Principal who told kids not to speak Spanish will lose job

(Chron) – The Hempstead school board won’t renew the contract of a principal who instructed her students not to speak Spanish, in a rapidly-evolving district where more than half of the students, like many Texas schools, are now Hispanic.

Hempstead Middle School Principal Amy Lacey was placed on paid administrative leave in December after reportedly announcing, via intercom, that students were not to speak Spanish on the school’s campus. The Hispanic population of the rural area, roughly 50 miles northwest of Houston, is growing quickly, and Latino advocates say that it’s important to allow Spanish in public schools.

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“When you start banning aspects of ethnicity or cultural identity,” says Augustin Pinedo, director of the League of United Latin American Citizens Region 18, “it sends the message that the child is not wanted: ‘We don’t want your color. We don’t want your kind.’ They then tend to drop out early.”

Such fast growth is pervasive in Texas, says Steve Murdock, a professor at Rice University and director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. Half of all Texas public-school students are now Hispanic, he notes. “When you look at issues related to education in Texas, to a great extent, you’re looking at the education of Hispanic children.”

Similar growth patterns, he says, hold true for the rest of the United States: “It’s not just Texas.”

Civil rights advocates say Lacey’s suspension may have set off a campaign to intimidate Hispanics, including the district’s superintendent, Delma Flores-Smith. They are calling for the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate possible civil rights violations. An FBI spokesman would not confirm an investigation.

Flores-Smith reports that she’s seen strangers watching her house and taking photos. She says vandals have trashed her yard, and someone has rifled through her garbage. She is worried about her safety.

Last month, school employees found that vandals had damaged the brakes of three Hempstead Independent School District buses and had left behind the bedraggled remains of a dead cat.

Hate crimes?

A bus with visibly severed brake lines didn’t leave the bus barn that morning. But two other buses, whose air-brake lines had been subtly nicked, carried children to school before the damage was discovered. Police investigated but didn’t identify any suspects.

“A lot of this sounds like Mississippi in the 1950s and ’60s,” Pinedo said during Monday night’s school board meeting, where the decision was made not to renew Lacey’s contract.

Pinedo acknowledged that there’s no hard evidence that the incidents are related or that they’re hate crimes.

“But when the lives of children are put in danger, that’s the bottom line,” he said. “We don’t know what the reasons are. Rather than guess, we’re asking the FBI to step in.”

He said LULAC and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund have asked the Department of Justice to investigate possible civil rights violations.

“The whole world is watching,” said Tony Diaz, head of the Houston-based radio show Nuestra Palabra and founder of the advocacy group Librotraficantes. “Banning Spanish is a national issue.”

“We got a lot of calls about activity in Hempstead,” said Cynthia Coles, who represented the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice. “We came to support this board, this superintendent.”

They also note that there’s no evidence that speaking Spanish hampers learning English, and note that in most of the rest of the world, it’s common to speak two or more languages.

At the school district’s board meeting in January, Pinedo read a list of American Founding Fathers who spoke multiple languages. They included Benjamin Franklin (French) and Thomas Jefferson (French, Italian, Spanish and Latin).

[H/T Chron: Lisa Gray]

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

(Washington Post) – The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

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Video: The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden. The Post’s Ashkan Soltani, who broke the story with Barton Gellman, explains the Obama administration’s recent guidance on bulk collection.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

Obama and changes at NSA

On Jan. 17, President Obama called for significant changes to the way the NSA collects and uses telephone records of U.S. citizens.

Here is the report from the five-member Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which contains 40-plus recommendations on the NSA.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation’s telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a growing debate over the NSA’s practice of “bulk collection” abroad.

Bulk methods capture massive data flows “without the use of discriminants,” as President Obama put it in January. By design, they vacuum up all the data they touch — meaning that most of the conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national security interests.

In the view of U.S. officials, however, the capability is highly valuable.

In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on “specific alleged intelligence activities.” Speaking generally, she said that “new or emerging threats” are “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats.”

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an e-mailed statement, said that “continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.”

Some of the documents provided by Snowden suggest that high-volume eavesdropping may soon be extended to other countries, if it has not been already. The RETRO tool was built three years ago as a “unique one-off capability,” but last year’s secret intelligence budget named five more countries for which the MYSTIC program provides “comprehensive metadata access and content,” with a sixth expected to be in place by last October.

The budget did not say whether the NSA now records calls in quantity in those countries or expects to do so. A separate document placed a high priority on planning “for MYSTIC accesses against projected new mission requirements,” including “voice.”

Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal of content from Americans who telephone, visit and work in the target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama’s Jan. 17 pledge “that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” regardless of nationality, “and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”

In a presidential policy directive, Obama instructed the NSA and other agencies that bulk acquisition may be used only to gather intelligence related to one of six specified threats, including nuclear proliferation and terrorism. The directive, however, also noted that limits on bulk collection “do not apply to signals intelligence data that is temporarily acquired to facilitate targeted collection.”

The emblem of the MYSTIC program depicts a cartoon wizard with a telephone-headed staff. Among the agency’s bulk collection programs disclosed over the past year, its focus on the spoken word is unique. Most of the programs have involved the bulk collection of metadata — which does not include call content — or text, such as e-mail address books.

Telephone calls are often thought to be more ephemeral and less suited than text for processing, storage and search. And there are indications that the call-recording program has been hindered by the NSA’s limited capacity to store and transmit bulky voice files.

In the first year of its deployment, a program officer wrote that the project “has long since reached the point where it was collecting and sending home far more than the bandwidth could handle.”

Because of similar capacity limits across a range of collection programs, the NSA is leaping forward with cloud-based collection systems and a gargantuan new “mission data repository” in Utah. According to its overview briefing, the Utah facility is designed “to cope with the vast increases in digital data that have accompanied the rise of the global network.”

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said history suggests that “over the next couple of years they will expand to more countries, retain data longer and expand the secondary uses.”

Spokesmen for the NSA and the office of Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. declined to confirm or deny expansion plans or discuss the criteria for any change.

Based on RETRO’s internal reviews, the NSA has a strong motive to deploy it elsewhere. In the documents and in interviews, U.S. officials said RETRO is uniquely valuable when an analyst uncovers a new name or telephone number of interest.

With up to 30 days of recorded conversations in hand, the NSA can pull an instant history of the subject’s movements, associates and plans. Some other U.S. intelligence agencies also have access to RETRO.

Highly classified briefings cite examples in which the tool offered high-stakes intelligence that would not have existed under traditional surveillance programs in which subjects are identified for targeting in advance. In contrast with most of the government’s public claims about the value of controversial programs, the briefings supply names, dates, locations and fragments of intercepted calls in convincing detail.

Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans would be gathered from the country where RETRO operates.

The NSA does not attempt to filter out their calls, defining them as communications “acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed against appropriate foreign intelligence targets.”

Until about 20 years ago, such incidental collection was unusual unless an American was communicating directly with a foreign intelligence target. In bulk collection systems, which are exponentially more capable than the ones in use throughout the Cold War, calls and other data from U.S. citizens and permanent residents are regularly ingested by the millions.

Under the NSA’s internal “minimization rules,” those intercepted communications “may be retained and processed” and included in intelligence reports. The agency generally removes the names of U.S. callers, but there are several broadly worded exceptions.

An independent group tasked by the White House to review U.S. surveillance policies recommended that incidentally collected U.S. calls and e-mails — including those obtained overseas — should nearly always “be purged upon detection.” Obama did not accept that recommendation.

Vines, in her statement, said the NSA’s work is “strictly conducted under the rule of law.”

RETRO and MYSTIC are carried out under Executive Order 12333, the traditional grant of presidential authority to intelligence agencies for operations outside the United States.

Since August, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and others on that panel have been working on plans to assert a greater oversight role for intelligence-gathering abroad. Some legislators are considering whether Congress should also draft new laws to govern those operations.

Experts say there is not much legislation that governs overseas intelligence work.

“Much of the U.S. government’s intelligence collection is not regulated by any statute passed by Congress,” said Timothy H. Edgar, the former director of privacy and civil liberties on Obama’s national security staff. “There’s a lot of focus on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is understandable, but that’s only a slice of what the intelligence community does.”

All surveillance must be properly authorized for a legitimate intelligence purpose, he said, but that “still leaves a gap for activities that otherwise basically aren’t regulated by law, because they’re not covered by FISA.”

Beginning in 2007, Congress loosened 40-year-old restrictions on domestic surveillance because so much foreign data crossed U.S. territory. There were no comparable changes to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens and residents whose calls and e-mails now routinely cross international borders.

Vines noted that the NSA’s job is to “identify threats within the large and complex system of modern global communications,” in which ordinary people share fiber-optic cables with legitimate intelligence targets.

For Peter Swire, a member of the president’s review group, the fact that Americans and foreigners use the same devices, software and networks calls for greater care to safeguard Americans’ privacy.

“It’s important to have institutional protections so that advanced capabilities used overseas don’t get turned against our democracy at home,” he said.

 

Soltani is an independent security researcher and consultant. Julie Tate contributed to this report.

[H/T WashingtonPost: Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani]

First Lady’s Food Dictates Force Gay White House Pastry Chef Out of a Job

(Rush Limbaugh) – The White House pastry chef has been forced out. The White House pastry chef! This is an outrage. The White House pastry chef has resigned. He was forced out, and he’s doing it because he needs to defend cream, butter, sugar, and eggs, because nobody else will.

He is gay, he is married, and Michelle Obama still told him: I don’t care what you’re good at. You’re not gonna use butter in the White House, and you’re not gonna use cream, and you’re not gonna use sugar, and you’re not gonna use eggs. So this guy had to come up with fruit puree as a sugar substitute in his baked goods, and he finally threw up his hands and said, “To heck with it.  I’m outta here.” They’ll hire another chef that will do what Michelle wants.

But here’s the point of this, though: I happened to mention this to a couple of people and their reaction was, “Well, wait a minute.  Okay, she doesn’t want to eat it but there are a lot of people in the White House that may not have a problem.”  I said, “That doesn’t matter.  They are going to eat what Michelle tells them to eat.” And that is the point. And it’s not just people in the White House.

Your kids are being forced to eat what Michelle is telling them to eat in the school lunch program. And many of you know the kids are saying, “To hell with what Michelle wants.” And they’re sneaking around eating what they want to eat. It’s fine and dandy if Michelle Obama does not want to eat cream, butter, sugar, and eggs. But because she doesn’t, nobody’s going to. She knows better than everybody else.

This is a story in The Daily Caller, and from the last line of the story, “I wish Bill…” the White House pastry chef, Bill Yosses. Y-o-s-s-e-s. “I wish Bill and his husband, Charlie, all the best in their future endeavors.”  So we have a same-sex married couple losing their income because of the dictates of Michelle Obama and her dislike for certain foods. What do you bet she eats this stuff in private anyway?  What do you bet? What do you…? I mean, we’re not exactly talking about…

Well, never mind.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Michelle Obama’s new slogan from the White House is, “Don’t let them eat cake!”  Marie Antoinette said, “Let ’em eat cake.”  Not Michelle Obama.

END TRANSCRIPT

[H/T RushLimbaugh]

U.S. transfer of Internet control years in the making, fueled by foreign pressure

(Fox News) – The decision was announced nonchalantly, in trademark Washington fashion on a Friday afternoon: The U.S. government will cede its last bit of control over the Internet.

The government has maintained that influence through contracts with the organization that administers the Internet, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. But a Commerce Department agency announced Friday that it would relinquish control over ICANN, presumably when its contract expires in September 2015. The office said it wants the group to next convene “global stakeholders” to come up with a transition plan — a transition to what remains unknown.

But that sudden and highly controversial decision was years in the making, and it arguably dates back close to two decades. Further, despite the Internet being hatched in the U.S., the move to transfer control to the “global” community has accelerated in recent years — under heavy pressure from foreign governments.

It came as little surprise, then, that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday praised the U.S. Commerce Department’s decision.

“The Secretary-General takes note of this important development,” a statement from Ban’s office said, calling for all stakeholders to pursue a “single, open, free, secure and trustworthy Internet.”

But whether that goal can be achieved is the big question. The decision Friday by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has raised concerns that, in the void left by America’s transfer of oversight, other nations that don’t share the United States’ commitment to free speech and expression could make a grab at Internet influence.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said Tuesday that the current model of Internet governance has been a “tremendous” success, and he cautioned against moving too quickly to change it.

“Any proposal to change that model therefore demands rigorous scrutiny, including close congressional oversight. In particular, those advocating change must prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their proposals would not increase the influence of repressive foreign governments over the Internet,” Pai said in a statement. “If I am not convinced that a different governance structure would preserve Internet freedom, I will strongly oppose it.”

Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan tech-focused D.C. think tank, wrote on his organization’s website that the U.S. was effectively giving up its “bodyguard” role.

“While on the surface this may seem like a simple administrative decision that gives more control over this key Internet function to more stakeholders, it could actually have far reaching negative implications for the freedom and security of the Internet,” he wrote.

The U.S. government does not technically control ICANN, but it nevertheless maintains significant oversight through the contractual agreements the Commerce Department has with the group. ICANN manages some of the most important elements of the Internet, including the domain name system and IP addressing. Domains are those tiny suffixes at the end of Internet addresses, like .com and .org and .gov.

The Commerce Department, whose contract with ICANN lasts through September 2015, stressed in its announcement that whatever system comes to replace the existing one will not give control to other governments.

“… NTIA will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution,” the official announcement said.

Lawrence Strickling, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, simply said in explaining the shift that “the timing is right to start the transition process.”

Strickling has been talking for years about broadening the oversight of the Internet. In a July 2012 speech at an Internet governance forum, he discussed giving the “global Internet community” more of a “direct say” in the process, and he said the Obama administration was making a “concerted effort” to expand international participation.

In response to criticism of Friday’s announcement, Strickling reiterated that a government body will not replace the NTIA role.

“Our announcement has led to some misunderstanding about our plan with some individuals raising concerns that the U.S. government is abandoning the Internet,” he said in a statement. “Nothing could be further from the truth. This announcement in no way diminishes our commitment to preserving the Internet as an engine for economic growth and innovation.”

The Committee on Energy and Commerce announced Tuesday that it will hold a hearing in the first week of April to investigate the matter, pledging to conduct “aggressive oversight following the recent announcement by the Obama administration on the future of Internet governance.”

The latest push to transition oversight began with a 2009 agreement between NTIA and ICANN. The agency, though, noted that the goal of completely privatizing the domain name system dates back to 1997, and that the U.S. government reiterated that goal when it partnered with ICANN a year later.

But international pressure has undoubtedly been mounting in recent years, only to be fueled by anger over NSA spying — which by itself has little to do with ICANN.

Some governments repeatedly have pushed for an Internet oversight body within the United Nations — to adamant objections from U.S. lawmakers. The process formally started in 2003, when the U.N. agreed to study bringing in more international involvement. That report, released in 2005, said no individual government should play the primary role in overseeing the Internet.

This led to proposals to create U.N.-linked governance bodies, which U.S. officials opposed.

The U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union also held a major conference in Dubai in late 2012 to address these and other issues. Amid concern about the U.N. and its multitude of member states asserting more authority, the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution advocating a “global Internet free from government control.” The resolution was a direct message to the U.N., as countries like Russia, China and Sudan tried to undermine the current structure.

Nevertheless, Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities subsequently increased pressure on the U.S. But Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, wrote on the group’s blog that the NSA controversy is a “pretext.”

“While the NSA revelations have rightly angered many people around the world, they have nothing to do with Internet governance. The U.S. Department of Commerce has not once abused its oversight of ICANN to aid the intelligence community,” he wrote, adding: “And if the Obama Administration gives away its oversight of the Internet, it will be gone forever.”

[H/T Foxnews: Judson Berger]

Former Obama groupie burns 2008 campaign shirt, calls him “biggest fraud ever”

(Allen B. West) – Uh, I don’t think Ms. Carey Welder will be signing up for Obamacare any time soon. It seems this young lady has come to realize that “Mr. Hope and Change” is just another shape-shifting politician. Now, am I under any ill-conceived notion that Ms. Welder has overnight become a conservative? Nah, but I can almost bet she’d be leaning more towards someone like a Senator Rand Paul than anyone else. Her reference to President Obama as the “criminal-in-chief” was a stinging indictment against the person she admittedly once adored.

Watch her video and give us your assessment of this former Obama groupie. Is this a growing trend among Millennials?

I hope she knows she’ll probably be charged by US Attorney General Eric Holder for open-air burning without a permit, and for defacing the image of “the one.”

[H/T AllenB.West]