Internet Scofflaw

In 2008, a team of ten Pakistani terrorists infiltrated Mumbai, India by sea. For four days they roamed the city, murdering 166 people before Indian forces finally took them down. A week ago, a thousand Hamas terrorists penetrated Israel’s border wall, murdering over 1300 people and taking over a hundred people captive, raping and torturing many of them.

Unfortunately, these tactics work. They worked against Israel despite Israel’s strong border defenses, generally competent police and military, and relatively small area to defend.

In contrast, America is much more vulnerable. Our southern border is easy to cross, and our northern border is entirely undefended. Our military is far away from most population centers and our police can’t even stop gangs of roving shoplifters. And we have vast empty spaces in which terrorists can hide. After Hamas’s horrifying success on October 7, similar attacks here are only a matter of time.

One Israeli kibbutz, Nir Am, came under attack by a dozen terrorists but survived unscathed. Why? They were armed and prepared. A few other armed kibbutzes were able to do the same. We need to be prepared here.

When terrorists attack us, they will chose where to attack. Wherever that is, our police will be outnumbered and caught by surprise. When the terrorists come to your home, rescue will be hours away. Terrorists will choose the location and we cannot be strong everywhere.

Except we can. Our founding fathers envisioned a militia consisting of all able-bodied males, all of whom would keep their own weapons and be given proper training (that is, a well-regulated militia). We should extend that vision and arm the women too.

Everyone should arm themselves, and should seek out the training to use their weapon effectively. You need a weapon that you can use to defend your community against a force of a dozen terrorists or more. We’re not talking about a handgun here. We’re talking about an AR-15 or similar.

As an aside: despite what the gun-control fanatics say, an AR-15 is not a weapon of war. Proper weapons of war are prohibited to civilians by the National Firearms Act without a special permit that you cannot get. We need to change that law immediately so we can get proper weapons into the hands of the public. We need to end the laws in some states that require absurdly small magazines — the terrorists surely won’t be using them.

More generally, we need a crash course to get weapons and training into the hands of every citizen willing to accept them. Thankfully, we have a lot of guns already, but they are too clustered. We need a broadly armed populace, or our losses will be unthinkable.

Americans have thought themselves safe and secure, protected by oceans and a strong military. Neither can protect us against this sort of enemy. Our security is in our own hands.

Barack Obama has released the 20th 9/11 hijacker from Guantanamo Bay. I have no words for this.

(Via Instapundit.)

The director of the OPM says no one is responsible for the catastrophic OPM hack:

“Fox News has learned that the number of victims of a pair of massive cyberattacks on U.S. government personnel files has soared to at least 18 million — but the head of the hacked Office of Personnel Management refuses to blame anyone in her agency.

“I don’t believe anyone is personally responsible,” OPM Director Katherine Archuleta said Tuesday. . .

Grilled on whether anyone takes responsibility, Archuleta said only the perpetrators should be blamed. . .

Only the perpetrators should be blamed; the government has no responsibility to secure its data!

One good person to blame would be whoever thought it would be a good idea to give root access to the Chinese, but Archuleta’s remarks prove that the idiocy started at the top. Take a look at the White House announcement of her appointment. It contains not one word on any actual qualification that Archuleta had for the job. Let’s go through each paragraph:

1. (The title) First Latina appointment
2. First latina appointment; diversity and inclusion
3. Workforce that reflects the population
4. Diversity
5. Political connections
6. Political connections
7. Trite meaningless praise, plus diversity

It’s clear what happened here: It’s only the Office of Personnel Management; what difference does it make who the director is? It’s the perfect place to appoint a minority with political connections.

Except that it did matter. Oops.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that the title isn’t really fair to bureaucrats. A typical bureaucrat at least has experience with bureaucracy, but there’s no evidence Archuleta even had that. A little slavish devotion to procedure might actually have helped here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Charlie Martin writes about how this kind of disaster goes about happening.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Archuleta’s complete lack of any qualifications for the job.

It’s an official change in US government policy:

In a softening of longstanding policy, the Obama administration will tell families of Americans held by terror groups that they can communicate with captors and even pay ransom without fear of prosecution — part of a broad review of U.S. hostage guidelines that will be released Wednesday. . .

Two people familiar with the review said there will be no formal change to the law, which explicitly makes it a crime to provide money or other material support to terror organizations. However, the administration will make clear that the Justice Department has never prosecuted anyone for paying ransom and that that will continue to be the case.

POSTSCRIPT: And, of course, note how this was done; no change in the law, just an official announcement that the law will be ignored.

Remember the Plame-Novak-Armitage affair, in which our media pretended they were outraged (outraged!) that someone might leak the name of a (nominally covert) intelligence employee to the press? Metric tons of ink were spent, there was a special prosecutor, there was even a movie.

What made that so hard to take was the rampant hypocrisy of the leftist media pretending they thought that exposing intelligence workers was a bad thing, when in fact they love to expose covert operations.

Now that the Bush administration is out of office, the media is back to not caring (or actively supporting) intelligence leaks. Thus, you won’t see much ink, a special prosecutor, or a movie on either of these stories:

It was the Obama administration that sealed the fate of the Pakistani doctor jailed for helping nail Usama Bin Laden, by divulging key details after the fact and dooming any chance Shakil Afridi’s cover story could win his freedom, according to a confidential Pakistani report.

When former Secretary of Defense and ex-CIA Director Leon Panetta publicly acknowledged Afridi’s role in the ruse which helped the CIA pinpoint Bin Laden’s presence in an Abbottabad compound, any chance that Pakistani authorities could help him get out of the country vanished, according to what some have called Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission, a 357-page report from an independent body set up to probe the aftermath of the 2011 raid by Navy SEALs in which the Al Qaeda leader was killed.

and:

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the name of the Navy SEAL unit that carried out the Osama bin Laden raid and named the unit’s ground commander at a 2011 ceremony attended by “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmaker Mark Boal.

Panetta also discussed classified information designated as “top secret” and “secret” during his presentation at the awards ceremony, according to a draft Pentagon inspector general’s report published Wednesday by the Project on Government Oversight. . .

The leaked version of the report does not address whether Panetta knew Boal was present at the ceremony, held under a tent at the CIA complex on June 24, 2011. “Approximately 1,300” people from the military and the intelligence community were on hand for the event, according to a CIA press release issued the following week.

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Remember in 2007 when the Democrats tried to get to the right of Republicans on national security by demanding that all cargo entering the United States be scanned?

Lawmakers agreed Thursday to a goal of scanning all cargo-containing ships before they leave foreign ports as Congress neared a deal on a major security bill to carry out the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. In House-Senate negotiations on the bill, House and Senate Democrats pushed through a provision allowing a five-year window for radiation scanning technology to be put in place and giving the Homeland Security secretary authority to make exceptions. . .

The measure was part of the House bill that passed in January, but it was not included in the Senate version and is strongly opposed by the Bush administration, which said it was technically and economically unfeasible.

It was a worthy goal, but unfortunately an infeasible one. Still, that didn’t dissuade the Democrats; liberals are always reluctant to acknowledge the limitations of reality. Plus, it was great demagoguery.

Execution of the mandate fell to the Obama administration and the five-year deadline is about to expire. What happened? Well, well, well:

The Obama administration has failed to meet a legal deadline for scanning all shipping containers for radioactive material before they reach the United States, a requirement aimed at strengthening maritime security and preventing terrorists from smuggling a nuclear device into any of the nation’s 300 sea and river ports. . . The department’s secretary, Janet Napolitano, informed Congress in May that she was extending a two-year blanket exemption to foreign ports because the screening is proving too costly and cumbersome.

Too costly and cumbersome? Sounds a lot like “technically and economically unfeasible” to me.

Border enforcement has gone completely off the rails:

It’s one thing to tell civilian employees to cower under a desk if a gunman starts spraying fire in a confined area, say members of Tucson Local 2544/National Border Patrol Council, but to give armed law enforcement professionals the same advice is downright insulting. The instructions from DHS come in the form of pamphlets and a mandatory computer tutorial.

“We are now taught in an ‘Active Shooter’ course that if we encounter a shooter in a public place we are to ‘run away’ and ‘hide’” union leader Brandon Judd wrote on the website of 3,300-member union local. “If we are cornered by such a shooter we are to (only as a last resort) become ‘aggressive’ and ‘throw things’ at him or her. We are then advised to ‘call law enforcement’ and wait for their arrival (presumably, while more innocent victims are slaughtered).”

The Obama administration is getting serious about the leak investigation:

Officials at the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies will be given expanded polygraph tests under a new Obama administration directive aimed at stamping out national-security leaks.

Except it’s not, if this story is complete. There’s no indication here that White House officials will be getting the polygraph tests. Since we already know that the leaks are coming from the White House, this whole thing is a charade.

President Obama says it’s offensive to suggest that his administration is leaking classified information for political purposes.

To be sure, we have no evidence that the administration is behind the series of leaks. Just because there’s been a never-ending series of leaks that cast the administration in a good light doesn’t mean that the administration is necessarily responsible for them.

But, is it really so outrageous to speculate? This is an administration that allowed the ATF to traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels in order to promote its domestic gun-control agenda. (Or, at least, that has never offered any alternative explanation.) It is not hard to believe that the same people might leak classified information for political purposes.

UPDATE: Alexander Kazam points out that the NYT story on Stuxnet includes a first-hand account from the White House situation room:

The culprit may not be a “White House official,” but the leaks came out of a White House meeting — directly from the president’s top national-security advisers. This is not some guy in the bowels of the State Department passing e-mails to Julian Assange; it is one degree removed from the president.

Perhaps not a White House official per se, but certainly a high administration official.

UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy points out that the same is true for other leaks:

The whole thing is a farce. . . TheTimes tells you who its sources are. At the very beginning of the 6300-word kill-list epic, it says: “In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of [Obama’s] current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.” The account goes on to quote, for example, former White House chief-of-staff Bill Daley, who not only confirms the existence of a kill-list but describes the considerations behind adding names to it. Current and former national security officials are quoted, in many instances by name (e.g., national security adviser Thomas Donilon and former national intelligence director Dennis Blair). And when names are not given, the Times quotes, for example, “one participant” in the approximately weekly meetings — videoconferences run by the Pentagon but involving national security officials across the administration — who describes some of the criteria for adding or removing terrorists from the kill-list.

The NYT told us everything except the leakers’ actual names. All of them are high-ranking administration figures. Moreover, Michael Ledeen adds that you can nearly always find the leaker:

“We always found the leaker(s),” he said, “but then nothing happened.”  Why?  “Because most of the time the leaker was so high-ranking that there was no desire to prosecute or punish.”

Bottom line: if no one is punished (for the leak itself — Ledeen also adds that a scapegoat is often picked who committed some ancillary offense), we know that the President either authorized the leak or chose to let it slide.

Democrats are upset about the latest leak of sensitive classified information:

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blasted leaks to the press about a cyberattack against Iran and warned the disclosure of President Obama’s order could put the United States at risk of a retaliatory strike. . .

Feinstein and Kerry, however, rejected charges from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that the leaks were made deliberately in an attempt to boost President Obama’s reelection bid. . . The White House has denied that it was an authorized leak.

I don’t know if it was an “authorized leak”, but this keeps happening. We blow the identity of Shakil Afridi, the doctor who helped us identify Osama bin Laden, and he goes to prison for 33 years. We leak the fact that we’ve infiltrated al Qaeda, and it blows the agent’s cover. (Plus, it turned out that the leak, to the extent that it credited US intelligence, wasn’t even accurate!)

I’m tired of debating each time whether the White House authorized the leak, or whether the leak — which cast the administration in a good light — was a lone wolf. It doesn’t matter. The White House’s acquiescence sends the message that this is acceptable. They need to make a very public effort to get to the bottom of it.

Compare the full-court press when the Valerie Plame’s identity was leaked to the press. That information was not closely held, and its leak wasn’t damaging, and the White House still launched an investigation that dogged it for years. Here we have a series of leaks that are actually damaging, and aside from a few remarks from Senate Democrats, it’s crickets.

UPDATE: The White House says it takes the leaks “very seriously”, but they won’t authorize a special prosecutor, or — as far as they are willing to say — any action at all. Well then.

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The West Michigan Shoreline Regional Development Commission spends homeland security money on sno-cone machines. I guess that means the homeland must be fully secure now.

(Via Instapundit.)

I saw a FEMA billboard today, urging us to prepare for natural disasters. I didn’t get a picture, but it seems to be part of the same ad campaign as this.

It’s good advice. But, if you do it, you will mark yourself as a potential terrorist according to the FBI. According to an FBI bulletin, purchasing any of the following is “suspicious” and a “potential indicator[] of terrorist activities”: MREs (meals, ready to eat), weatherproofed ammunition or matches, flashlights, or full-capacity magazines.

Is the real terrorist threat gone, so that we can waste resources on imaginary ones now?

(Via Instapundit.)

The Department of Homeland Security is looking at using its hated body scanners outside the airport:

Giving Transportation Security Administration agents a peek under your clothes may soon be a practice that goes well beyond airport checkpoints. Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been planning pilot programs to deploy mobile scanning units that can be set up at public events and in train stations, along with mobile x-ray vans capable of scanning pedestrians on city streets.

The non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on Wednesday published documents it obtained from the Department of Homeland Security showing that from 2006 to 2008 the agency planned a study of of new anti-terrorism technologies that EPIC believes raise serious privacy concerns. The projects range from what the DHS describes as “a walk through x-ray screening system that could be deployed at entrances to special events or other points of interest” to “covert inspection of moving subjects” employing the same backscatter imaging technology currently used in American airports. . .

One project allocated to Northeastern University and Siemens would mount backscatter x-ray scanners and video cameras on roving vans, along with other cameras on buildings and utility poles, to monitor groups of pedestrians, assess what they carried, and even track their eye movements. In another program, the researchers were asked to develop a system of long range x-ray scanning to determine what metal objects an individual might have on his or her body at distances up to thirty feet.

TSA responded to the Forbes story saying that they have no plans to test body scanners in mass transit environments, but that doesn’t explain why they are funding studies to do exactly that. (Forbes has the documents.) The answer might come from a loophole in TSA’s carefully worded denial: “TSA has not tested the advanced imaging technology that is currently used at airports in mass transit environments and does not have plans to do so.” This leaves open that a slightly different technology might be used.

But never mind that, it pales in comparison to the other part of the story: roving body-scanning vans. DHS vans would prowl the streets searching everyone, no warrants, no notification, no fuss.

Another great idea from the civil libertarians in the Obama administration.

An airline pilot has been punished by the TSA for pointing out flaws in airport security:

The YouTube videos, posted Nov. 28, show what the pilot calls the irony of flight crews being forced to go through TSA screening while ground crew who service the aircraft are able to access secure areas simply by swiping a card.

“As you can see, airport security is kind of a farce. It’s only smoke and mirrors so you people believe there is actually something going on here,” the pilot narrates.

Video shot in the cockpit shows a medieval-looking rescue ax available on the flight deck after the pilots have gone through the metal detectors. “I would say a two-foot crash ax looks a lot more formidable than a box cutter,” the pilot remarked.

Security theater indeed.

UPDATE: What he said:

I don’t know what the point of this is, other than for the TSA to inform all of us that it does not like being shown up by mere airline pilots. . . In a sane world, of course, higher-ups at the TSA, and at the Department of Homeland Security would be forced to answer for the huge security lapses documented in the pilot’s video. But we do not live in a sane world.

Take a look at this picture:

This crowd was attending a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon, and it’s likely that every one of them would be dead if the anti-anti-terrorists on the left had had their way.

The event was the target of a bombing plot hatched by Mohamed Mohamud, a Somali-born US citizen. After becoming radicalized, Mohamud contacted an Islamic terrorist group in Pakistan. The FBI became aware of their contacts, and contacted him, pretending to be associates of the Pakistani terrorists. The FBI gave him a nonfunctional bomb and arrested him after he tried to detonate it.

We haven’t been told exactly how the FBI became aware of Mohamud’s contacts with the Pakistani terrorists (and it’s good we haven’t), but it seems likely that the government intercepted their messages. Communications such as those, between foreign terrorists and Americans, are the ones we most need to know about. They are also the ones that the left feels strongly we shouldn’t listen to.

No one (well, almost no one) questions the government’s right (indeed responsibility) to capture the communications of foreign terrorists. However, many feel that whenever those terrorists receive a call from the United States, the government should stop listening until it obtains a warrant.

ASIDE: As I understand it, the law provided that the government could listen to communications between foreign powers and US citizens, but a legal gray area arose because Al Qaeda is not a foreign power. The Bush Administration contended that the authorization for military force, which effectively declared war against Al Qaeda, gave the president the authority to use any means against Al Qaeda (including wiretapping) that it would use against a nation-state with whom we are at war.

Fortunately, the terrorist surveillance program survived, albeit on a shorter leash. (Barack Obama voted against it 2007, but voted for it when it was renewed in 2008.) Which brings us to today. If the FBI had not learned of Mohamud’s efforts, it seems very likely he eventually would have made contact with real terrorists and probably would have succeeded in his plot.

Some earnestly feel that listening to conversations between foreign terrorists and persons inside America without a warrant constitutes an unacceptable breach of our civil rights. I can respect that, although I disagree. But let’s be clear about the cost: every one of the people in that photograph. And this is just one incident.

POSTSCRIPT: There’s one additional wrinkle in this story: The city of Portland voted in 2005 not to cooperate with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Portland is now reconsidering that decision, but even now they won’t admit they were wrong. Rather, the mayor says he feels better about it now that Obama is president. (Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: We’ve now seen the anti-anti-terrorists’ rebuttal. Astonishingly, they are blaming the FBI. They are saying that if the FBI hadn’t interfered, Mohamed Mohamud would have limited himself to writing angry letters to the editor or something.

This is delusional. Common sense should suffice to recognize that, but if not, we could read the actual story:

Mohamud also indicated he intended to become “operational,” meaning he wanted to put an explosion together but needed help. The two met again in August 2010 in a Portland hotel.

“During this meeting, Mohamud explained how he had been thinking of committing some form of violent jihad since the age of 15,” the affidavit says. “Mohamud then told (the FBI operatives) that he had identified a potential target for a bomb: the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square on Nov. 26, 2010.”

The FBI operatives cautioned Mohamud several times about the seriousness of his plan, noting that there would be many people, including children, at the event, and that Mohamud could abandon his plans at any time with no shame.

“You know there’s going to be a lot of children there?” an FBI operative asked Mohamud. “You know there are gonna be a lot of children there?”

Mohamud allegedly responded he was looking for a “huge mass that will … be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays.”

To summarize: Mohamud hatched the plot himself, and was only looking for a bomb to set off. The FBI tried to talk him out of it, but he was determined.

In an op-ed for USA Today, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the controversial body scanners:

Rigorous privacy safeguards are also in place to protect the traveling public. All images generated by imaging technology are viewed in a walled-off location not visible to the public. The officer assisting the passenger never sees the image, and the officer viewing the image never interacts with the passenger. The imaging technology that we use cannot store, export, print or transmit images.

(Emphasis mine.) The last part, at least, is not true. In fact, the TSA requires its machines to have the capability to retain and export images. According to the TSA, that capability is used only for training, and is disabled before the machines are delivered to airports.

Should we believe them? Well, there’s good reason for skepticism. The US Marshals Service has admitted that it surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of body scanner images. Frankly, the Marshals Service is a much more professional operation than the TSA. Moreover, the fact that the Secretary is (at least) misleading the public about the capabilities of its technology does not inspire confidence.

All of this might be tolerable if the machines and the pat-downs were stopping terrorists, but there’s no reason to believe that. As Glenn Reynolds puts it, the whole process is security theater, not security.

Purely political, according to Bob Woodward’s new book:

During a daily intelligence briefing in May 2009, [national intelligence director Dennis] Blair warned the president that radicals with American and European passports were being trained in Pakistan to attack their homelands. [White House chief of staff Rahm] Emanuel afterward chastised him, saying, “You’re just trying to put this on us so it’s not your fault.”

To these guys, It’s not about protecting America. It’s about who the blame lands on.

Over a year after President Obama disbanded the CIA’s interrogation program, we still have nothing to replace it:

In February 2009, after two wars and years of confusion over the best way to interrogate a terrorist, the U.S. created a special unit called the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) to relearn how to get critical information from suspects in custody.

Fifteen months later and in the wake of the failed car-bombing in Times Square, the question now is: where are they?

The HIG was supposed to bring together all that the U.S. had learned about getting prisoners to talk, the intent being to make the nation’s intelligence sector more effective. Based on a recommendation by a fact-finding intelligence panel, it was to be an interagency group staffed by the best interrogators in government — with broad powers to travel and decide interrogation techniques on a case-by-case basis.

More importantly, the HIG was to report directly to the National Security Council — ending a longtime bureaucratic war between the CIA and the FBI over who would control interrogations, a battle that had damaged intelligence operations.

Now, after a rocky start, sources say the secretive unit is almost up and running. But just how functional it is remains a matter of some dispute.

Five months ago, after the Christmas Day arrest in Detroit of the alleged “underwear bomber” Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, intelligence watchers were stunned to learn that the HIG not only didn’t participate in his interrogation, but it was not yet operational. And now, despite reports that the HIG has been involved in the Times Square bombing case, intelligence sources say it is still a work in progress.

(Emphasis mine.)

Marc Thiessen’s book explains how dangerous and inexcusable the administration’s failure is.