Posted on 04/16/2004 7:17:42 AM PDT by adam_az
Thank you, and here's Jamie Gorelick. (Applause.)
MS. GORELICK: Mr. President, distinguished guests. Ten years ago I would not have put cyber terrorism at the top of the threats to our national security. But the landscape has changed. Given how well-armed we are, as Josh said, as a nation, but how reliant we are on computers in our everyday business and private lives, our nation's cyber systems become a tremendous target.
Today a small group of technically sophisticated people with nothing more than off-the-shelf computer equipment can get into, can disrupt the computers and the Internet connections on which our finance, telecommunications, power, water systems, emergency service systems all depend.
Is this speculation? No, it is not. In exercise eligible receiver, our Defense Department conducted a war game using this technique and came to just that conclusion. And terrorists, organized crime, drug cartels, as well as nation states are either creating cybertech capabilities or are talking about using them. I believe that cyberspace is the next battlefield for this nation.
Now, cyber terrorism may be a new issue to many Americans, but it's not new to me and it's not new to this administration. In 1995, our Attorney General asked me to chair a critical infrastructure working group that brought together Justice and Defense and the intelligence community to begin to address what we saw as a new and emerging threat. The President then appointed a commission on critical infrastructure protection whose advisory board I co-chaired.
In response to his commission's work, last year the President signed two directives -- to strengthen U.S. readiness to meet unconventional threats to our nation, and to protect our critical infrastructures. He appointed a national coordinator, Dick Clarke, to review and handle and coordinate security infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, and a national plan is under development to ensure that America can defend itself in cyberspace.
Now, as part of that national plan I hope that we can see action in a number of areas, three of which I see as particularly pressing. The first, both the public and private sectors need to be aware of the problem and the security measures that can be taken to address it. I'd like to see the private sector work with the federal government to make sure that we have enough people who are trained in computer security, which we do not now have.
Introducing the Honorable Jamie Gorelick
Our next speaker is the Honorable Jamie Gorelick who was recently until very recently number two in the Justice Department--Deputy Attorney General. She was also the Chief Operating Officer of the Department of Justice. As such, she oversaw all the security preparations for the Atlanta Olympic Games. Prior to that, she was General Counsel for the Department of Defense, which gave her important insights into the military roles.
Jamie was a valuable contributor to the development of the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici law enacted last year. She helped us to steer a careful course that will allow the use of our military assets under tight civilian controls in compliance with our historic Constitutional values, in the event of a chemical or biological attack on civilian targets. The Department of Justice has important responsibilities in ensuring our domestic preparedness to face the threat of terrorist attacks and in mobilizing and directing such military units as may be needed, maintaining civilian control. We look forward to hearing about the planning and coordinating process from the point of view of a top Justice Department official, just retired.
We saw attacks from the World Trade Center to the bombing in Oklahoma City, and then we saw attacks that were prevented, like the attacks that were planned by the folks who would have blown up the bridges and tunnels in New York City and attacks that you all have never heard about, efforts that were underway and that were thwarted. That is critically important, as Jim Woolsey said.
Now, what are the things that one learns from this immersion in the efforts by terrorists, domestic and international, to utilize weapons of mass destruction to achieve their goals? Well, the first thing you learn is that, unlike in the military situation, we do not have command and control. We respond, as you can just see from this panel and this is just the tip of the iceberg with a multiplicity of organizations and people.
Organizing that effort to respond and to prepare coherently and cohesively is a massive a massive undertaking. Now, we had a hint of that in the preparation for the Olympics. Senator Nunn says that I was responsible for the law enforcement response and preparation of the Olympics. I got that assignment in February before the Olympics four months before the Olympics. And why? Because the White House looked at the proliferation of individuals and personalities and institutions that had responsibility for law enforcement and realized that there was not anybody responsible. So the first thing I did was get Gill, which I think was a pretty smart move on my part because he is very experienced in these matters, and we took a look at what we had. What we had was this: we had eleven eleven federal law enforcement agencies, and we had upwards of fifty state and local and federal agencies altogether, trying to sit around a table and to come to some understanding about who would do what when if an event should occur and how information would be shared. If anybody thinks that that is a way to either prevent a terrorist attack or to deal with one, they would have to have their head examined. The first thing we did was narrow that group. We kicked out of the room all but seven people. That was the first thing that happened. And we said, "We have to get closer control of this." We still never had command and control like you would have in a military situation, but we did, in an ad hoc fashion, come together, and by talking through various scenarios, and by working together, and by placing everyone in the same building and in the same set of offices, come to some cohesive way to respond to that event. In addition, of course, we relied extraordinarily heavily on the military. And let me tell you, if anybody thinks that we can respond to serious domestic terrorist events in this country, or international terrorist threats in this country involving weapons of mass destruction without a substantial involvement by our U.S. military, again you would have to have your head examined. They are really the only people who can provide the critical underpinning for such a response. They gave us unbelievable support.
Now, one of the things, however, that underlies the relationship between our military and responding to such events is something called the Posse Comitatus Act, which basically says we as American people want to keep our military out of a law enforcement function. Now, the law is very specific, but the aura around the law is not so specific. The aura around the law is just what I have said, that we want our law enforcement functions to be undertaken by cops and not by military officers. And that is a very long and important tradition in this country. The problem with it, however, is just as I said before we are not going to be able to disassociate our military from responding to these events and helping to prepare for them. So working through those issues is a critical component of our readiness. Third, you have the emergency responders, whether it is the Federal Emergency Management Administration or whether it is the local docs or the health commissioners, the people who would find themselves with a disaster on their hands. Then you have many other agencies of federal, state and local government, like the Energy Department at the federal level. Now, that gives you a sense of the lay of the land. What did we find when we started trying to deal with our state and local partners? Well, we found that there were substantial resource issues, as you can well imagine. We found that there were suspicions mutual suspicions in intelligence sharing. We found that there was no one really skilled in planning for an event where you had a multiplicity of organizations trying to work together. And what does this tell you about our potential response to something for which we have not planned, for which we have not been able to plan for years, as was the case with the Olympics? It tells you we have our work cut out for us. There are some 18,000 local police departments, just to give you one sense of how difficult it would be to ensure that there is the relevant expertise in each and every police department around this country. Even if you focus on the major metropolitan areas, the FBI has so-called joint terrorism task forces in eleven cities eleven and they are the subject of intense effort and training and cooperation and intelligence sharing. Now, to extrapolate that capacity to the rest of the country, even to the major cities, is an enormous undertaking. How much money do you think we have in the Justice Department budget for training local law enforcement agencies and integrating them into joint terrorism task forces? Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Now, that would train about two local law enforcement agencies. Now, the Nunn-Lugar II money is wonderful in its focus on training emergency response to weapons of mass destruction, but I would say to you we have to back up further and have further integration of our state, local, and federal law enforcement and other agencies in advance of an attack, in advance of an event, to do a number of things. One, a planning process we have to get people together around the room and plan what would be done in the case of an event in a particular city. Two, we have to have much more effective means of intelligence sharing. We had an event just before I left the Justice Department in which the Police Commissioner of a major American city, and I will not say which one for fear of scaring the populace of that city, who said that he did not want his police force to participate in a joint terrorism task force with the FBI because he did not want his police to be spying on the people of that jurisdiction for the FBI. That really took me aback, and I called the senator from that particular jurisdiction, one of the senators, and asked for some help and intervention, which was forthcoming, and we now have got that effort back on track. But if there is that degree of mutual suspicion, we have a big problem. And we do have that problem, and we know we have it, and we have to work at it. The next point that we have to work through is the threat warning system. One of the issues that is so difficult when you are the recipient of information about a potential threat is how much you make public, because in making a threat public you may create much more harm than you could account for in the saving of lives or in public safety by giving the warning, particularly when you do not have particularized information and specific information. You are put in a very difficult quandary. There is an exercise ongoing right now at the Justice Department to work through those issues, but we have to have a common understanding nationwide of what the public has a right to know and should know. We also have to have greater readiness. When the bomb went off in Oklahoma City, I asked for the emergency plan and there was none. There was no No one had written down what the procedures were in a situation like that. We now have one. We have a book, which is a crisis handbook, which brings together all the extant plans and vests command and control at least within the Justice Department. But we need that nationwide, and I would suggest to you an important next step is ensuring that we vest control and authority and responsibility in one person to bring together all of these threats. I want to say one final point that I think that we need to focus on, and that is an issue that my friend and colleague Jim Woolsey alluded to.
Intelligence gathering will be the heart of our readiness. We have in this country a very long and important tradition of keeping the government, keeping law enforcement, keeping intelligence, out of our domestic political debates and out of our debate about religion and society. Now, what motivates most terrorists today? It is politics, views of what our national policy should be (you can see it in the animus toward the federal government), and religion religious zealotry, whether it is motivating international terrorists or domestic terrorists or people who would be motivated by religious beliefs to undertake a violent act. In those arenas, the gathering of intelligence is unbelievably sensitive. Jim mentioned whether we should look at our guidelines for the investigation of potential domestic terrorism. Those guidelines were crafted in 1976 after it was found out that the FBI had been infiltrating domestic organizations to determine whether they were thinking about using violence to achieve their ends. It constrained, and it constrained considerably, the FBI in its information gathering. But I suggest to you that moving away from those guidelines presents very difficult questions that need enormous debate. That debate will force us to look at how much we care about being protected from every possible event, which would lead us toward allowing our FBI to infiltrate domestic political and religious organizations in a way that we do not now. Or, on the other hand, are we willing to take some risks that we will not know, as we did not know about Oklahoma City, that an event is about to occur. In that case, it will lead us to give the kind of space we currently give to domestic organizations that have thoughts that are maybe not in the mainstream. Just listing these issues in the few minutes that are allotted to me should give you a sense of the breadth of the challenge before us and the importance of colloquia like this and gatherings like this in working through these important issues. Thank you very much.
Speaker: Hon. Jamie Gorelick
University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia
April 28, 1997
(5) an increase in the time period within which criminal prosecutions can be initiated under the National Firearms Act, making the statute of limitations for the illegal use of machine guns and bombs as long as the statute of limitations for the misuse of the Smokey the Bear logo. We believe that each of these provisions is meritorious, and we would encourage the Committee to consider adding them to H.R. 1710.
Next, HR 1710 lacks a definition of the terms "national security" and "terrorist". We recommend the use of the definitions for these terms contained in the Administration's proposals.
Apparently they were talking points for the administration to give to the press.
Took threat v seriously and then segue to wh we have been doing. Rise above Clarke. Emphasize importance of 9/11 commission and come back to what we have been doing. Gorelick pitting Condi v. Armitage. Our plan had military plans to attack Al Q -- called on def to draw up targets in Afg -- develop mil options.
Stay inside the line -- we dont need 2 puff this at all. we need 2b careful as hell about it. This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line.
by Brock N. Meeks
Fri, 18 Oct 1996 16:53:53 -0400
The Justice Department has, for the first time, publicly acknowledged using the code-breaking technologies of the National Security Agency, to help with domestic cases, a situation that strains legal boundaries of the agency.
Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick admitted in July, during an open hearing of the Senate's Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations, that the Justice Department: "Where, for example, we are having trouble decrypting information in a computer, and the expertise lies at the NSA, we have asked for technical assistance under our control."
That revelation should have been a bombshell. But like an Olympic diver, the revelation made hardly a ripple.
By law the NSA is allowed to spy on foreign communications without warrant or congressional oversight. Indeed, it is one of the most secretive agencies of the U.S. government, whose existence wasn't even publicly acknowledged until the mid-1960s. However, it is forbidden to get involved in domestic affairs.
During the hearing Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) asked Gorelick if the President had the "the constitutional authority to override statutes where the basic security of the country is at stake?" He then laid out a scenario: "Let's say a whole part of the country is, in effect, freezing to death in the middle of the winter [because a power grid has been destroyed] and you believe it's domestic source, but you can't trace it, because the FBI doesn't have the capability. What do you do?"
Gorelick replied that: "Well, one thing you could do -- let me say this, one thing you could do is you could detail resources from the intelligence community to the law enforcement community. That is, if it's under -- if it's -- if you're talking about a technological capability, we have done that." And then she mentioned that the NSA had been called on to help crack some encrypted data.
But no one caught the significance of Gorelick's' statements. Instead, the press focused on another proposal she outlined, the creation of what amounts to a "Manhattan Project" to help thwart the threat of information warfare. "What we need, then, is the equivalent of the 'Manhattan Project' for infrastructure protection, a cooperative venture between the government and private sector to put our best minds together to come up with workable solutions to one of our most difficult challenges,'' Gorelick told Congress. Just a day earlier, President Clinton had signed an executive order creating a blue-ribbon panel, made up of several agencies, including the Justice Department, the CIA, the Pentagon and the NSA and representatives of the private sector.
Though the press missed the news that day; the intelligence agency shivered. When I began investigating Gorelick's statement, all I got were muffled grumbling. I called an NSA official at home for comments. "Oh shit," he said, and then silence. "Can you elaborate a bit on that statement?" I asked, trying to stifle a chuckle. "I think my comment says it all," he said and abruptly hung up the phone.
Plumbing several sources within the FBI drew little more insight. One source did acknowledge that the Bureau had used the NSA to crack some encrypted data "in a handful of instances," but he declined to elaborate.
Was the Justice Department acting illegally by pulling the NSA into domestic work? Gorelick was asked by Sen. Nunn if the FBI had the legal authority to call on the NSA to do code-breaking work. "We have authority right now to ask for assistance where we think that there might be a threat to the national security," she replied. But her answer was "soft." She continued: "If we know for certain that there is a -- that this is a non-national security criminal threat, the authority is much more questionable." Questionable, yes, but averted? No.
If Gorelick's answers seem coy, maybe it's because her public statements are at odds with one another. A month or so before her congressional bombshell, she revealed the plans for the information age "Manhattan Project" in a speech. In a story for Upside magazine...
www.upside.com, by old-line investigative reporter Lew Koch, where he broke the story, Gorelick whines in her speech about law enforcement going through "all that effort" to obtain warrants to search for evidence only to find a child pornography had computer files "encrypted with DES" that don't have a key held in escrow. "Dead end for us," Gorelick says. "Is this really the type of constraint we want? Unfortunately, this is not an imaginary scenario. The problem is real."
All the while, Gorelick knew, as she would later admit to Congress, that the FBI had, in fact, called the NSA to help break codes.
An intelligence industry insider said the NSA involvement is legal. "What makes it legal probably is that when [the NSA] does that work they're really subject to all the constraints that law enforcement is subject to." This source went on to explain that if the FBI used any evidence obtained from the NSA's code-breaking work to make it's case in court, the defense attorney could, under oath, ask the NSA to "explain fully" how it managed to crack the codes. "If I were advising NSA today I would say, there is a substantial risk that [a defense attorney] is going to make [the NSA] describe their methods," he said. "Which means it's very difficult for the NSA to do its best stuff in criminal cases because of that risk."
Some 20 years ago, Sen. Frank Church, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned of getting the NSA involved in domestic affairs, after investigating the agency for illegal acts. He said the "potential to violate the privacy of Americans is unmatched by any other intelligence agency." If the resources of the NSA were ever used domestically, "no American would have any privacy left . . . There would be no place to hide," he said. "We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is an abyss from which there is no return," he said.
And yet, the Clinton Administration has already laid the groundwork for such "mission creep" to take place, with the forming of this "Manhattan Project."
But if the Justice Department can tap the NSA at will -- a position of questionable legality that hasn't been fully aired in public debate -- why play such hardball on the key escrow encryption issue?
Simple answer: Key escrow is an easier route. As my intelligence community source pointed out, bringing the NSA into the mix causes problems when a case goes to court. Better to have them work in the background, unseen and without oversight, the Administration feels. With key escrow in place, there are few legal issues to hurdle.
In the meantime, the Justice Department has started the NSA down the road to crypto mission creep. It could be a road of no return.
Meeks out...
Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick told a Senate panel that the FBI and CIA have agreed that the FBI will take the lead in the counter-terrorism effort because perceived threats come from domestic as well as overseas groups. Gorelick and CIA General Counsel Jeffrey Smith refused to discuss specific potential threats, but Smith told reporters the CIA is involved in efforts to penetrate Hezbollah and other organizations which may want to disrupt the Atlanta Olympics. (145K AIFF sound or 145K WAV sound)
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae: Corporate Welfare King & Queen
by Vern McKinley
McKinley has worked as a financial analyst and attorney in Washington, D.C. This article is based on a policy analysis published by the Cato Institute.
They are two of the largest financial institutions in the nation, with more than half a trillion dollars in assets between them: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. But few people can explain exactly what function those financial giants serve.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae indirectly assist homebuyers by purchasing mortgages from lenders, such as commercial banks, savings and loans and mortgage banks. Freddie and Fannie, in turn, generally get those loans off their books by creating securities that are eventually paid off as the underlying mortgages are paid off. Homeowners are happy because they are aided in borrowing money for a home. Lenders are happy because they don't have to hold mortgages for several years. Investors in the securities are happy because they have a reliable investment, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are happy because they make a handsome profit. Sound like capitalism at its finest? Not exactly.
Although Freddie and Fannie are privately owned, they are what is known as government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). GSEs don't have to follow all the rules that true privately owned companies do: they don't have to register their securities with the government, their securities receive special treatment for investment purposes, they don't have to pay state and local income taxes and--most important--their government sponsorship gives them the aura of a fully guaranteed government entity. That final benefit means they save billions in borrowing costs, just as lenders are willing to offer low-interest student loans that are guaranteed by the government. That savings alone allows the GSEs to pocket about $2 billion per year, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and the Treasury Department.
Allowing Congress to grant such special privileges is a bad idea. Those privileges, which are granted solely to Freddie and Fannie, crowd out other potential competitors in their market. Privately owned companies should not receive such preferred borrowing status, because it redirects investor funds into the middle- and upper-income housing market at the expense of other potential investments. Finally, the failure of either Freddie or Fannie could saddle taxpayers with a huge liability.
Throughout 1996, a number of reports mandated by recent legislation were issued by the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Department of Housing and the Treasury Department. Those reports scrutinized the system under which Freddie and Fannie operate. Congressional hearings were also held on the subject. Critical commentators argued that the $2 billion in benefits received by the GSEs is a blatant form of corporate welfare. They further argued that Freddie and Fannie constitute a duopoly, a fancy term to indicate that the two GSEs share above-average profits in a noncompetitive market. It's no wonder that with the many benefits of their special status, Freddie and Fannie have no direct competition. They have even begun to move into new markets.
A clear sign of how much Freddie and Fannie value their government sponsorship is the great effort they expend to maintain it. They have used a portion of their billions of dollars in benefits to fund a high-powered public relations and lobbying machine with the sole purpose of maintaining their current status. Their efforts have involved spending millions on full-time lobbyists, paying millions to politically connected executive officers, and making "soft money" political contributions of three-quarters of a billion dollars, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, during the last election cycle.
One would think that the scrutiny of last year's reports and hearings would have prompted the GSEs to lie low for a while, but that has not been the case. They have continued to squeeze competitors who do not enjoy their borrowing and tax advantages by entering or increasing their presence in the insurance, reverse mortgage, home equity and subprime mortgage markets. They have contributed nearly $400,000 in soft money in just the first six months of this year. Finally, Fannie Mae brought on board a new political hired gun: Jamie Gorelick, Janet Reno's second-in-command at the Justice Department. She will be compensated millions to, as the American Banker put it, "fight for Fannie Mae on Capitol Hill."(sounds like a lobbyist to me)
The GSE structure is a classic case of a special legislative benefit that its recipients will fight to the death to maintain. Congress should immediately revoke all the benefits of government sponsorship: clearly, Freddie and Fannie can be profitable without them. Eliminating special privileges will force mortgage markets to be truly competitive and will eliminate the possibility that the current system of government sponsorship will someday lead to yet another taxpayer-funded bailout.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.