Tag Archives: Obama administration

FAA backed away from proposing privacy regulations for drones – but that might be a good thing, experts say

WASHINGTON—When the Federal Aviation Administration released its proposed “framework of regulations” for governing the commercial use of small unmanned aircraft systems last month, people were surprised. After years of failing to act on a 2012 congressional order to develop regulations, the FAA’s proposal seemingly fell from the sky – unexpected, and as it turns out, an unexpected gift to the drone community.

But noticeably missing from the proposed regulations? Privacy.

And the FAA owned up to it. In a privacy impact assessment issued along with the proposed framework, the agency stated that it “acknowledges that privacy concerns have been raised about unmanned aircraft operations. … These issues are beyond the scope of this rulemaking.”

That makes sense, according to Matt Waite. Privacy is not in its wheelhouse.

“The FAA has said all along that it is not a privacy organization – It is an aviation safety organization. They don’t have the experience or the skill[set] to be in the privacy business,” Waite added.

A professor of journalism and founder of the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Waite said that the FAA more or less intentionally walked away from building privacy regulations into its proposal. “They had been talking about it and had been claiming that that was the reason it was all being delayed [as] they were considering privacy regulations … But ultimately, nothing.”

Waite said that the implications of that choice suggest that states are going to have to make up the difference.

“The FAA has wisely backed off all privacy issues [because] there’s no need for a new federal privacy bureaucracy [when] states already have protections in place,” said Charles Tobin, a privacy rights lawyer and partner at Holland & Knight.

“The laws that are on the books are all technology agnostic. They apply to computers, they apply to still cameras, they apply to wireless microphones, they apply to video cameras … and there’s no reason that they can’t be applied – as already written – to UAVs,” Tobin added.

He said he understands why people are concerned, but suggests we look to history for any insight we might need. “Since the turn of the century, people have expressed concerns about every single new phase of technology [that has been] developed to allow people to gather information in public places and private places, and so over the decades, states have developed a strong series of statutes and precedents in the courts that deal with electronic surveillance, eavesdropping, trespassing and just about any other concern for invasion of privacy.”

To add additional statutes would be more than redundant, Tobin said. It would be confusing for everyone involved. It also leaves the possibility that one law could potentially violate the other.

While recognizing that the FAA made the appropriate call when it chose to step aside, Tobin said the baton has simply been passed on down the line. A presidential memorandum issued the same day as the FAA’s proposed regulations relays the responsibility to “develop a framework regarding privacy, accountability, and transparency for commercial and private UAS use” to the Department of Commerce. The memo states that the department must initiate a “multi-stakeholder engagement process” within 90 days of the memo’s release – so it must begin work by mid-May. According to Tobin, “the development of private industry best practices” by the Department of Commerce is a positive step – but it should avoid stepping further.

Government trying to involve itself in the regulation of a specific piece of technology is just a terrible idea, Waite said. “As we are already seeing, the government lags way behind technology when it comes to laws that would deal with that technology. It’s taken the FAA a long time to come up with rules for these drones and they’re flying around right now. They’re being used for commercial purposes even though the FAA says, ‘No, you can’t do that.’” Law will forever lag behind technology, he said.

“So if that’s the case, then legislatures and policymakers need to acknowledge and accept that and begin to craft rules that are technology agnostic,” Waite added. Because therein lies the solution to any concerns that privacy might be invaded.

Waite said that the key is deciding what we don’t want people to do – what we need to prevent from happening. “We need to start thinking about what we consider a reasonable expectation of privacy in our modern times. And if that’s not allowing [me to] photograph [someone] streaking in their backyard, then that’s great. We can say I can’t do that. But it shouldn’t matter how I do that, [just that] you don’t want me to do it.”

It’s about understanding what we’re offended by. And then realizing that if privacy was violated, then how it was done is unimportant, he added.

The drone-related privacy concerns of the average American are actually pretty obvious, Waite said. They’re afraid of a drone operator peering into their windows like a 21st Century peeping tom, or using them to stalk and harass people. And they’re also afraid that someone might gather information about them and their behaviors.

Amie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel for privacy advocacy group Access Now, said these concerns are genuine because drone technology is in a league of its own. “Drones have [the] capacity to bring a bunch of different surveillance technologies onto a singular platform and to reach into areas that other vehicles have not been able to get to. For example, up into very high buildings or into inside spaces.”

But many of the acts people are fearful of are actually crimes, Waite said. They’re already illegal. “It is illegal for you to fly up and peer in[to] someone’s window, those peeping tom laws already handle that.” He admitted that some states aren’t as advanced as others because they require that an offender physically be on the property to be prosecuted as a peeping tom. “[But] that doesn’t take a great leap of mind to fix that real quick,” he added.

Gathering information through surveillance is a different issue, however, one steeped with potential for abuse. Stepanovich said that limitations should be put in place to restrict the ways in which government agencies can use drone technology. “It’s highly advanced and gives them a great deal [of] increased capability and can be used to collect a great deal of information,” she said.

“We need things that will, for example, protect users’ location information from being collected and tracked. … It comes back to tracking people over time without a warrant and being able to pinpoint their exact location. And this is true with drones but … there are several other different kinds of technologies that are coming out. And we need to make sure that that information is adequately protected.”

The presidential memo issued in conjunction with the FAA’s proposal states that agencies must “comply with the Privacy Act of 1974, which, among other things, restricts the collection and dissemination of individuals’ information that is maintained in systems of records, including personally identifiable information.”

The White House’s assurance that government agencies will be held accountable to legacy privacy standards is a good thing, Stepanovich said, but she recommends further attribution and transparency.

“The FAA has a publicly accessible database of who is able to fly airplanes in any specific geographic area in the United States. But they haven’t made a similar commitment to do that for drone operators,” Stepanovich said. She calls that a double standard.

People won’t know which agency, company or person is behind the remote of the drone flying over their homes. They’re already fearful, so that’s not the best way to go about this, Stepanovich added.

“And so the FAA definitely has a role to play in protecting privacy,” and she recommends the agency operate a full registry. “We’re talking about transparency, requiring that drone users register what technology they are deploying on their drones, and what capacity these drones will have. This just gets at making sure people are aware of what’s going on in their own area,” she added.

“But it should be up to Congress and other agencies to ensure that users don’t violate one another’s privacy rights.” That requires a separate law, but Stepanovich said it would be a mistake to make a new law for a singular piece of technology.

Like Waite and Tobin, she advises technology agnosticism when it comes to lawmaking. Because technology changes frequently. And for that same reason, Stepanovich said the drone privacy debate is an important one: “It will definitely be worth paying attention to because it’s really deciding the future of this technology in the U.S.”

All three agree that the next 24 months will be very exciting. “We’re sort of in the early years of the Wild West stage here, where the rules and the court cases [haven’t happened] yet,” Waite said. “But things are going to happen and they’re going to be tested in court and they’re going to be squared to our constitutional values and when they are, we’ll actually have a fairly stable system.”

“But until then you’re going to have some crazy stuff going on,” Waite added. “You’re going to see people doing things that were never envisioned and you’re going to see [drones] being used in ways that we hadn’t thought of yet. And some of that’s going to be cool and neat and some of it’s going to be kind of ugly.”

One thing is guaranteed: The waiting game has just begun.

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White House pushes for student data regulations

WASHINGTON — When the educational company ConnectEDU filed for bankruptcy about a year ago, it tried to do what any business would — sell off its most valuable asset: student data.

Millions of students submitted personal information such as email addresses, birth dates and test scores to the college and career planning company.

The Federal Trade Commission eventually stopped any transactions involving the data after noting that they violated ConnectEDU’s privacy policy.

Some student educational records are protected through the Family Educational and Privacy Rights Act, or FERPA. Originally signed into law in 1974, FERPA essentially protects the records schools collect on students and gives parents certain oversight and disclosure rights.

The growing influence of technology in classrooms and in administrative data collection, though, is making FERPA out-of-date.

Teachers, students and parents now routinely submit information to educational services companies, such as ConnectEDU. FERPA does not regulate how these companies use that data. And there is no other federal law that does. The companies’ own privacy policies are the only limit to what the companies can do with the information users provide.

The concern is that ConnectEDU may not be the only education technology company that is trying to sell its data to third parties.

ConnectEDU’s databases, for example, were filled with students’ personally identifiable information including names, birthdates, email addresses and telephone numbers. The sale of that information to other companies is not regulated.

In order to make FERPA up-to-date, President Barack Obama, in conjunction with partners in the private sector, called for a legislation to establish a national standard to protect students’ data in January.

“It’s pretty straightforward,” Obama said in a speech at the Federal Trade Commission. “We’re saying the data collected on students in the classroom can be used for educational purposes — to teach our children, not to market to our children. We want to prevent companies from selling student data to third parties for purposes other than education. We want to prevent any kind of profiling about certain students.”

Dubbed the Student Digital Privacy Act, the White House’s plan is loosely based on a 2014 California law that prohibits third-party education companies from selling student information. While other states have laws regulating and increasing the transparency, regulation and collection of student data, the California law seems to be the most far-reaching.

Because FERPA doesn’t cover third-party use, some private sector leaders have taken a vow to establish clear industry standards for protecting student data through the Student Privacy Pledge.

Created by the Future of Privacy Forum and the Software and Information Industry Association in the fall of 2014, Obama mentioned the pledge as an encouraging sign for the protection of student information.

“I want to encourage every company that provides these technologies to our schools to join this effort,” Obama said. “It’s the right thing to do. And if you don’t join this effort, then we intend to make sure that those schools and those parents know you haven’t joined this effort.”

So far, 123 companies have signed the pledge, including tech and education giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

“There was a lack of awareness, information and understanding about what school service providers did and didn’t do with data and what the laws required and allowed,” Mark Schneiderman, senior director of education policy at SIIA, said. “Rather than waiting for public policy and public debate to play itself out, we figured, let’s just step in and make clear that the industry is supporting schools, is using data only for school purposes, not selling the data, not doing other things that there was a perception out there that maybe [companies were doing].”

The National Parent-Teacher Association and other groups support the pledge, according to Schneiderman.

“It is imperative that students’ personal informational formation is protected at all times,” the National PTA wrote in a statement.

The companies that signed the pledge are not subject to any policing body, but by signing the pledge they show consumers their commitment to student privacy, Schneiderman said.

But many notable educational technology companies, like Pearson Education, have not signed the pledge. Pearson was recently the subject of a POLITICO investigative report that revealed that the company’s use of student data was unmonitored.

According to the report, Pearson claims it does not sell the students’ data it collects.

The College Board, ACT and Common Application are often viewed as integral to the college admissions process, but are also not included in the pledge.

Instead, these education companies point consumers to their privacy policies, which can often be difficult to understand because of the legal jargon and ambiguous terms.

Some groups such as the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy think the pledge and the privacy policies aren’t enough.

“We also need strong enforcement and security mechanisms to prevent against breaches,” Leonie Haimson, one of the group’s co-chairs, said in a statement responding to Obama’s speech. “This has been a year of continuous scandalous breaches; we owe it to our children to require security provisions at least as strict as in the case of personal health information.”

Out of the 12 commitments listed in the pledge, only one deals with preventing leaks or breaches.

The signees must “maintain a comprehensive security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of student personal information against risks,” the pledge states.

Haimson said the policies are a decent start, but do not go nearly far enough in protecting educational data.

Regardless, a bill for a comprehensive national standard has yet to be introduced despite the White House’s push.

In early February, though, the White House said that it had been working closely with Republican Rep. Luke Messer of Indiana and Colorado Democrat Rep. Jared Polis to introduce a bipartisan bill to Congress.

The bill’s release is expected by the end of the month, according to Messer’s office.MINTZERPRIVACY (9) 2

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PRISM is bigger than anything that came before it—but no-one knows how much bigger

The mystery surrounding how much domestic spying the US government has been conducting on its own citizens will only intensify in the coming days, as a growing number of the nine major internet companies linked to an alleged top-secret data-mining program deny they had anything to do with it.

The stories in the Guardian and Washington Post contend that the National Security Agency and FBI were jacking directly into the central servers of the companies and scooping up all sorts of personal data in a hunt for terrorist activity. Publicly, these agencies insist that they only do that overseas, to foreigners, while the tech firms concerned insist they aren’t involved and have never heard of such a scheme.

That may or may not be true, and finding out the gritty details is sure to become the next parlor game in Washington. One thing is for sure, though. If PRISM is what the two newspapers say it is, it is the biggest domestic spying program that the United States has ever conducted, and by orders of magnitude.

“It looks from what I’ve seen to be larger than anything I thought we were doing,” says Paul Rosenzweig, author of a recent book, Cyber Warfare.

Rosenzweig should know. As a former acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, he was one of those people given the kind of Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances needed to work on any project as sensitive as this. But, he says, “I wasn’t read in on this.” (He wouldn’t comment on what he was “read in on”).

The reports about PRISM come a day after The Guardian reported on another data mining program that allowed the US government access to metadata about every single phone call flowing through the trunk lines at Verizon, one of the country’s biggest wireless carriers. The Wall Street Journal has since reported (paywall) that secret court orders also enable such surveillance at AT&T and Sprint, the other two big carriers, and that the orders are renewed every three months; NBC says it has been happening on every call in the US for the last seven years.

James Bamford, author of three books on the NSA, says the disclosures have certainly raised a lot of questions about what’s going on out at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. But Bamford says the two programs have may solved another mystery that he’s been wrestling with for a year now—why the NSA needed to build such a cavernous and secret complex way out in Bluffdale, Utah. “They need that data center to store all of this stuff,”  Bamford told Quartz.

Bamford said that he and other security experts familiar with the NSA have long snickered about how the NSA’s spooks and engineers were vacuuming up their emails and everything else they were doing. “It used to be a joke,” he said. “Now, it’s not a joke at all.”

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Targeted killing of U.S. citizens lawful, says Holder, but critics pounce


Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that U.S. citizens are not exempt from being targeted by the government. (Office of the Attorney General)

WASHINGTON – The U.S. government has the right to kill terrorists overseas if they pose an imminent threat and can’t be captured – even if they are American citizens, Attorney General Eric Holder said last week in a major address in Chicago.

Leading civil liberties groups say the administration should involve courts in setting standards for when it is legal to kill terrorists before decisions are made to use lethal force, but other legal scholars assert that providing due process, especially to U.S. citizens, does not necessarily mean providing a judicial process.

Holder’s assertion was the Obama administration’s most weighty justification for armed drone strikes against a terrorist target, specifically a “senior operational leader of al-Qaida or associated forces.” Though Holder didn’t mention anyone by name, the statement comes just months after the government targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior al-Qaida operative in Yemen and an American citizen. Al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, was killed in an unmanned drone strike in September.

“It’s clear that United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted,” Holder said in a speech at the Northwestern University School of Law. “But it does mean that the government must take into account all relevant constitutional considerations with respect to United States citizens – even those who are leading efforts to kill innocent Americans.”

Holder’s speech is a welcome step toward transparency, said Nathan Wessler, the national security fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. But, he added, it’s nowhere near sufficient in opening up the targeted killing program to public scrutiny.

“When we’re talking about killing U.S. citizens, there’s no chance to make it better after they’re dead,” Wessler said. “So it’s very important that courts are involved to help set the standards under which the government can use lethal force, and to evaluate whether they’ve observed the constitution after they carry out a strike.”

Targeted killings are constitutional, Holder said, because they afford targets the due process mandated in the Fifth Amendment, which says that the government may not deprive a citizen of his or her life without due process of law.

Holder argued that the “thorough and careful review” that the government engages in to determine whether a U.S. citizen is a lawful target amounts to due process. He made a distinction between due process and “judicial process,” maintaining that “where national security operations are at stake, due process takes into account the realities of combat.”

Examples of due process without judicial involvement can be found throughout U.S. law, said Charles Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. If the military wants to discharge a soldier, for instance, judge advocate generals, the military justice system’s judiciary, have to review the facts in the case. Though the soldier isn’t tried through the court system, Stimson said the offender has been afforded due process that is “fully consistent with” the constitution.

The Geneva Conventions stipulate that targeted killings are only legal in the context of “armed conflict.” Because the U.S. is engaged in armed conflict with terrorists, Holder said, the government’s targeted killing program complies with international law.

Holder acknowledged that the war the U.S. is waging on terrorists isn’t a conventional one with a set battlefield. Al-Qaida operates out of Afghanistan, he said, but the U.S. can’t afford to limit its self-defense to that battlefield. Holder alluded to al-Alwaki’s Yemeni group, noting that “al-Qaida and its associates have directed several attacks – fortunately, unsuccessful – against us from countries other than Afghanistan.”

“We are at war with a stateless enemy, prone to shifting operations from country to country,” he said. “Our government has both a responsibility and a right to protect this nation and its people from such threats.”

As a lawyer in the Israel Defense Forces, Amos Guiora sat at the table during counterterrorism discussions, helping make decisions in targeted killing cases. Now a law professor at the University of Utah, Guiora said Holder should have done a better job of defining exactly what constitutes a legitimate target. Without a “criteria-based approach” to targeted killing, he said, the government could apply the policy far too broadly.

“We need to have narrow, as in precise, articulations of these definitions in order to ensure that we’re not engaging in, for lack of a better term, overkill,” Guiora said. “And if you have loosey-goosey standards devoid of strictness, then what you ultimately have is a policy of obtuseness which lends itself to abuse.”

Wessler also worries that, devoid of public debate and judicial scrutiny, targeting American citizens will give the government too much power.

“The administration is asking the public just to trust it when it comes to protecting the rights of U.S. citizens who are targeted with lethal force,” Wessler said. “But that can’t be enough.”

Because terrorists who can be lawfully targeted pose an “imminent threat” to national security, Holder said capture can be a “time-sensitive” issue.

“It is preferable to capture suspected terrorists where feasible — among other reasons, so that we can gather valuable intelligence from them — but we must also recognize that there are instances where our government has the clear authority — and, I would argue, the responsibility — to defend the United States through the appropriate and lawful use of lethal force,” Holder said.

The legal authority to capture and detain is the same legal authority to target and kill, Stimson said. Once the government determines a terrorist is a lawful target, it’s up to the president to make a policy decision: capture or kill.

“This administration, because detention has proven, at least in their minds, to be difficult, has chosen to kill rather than capture,” Stimson said. “They prefer justice from 30,000 feet instead of capturing them, lawfully detaining them, lawfully taking them to Guantanamo, giving them an attorney and giving them access to our federal courts through habeas. And that’s a policy decision.”

It’s a decision, Stimson said, that the next administration can easily reverse – or enhance. With an ever-evolving terrorist threat, Holder is adamant that the power to target U.S. citizens is indispensable.

“This is an indicator of our times – not a departure from our laws and our values,” Holder said. “For this administration – and for this nation – our values are clear.”

 

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U.S. surveillance to follow in footsteps of the UK?

The United Kingdom is light years ahead of the U.S. in terms of surveillance, but will we soon be seeing a similar push stateside?

In mid-July, the Telegraph newspaper reported that the UK is using covert surveillance to monitor conversations in an effort to detect behavior that could be conceived as threatening. In addition, it was announced that the country’s police traffic network camera system is being used to monitor drivers’ movements and to keep a database of all relevant information for up to two years.

Add those two to an already controversial decision to require all Internet records to be stored for a year and tracking devices used to covertly track citizens and the UK would seem to have the makings for a perfect storm of privacy concerns. That doesn’t even take into account the more than 4 million surveillance cameras already in place.

The possibility of similar measures coming across the pond may seem highly unlikely, according to experts, especially under an Obama administration that praises transparency. But is it really? Just over a year ago, a bill was proposed to stop a program called the National Applications Office from ever starting up. The NAO was a program designed to use military satellites to keep tabs on Americans whether in their home or in the public and then share that information with law enforcement officials at all levels.

However, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ended the program, after a five-month review, before it came to fruition.

At the time of her decision, she said in a news release that, “This action will allow us to focus our efforts on more effective information sharing programs that better meet the needs of law enforcement, protect the civil liberties and privacy of all Americans, and make our country more secure.”

But even the idea of a program such as the NAO raises the question of whether the U.S. is headed down the same road as the UK, with increased surveillance as we never seen before.

In some ways, that has already started, with various cities across the country taking measures into their own hands when it comes to surveillance. Chicago has more than 10,000 public and private cameras used for surveillance, with plans to add more. New York City has about 4,200 surveillance cameras. None of the U.S. efforts come close to the UK, but the foundation has been laid. And it is being laid at the local level.

“In the U.S., we see signs of increasing numbers of cameras in cities between governments and private parities,” said John Verdi, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “You’re seeing a push and pull across the country. Now, there is no move to federalize it, it is a local issue. It is driven by local groups, politicians. They are getting some federal money, but it’s all at the municipal level.”

While cities may be leading the charge, could it be only a matter of time before the federal government takes the lead?

“It is a concern,” Verdi said. “But I don’t see it happening for two reasons: it is fairly expensive and it is fairly ineffective. As we saw in Times Square, one of the most densely populated camera areas, with the bomb just over a month ago, it was vendors on the street who noticed the van before the cameras did, even though it was on camera for quite awhile.”

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, added, “In the UK, in cases of crime and public misconduct, you’re more likely to be on visual record. Here in the U.S., we value the sense of not always being monitored by some official surveillance. It’s part of the American preference for freedom from official intrusion. It’s part of our national character.”

But should American’s citizens be concerned that a government agency is listening in to their conversations or watching their every action?

“Still quite a gap separates us from the UK,” Aftergood said. “But there’s a perceptible temptation in increase surveillance, especially in areas of high crime or perceived threat.”

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Yemen's water: a different national security threat

WASHINGTON–After a Yemen-based branch of al Qaeda claimed it was behind the foiled terrorist attack on Christmas day late last year, the country on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula has garnered national attention.
Described as a ticking time bomb for extremism, Yemen has captured public attention as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s primary new breeding ground —  a chronic politically unstable state ripe for AQAP’s exploitation. More than 100 Yemenis have been incarcerated in Guantanamo since 2002 and several hundred al Qaeda affiliated militants are said to operate in the country.
Yet for many Yemenis, the pervasive al Qaeda threat is eclipsed by more impending crises, including an increasingly violent secessionist movement in the south and a civil war in the north. In addition to civil unrest, the poorest nation  in the region – and one of the poorest in the world – faces yet another catastrophe whose numbers portend a far deadlier long-term challenge.
Yemen’s population of 23 million, nearly half of whom are under the age of 15, is expected to double by 2035.
And experts claim the capital city, Sana’a, could become the world’s first capital city to run dry, raising concerns that a World Heritage City could devolve into a mere ghost town.
Yemen’s oil accounts for approximately 85% of the government’s revenue. Profit is used to subsidize expensive diesel pumps to extract water, but analysts predict that its petroleum output, already down from 460,000 barrels a day in 2002 to 300-350,000 in 2007, will fall to 0 in 2017.
“Everyone — the Yemeni people, the American government — are sitting around waiting for the crisis to vanish,” said Mohammed Albasha, press and public relations officer at the Embassy of Yemen in Washington. “They’re just talking about it and no one is giving solutions.”
Greg Johnsen, Princeton University expert on Yemen, argues that solutions have been offered – they’re just detrimental.
“Counterterrorism is the only tool the administration is availing themselves with to deal with Yemen and that is a catastrophic mistake,” said Johnsen.
Will Rogers, research assistant at the Center for a New American Security think tank, says the development community must work with locals to break the cycle and bolster the government’s legitimacy.
“You can throw money at the problem but if u don’t have a sustainable plan, you won’t see improvement,” he said.
As water becomes more scarce, the government is increasingly unable to maintain control and legitimacy over tribal governments. Pockets of ungoverned spaces present opportunities for al Qaeda to exploit economic and political challenges.
If the overarching goal is to make Yemen a more stable state, then the first and most basic task is to develop sustainable water projects. But that has become increasingly difficult.
According to a February 2009 report by Integrated Regional Information Network, eighty percent of rural water projects funded by World Bank and Yemen government programs had been seized by tribesmen near or upon completion.
“The effective implementation of programs is hampered by Yemen’s limited institutional capacity,” said Xavier Devictor, World Bank Country Program Coordinator for Egypt, Yemen, and Djibouti. “And actions are likely to require social change, which may take time to materialize.”
Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affair Maria Otero recently traveled to the Middle East in a trip that was said to underscore the need to elevate America’s diplomatic efforts surrounding water.
“Yemen is perhaps the most extreme example of the problems in the region,” said Carl Schonander, primary policy person for the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs under Otero.
But Yemen wasn’t a stop on the department’s tour.
“The trip was planned far in advanced and we didn’t make it to Yemen,” he said, “but the consciousness of the issues should no doubt be raised more.”
Many are counting on it. But as the Yemeni proverb goes, from a pound of talk, an ounce of understanding.
“The next big war in the Middle East wont be over oil, but water,” said Albasha.
“It’s the main source for life,” he said, “and will be the next big ugly battle.”

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U.S. response to Israeli flotilla raid shows an administration paralyzed

WASHINGTON—The White House still appears to be a bit tongue-tied when it comes to Israel’s recent deadly confrontation with ­a Gaza-bound flotilla .

Israel Defense Forces Navy killed nine pro-Palestinian activists last Monday after commandos stopped nine ships trying to run Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. The group, which said it sought to deliver aid to the Hamas-controlled region, had publically declared it would steam through the Israel’s three-year blockade. The sanctions, meant to keep weapons out of Gaza, have also blocked food and building materials.

But, as American and Israel officials predicted, things went awry. When the IDFN  boarded The Mavi Marmara in a late-night ­ siege, firefights broke out. One week later, the U.S. is left in the awkward position of sticking up for an ally, while many in the international community now condemn the incident as an Israeli attack. (Israel says it was attacked enforcing a lawful blockade; Gaza sympathizers say it was an unprovoked assault.)

For proof, look no further than the public record. Transcripts of press briefings, gaggles and official statements all reveal an administration that appears to condemn what happened, but is too wary to get involved. It’s typical of America’s increasingly fraught relationship with its biggest ally in the Middle East, according to some observers, who said ­that at some point things need to change.

As Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, told The New York Times this week:

“America has three choices. Either say, it’s politically too hot a potato to touch, and just pay the consequences in the rest of the world. Or try to force through a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, so that the Palestinian grievance issue is no longer a driving force or problem.” The third choice, he said, “is for America to say, we can’t solve it, but we can’t pay the consequences, so we will distance ourselves from Israel. That way America would no longer be seen, as it has been this week, as the enabler of excesses of Israeli misbehavior.”

It’s still unclear which direction the U.S. is headed.

After the May 31 attack, the UN Security Council spent 10 hours drafting a painstakingly carefully worded statement. “The council, in this context, condemns those acts ­,” the statement reads. “The security council stresses that the situation in Gaza is not sustainable.”

For the next several days, this became the only comment the White House would offer on the matter. When pressed with follow up questions ­, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told the Associated Press’s Ben Feller, “well, Ben, let me simply restate what the international community and the United States supported early this morning at the U.N. Security Council through a presidential statement.”

That would seem to suggest that the U.S. is not on Israel’s side on this issue. But as Vice President Joseph Biden stressed June 2, two days after the incident, this is not the case.

“Reports of fissures between the United States and Israel are ‘vastly exaggerated.’”, Biden said, according to a pool report from The Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y. “No administration has been more supportive of Israeli security than this administration.”

Granted, the vice president is known to veer from the White House script. Yet he’s not the only example of administration doublespeak on the matter.

One of the administration’s main talking points is that until an impartial investigation is completed, as demanded by the UN, it’ll withhold judgment. In a June 1 phone conversation with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a vocal critic of the Jewish state, President Barack Obama “affirmed the United States position in support of a credible, impartial, and transparent investigation of the facts surrounding this tragedy,” according to White House press release.

Three days later, when journalists on Air Force One cited rumors that Israel would go it alone in the upcoming investigation, Gibbs evaded a response.

“We’ve had some discussions with them,” he said, according to White House transcripts.  “I think, let me make sure, because I have not checked my email on the flight.  I think there may have been some movement on that.  Let me check on that.”

The one consistent message thorough the whole affair has been that the current situation in Gaza is a humanitarian nightmare. “Unsustainable,” has become the administration’s descriptor of choice, and a National Security Council Statement dated June 4 says the U.S. is working with Israel and the Palestinian Authority to solve the matter.

More recently. ­Israel defense officials formally announced that they would conduct their own investigation of the incident­, just one day after ­Defense Minister Ehud Barak said his government will not allow foreign investigators to scrutinize Israeli soldiers,­according to a Voice of America report.

The White House had no immediate ­comment.

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From eradication to assent: U.S. policy on opium crops

WASHINGTON–In the transition to the Obama Administration from the Bush Administration, freshly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed Richard Holbrooke as the Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. With that move, U.S. global counternarcotics policy – regarding Afghan poppy farming in particular – took a sharp turn. Troops stemmed the practice of destroying poppy crops, concentrating on education, giving farmers alternatives and targeting drug traffickers, among other non-forcible eradication practices.

This recent video shows just how far that policy has set in, with U.S. soldiers not only permitting poppy farming but essentially helping Afghan farmers grow the crop.

Although some soldiers and Afghans see progress in various areas, many criticize the tacit support of poppy growing, according to a report on the counter-narcotics effort from the inspector general for the State Department.

The concern is that poppies used for the opium trade wind up supporting terrorism. They provide much of the funding for the Taliban, according to estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The U.S. policy now hopes to prevent that by focusing only on drug traffickers, so as not to affect farmers for whom poppies are their sole livelihood.

Tom Schweich, the U.S. ambassador for counter-narcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan from 2007-08, debates the effectiveness of any policy that fosters poppy growing and does not include at least some amount of eradication.

“That’s like getting rid of a tree by cutting the branches instead of the roots,” Schweich said. The policy adopted by Holbrooke is more politically based than attending to actual situation, according to Schweich, who helped shape policy that included eradication under the Bush Administration. He says there has to be a policy that’ attacks the problem at all levels: cultivation, the process of turning it into heroin, the chemists, traffickers, and people protecting traffickers.

Holbrooke’s office did not respond to questions about the effectiveness of their policy, or the State Department OIG’s criticism by press time.

Tom Gregg, a fellow on the Afghanistan regional project at the Center on International Cooperation, said that moving away from eradication is acknowledging the complexity of the issue. The CIC is part of New York University, where Holbrooke’s senior advisor Barnett Rubin is a director of studies and senior fellow on Afghanistan.

“Fundamentally it’s not as dreadful as an eradication policy,” Gregg said.

The source of drug trafficking and its connection to terrorism dates back to the late 1970s after the collapse of the Afghan state during the Soviet-influenced communist coup. Afghan political-military leaders allied with businessmen engaged across many trades including arms dealing and drugs. Businessmen depended on the strongmen, presumably like the Taliban, and then in exchange gave them money.

The UNODC said that the Taliban and “other anti-government forces” made $50 million to $70 million by charging farmers something like at 10 percent fee on their crops. Also, levies imposed on opium processing and trafficking may have raised an additional $200-$400 million. In addition to revenue, drug traffickers provide insurgents material support, including vehicles, weapons, and shelter.

It’s not so easy to go back now, however. The World Bank’s Department for International Intelligence describes the nuances of trying to reverse the proliferation of poppy farming amid the continuing/escalating turbulence. Security incidents in Afghanistan have increased every year since 2003, and in 2009 there was another sharp rise in security incidents.

Meanwhile, some farmers have lost the skills to live off of crops – raisins (See DII report pg. 15) are just one example – and therefore the comparative advantage has gone down. Consequently, switching a farmer back to such benign crops becomes a chore.

So too is it difficult to pin down the demographic that is impacted by eradication. Rubin and others in the Holbrooke camp underscore the dire economic situation for those who would lose their incomes and the anti-American sentiment eradication creates, thus fueling insurgency. Schweich says that it is in part misleading, as farmers who grow poppies don’t do so out of need.

“It’s not poverty that is driving this, it’s greed in most cases,” he said.

A 2008 UNODC report does say that poverty is not a driving factor in creating an opium boom; rather it is more a combination of under-resourced governments and ongoing insurgencies. Data from the NODC shows that poppy growing in Afghanistan exploded after 9/11 to its record high of 193,000 hectares in 2007, before beginning to decline again.

Now the poppy harvest is decreasing for the third year in a row, only the most recent one coming under the Obama administration. And the decline under Obama is largely due to a naturally-occurring fungus that has destroyed opium crops.

Though Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world’s opium, the vast majority of farmers grow something other than poppies. Only 6.4 percent of the total population or 12.9 percent of the rural population was involved in poppy cultivation (UNODC survey, pg. 76).

What’s more, in Afghanistan, it’s actually against the Constitution to grow or cultivate poppies. So permitting poppy growing could send the wrong message to other Afghan farmers who are not growing poppies, Schweich suggests, in essence telling farmers it’s OK to violate the constitution, and it undermining the very rule of law they’re trying to establish.

“It’s a preposterous mixed message with no chance of long-term success,” he said.

Gregg admits though there are a number of contradictions in the international approach, such as the inequitable distribution of the foreign dollar in Afghanistan. The insurgency is in the South and Southeast, he says, where a lot of the foreign aid goes. “In some ways is rewarding bad behavior,” Gregg said. Some of what the military needs to do is to identify the swing provinces, he recommended, first award areas that aren’t growing poppies.

It may be that the previous policy of eradication – which could only be executed with force-protected, ground-based eradication and not aerial sprays – could be done better. But it was not in and of itself a bad policy, according to Schweich.

“The central poppy eradication force was inefficient. There’s no doubt about that. However, an eradication component to a comprehensive counternarcotics policy remains essential,” he said.

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Some point to abuses in Mexican drug war

WASHINGTON–Mexican President Felipe Calderon and U.S. President Barack Obama used Calderon’s recent trip to Washington to reaffirm their mutual support for the fight against drug cartels on both sides of the border.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called the fight a priority, and both Democrats and Republicans have proposed beefed-up security measures on the U.S. side of the border. Most recently, Obama announced plans to send 1,200 National Guard troops to the southwest border.

Congress has appropriated about $1.3 billion in anti-crime and drug funding for Mexico through the Merida Initiative, a multi-year program launched in 2007 that also targets criminal organizations in Central America and the Caribbean.

But the militarization of the fight against drug cartels on the Mexican side of the border, and U.S. support of the effort, has raised red flags in some quarters over escalating violence as well as human rights violations and corruption in the Mexican military and justice system.

At a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on drug enforcement and the rule of law May 18, Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, criticized the human rights record of the Mexican military and the lack of accountability for human rights violators. Calderon has relied heavily on the military in his effort to quell the drug cartels.

“Too often local leaders respond to public demands to get tough on crime by condoning abusive practices that not only undermine the rule of law by violating basic rights but also fail to curb crime,” Vivanco said.

In the three years since Calderon launched a military crackdown on drug cartels, about 22,700 people have been killed in drug-related violence.

Beyond the violence, Vivanco’s testimony pointed to alleged abuses by the military, including rape and killings, as well as at least 100 people who claimed to have been arbitrarily detained and then tortured to obtain false confessions since 2009.

Vivanco said that last year Congress should not have given Mexico the 15% of its funding under the Merida legislation that is conditional on fulfillment of human rights requirements. A State Department report to Congress highlighted some issues, including lack of transparency in the military justice system, but found that Mexico had met the four human rights conditions.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairmen of the subcommittee, was also the sole senator in attendance at the hearing, as his colleagues were occupied with debating Wall Street reform. Durbin called the fight against drug cartels a priority but said the United States has a responsibility to see that its aid does not fuel human rights abuses.

“The military in Mexico in many instances operates with virtual impunity, resulting in limited success in stemming drug violence and human rights abuses that rival and surpass often the corruption of the law enforcement system they were sent to replace,” he said.

Officials from the State Department and Department of Justice testified that Mexico has made significant reforms. The Calderon administration has taken steps to remove suspect law enforcement officials, customs officials and judges and to reform and modernize its judicial system, with U.S. assistance.

David T. Johnson, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, wrote in his testimony that institutional reforms in Mexico are a work in progress.

“The strategy that the U.S. Government is pursuing with the Government of Mexico is an effective, long-term program, not a temporary ‘quick fix’,” he wrote.

As the drug war continues in Mexico, it’s a debate that will likely be played out many times.

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