U.S. declassifies paperwork
that Snowden had revealed


The U.S. has declassified secret orders that allowed it to engage in massive surveillance of the phone calls and Internet usage of Americans, information about two clandestine programs that former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked last month.

The government released the orders Wednesday, but blacked out key information, such as the names of the telephone companies it sought the records from. The release of the documents appeared to be a new effort by President Barack Obama's administration to support its claim that the data collection is necessary to thwart terrorist attacks on the country.

One document sent to key congressional leaders in 2011 described the National Security Agency surveillance as some of the most sensitive foreign intelligence collection programs being conducted by the government. It said telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, the times of the calls and messaging and their dates are being collected, but not the content of the calls and Internet messages.

Even as the government released the information, Britain's Guardian newspaper disclosed details of another clandestine NSA program leaked by Snowden, XKeyscore. The newspaper said the agency boasted that XKeyscore is its widest-reaching system, with analysts able to monitor online Internet chats and the browsing history of millions of Internet users.  

The scope of the surveillance has surprised many Americans and sparked a debate whether it ought to be curtailed. The House of Representatives narrowly rejected a bid last week to end some of the spying.

But at a hearing on the surveillance Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, voiced skepticism about the need for the spying.

"The government is already collecting data on millions of innocent Americans on a daily basis, based on a secret legal interpretation of the statute that does not, on its face, intend to authorize this kind of bulk collection," he said. "So what's going to be next? When is enough, is enough?"

Snowden leaked details of the surveillance as he fled first to Hong Kong and then Moscow, where for the last month he has been encamped in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo airport while seeking asylum in any country where he can avoid extradition to the United States to face pending espionage charges.

He is seeking temporary asylum in Russia while saying he wants to eventually leave for Latin America, where Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have offered him asylum.  But his quick departure from Moscow was blocked when the U.S. revoked his passport, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has refused a request from Obama to expel Snowden so he can stand trial in the U.S.

NSA deputy director John Inglis told Leahy that no one has been fired or offered to resign at the agency in the aftermath of Snowden's leaks. Inglis said the NSA is in the midst of investigating how the disclosures occurred and that officials will be held accountable.

Snowden's father, Lon Snowden, told Russian television Wednesday he was grateful that the Kremlin has kept his son safe while it considers his asylum request.

In another interview, the elder Snowden told The Washington Post that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to convince him to fly to Moscow to persuade his son to return to the U.S. However, Lon Snowden told the newspaper that the intelligence agency could not guarantee that it could arrange a meeting with his son.

The Post reported the elder Snowden told the FBI that he would "not sit on a tarmac to be an emotional tool" for the agency's benefit.

Snowden told the newspaper that he was as surprised as the rest of America when his son exposed top-secret U.S. surveillance plans. He said he did not see any direct signs of a growing disillusionment with the government and its surveillance methods that Edward has spoken about in interviews. He said his son simply did not talk about his work.



Now they have plate readers
to track motorists with video


Privacy advocates, already reeling from leaks on the government's surveillance of private citizens, have found another concern.  Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. are using powerful camera technology to scan license plates and build databases on the movements of millions of Americans.

Arlington County Police Detective Mohammed Tabibi is with the auto theft unit.  He uses license plate readers mounted on the hood of his car to look for stolen vehicles.

“It has paid dividends.  We have caught some people involved in some serious crimes because of LPR.  And I know it has helped out a lot of agencies in the area as well," said Tabibi.

The use of license plate readers is growing across the United States.  Some are mounted on poles, others on cars, and privacy groups are concerned.  They say the information is being stored on computer servers and shared with other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. 

“What they are also doing is storing everybody’s time, place, and location," said Jay Stanley, who is with the American Civil Liberties Union. "And many police departments are holding that information indefinitely.  You know in our society, the government doesn’t follow you and invade your privacy and track you unless it has a specific reason that you are involved in wrongdoing."

Arlington Police Capt. Kevin Rearden heads the Homeland Security division.  He says license plate reader information is kept for six months.  But other law enforcement agencies, with access to their server, may store it indefinitely.

“We originally had a two-month period, and the detectives requested the chief extend it to six months because they found in so many investigations, keeping it for two months wasn’t long enough," said Rearden.

Privacy advocates say they have no problem with police departments scanning license plates to investigate crimes. But they're opposed to storing information for long periods of time.

“...Once you are past a certain amount of time, it is very unlikely it is going to be useful. Meanwhile we are creating this giant infrastructure for tracking people," said Stanley. “They keep bringing up the tracking word. And if I went out and ran your tag in our server, I would not be able to track you.  I would be lucky if I could put you in a few places in Arlington in a particular time.  By no stretch of the imagination would I be able to track you,"

But the ACLU says Americans need to know more about the technology. 

It has filed suit in federal court against the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to see how federal officials are using the license plate reader information they acquire.



Senate panel hears reasons
for surveillance of citizens


Top U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials say the government’s vast domestic data collection activities do not infringe on citizens’ privacy but do help identify and defeat terrorist threats.  Officials testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee hours after the Obama administration released documents detailing telephone data collection programs exposed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

Revelations that the U.S. government collects telephone records have unnerved many Americans, according to committee chairman Patrick Leahy.

“I think the patience of the American people is beginning to wear thin. But what has to be of more concern in a democracy is the trust of the American people is wearing thin," he said.

Wednesday, the Obama administration released previously classified documents on the extent and limitations of federal telephone snooping.

“These are telephone records maintained by the phone companies. They include the number the call was dialed from, the number the call was dialed to, the date and time of the call and the length of the call," said Deputy Attorney General James Cole. "The records do not include the names or other identifying information. They do not include cell site or other location information, and they do not include the content of any phone calls."

Actual monitoring of phone calls requires special court authorization.  Overall, data collection has helped defeat terrorists, according to National Security Agency Deputy Director John Inglis.

“There were 54 plots that were disrupted over the life of these two programs," he said.

The House of Representatives recently voted down a proposal to limit telephone data collection.  Similarly, senators showed no inclination to terminate the programs but did express dismay over the lack of voluntary public disclosure.

“We have a lot of good information out there that helps the American public understand these programs," said Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. "But it all came out late.  It all came out in response to a leaker. There was no organized plan for how we rationally declassify this so that the American people can participate in the debate."

Vast data collection has a chilling effect on freedom, according to Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“People who know the government could be monitoring their every move, their every phone call, or their every Google search will comport themselves differently.  They will hesitate before visiting controversial Web sites.  They will hesitate before joining controversial advocacy groups.  They will hesitate before exercising rights that the Constitution guarantees," he said.

Not so, says Robert Litt, general counsel in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“Collection of this kind of telephone meta-data from the telephone companies is not a violation of anyone’s constitutional rights," he said.

Litt said that disclosure of the programs has damaged the government’s ability to protect the nation.



Delay in Obamacare mandate
will save $10 billion in fines


President Barack Obama's decision to delay implementation of part of his health care reform law will cost $12 billion and leave a million fewer Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance in 2014, congressional researchers said Tuesday.

The report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is the first authoritative estimate of the human and fiscal cost from the administration's unexpected one-year delay announced July 2 of the employer mandate, a requirement for larger businesses to provide health coverage for their workers or pay a penalty.

The analysts said the delay will add to the cost of Obamacare's insurance-coverage provisions over the next 10 years. Penalties paid by employers would be lower and more individuals who otherwise might have had employer coverage will need federal insurance subsidies.

“Of those who would otherwise have obtained employment-based coverage, roughly half will be uninsured,” the budget office said in a July 30 letter to Rep. Paul Ryan, Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Budget Committee.

Under Obama's health care reform law, employers with 50 or more full-time workers were supposed to provide health care coverage or incur penalties beginning Jan. 1. But the requirement will now begin in 2015.

The delay intensified doubts about the administration's ability to implement Obama's signature domestic policy achievement and stirred Republican calls for a similar delay in another Obamacare mandate that requires most individuals to have health insurance in 2014.

The Republican-controlled House followed up the administration's decision by voting on July 17 for its own measures to delay the employer and individual mandates. Neither piece of legislation is expected to succeed in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

State and federal officials are racing to set up new online health insurance exchanges, where lower-to-moderate income families that lack health insurance will be able to sign up for federally subsidized coverage beginning Oct. 1. The poor will also be able to sign up for Medicaid coverage in 23 states that have opted to expand the program.

Most large employers already offer health insurance, and the Congressional Budget Office said few are expected to drop coverage because of the delay.

But the change will still result in a $10 billion reduction in penalty payments that some employers would have made in 2015 for failing to provide coverage next year, the budget office said.

The change also means another $3 billion in added costs for exchange subsidies. That is because about half of the 1 million workers who would have gained employer-sponsored coverage next year will now obtain insurance through the exchanges or via public programs including Medicaid, the report said.

Other changes, including an increase in taxable compensation resulting from fewer people enrolling in employment-based coverage, will offset those factors by about $1 billion.

The budget office now puts the net cost of Obamacare's insurance coverage provisions at around $1.38 trillion over the next 10 years, vs. its May baseline projection of $1.36 trillion.


Defense secretary warns
of military budget cuts


U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says automatic government spending cuts, if they continue, will force the Pentagon to reduce its forces by tens of thousands of troops or cancel plans to develop and buy new weapons. 

The U.S. defense budget already is being cut by $46 billion this year under the automatic cuts known as sequestration. If the cuts continue, the Pentagon will have to cut $500 billion in the next 10 years.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday,Hagel said a review he ordered on the effects of the cuts shows the reductions will inevitably hurt the U.S. military's readiness.

“The review showed that the in-between budget scenario we evaluated would bend our defense strategy in important ways and sequester level cuts would break some parts of the strategy, no matter how the cuts were made," said Hagel.

He said the cuts would mean the armed forces would have fewer options at their disposal for defending U.S. interests and require the Pentagon to make a devastating choice. 

“The basic trade-off is between capacity measured in the number of army brigades, navy ships, air force squadrons, and marine battalions and capability — our ability to modernize weapons systems and maintain our military's technological edge," he said.

Under the scenario that Hagel presented, the U.S. military would have to get rid of up to three of its 11 aircraft carriers and reduce the size of the Army to as low as 380,000 troops from a recent wartime high of 570,000.  The Marines would see reductions to as few as 150,000 from a wartime high of 205,000.

The carrier numbers and troop levels would be the lowest since the drawdown that followed World War II.

Hagel's message was indirectly meant for Congress, which remains locked in a budget dispute with the Obama administration.  The failure of both sides to reach an agreement on the federal budget resulted in the implementation of those automatic cuts.


U.S. economy is reported
to be better than expected


New reports show the U.S. economy is advancing at a faster pace than some analysts had predicted, but the country's central bank says it is not ready yet to trim its stimulus measures to boost growth.

The government Wednesday said the American economy grew by a 1.7 percent annual rate in the April-to-June period, compared to a newly calculated 1.1 percent pace over the first three months of the year.

The Federal Reserve described the country's expansion as modest. The second quarter growth was nearly twice what many economists had projected, with some saying it pointed to even more robust growth in the second half of the year.

After a two-day meeting in Washington, central bank policy makers said the Fed will continue its monthly $85 billion purchase of securities to pump more money into the economy, and keep its benchmark interest rate near zero.

Analyst Greg McBride of Bankrate.com said there is no urgency for the Fed to scale back its asset purchases.

"We still have a slow-growth economy with high unemployment and low inflation. As a result, there's really nothing urgent that's going to prompt the Fed to scale back their stimulus anytime soon," he said. "What they've done instead is adopt kind of a wait-and-see attitude with more of the same in the meantime."

The Fed's asset purchases have been aimed at spurring the economy and boosting job growth, but the central bank said previously that as the economy improves, it is looking to curtail the program later this year and end it by mid-2014.

The government said the second quarter advance was fueled by more consumer spending, a growth in exports and expanding corporate investment.  That offset reduced federal government spending after Washington failed to agree on a new budget plan and automatic cuts took effect in March.

In another report, the government revised last year's U.S. economic performance upward, saying the country's overall output moved ahead by 2.8 percent, up from the 2.2 percent figure it earlier posted.



Latin IMF representative
backs away from Greek loan


Brazil's executive director at the International Monetary Fund refused to back the Fund's move this week to keep bankrolling Greece, citing risks of non-repayment, and the Fund itself said Athens might need faster debt relief from Europe.

The abstention by Latin American states from the decision was revealed by their Brazilian representative in an unusual public statement Wednesday, highlighting growing frustration in emerging nations with Fund policy to rescue debt-laden Europeans.
 
"Recent developments in Greece confirm some of our worst fears,'' said Paulo Nogueira Batista, Brazil's executive director at the monetary fund, who also represents 10 small nations in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. Batista clarified on Wednesday that he was speaking only for himself.
 
Implementation of Greece's reform program has been unsatisfactory in almost all areas; growth and debt sustainability assumptions continue to be over-optimistic, said Batista, criticizing the monetary fund's executive board's decision on Monday to release 1.7 billion euros of rescue loans to Greece.
 
This raised to 28.4 billion euros ($37.6 billion) the total amount of money the Fund has so far committed to Greece, an amount that Athens might default on if it gets ditched by its euro zone partners, Batista warned.
 
He was pointing to a separate report published by the Fund Wednesday which said that if Greek reforms derail and European governments withdraw their support, then Athens' “capacity to repay the Fund would likely be insufficient.”
 


Chines woman held in D.C.
after extensive vandalism


U.S. authorities are investigating whether a Chinese-born woman is responsible for the worst series of vandalism of historic sites in Washington, D.C., in recent years.
 
Jiamei Tian, 58, is awaiting a second court hearing in the U.S. capital Friday, in connection with the splashing of green paint at the Washington National Cathedral, where she was arrested Monday.
 
A police officer found Ms. Tian with several paint cans inside the cathedral soon after green paint was thrown onto decorative objects in two chapels. She also had green paint on her shoes.
 
The woman's detention followed the discovery of several other cases of vandalism involving paint at Washington historic sites on Thursday, Friday and Sunday. Police believe the incidents are connected.
 
Ms. Tian made her first court appearance Tuesday to face a charge of felony destruction of property for allegedly causing the damage at the cathedral. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000. The court ordered her to remain in custody because of concerns that she might flee if granted bail.
 
Officials involved in the hearing said Ms. Tian's English is weak. They also said she has revealed little about her herself to police, besides claiming that she lives in Los Angeles.
 
Police Chief Cathy Lanier told a local television station the woman may have mental issues.
 
Prior to her arrest, Ms. Tian attended a Sunday morning service at Washington's Luther Place Memorial Church.
 
Its administrator, Jack Reiffer, said that several congregants shook her hand in a traditional Christian greeting, but noticed that she did not engage in conversation.
 
"Most people took her to be a homeless person who was sitting in on the service," Reiffer said. "That would have been fairly common here. We frequently have folks that we have not met before who come off the street and sit in the sanctuary."
 
He said several congregants returned to the sanctuary after the service and discovered that a mixture of paint, urine and feces had been splattered onto an organ and chairs around the pulpit, prompting them to call police.
 
The church already had informed police about a previous case of vandalism Thursday, when green paint was found on its statue of Martin Luther outside the sanctuary. It was the earliest of the reported incidents.
 
Similar vandalism with green paint was discovered the next day at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial and the statue of John Henry outside the Smithsonian Castle.
 
Damage estimates for the church, cathedral and Lincoln Memorial each run into thousands of dollars.
 
National Mall and Memorial Parks spokeswoman Carol Johnson said the last major vandalism of a national park monument in Washington was in 1962.
 
“On the 100th anniversary of the emancipation proclamation, the backside of the Lincoln statue was vandalized and there was a racial epithet written in large pink letters,” Ms. Johnson said.
 
“During the protests of the 1960s and 70s, apparently there were smaller amounts of vandalism with people spray painting, but nothing of the magnitude of the latest incident.”
 
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the District of Columbia, Bill Miller, said there have been no recent vandalism cases in the city like those of the past week.
 
Court documents showed Ms. Tian had a U.S. visa that expired Saturday. It is not clear how her immigration status will affect the court proceedings against her.
 
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a question about whether it has provided any assistance to the Chinese citizen.


Tail of ancient dinosaur
uncovered in México


A team of paleontologists in Mexico has discovered an unusually well-preserved dinosaur tail that is 72 million years old.

Scientists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History say the five-meter-long tail was found earlier this month in the desert about 150 kilometers west of Monterrey near the small town of General Cepeda and is the first ever found in the country.

The paleontologists took 20 days to uncover 50 complete vertebrae of the tail along with several other parts of the dinosaur, including a hip.

The scientists say the tail resembles that of a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, and probably made up half of the dinosaur's length.