countries’ worth of communications. That communication will continue as persons’ information for that rolling buffer of 30 days, and it’s not considered collection, or these minimization procedures don’t fall into place, until someone looks at it. But all during this time, your information has been recorded and is accessible, right? So it’s one of these things where it’s essentially the government saying, "We want to be able to look, but we won’t look unless—you know, unless we really need to, and we’ll close our eyes." And I think a lot of people would say, "Well, no, you shouldn’t be able to look unless you need to," right? And that’s the disconnect.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about this whole issue of the government’s restrictions in terms of collecting material on Americans. In the articles that you did on Google and the ability of the U.S. government to access Google data centers, you raised a particular, I think, issue that most people are not aware of. If I write on a Gmail account an email to Amy here in New York City, that email can appear in a Google server somewhere else in the world. Could you talk about that?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: That’s right. So, as we’re moving to a cloud-based kind of architecture, as more of our services are cloud-based, what that means is the servers are distributed all over the world, and they replicate, and they’re redundant to one another, such that if California fell off the, you know, grid sometime, that your emails and your communications are still accessible, right? And so, what happens is, in the scenario you described, if you’re in New York, you might be talking to either a Mountain View data center or something—or something in North Carolina, a data center in North Carolina. Your emails and your activity, your login, your—kind of the data that you generate will be housed in North Carolina, but it will immediately get replicated to Google’s data centers all over the world, the ones in Iceland, the ones in Japan. And as that data gets replicated, the NSA is able to tap that communication, that replication, that transfer of data. And so, even though, under their Executive Order 12333, they’re collecting overseas, they’re going to be incidentally collecting a large number of U.S. persons’ information, given the global architecture that we’re moving to, this global cloud architecture that we’re moving to.
AMY GOODMAN: And this Executive Order 12333 was signed by Reagan in 1981?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: Yeah, that—what’s interesting about 12333, it’s the kind of president’s sole kind of guidance on collection overseas for the intel agencies. And it’s—not a lot is known around that particular program. In my opinion, it’s actually—you know, there’s been a lot of talk of Section 215, the bulk metadata program; Section 702, which is essentially the PRISM program, where they go to companies and get data from Google and Yahoo. The bulk kind of—almost all of our stories, or the ones that I’ve been involved in, have been focusing around this 12333 kind of international collection, since it allows the government, almost kind of with very few restrictions, to collect data internationally. And there’s minimization procedures that apply to U.S. persons’ information that is encountered internationally, but those are only after, as I said, the information is accessed or looked at. But in the machine processing of it, they’re able to collect, broadly, everyone’s data under this executive order.
AMY GOODMAN: Ashkan, very quickly, can you talk about Google cookies?
ASHKAN SOLTANI: Sure, absolutely. So, another one of the stories in—in the story we did on location tracking, we kind of highlighted the government collecting information broadly from mobile devices, from cellphone networks, a variety of sources to track people’s location—five billion records a day, I think, was what we described. One of the findings from that particular kind of line of research was that the government was also using or relying on Google cookies to identify individuals. And so, the kind of the purpose might seem strange, but this goes back to the costs of surveillance and the costs to do identification, right?
So, you guys at Democracy Now! might use the Internet, and all of you will be behind the Democracy Now! firewall, and you would appear as the same user, the same IP address, and so the government couldn’t identify one of you versus another, right? But because you use Google services, Google will essentially identify you guys individual. They’ll set cookies for each user that’s unique to that user.
And so, what we found is the government was in fact relying on Google cookies, Yahoo cookies, a bunch of services, to uniquely identify users that they couldn’t otherwise do—again, an indication of their growing capacity due to the kind of change in our global telecommunications network. They’re benefitting from it or they’re able to leverage it in a kind of a really interesting way.
AMY GOODMAN: Ashkan Soltani, we want to thank you very much for being with us, independent privacy and security researcher. He has co-written a series of exposés for The Washington Post based on the leaks of Edward Snowden, including, most recently, the one headlined "NSA Surveillance Program Reaches 'Into the Past' to Retrieve, Replay Phone Calls." This is Democracy Now! We’ll link to that piece at democracynow.org, and all your pieces.
When we come back, Scott Olsen joins us. He’s the Iraq War vet who was protesting at Occupy Oakland, was grievously injured by a police projectile. Today on Democracy Now!, he announces a settlement of his lawsuit with the Oakland police. Stay with us.
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Headlines:
Russia, U.S. Trade Sanctions over Ukraine; EU Leaders Sign Deal with Ukraine Gov’t
Russia and the United States have each imposed new sanctions on the other over the crisis in Ukraine. President Obama made the announcement on Thursday.
President Obama: "Based on the executive order that I signed in response to Russia’s initial intervention in Ukraine, we’re imposing sanctions on more senior officials of the Russian government. In addition, we are today sanctioning a number of other individuals with substantial resources and influence who provide material support to the Russian leadership, as well as a bank that provides material support to these individuals. Now we’re taking these steps as part of our response to what Russia has already done in Crimea."
Obama also said the United States could impose sanctions on key sections of the Russian economy. Russia in turn barred nine U.S. officials from entering the country, including House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Earlier today, President Putin signed bills completing Russia’s annexation of Crimea after the region voted to secede from Ukraine. European leaders meanwhile signed a deal to strengthen ties with Ukraine’s new pro-EU government. The deal’s abandonment by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych sparked the protests that led to his ouster.
Afghanistan: AFP Reporter Among Dead in Wave of New Year’s Attacks
Afghanistan has seen a wave of attacks surrounding the new year’s holiday of Nowruz. Today, at least three people were killed when attackers threw an explosives-filled bottle at a Nowruz ceremony in Kandahar. On Thursday night, four gunmen attacked the luxury Serena Hotel in Kabul, killing nine people before they were shot dead by security forces. Among the dead was Sardar Ahmad, an Afghan journalist who was the senior reporter in Kabul for Agence France-Presse. He was killed along with his wife and two of his three children. Earlier in the day, an attack targeting a police compound in the city of Jalalabad killed at least 10 police officers, including the district chief.
Reid Orders Probe of Senate Computers After Reports of CIA Spying
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has ordered a forensic examination of Senate Intelligence Committee computers following reports the CIA spied on committee staff to thwart a probe of the CIA’s torture and rendition program. In a letter to CIA Director John Brennan, Senator Reid bolstered last week’s claims by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who openly accused the CIA of spying on Senate staffers and seizing material from their computers. Reid also dismissed Brennan’s claim Senate staffers penetrated classified CIA networks, calling the allegation "patently absurd."
Report: U.S. Boycotts Talks on Drone Strikes in Geneva
The Obama administration is boycotting international talks about its drone strikes. According to Foreign Policy, Pakistan is trying to pass a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council calling for greater scrutiny of whether drone strikes violate human rights. A round of talks on the proposal was held in Geneva this week, but the United States refused to attend.
Turkey Attempts to Block Twitter, Causing Twitter to Erupt
Turkey has blocked the social media site Twitter amid a corruption scandal facing the administration of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan vowed to "eradicate Twitter." But Turkish users could still reportedly send tweets by text, and the hashtag #TwitterIsBlockedInTurkey has exploded worldwide.
Report: Groups Descended from Right-Wing Death Squads Slaughtering Residents of Colombian City
In news from Colombia, Human Rights Watch has released a report on killings by right-wing paramilitary successor groups in the largely Afro-Colombian port city of Buenaventura. The groups reportedly use so-called "chop-up houses" to slaughter victims, sometimes dismembering them while they are still alive, then dumping them in the ocean. Scores and potentially hundreds of residents have been abducted and disappeared. Last year, more than 19,000 people fled Buenaventura, more than in any other municipality in Colombia, a country with the second largest population of internally displaced people in the world. HRW’s Daniel Wilkinson described the groups’ origins.
Daniel Wilkinson: "There are basically two groups who are operating in these neighborhoods. One is called the Urabeños. The other is called the Empresa. And these are groups that basically descended from right-wing paramilitary death squads that existed throughout the country. Those paramilitaries demobilized in the government program 10 years ago. But these groups today operate in a very similar fashion."
Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, Removed by President
In other news from Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos has removed the mayor of the capital Bogotá. Gustavo Petro is a former guerrilla leader who played a key role in uncovering ties between politicians and right-wing militias in 2006 while he was a senator. Petro’s removal as mayor was originally ordered in December by Colombia’s inspector general in what his supporters called a right-wing coup.
Texas: Hunger-Striking Immigrants in Private Prison Report Retaliation
Immigrants on hunger strike at a detention prison in Conroe, Texas, say they are facing retaliation. The strike is in its fifth day after it began with a reported 120 participants calling for better treatment and an end to record deportations. The hunger strikers say they have been placed in solitary confinement and pressured to sign voluntary deportation papers. The prison is run by the for-profit GEO Group. At another GEO-run prison in Tacoma, Washington, prisoners who launched a hunger strike two weeks ago say they have also faced punishment, including threats of force-feeding.
Top U.S. Army General Avoids Prison Time in Sexual Assault Case
Army Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, a former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, will avoid any prison time after a subordinate accused him of sexual assault. Sinclair was docked $20,000 in pay after pleading guilty to lesser offenses, including mistreating the junior officer during a three-year affair. The officer said Sinclair twice forced her to perform oral sex and threatened to kill her and her family if she spoke out. Speaking Thursday, Sinclair praised the military justice system.
Jeffrey Sinclair: "This has been a very difficult time for me and my family. It really has. The system worked. I’ve always been proud of my Army. All I want to do now is go up north and hug my kids and see my wife. And thank you very much for treating me with dignity and respect and taking care of my family. I appreciate it. Thank you."
Former Navy Football Player Acquitted of Sexual Assault
In another case, a former Naval Academy football player was acquitted Thursday of sexually assaulting a classmate. Prosecutors said Joshua Tate assaulted the victim after she got drunk and passed out at a party, but a military judge ruled the case was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt. At a preliminary hearing in September, the alleged victim was grilled on topics including whether she wore a bra and underwear to the party, how she performs oral sex, and whether she "felt like a ho" after the alleged assault.
Florida Executes 5th Prisoner Using Controversial Drug Method
Florida has executed a fifth prisoner using an experimental drug process involving the sedative midazolam. The first prisoner executed under Florida’s new protocol, back in October, appeared to stay conscious longer and move more while unconscious than prisoners in previous executions. On Thursday, Robert Henry was executed using the same process for the murders of two co-workers. He was pronounced dead 11 minutes after the injection began.
North Carolina: Duke Energy Cited for Dumping 61 Million Gallons of Toxic Waste
Environmental regulators in North Carolina have cited Duke Energy for intentionally dumping 61 million gallons of toxic coal ash waste into a canal that feeds a river which supplies drinking water. Duke is already under federal investigation for a coal ash spill in February that coated the bottom of another river with 70 miles of toxic sludge. North Carolina regulators have faced accusations of guarding Duke from litigation over coal ash. Governor Pat McCrory worked at Duke for 28 years.
New York: 59 Arrested Protesting for Economic Justice at State Capitol in Albany
In New York, 59 people were arrested in the State Capitol in Albany at a protest calling for economic and social justice. As lawmakers debated the state budget, the protesters staged a sit-in and blocked the entrance to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office. Their demands include closing the gulf between rich and poor.
Rev. Frances Rosenau: "Because a budget is a moral document, it has implications for people across the state, young and old, rich and poor. And because these decisions about the budget are so crucial, they have moral implications. And so we join with people of faith and people of no faith who call for morality in our leadership as a state."
Julia Boyd: "So far, our 1 percent governor has done absolutely nothing, and we’re sick and tired. So we’re here today, and I’m oldest one here, to let him know we ain’t gonna take it no more."
That was Julia Boyd, age 77, and, before that, Reverend Frances Rosenau. Special thanks to Democracy Now! fellow Messiah Rhodes for that report.
NYC Mayor de Blasio Signs Paid Sick Leave Bill
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has signed a paid sick leave bill – the first bill he has signed as mayor. Starting April 1, more than half a million New Yorkers will be able to take up to five paid sick days without fear of being fired.
Lawrence Walsh, Prosecutor in Iran-Contra Scandal, Dies at 102
Lawrence Walsh, who prosecuted top Reagan administration officials for the Iran-Contra scandal, has died at the age of 102. Walsh conducted a six-year investigation of the Reagan administration’s covert sale of weapons to Iran and its use of the proceeds to secretly supply weapons to contra rebels in Nicaragua despite a congressional ban. Walsh won key convictions, but President George H.W. Bush later pardoned several officials involved, including Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger.
Anti-Gay Extemist Fred Phelps Dead at 84
And the anti-gay extremist Fred Phelps has died at the age of 84. Phelps was the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, a Kansas-based group known for holding anti-gay protests at the funerals of military veterans and AIDS victims. His daughter told a local news station there would be no funeral for Fred Phelps. In a statement, the Kansas Equality Coalition urged people not to publicly protest Phelps, saying, "The best vengeance is knowing that we will prevail, his views will fail, and his life will be rendered meaningless."
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