This Week in Epistemic Closure

I have argued in the past that those who charge the Republican party with epistemic closure forget (conveniently or not) that there is plenty of epistemic closure in their ranks as well. But this does not mean that epistemic closure amongst Republicans should not be criticized.

So, let me go on record as stating that cherry-picking a convenient media forum for debates between Republican presidential candidates is a bad idea. I recognize that Republicans would like to have friendly moderators ask friendly questions of their candidates, but eventually, those candidates are going to have to confront potentially unfriendly moderators. Best that they learn how to joust successfully with unfriendly moderators early in the campaign; honing that particular skill from the outset could be useful to the candidates and to Republicans in general as the campaign goes on.

And let me also go on record as stating that purging Republicans who happen to disagree with certain planks in the Republican party platform is a really terrible idea. (Link via Charles Lipson.) Winners can afford to purge their ranks. Losers cannot, and given that the Republican party has picked up the unfortunate habit of losing elections, it currently qualifies as a loser party. To win, it has to expand its tent, not shrink it. And incidentally, whether or not one is a same-sex marriage supporter (and I am), who in their right mind thinks that opposing same-sex marriage is a political winner these days?

So, the NSA Broke the Law

A lot. Let us count the violations:

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

To be sure, as the Post report points out, most of the violations were unintended, and the percentage of violations was quite small, given the vast amount of activity that the NSA engages in. But that hardly obviates one's concerns. And some of the violations are quite serious, consisting, as they do, of "unauthorized access to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful surveillance." Additionally,

[i]n what appears to be one of the most serious violations, the NSA diverted large volumes of international data passing through fiber-optic cables in the United States into a repository where the material could be stored temporarily for processing and selection.

The operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.

In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional. The court said that the methods used were “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion, and it ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.

The mind reels. How any of this activity helps protect the country and makes Americans feel safer and more secure is left almost entirely to the imagination, especially given the NSA's efforts to circumvent FISA Amendment Act audits that are designed to keep the program honest.

Of course, you should read the whole report. But doing so may depress you tremendously. You have been warned.

Say Goodbye to Democracy in Egypt

As I have mentioned before, I am neither a fan of Mohammed Morsi, nor one of the Muslim Brotherhood in general. I think they are generally a totalitarian lot and Egypt would be better off without them. But as Morsi and the Brotherhood won legitimate elections in Egypt, the way to get rid of them is through subsequent elections.

Instead, we had a coup, even though the Obama administration refrains from calling it a coup. And now, the powers-that-be in Egypt are considering disbanding the Muslim Brotherhood altogether. Because, of course, that won't drive religious sentiment underground, making it even more fanatical in the process.

I am sure that there are people in the Egyptian government who have good ideas about how best to go forward. Too bad that no one is giving them the microphone at all.

Slightly Amending George Will's Title

Whether President Obama's "unconstitutional steps" are indeed worse than those of Richard Nixon's is, in my view, not that much of a pressing issue. For me, it suffices to point out that we have ourselves an imperial presidency and the people who complained that George W. Bush was an imperial president are strangely silent about the executive overreach we are seeing nowadays.

I Am Sure that There Is Absolutely No Reason Whatsoever for Any of Us to Worry

None at all. What could possibly go wrong?

The federal government is months behind in testing data security for the main pillar of Obamacare: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1

The missed deadlines have pushed the government's decision on whether information technology security is up to snuff to exactly one day before that crucial date, the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general said in a report.

As a result, experts say, the exchanges might open with security flaws or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.

"They've removed their margin for error," said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. "There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint."

The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance.

Don't you just love what we are finding out about the health care bill now that we have passed it?

 

Someone Please Listen to Ramesh Ponnuru

Comme d'habitude, he makes a lot of sense:

Newt Gingrich is telling Republicans not to fear a government shutdown because the last one went so well for them. This is pure revisionist history, and they would be fools to believe him.

Some Republicans are urging the party to refuse to back any legislation to keep the government operating unless funding for President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul is stopped. Other Republicans say this tactic will fail, citing the conventional wisdom that the government shutdowns of 1995-96 helped President Bill Clinton and hurt congressional Republicans.

The former speaker of the House is off message, or rather is revealing a contradiction in the political strategy of his current allies. Their public line is that any shutdown would be the unfortunate product of Democrats’ obstinate refusal to give in to the Republican demand to defund Obamacare. But it’s not easy to convey that message when prominent Republicans are saying that shutdowns are good for their party.

More important, Gingrich’s current spin on the events of 1995-96 is just wrong. The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 put government spending on a lower trajectory, as the election of a Republican House did again in 2010. Whether the shutdowns contributed to that result is a different matter.

The irony, of course, is that Gingrich is a historian by training--as he so often reminds us. I can get better history lessons from a coffee table, and for that matter, so can the current batch of congressional Republicans.

Gremlins Attack Obamacare

Well, either that, or Obamacare wasn't well thought out:

In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.

The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed. When asked in recent days about the language — which appeared as an answer to one of 137 “frequently asked questions about Affordable Care Act implementation” — department officials confirmed the policy.

Avik Roy has much more. Note his comment that even after the limit on out-of-pocket costs is imposed, we will be set for huge increases in premiums, which the Obama administration will not be able to do a thing about.

Bono: Smarter than the Average Celebrity

Don't believe me? Read this:

Just recently drawing upon his Christian faith (and possibly the economics influence of Professor Ayittey?), in a speech at Georgetown University, Bono altered his economic and political views and declared that only capitalism can end poverty.

“Aid is just a stopgap,” he said. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.”

Quite so, and you don't need to be particularly religious to know this. You just need to understand economics.

The World Is Full of Extraordinary Surprises

To wit:

For nearly two centuries, scholars have debated whether some 325 lines in the 1602 quarto edition of Thomas Kyd’s play “The Spanish Tragedy” were, in fact, written by Shakespeare.

Last year, the British scholar Brian Vickers used computer analysis to argue that the so-called Additional Passages were by Shakespeare, a claim hailed by some as the latest triumph of high-tech Elizabethan text mining.

But now, a professor at the University of Texas says he has found something closer to definitive proof using a more old-fashioned method: analyzing Shakespeare’s messy handwriting.

In a terse four-page paper, to be published in the September issue of the journal Notes and Queries, Douglas Bruster argues that various idiosyncratic features of the Additional Passages — including some awkward lines that have struck some doubters as distinctly sub-Shakespearean — may be explained as print shop misreadings of Shakespeare’s penmanship.

“What we’ve got here isn’t bad writing, but bad handwriting,” Mr. Bruster said in a telephone interview.

Claiming Shakespeare authorship can be a perilous endeavor. In 1996, Donald Foster, a pioneer in computer-driven textual analysis, drew front-page headlines with his assertion that Shakespeare was the author of an obscure Elizabethan poem called “A Funeral Elegy,” only to quietly retract his argument six years later after analyses by Mr. Vickers and others linked it to a different author.

This time, editors of some prestigious scholarly editions are betting that Mr. Bruster’s cautiously methodical arguments, piled on top of previous work by Mr. Vickers and others, will make the attribution stick.

“We don’t have any absolute proof, but this is as close as you can get,” said Eric Rasmussen, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an editor, with Jonathan Bate, of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the complete Shakespeare.

“I think we can now say with some authority that, yes, this is Shakespeare,” Mr. Rasmussen said. “It has his fingerprints all over it.”

The Justice Department Is Fudging Statistics

Jonathan Weil calls Eric Holder out on the practice:

The Justice Department made a long-overdue disclosure late Friday: Last year when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder boasted about the successes that a high-profile task force racked up pursuing mortgage fraud, the numbers he trumpeted were grossly overstated.

We're not talking small differences here. Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. It now says the actual figure was 107 -- or 80 percent less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.

The government restated the statistics because it got caught red-handed by a couple of nosy reporters. Last October, two days after Holder first publicized the numbers, Phil Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg of Bloomberg News broke the story that some of the cases included in the Justice Department's tally occurred before the initiative began in October 2011. At least one was filed more than two years before President Barack Obama took office.

After their initial story, I asked a Justice Department spokeswoman, Adora Andy, several times over the course of a month for a list of the people charged and their case details so I could look them up myself. She promised repeatedly to provide one, until she finally stopped responding to my requests.

Her e-mails to me were priceless. On Oct. 19, Andy said: “We’ll have a list to you -- it will take some time to pull it together.” On Oct. 26, she said: “You will get a list,” explaining that “this is a labor-intensive process.” On Nov. 5, she said: “It looks like we should have the list to you by the end of the week if not sooner.” On Nov. 13: “Hold tight. Finalizing things on this end. Should have something to you tonight.” Again, no list. “I assure you I’m working as hard as I can to get this to you along with the lead agency on this matter, FBI,” she said later that same day. “It’s just very laborious with so much going on and so little staff.”

My column about the Justice Department's refusal to come clean ran a few days later last fall. And it seems obvious now why I wasn't given the list. The government would have been handing me the proof that the numbers it was touting were wrong.

I recognize that the attorney general doesn't like it when he and his department are made the subjects of congressional hearings, but alas, congressional hearings need to be held yet again. And however much Eric Holder may resent having to explain why the Justice Department inflated statistics regarding the work of its mortgage fraud task force, Congress should not relent until a full explanation is given.

Oh, and incidentally, perhaps it is high time that President Obama ask Eric Holder to go spend more time with his family.

What Paul Krugman Gets Wrong

Let us make a little list:

  • Tyler Cowen points out that when it comes to discussing Milton Friedman's analysis of the Great Depression, Paul Krugman gets things wrong.
  • Both Tyler Cowen and Donald Boudreaux point out that Krugman gets Hayek wrong.
  • Raghuram Rajan points out that Krugman gets Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff wrong, though I am not sure that Krugman actually engaged in a classic ad hominem. It seems that he was just needlessly insulting and made ludicrous charges against Reinhart and Rogoff, which is par for the course for Krugman when it comes to dealing with people he views as enemies.
That's a lot of things to get wrong in a short period of time. Fortunately, as ever, Krugman proves himself equal to the task.

Hassan Rohani May Disappoint Us Yet

My latest for the Atlantic Council discusses whether Hassan Rohani will prove himself a genuine reformer. On that issue, I have my doubts:

The Islamic Republic of Iran has a new president: Hassan Rouhani. There has been a lot of talk about Rouhani’s supposed political moderation and pragmatism, just as in 1982, there was talk that Yuri Andropov’s supposed fondness for jazz indicated a liking for the West in general, and the possibility that there would be a thaw in Soviet-American relations. In Andropov’s case, such thinking proved to be too optimistic. Similarly, there may be no justification for optimism in Rouhani’s case either; both because Rouhani has been a mainstay of the Islamic revolution in Iran, and because the Iranian president has significantly less power than many Western observers seem to think he does.

Read it all. Incidentally, it would appear that the Atlantic Council insists on spelling the new president's name as "Rouhani," when it should be "Rohani"; the first syllable rhymes with "roe" or "no." But as long as they keep publishing me, I will likely refrain from complaining.

The Latest Living Wage Outrage

Isn't it positively scandalous? Good thing that there are humane companies out there--like a small outfit from Arkansas which is mentioned in the story--willing to set a better example than the one set by a certain media organization (also mentioned in the story), whose cheapskate ways should evoke anger and disappointment from living wage advocates.

By the way, the ending of this story is just precious.

It's Good to Work on Capitol Hill

You get to be insulated from the consequences of your votes, and the votes of your bosses:

Lawmakers and staff can breathe easy — their health care tab is not going to soar next year.

The Office of Personnel Management, under heavy pressure from Capitol Hill, will issue a ruling that says the government can continue to make a contribution to the health care premiums of members of Congress and their aides, according to several Hill sources.

A White House official confirmed the deal and said the proposed regulations will be issued next week.

Thanks to this fix, unlike you and me, lawmakers and congressional assistants will not have to pay "thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year." Ain't life grand for them? And of course, the important thing is that they get special treatment, as opposed to, say, living under the same laws that the rest of us have to live under.

What Real Whistleblowing Looks Like

Contrary to what Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden tell us, real whistleblowing does not entail "telling the public about programs that may not be illegal, but are distasteful and morally offensive to the whistleblower, and possibly to a significant portion of the populace." Rather, real whistleblowing entails revealing programs and scandals that are illegal or that subvert the law.

Like, say, this:

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

Read the story, and you will find that prosecutors hate this program as well, since "it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The list of scandals demanding congressional investigation--in the form of open hearings, as I probably ought to emphasize yet again--just seems to be growing, doesn't it?