Is American democracy headed to extinction? WaPo editorial

Behind dysfunctional government, is democracy itself in decay?

It took only 250 years for democracy to disintegrate in ancient Athens. A wholly new form of government was invented there in which the people ruled themselves. That constitution proved marvelously effective. Athens grew in wealth and capacity, saw off the Persian challenge, established itself as the leading power in the known world and produced treasures of architecture, philosophy and art that bedazzle to this day. But when privilege, corruption and mismanagement took hold, the lights went out.
It would be 2,000 years before democracy was reinvented in the U.S. Constitution, now as representative democracy. Again, government by popular consent proved ingenious. The United States grew into the world’s leading power — economically, culturally and militarily. In Europe, democracies overtook authoritarian monarchies and fascist and communist dictatorships. In recent decades, democracy’s spread has made the remaining autocracies a minority.
The second democratic experiment is approaching 250 years. It has been as successful as the first. But the lesson from Athens is that success does not breed success. Democracy is not the default. It is a form of government that must be created with determination and that will disintegrate unless nurtured. In the United States and Britain, democracy is disintegrating when it should be nurtured by leadership. If the lights go out in the model democracies, they will not stay on elsewhere.
It’s not enough for governments to simply be democratic; they must deliver or decay. In Britain, government is increasingly ineffectual. The constitutional scholar Anthony King has described it as declining from “order” to “mess” in less than 30 years. During 10 years of New Labor rule, that proposition was tested and confirmed. In 1997 a new government was voted in with a mandate and determination to turn the tide on Thatcherite inequality. It was given all the parliamentary power a democratic government could dream of and benefited from 10 years of steady economic growth. But a strong government was defeated by a weak system of governance. It delivered nothing of what it intended and left Britain more unequal than where the previous regime had left off.
The next government, a center-right coalition, has proved itself equally unable. It was supposed to repair damage from the economic crisis but has responded with inaction on the causes of crisis, in a monopolistic financial-services sector, and with a brand of austerity that protects the privileged at the expense of the poor. Again, what has transpired is inability rather than ill will. Both these governments came up against concentrations of economic power that have become politically unmanageable.
Meanwhile, the health of the U.S. system is even worse than it looks. The three branches of government are designed to deliver through checks and balances. But balance has become gridlock, and the United States is not getting the governance it needs. Here, the link between inequality and inability is on sharp display. Power has been sucked out of the constitutional system and usurped by actors such as PACs, think tanks, media and lobbying organizations.
In the age of mega-expensive politics, candidates depend on sponsors to fund permanent campaigns. When money is allowed to transgress from markets, where it belongs, to politics, where it has no business, those who control it gain power to decide who the successful candidates will be — those they wish to fund — and what they can decide once they are in office. Rich supporters get two swings at influencing politics, one as voters and one as donors. Others have only the vote, a power that diminishes as political inflation deflates its value. It is a misunderstanding to think that candidates chase money. It is money that chases candidates.
In Athens, democracy disintegrated when the rich grew super-rich, refused to play by the rules and undermined the established system of government. That is the point that the United States and Britain have reached.
Nearly a century ago, when capitalist democracy was in a crisis not unlike the present one, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Democracy weathered that storm for two reasons: It is not inequality as such that destroys democracy but the more recent combination of inequality and transgression. Furthermore, democracy was then able to learn from crisis. The New Deal tempered economic free-for-all, primarily through the 1933 Banking Act, and gave the smallfolk new social securities.
The lesson from Athens is that success breeds complacency. People, notably those in privilege, stopped caring and democracy was neglected. Six years after the global economic crisis, the signs from the model democracies are that those in privilege are unable to care and that our systems are unable to learn. The crisis started in out-of-control financial services industries in the United States and Britain, but control has not been reasserted. Economic inequality has followed through to political inequality, and democratic government is bereft of power and capacity. Brandeis was not wrong; he was ahead of his time.

5 years after H1N1 Swine Flu was discovered, what do we know about Pandemrix and Narcolepsy?

1.  How widely was Pandemrix vaccine used?

Virtually all the narcolepsy data comes from Europe, where the GlaxoSmithKline Pandemrix swine flu vaccine was given to about 31 million Europeans and was used in 47 countries.  It was used in Canada (12 million doses) and a number of developing countries, but little is known about increased cases of narcolepsy outside Europe.  Increased narcolepsy cases have been confirmed post-vaccination in (at least) Finland, Sweden, England, Ireland, France, and Norway. 

2.  Did the US use Pandemrix?

No. The US purchased novel adjuvants as it prepared to deal with the swine flu epidemic, including Pandemrix's ASO3, but then chose not use Pandemrix, instead using other brands of H1N1 vaccines (without novel adjuvants) for swine flu.  This was almost certainly in response to extensive public discourse on the subject. I wrote a number of pieces on the potential risks of novel adjuvants in 2009-10, including those here, here, here and here.

3.  How many people developed narcolepsy as a result of Pandemrix?

800 European children are reported to have developed this condition after Pandemrix vaccine in about 6 European countries.  The number in other countries and excess cases in adults are not known.

Several studies, but not all, found maximum rates of narcolepsy (attributable risk from the vaccine) of 6/100,000 in vaccinated children aged about 4-19.  According to Ireland's Health Protection Surveillance Center, the increased rate of developing narcolepsy after receiving a Pandemrix inoculation, compared to the unvaccinated baseline rate, ranged from 4-5 fold in Sweden and France, up to 16 fold in the UK.  The increase was 13 fold in Finland and Ireland, and 15 fold in Norway.

In addition to kids being more susceptible to narcolepsy following Pandemrix, there were also relatively more children than adults vaccinated.  In Ireland, 42% of all children were vaccinated, but only 14% of adults over 20. Therefore almost exactly the same number of Irish children as adults received the vaccine, even though 3/4 of Ireland's people are adults.  In other European countries as well, higher percentages of children were vaccinated than adults.

Although the greatest risk for narcolepsy occurred in children aged 4-19, there is also a mildly increased risk of narcolepsy in vaccinated adults (2-3 times the baseline rate) and younger children.

4. Who is responsible to pay damages for narcolepsy?

Because all countries that purchased or were given the vaccine were required to give a liability waiver to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) (and to the other manufacturers of different brands of swine flu vaccines), GSK is not responsible to compensate families for illnesses related to the vaccine.

Instead, the taxpayers of each country are responsible for paying families for serious illnesses caused by the vaccine, because this was the agreement made by their governments.  Each country is evaluating and compensating affected families its own way. In countries where no studies were done to look at whether Pandemrix caused narcolepsy, there may be no method for affected individuals to receive compensation.

There is a financial conflict of interest when a government that is responsible for damages is the same government that determines whether Pandemrix caused narcolepsy cases.

5.  What was WHO's role regarding liability?

It was the World Health Organization (WHO) that facilitated this vaccine "tort reform," transferring the liability for vaccine injuries from manufacturers to taxpayers, as noted in this 2012 WHO report:

     "To facilitate the acceptance of vaccines by the large number of recipient countries involved, WHO developed a Letter of Agreement that was signed by each recipient-country government as a condition of receiving vaccines. This Letter of Agreement acknowledged and incorporated clauses from the donation agreement outlined above. All agreements with countries therefore included the same required terms, including those relating to limitations of liability, that were included in the agreements between WHO and donors.

     Because the initial urgency of the pandemic response required an unprecedented number of doses of a new vaccine to be deployed globally in a period of only a few months, vaccine manufacturers required that all customers (primarily developed-country governments) indemnify them (or otherwise discharge them from liability) for any adverse events arising from the use of the pandemic H1N1 vaccine, except to the extent that such adverse events were caused by a failure to comply with cGMP or to meet agreed specifications..."

WHO in 2012 also downplayed the significance of Pandemrix to narcolepsy, despite a report by Canada's Globe and Mail in 2011 that WHO acknowledged increased narcolepsy cases in 12 of 47 countries that used Pandemrix:

Although the preliminary information was not conclusive, subsequent data indicated an increased incidence of narcolepsy in children between the ages of 4 and 19 years who had been immunized against pandemic H1N1 influenza. These increased incidences were observed only in Finland, Iceland and Sweden (where higher rates of narcolepsy normally occur)...  

6.  How did Pandemrix cause narcolepsy?

There is some evidence that a portion of the hemagglutinin of the 2009 swine flu virus (and vaccine) resembles hypocretin (which is the hormone produced in the hypothalamus that induces wakefulness, and is in short supply or absent in narcolepsy patients), and therefore may stimulate an immune response via "molecular mimicry" against cells producing hypocretin.  But against this hypothesis is the fact that getting the swine flu illness did not increase cases of narcolepsy (here and here); only the vaccine did that. So the answer is we don't know yet.

7.  Did Pandemrix cause other medical problems?

Were other neurological conditions caused by Pandemrix?  This question should have been asked by many international enhanced surveillance projects put in place in 2009.  It has been answered for Sweden as "no"--only narcolepsy cases increased.  There may be slightly increased risks for other conditions, such as paresthesias and inflammatory bowel disease.  I await more studies on this subject.

U.S. Scurries to Shore Up Spying on Russia In Crimea: Russia May Have Gotten a Jump on West by Evading U.S. Eavesdropping/ WSJ

Here we go again.   Twenty-five years ago, the US intelligence community did not know that the USSR was about to fall.  Since then, many hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent by the intelligence agencies, but they still missed the boat on the invasion of Crimea--a subject that should have been of utmost importance.

According to the Wall Street Journal, our spies did not know that Russia was about to invade Crimea. Even when they saw troops positioning, they failed to overhear phone calls that discussed the invasion.  They had no clue the Russians were communicating using methods we hadn't tapped.  They had no idea they were missing something.

Can NSA stop wasting money and talent on the easy targets (like you and me) and actually do what is supposedly (for no one without a very high clearance has ever seen NSA's charter) the job for which NSA was created:  to protect the US from foreign enemies? 

"No statute establishes the NSA," former Senate intelligence committee chairman Frank Church reported, "or defines the permissible scope of its responsibilities." That is not very comforting.  And whatever happened to HUMINT? Why did we have no spies on the ground in Crimea?

From the WSJ: 

U.S. military satellites spied Russian troops amassing within striking distance of Crimea last month. But intelligence analysts were surprised because they hadn't intercepted any telltale communications where Russian leaders, military commanders or soldiers discussed plans to invade. 

America's vaunted global surveillance is a vital tool for U.S. intelligence services, especially as an early-warning system and as a way to corroborate other evidence. In Crimea, though, U.S. intelligence officials are concluding that Russian planners might have gotten a jump on the West by evading U.S. eavesdropping. 

"Even though there was a warning, we didn't have the information to be able to say exactly what was going to happen," a senior U.S. official says...

U.S. officials haven't determined how Russia hid its military plans from U.S. eavesdropping equipment that picks up digital and electronic communications... 

Inside Crimea, Russian troops exercised what U.S. officials describe as extraordinary discipline in their radio and cellphone communications. Remarks that were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies revealed no hint of the plans...

European Command officials again asked for more intelligence-collection resources. The military increased satellite coverage of Ukraine and Russia but couldn't steer too many resources away from Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and other hot spots, U.S. officials say. (With hundreds of orbiting satellites we couldn't do better?--Nass)

 There were no Americans on the ground in Crimea to check reports of Russian military movements, U.S. officials say. The U.S. also didn't have drones overhead to gather real-time intelligence, officials say. That increased the U.S.'s reliance on satellite imagery and information gleaned from an analysis of social media, which was muddled by Russian disinformation. State Department officials declined to discuss any technical-intelligence activities.

If Mr. Putin decided to launch a takeover, many U.S. intelligence analysts thought he would use troops participating in the military exercises. Officials now say they underestimated the quality of Russian forces inside Crimea...

NSA warrantless spying on Americans (and probably blackmailing) goes back decades

Thanks to DS Wright at FireDogLake for this article with useful links.  Don't miss Scott Shane's Baltimore Sun piece of how intelligence agency trainees listened in to phone conversations by tapping microwave towers, as part of their training--in 1995!

During the drama over the so-called Amash Amendment General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, went to Capitol Hill to lobby against the law. During the course of his lobbying members of Congress responded to his presentations with a reasonable question – can we see our own files? Alexander said no. According to David Sirota of NSFW Corp (paywalled) these exchanges are quite revealing as to how the NSA’s power works in Washington.

"Consider the deep messaging of the NSA’s brand. Only forty years removed from the blackmail-tinged reign of J. Edgar Hoover, the NSA has developed an image which implies the agency is vacuuming up more than enough incriminating phone records, emails and text/sext messages to politically torpedo any rank-and-file congressman, should that congressman step out of line.

And here’s the thing: for all the agita intelligence officials express about new disclosures, those disclosures illustrate the sheer size and scope of governement surveillance. That doesn’t weaken the NSA – on the contrary, it serves to politically strengthen the agency by constantly reminding lawmakers that the NSA 1) probably has absolutely everything on them and 2) could use that stuff against them." 

Sirota also spoke with Rep. Alan Grayson who told him that in the course of the conversation about the NSA and files they might have on members of Congress said “one of my colleagues asked the NSA point blank will you give me a copy of my own record and the NSA said no, we won’t. They didn’t say no we don’t have one. They said no we won’t.” Dare anyone accuse the NSA of being cryptic?

Of course we already know that it was Nancy Pelosi that killed the Amash Amendment. What we don’t know is whether she did so out of fear of an NSA file, party interests or both. We also know she was involved in insider trading while in Congress. What more does the NSA know about her?

There was also a report by a former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Russell Tice that the NSA wiretapped Barack Obama in 2004. Is there some massive archive of politicians’ dirty secrets somewhere at the NSA? Surely the NSA at least has their metadata – they have everyone’s. It is hard to imagine when push comes to shove and its budget time that the NSA doesn’t take a peek at who they are doing business with in Congress. Intelligence is all about having as much information as possible, that’s the training and that’s the game. Old habits probably die hard.

It was a troubling thought, but I had no smoking gun evidence to support it, until I heard Mark Ames discussing Sirota’s story with Sirota yesterday. Ames referenced a blockbuster story broken by New York Times reporter Scott Shane. Published by the Baltimore Sun, the story Listening in: Though the National Security Agency can’t target Americans, it can — and does — listen to everyone from senators to lovers, provides smoking gun evidence that the NSA has been spying on members of Congress andallowing the information to be used for leverage since at least the Reagan Administration.

“We listened to all the calls in and out of Washington,” says one former NSA linguist, recalling a class at the Warrenton Training Center, a CIA communications school on a Virginia hilltop. “We’d listen to senators, representatives, government agencies, housewives talking to their lovers.”…

"NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay 100% of phone calls"/ Washington Post

And now from the Snowden cache is the story of how it ain't only the metadata that is vacuumed up by NSA and saved for posterity.

No, it is the complete audio recording of calls that is being obtained and stored.  The program allegedly began in 2009, but according to the WaPo, calls are only being stored for a month. However, with the cheapness of digital storage and a huge electronic vault already established in Bluffdale, Utah, why bother ever pressing the delete button?

The story is confusing.  Where is this taking place?  Are all domestic calls being recorded? In which countries is NSA collecting all the calls? The WaPo is coy on this:

"... At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned."

Here is the meat (a very small portion) revealed by the Post:

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance...

No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation’s telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a growing debate over the NSA’s practice of “bulk collection” abroad.

Bulk methods capture massive data flows “without the use of discriminants,” as President Obama put it in January. By design, they vacuum up all the data they touch — meaning that most of the conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national security interests." 

European Parliament votes for consequences if NSA Mass Surveillance Does Not Cease/ European Parliament

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20140307IPR38203/html/US-NSA-stop-mass-surveillance-now-or-face-consequences-MEPs-say

Parliament's consent to the EU-US trade deal "could be endangered" if blanket mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) does not stop, MEPs said on Wednesday, in a resolution wrapping up their six-month inquiry into US mass surveillance schemes. The text also calls on the EU to suspend its bank data deal with the US and the “Safe Harbour agreement” on data privacy. The fight against terrorism can never justify secret and illegal mass surveillance, it adds.

The resolution, in which MEPs set out their findings and recommendations to boost EU citizens' privacy, was backed by 544 votes to 78, with 60 abstentions. "The Snowden revelations gave us a chance to react. I hope we will turn those reactions into something positive and lasting into the next mandate of this Parliament, a data protection bill of rights that we can all be proud of", said Civil Liberties inquiry rapporteur Claude Moraes (S&D, UK). "This is the only international inquiry into mass surveillance. (...) Even Congress in the United States has not had an inquiry", he added.

Parliament's should withhold its consent to the final Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal with the US unless it fully respects EU fundamental rights, stresses the resolution, adding that data protection should be ruled out of the trade talks. This consent “could be endangered as long as blanket mass surveillance activities and the interception of communications in EU institutions and diplomatic representations are not fully stopped”, notes the text.

MEPs also call for the "immediate suspension" of the Safe Harbour privacy principles (voluntary data protection standards for non-EU companies transferring EU citizens’ personal data to the US). These principles “do not provide adequate protection for EU citizens” say MEPs, urging the US to propose new personal data transfer rules that meet EU data protection requirements.

The Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) deal should also be suspended until allegations that US authorities have access to EU citizens’ bank data outside the agreement are clarified, insist MEPs.

European whistle-blower protection and EU cloudThe text also calls for a "European whistle-blower protection programme", which should pay particular attention to the "complexity of whistleblowing in the field of intelligence". EU countries are also asked to consider granting whistleblowers international protection from prosecution.

Furthermore, Europe should develop its own clouds and IT solutions, including cybersecurity and encryption technologies, to ensure a high level of data protection, adds the text.

The UK, France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Poland should clarify the allegations of mass surveillance - including potential agreements between intelligence services and telecoms firms on access to and exchange of personal data and access to transatlantic cables - and their compatibility with EU laws, the resolution says. 

Other EU countries, in particular those participating in the "9-eyes" (UK, Denmark, France and the Netherlands) and "14-eyes" arrangements (those countries plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden) are also urged to review their national laws to ensure that their intelligence services are subject to parliamentary and judicial oversight and that they comply with fundamental rights obligations. 

BackgroundThe Civil Liberties Committee inquiry into mass surveillance of EU citizens began in September 2013. A total of 16 hearings have been held since then.

My Op-Ed: Maine senators should abide by Constitution, OK release of torture report/ Portland Press Herald

Maine Voices: Maine senators should abide by Constitution, OK release of torture report

They should also place the full force of their offices behind a return to constitutional government.

By Meryl Nass 
Special to the Press Herald

ELLSWORTH — On one historic day 225 years ago, on March 4, 1789, the first U.S. Congress met and the Constitution came into force. The Bill of Rights was ratified nearly three years later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Meryl Nass of Ellsworth is a Maine physician and an expert on bioterrorism. She has served as chair of the state Commission to Protect the Lives and Health of Members of the Maine National Guard.

Massachusetts, which in those days included Maine, had opposed the original Constitution, until a Bill of Rights was added as the first amendments to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights has been part of the Constitution ever since, guaranteeing inviolable rights to all citizens. It led the United States to become the world’s beacon of human rights.

But since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has trampled at least four of the Bill of Rights’ amendments: disregarding the prohibitions against search and seizure without cause, the right to due process, the right to a prompt, public trial and the prohibition of torture (“cruel and unusual punishment”). Thus, on this 225th anniversary of the start of constitutional law in the United States, there is no cause for celebration.

But we now have an opportunity to help restore the primacy of the Constitution in our republic. Because of a happy coincidence, Maine can lead the way, because Maine is the only state both of whose senators are members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence spent three years and $40 million investigating the covert U.S. government program to kidnap, detain, interrogate and torture designated “enemy combatants.”

After reviewing millions of pages of documents, the committee issued the most comprehensive report on this subject to date, in December 2012. However, the 6,300-page report has yet to see the light of day: It was immediately classified. Ten years after we first learned about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the scope of what was done has yet to be made public.

The contents of the report are critical to gaining an understanding of what happened, and learning how to prevent a repeat.

How important is the report? Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein saidthat the report “uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight ... The creation of long-term, clandestine ‘black sites’ and the use of so-called ‘enhanced-interrogation techniques’ were terrible mistakes.”

She further said that the committee report “will settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques such as those detailed in this report.”

But without a public airing of the report, there will never be accountability; without access to the report, the necessary national discussion on torture will be spun and controlled by those with vested interests – those who have lied repeatedly about this subject, with impunity.

For example, former administration officials linked the Navy SEAL raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed to the “enhanced interrogation” program. However, both Sens. Feinstein, D-Calif., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Armed Services Committee, called this claim “misguided and misinformed.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify its report. Declassifying the Senate report on U.S.-instigated torture is the first, necessary step to prevent similar violations of human rights in the future. It should also be understood that the U.S. program of torture, rendition and detention depended on infringing on the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution. As we begin the conversation on torture, it should be grounded in a new commitment to the preeminent role of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights in the affairs of the United States.

Agreement by Maine U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King will likely be pivotal to achieving declassification of the torture report and a national discussion of the report’s contents. Maine’s senators should not only vote to release the report, but also place the full force of their offices behind a return to constitutional government.

We must learn how the United States came to ignore its laws and Constitution and adopt medieval torture, extraordinary rendition and other illegal practices as policy. To end torture, and return to the rule of law, Americans need to know what was done in our name and with our dollars. Then we must say, “Never again.”

WaPo claims dramatic rise in child deaths from flu--but CDC graph shows lowest percentage of hospitalizations in children of past 5 flu seasons

The Washington Post  claimed last week: ‘Swine flu’ strain returns; dramatic rise in deaths of young adults, children.  But CDC does not collect info on young adult deaths.  It does collect info on child deaths, however.  And it collects data on hospitalizations. It is actually the 50-64 year olds who are suffering more hospitalizations this year.  Kids are doing quite well. Only 52 deaths in children have had an association with flu.  From CDC:

GCHQ collected, stored webcams of 1.8 million users during a six-month period in 2008 /Guardian

This article is also based on documents from the Guardian's Snowden cache.

How can people believe that NSA, GCHQ and their ilk are not storing all phone calls (full audio files, not just metadata) when it takes so much more storage to college webcam information?

Let's get real.  Every digital signature you have left during the last many years (five? ten?  fifteen?) has been collected, possibly reviewed, but is definitely in storage, awaiting a time it might be useful.  That is why NSA's Bluffdale facility was built:  to store this and so much more in future.

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images ofYahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

 In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

 Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

 GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

 The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.

Here's the thing.  They spied on anyone, random people, to supposedly test the system. Or because they do spy on everyone. Hey there squeaky clean, that means you, too. From Time:

According to the documents, the British spy agency  GCHQ snooped on “unselected” Yahoo users—that is, people who were spied on at random regardless of whether or not they were suspected of any wrongdoing—during webcam chats and took millions of still shots at five-minute intervals. 

From CNN:

The GCHQ estimated that up to 11% of the digital images it collected from the webcam chats were explicit, the Guardian reported, citing the leaked documents.

Eleven per cent????!!!!

What has not been made clear from media reports is whether snapshots were being taken when people were not using their webcams.  NSA has been alleged to have the ability to view us through the computer's internal camera when we believe the camera is "off ".  

If GCHQ and NSA are taking shots at random through your computer, and your computer is in the bedroom, it would explain why so much nudity and sexually explicit material was being caught.

Mumps outbreak at Fordham University -- every affected student had been vaccinated/ ABC

From ABC News in NYC:

The outbreak of the mumps at Fordham University has spread from one campus to another.

There are now 13 reported cases, 12 at the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx and one at the Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan.

 The symptoms are similar to the flu, but the virus can also cause painful swelling.

All of the infected patients had the mumps vaccine, but doctors say it's not 100 percent effective...

From TechTimes:

Most kids in the United States receive mumps-containing vaccine but vaccination does not give guarantee that the disease will be avoided. "Studies suggest that the mumps vaccine is 80% to 90% effective," the NYC Health Department said. "That means that for every 100 people vaccinated, 80 to 90 of them will be fully protected, but 10 to 20 are at risk for the disease." 

Health experts also said that vaccination does not give 100 percent protection. Dana Saltzman, a disease specialist, said that virus-induced immunity against a disease can wane. "The immunity that's induced by the virus starts to wane. They believe that it holds until at least late teenage years, but then it starts to wane," Saltzman said. "There's no way to predict who's going to lose their immunity or not."
 

Combating Corruption by Creating an International Corruption Police Force/ NY Times

Alexander Lebedev penned the following NY Times Opinion piece.  He is "a businessman and former senior officer in the K.G.B., is an owner of the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta and publisher of The London Evening Standard and The Independent" according to the Times. He suggests that $30 trillion (yes, with a T) has been embezzled worldwide over the past 15 years.  Want to identify a MAJOR contributor to global economic decline that is hardly discussed? This is it. Lebedev posits one possible approach:

Whenever government representatives from around the world meet, they’re often able to make progress in many areas of common interest: combating climate change, poverty, the drug trade, Islamic extremism, human trafficking and modern-day slavery, even cybercrime — the list is long. What these officials often fail to dwell upon is corruption. All of their nations suffer from it; they agree it’s a cancer of our age and should be stamped out. But they do precious little about it.

This is bizarre, when you consider the scale of the problem. What is corruption? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power.” And “by those in power” I would include those working for corporations and institutions that are part of the ruling elite.

According to the Tax Justice Network, an independent group promoting efforts to curb tax avoidance, crooked business people, working with corrupt officials, have embezzled $30 trillion over the last 15 years — or half of the world’s annual gross domestic product.

From China, nearly $4 trillion is thought to have disappeared between 2000 and 2011, much of it the profits of corruption, channeled into secret offshore financial havens. From Russia, the figure is close to $1 trillion. In the European Union, the total is put at $1.2 trillion.

In the West, the best-known figures linked to high-level fraud include Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, Jérôme Kerviel of Société Générale, Kweku Adoboli of UBS. And everyone knows of the subprime debt scandal and the criminal rigging of the Libor rate. In my country, Russia, there have been similar scams: the theft of $5 billion from Bank of Moscow; $4 billion from BTA Bank and AMT Bank; $4 billion from Rosukrenergo; $3 billion from Globex and Sviaz Bank; $2 billion from Russian Agricultural Bank; $1 billion from Rosagroleasing; and $1 billion from VEFK Bank.

Many of the perpetrators of these scams have been able to move abroad, where they draw upon the expertise of what I term the “financial services oligarchy” of international banks, law firms and accountants to ensure they can continue to live off the proceeds of their crimes. Some, like Andrei Borodin, former chief executive of Bank of Moscow, have been granted political asylum (Mr. Borodin, in Britain)....

 If governments want to have any chance of recovering what has been lost, they must join together to create an international anticorruption force, along the lines of Interpol, to defeat these financial oligarchs...

Without such a body, it is difficult to see how the battle against corruption can be won. Ranged against national police forces and investigators is an entire corps of professional advisory firms well-versed in assisting those who want to put their wealth beyond the authorities’ reach. Aiding and abetting those who have committed fraud are offshore tax havens that structure their laws to help those seeking total secrecy and security. This oligarchy can be broken only if governments fight like with like — by creating a well-equipped sleuthing agency that is not afraid of anybody or aligned with any particular nation...

Governments around the world are struggling to raise funds to counter the global downturn, but they can’t simply keep increasing taxes on the middle- and higher-income brackets. Rather, they must pursue cash anywhere they can — and one source has to be the proceeds of corruption. (After all, in many cases, it’s government money that was spirited away in the first place.)

I propose a relatively cheap, effective solution to one of the world’s most pressing issues: an international body to police corruption. And we must have it now, not at some date far into the future. It’s our money — and we want it back.

CDC reports high FLU death rates in young Americans, but may be overestimating by 300%

CDC notes the following, where P stands for pneumonia and I stands for influenza:

Among 14,628 P&I deaths reported through the 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System from September 29, 2013 to February 8, 2014, a total of 571 (3.9%) were influenza-associated (i.e., they had influenza listed on the death certificate as an underlying or contributing cause of death), of which 352 (62%) were in persons aged 25-64 years, 194 (34%) in persons aged ≥65 years, and 25 (4%) in persons aged 0-24 years.

The first thing to notice is that CDC likes to lump pneumonia and influenza numbers together.  But when you only look at deaths, only 3.9% of deaths associated with pneumonia and/or influenza (in an area of 27 million Americans used by CDC for medical surveillance purposes) actually had influenza listed as a cause or contributor to death.  That means over 96% were due to pneumonia in the absence of flu.

Let's look at these numbers more carefully. From end September of last year until 2 weeks ago today, CDC says 571 people died (in 122 cities) who had influenza listed on their death certificate. Twenty-five were allegedly aged 0 through 24 years old.  Remember, this is in a group of only 27 million Americans.  If you extrapolated this death rate to 317.5 million Americans, you would have 294 deaths in the 0-24 years age group this year.

Except it seems we have no where near that number.  CDC never measures total deaths from influenza by death certificate. Nor does it measure total US deaths associated with influenza from other records. But flu deaths in children are required to be reported, so CDC does keep records of flu-associated deaths in children aged 0-18 years

In the next paragraph, CDC says that only 50 deaths in children associated with influenza have occurred in the entire US this flu season, through Feb. 8. Checking the Fluview website, we see 2 more pediatric deaths were reported between Feb 9 and Feb. 15.

Now look at hospitalizations for different age groups for lab-confirmed influenza (Figure 3).  To estimate actual flu death rates in those aged 18-24, for whom CDC does not provide specific numbers, I will use 2014 flu hospitalization rates by age as a rough estimate of flu-associated death rates, by age. I am doing this because there are no good overall US statistics for flu-associated deaths in those over 18.

The following graph shows that children aged 0-4 years have the third highest rate of severe illness (requiring hospitalization), after those 50-64 and over 65 years.  Hospitalizations in those aged 5-17 occur at only 15% of the rate of younger children, and people aged 18-49 are hospitalized at half the rate of those aged 0-4.

Using comparative hospitalization rates to extrapolate flu deaths for Americans aged 0-24 from the data on those aged 0-18, you would only expect about 25 additional deaths in those aged 18-24, or a total of 75 deaths in those aged 0-24 throughout the US through Feb. 8, 2014--instead of 294 (the extrapolation using CDC's 121 Cities data).

Therefore, either the 121 cites data dramatically overestimated flu deaths this season in those under 25, or the pediatric death reports are extremely low.  But they are in line with those of previous, recent years.

One explanation might be that most of the deaths for which death certificates list flu as a contributor, were not considered flu deaths and were therefore not reported as such to CDC.  The discrepancy cannot be explained at this point, but it does suggest that CDC's announcements of high mortality in children and young adults could be off -- perhaps by 300%.

FIGURE 3. Rates of hospitalization for laboratory-confirmed influenza, by age group and surveillance week - FluSurv-NET,* 2013-14†

Covering Up Corruption: KBR and Halliburton/ WP

Whistleblowers have some protections under US law.  In fact, those who report on corruption that costs the government money are entitled to a large chunk of what $ is recovered as a result of their whistle-blowing.  This often results in multimillion dollar payouts from what are termed "qui tam" or False Claims Act lawsuits.

But apparently Halliburton and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root were not happy about the possibility that their employees might blow the whistle if they discovered fraud... and these companies have in fact been found liable in such lawsuits in the past.

Between 2002 and 2011, KBR was the largest U.S. contractor operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, winning nearly $40 billion worth of federal work, according to the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. KBR has been the subject of numerous lawsuits and allegations of fraud relating to contracts with the U.S. government, according to the war commission and the Justice Department.

So the companies required employees to sign confidentiality statements that prohibited employees from speaking to government officials or anyone else, under penalty of termination and legal action.  From the Washington Post:

One of the nation’s largest government contractors requires employees seeking to report fraud to sign internal confidentiality statements barring them from speaking to anyone about their allegations, including government investigators and prosecutors, according to a complaint filed Wednesday and corporate documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Attorneys for a whistleblower suing Halliburton Co. and its former subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, said the statements violate the federal False Claims Act and other laws designed to shield whistleblowers...

Is this a very severe flu season?/ WP and CDC

Today's Washington Post headline reads "‘Swine flu’ strain returns; dramatic rise in deaths of young adults, children." But the data do not bear this out.

Swine flu isn't really "back"-- since 2009, it never left, but there are more cases this year than the last two, relative to other flu strains.  After the 2009-10 swine flu epidemic, two studies I saw suggested that at least 60% of the population developed antibodies (presumed immunity) to the disease.  Which begs the question whether all the measured antibodies were effective at preventing H1N1 swine flu.

What is CDC saying about this year's epidemic?  Influenza is winding down in most parts of the country.  In Maine, where I live, it never really got going.  

This graph plots the percent of outpatient visits to medical providers for flu-like illnesses. It looks like an average year.  And we are well past the peak.


Here are pediatric deaths by week.  Again, an average year.


And in this chart, CDC looks at deaths due to either pneumonia and/or influenza in a select group of cities.  Again, it looks like an average year.

In 2011, Tony Blair told Rebekah Brooks (editor, News of the World) how to beat the rap: publish a "Hutton"-style report. Hutton whitewashed David Kelly's almost certain murder for Blair./ BBC

David Kelly was the UK WMD expert and weapons inspector who was found "dead in the woods" in 2003 after he told a BBC reporter that the Blair government memo on WMD did not conform to the facts, and specifically that Saddam could not hit the UK with a nuke in 45 minutes.  This undermined Blair's entire case for war 4 months after the war started.

Immediately after, or possibly before Kelly's death, Blair had his former flatmate, Lord Falconer, set up an investigation of the death.  About three hours after the death, Falconer contacted Lord Hutton to conduct an inquiry into the matter.  Hutton's inquiry failed to explain how exactly Kelly died, and why many items at the scene, including the packet of pills he allegedly took and the knife he allegedly used to cut his wrists (neither of which was proven to have been a cause of death) were devoid of any fingerprints. Falconer stopped the inquest, and documents about the case were sealed by Lord Hutton in 2010 for 70 years "for the sake of the family."

So when Tony Blair told his good friend (Brooks) to create a "Hutton-style" report to help her get off bribery and illegal surveillance charges, Blair is telling her how a fixer would operate--but he is also telling her that Hutton was a fixer.  And he is strongly implying that Hutton covered up Kelly's murder. (Disclosure:  I met Kelly once or twice at anthrax conferences--Nass)

From the BBC:

The phone hacking trial has heard details of an email sent by Rebekah Brooks in which she claims to have received advice from former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Mrs Brooks spoke to Mr Blair on the telephone and passed on what he said to James Murdoch, who was then News International executive chairman, the Old Bailey trial heard.

The email read:

"Only got ten minutes before I see Charlie for confiscation!
But I had an hour on the phone to Tony Blair.

He said:

1. Form an independent unit that has a outside junior council, ken macdonald, a great and good type, a serious forensic criminal barrister, internal counsel, proper fact checkers etc in it. Get them to investigate me and others and publish a hutton style report.
2. Publish part one of the report at same time as the police closes its inquiry and clear you and accept short comings and new solutions and process and part two when any trials are over.
3. Keep strong and definitely sleeping pills. Need to have clear heads and remember no rash short term solutions as they only give you long term headaches.
4. It will pass. Tough up.
5. He is available for you, KRM and me as an unofficial adviser but needs to be between us.

He is sending more notes later."

Ken Macdonald, whom Mrs Brooks referred to in the email, is a former director of public prosecutions.

Mrs Brooks also said Tony Blair had urged her to set up a "Hutton style" inquiry. This was a reference to the inquiry into the death of government weapons adviser Dr David Kelly. Its report exonerated Mr Blair and other officials over flawed evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including the so-called "dodgy dossier".

How does the US minimum wage compare to other developed nations?/ The Guardian

The UK Guardian published the following chart in October 2012.  PPP stands for purchasing power parity, or how much the minimum wage is able to buy in its country.  In terms of PPP, we are still beaten by every nation with a higher minimum wage, except Japan.  So we cannot say the US' low minimum wage is offset by cheaper goods, because it isn't.

The Ozzie minimum wage, in pounds sterling, was worth more than twice the US minimum wage. Luxembourg has almost double the US rate. Only Greece, Spain and Portugal (in this chart) had lower minimum wages than the USA.

Here is wikipedia's chart on minimum wages throughout the world.

UPDATE: GAP announced it is raising its corporate minimum wage in the US:  Gap Chief Executive Glenn Murphy announced on Thursday that the company will sets its minimum hourly rate for U.S. employees at $9 this year and $10 in 2015.

World press freedom index 2014: USA sinks to #46

The World Press Freedom Index is issued yearly by international NGO Reporters Without Borders. The methodology for ranking nations is described here.

180 nations are included.  At #46, the US is assessed as having less freedom of the press than Papua-New Guinea, Romania, Slovenia, Latvia, and South Africa, to pick a few. However, we did beat out Haiti, at #47.  The US' ranking is consistent with the Committee to Protect Journalists' report from October 2013, which I wrote about here.

Freedom of the press could be considered the right of reporters a) to confidential discussions with informants, b) to inspect the scenes of events, and c) not have their safety put at risk because of the work they do.  We now know that confidentiality no longer exists and communications of reporters with sources have been specifically sought out by government; that war correspondents are spoon fed information and are restricted in their movements by military officers; and that in some cases reporters have been targeted by military operations.  The unusual death of Michael Hastings, whose reportage led to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal, and was working on a story about NSA surveillance techniques before he died, likely put an additional damper on investigative reporting in the US.

Cook from scratch--or beware your future health!/ Guardian

I gave a "super-easy" cooking class this morning.  Why is a doctor giving cooking classes?  Because the quality of the ingredients in processed food is so poor, I believe it is ushering in an age of chronic ill health.  At least when you cook from basic ingredients, you know what they are.  I may have to start printing recipes on this blog in future.  For now...  From the Guardian:

Fake-food scandal revealed as tests show third of products mislabelled

Consumers are being sold drinks with banned flame-retardant additives, pork in beef, and fake cheese, laboratory tests show 

Consumers are being sold food including mozzarella that is less than half real cheese, ham on pizzas that is either poultry or "meat emulsion", and frozen prawns that are 50% water, according to tests by a public laboratory.

The checks on hundreds of food samples, which were taken in West Yorkshire, revealed that more than a third were not what they claimed to be, or were mislabelled in some way.

Their results have been shared with the Guardian.Testers also discovered beef mince adulterated with pork or poultry, and even a herbal slimming tea that was neither herb nor tea but glucose powder laced with a withdrawn prescription drug for obesity at 13 times the normal dose.

A third of fruit juices sampled were not what they claimed or had labelling errors. Two contained additives that are not permitted in the EU, including brominated vegetable oil, which is designed for use in flame retardants and linked to behavioural problems in rats at high doses. 

Experts said they fear the alarming findings from 38% of 900 sample tests by West Yorkshire councils were representative of the picture nationally, with the public at increasing risk as budgets to detect fake or mislabelled foods plummet...

EU losing an estimated 120 Billion Euros yearly to Corruption/ EU

It is great to have this long-awaited EU report on corruption make the news around the world. Yes, corruption is now visible almost everywhere, from petty officials demanding bribes from anyone to the awarding of major government contracts.  We knew that.  Now this is an estimate of size.  However, when you estimate the magnitude of corruption--something that is illegal--you have only a very rough sense of how big it truly is.  Turns out that 120 Billion Euros is only about 1% of the GDP of Europe.  From the NY Times:

Ms. Malmstrom said the commission’s estimate that corruption costs Europe €120 billion, or roughly $162 billion, annually was almost certainly too conservative. The figure is equivalent to about 1 percent of the €11.7 trillion gross domestic product of the 28-nation European Union. Ms. Malmstrom did not provide a breakdown of how officials had arrived at the €120 billion figure... 

Transparency International, a nonprofit organization that monitors corporate and government corruption, said in a statement that the report was “an important step in the E.U.’s collective effort to scale up its anti-corruption efforts.” But it noted the commission had failed “to issue detailed recommendations in the area of whistle-blowing, access to information and lobbying.”

...A survey of companies by the European Commission showed that 75 percent of businesses said corruption was widespread in their countries. The worst was the construction industry, where four out of five companies said so, including nearly 100 percent of construction companies in Greece, Spain and Italy. 

What the reader should not assume is that the problem is "over there".  Here in the US, the stakes are bigger, the wars are larger, government contracting is over the top-- (for example, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to build the not-that-complicated healthcare.gov website that still had bugs when I checked it out this morning) and the fines and penalties issued (those rare times when they get issued) for corrupt activities have been insufficient to serve as a deterrent.  I suspect that the drag on the economy caused by corruption, in all sectors, is the underlying reason why we cannot get over the recession. The gray money just doesn't get added to the economy--instead it winds up in offshore accounts. Or sweet deals. Or buys something really expensive, maybe under the wrong name.

Now HHS is going to partner with Pharma to bring us better drugs.  Really?  Were Pharma's double digit yearly profits insufficient to fund the search for blockbusters? Unlikely.  More likely, this partnering is just another way to spend public funds on healthy private companies that are doing just fine, thank you, so fine they have more lobbyists in DC than any other industry.  Of course the industry found a way to tap the public coffers. Why else are those lobbyists there?

What is really needed is using public funds in the US and around the world to fund new agencies that are given the power to investigate all local corruption.  I have lots of ideas about the types of investigations that would likely bear fruit.  The agencies need major political clout and they need to be protected. Then we might see comparable interst in the subject in the US.