Impeachable Offenses Announced Live on TV - by President Trump!

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

28 March 17

We were very close [on the health care bill]. It was a very, very tight margin. We had no Democrat support. We had no votes from the Democrats. They weren’t going to give us a single vote, so it’s a very difficult thing to do. I’ve been saying for the last year and a half that the best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode. It is exploding right now…. It’s going to have a very bad year…. This year should be much worse for Obamacare…. We’ll end up with a truly great healthcare bill in the future, after this mess known as Obamacare explodes…. I know some of the Democrats, and they’re good people – I honestly believe the Democrats will come to us and say, look, let’s get together and get a great healthcare bill or plan that’s really great for the people of our country. And I think that’s going to happen.

– President Trump, press briefing March 24, 2017

uite a curious piece of Trumpery, this ten-minute meeting prompted by the failure of the Republicans’ American Health Care Act (AHCA) to get enough support even to risk a vote in the House. This wasn’t President Trump’s health care plan – he’s never proposed a plan – but he’s still selling the possibility of a plan, bi-partisan at that, even if he has to allow – or cause – millions of people to suffer in the process, which implicitly involves his committing clearly impeachable offenses. Back to that in a moment.

First let’s wonder: why would anyone with a grasp on reality be surprised by the absence of Democratic support for eviscerating Obamacare? Obamacare was a rickety compromise with a Rube Goldberg structure trying to satisfy mutually exclusive goals, one of which was NOT universal health care coverage. But still it managed to insure some 20 million Americans who were previously without health care insurance. And Obamacare passed in the first place with no Republican votes! So why would Democrats, even the truly corrupt ones, vote to make a bad situation worse? No wonder President Trump quickly abandoned this argument untethered to any recognizable reality. He clearly acknowledged that, stating “Obamacare was rammed down everyone’s throats – 100 per cent Democrat.” The president suggested that if Obamacare collapses as he predicts, that will pressure Democrats to seek a bi-partisan deal to the Republicans’ liking. As a candidate, Trump was selling a health care con, and that hasn’t changed.

“Obamacare is the law of the land,” House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged after his bill, the AHCA, was pulled before a vote.

Ryan had failed to get Obamacare repealed or replaced. That’s mostly because “repeal and replace” was always just an empty slogan. Passed by the House a zillion times in the past seven years, “repeal and replace” isn’t any kind of a plan no matter how loud you shout it. “Repeal and replace” may represent Republican seriousness and substance at its highest level, but even zealous Republicans can’t pass nothing into law.

Given that Obamacare is the law of the land, the president has a duty, an affirmative legal duty, to uphold that law unless and until it’s constitutionally changed. That’s the point of the president’s oath of office in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

This is reinforced in Section 3, which enumerates many of the president’s other Constitutional duties, including: “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” [emphasis added]

So when President Trump tells the Washington Post, “The best thing politically is to let Obamacare explode,” he may be cynically correct, but he’s Constitutionally wrong. As president, Trump has no right to let Obamacare explode. He has a duty to faithfully execute Obamacare, which may prove easier than he hopes, since Obamacare may not be currently exploding so much as settling into a disappointing, low level stability.

At this point, no one knows what the Trump administration will or will not be willing to do to undermine the law of the land that it despises. Active measures by the White House could clearly be unconstitutional, but so could passive responses to Obamacare’s difficulties. The new Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Dr. Tom Price, a former self-dealing Congressman, is a devout Tea Party enemy of Obamacare and was a point man for its repeal. As HHS secretary, Price is responsible for managing Obamacare, obligated to do his best to make sure it doesn’t explode. But he is also in a position to make large and small decisions to undermine Obamacare by stealth and connivance. And what Price does or doesn’t do is all, ultimately, the president’s responsibility.

It’s hard to imagine that either the president and his secretary, with their vivid history of bad faith, will act honestly to make Obamacare work as well as possible. Perhaps they will be more or less correct in their prediction of an Obamacare explosion and clever enough to conceal whatever nefarious fingerprints they leave on the wreckage. What will Democrats do then?

The smartest, simplest answer for American health care that benefits the American people has long been in plain sight, and specifically rejected by President Obama in 2009, after campaigning on it in 2008. Senator Bernie Sanders has campaigned for it for decades, but it was specifically rejected by the Democratic leadership in 2016. Now the idea of single payer health care, also known as Medicare for All, is once more being dangled not only before Democrats, but before President Trump as the only way he can fulfill his grandiose campaign promises on health care. Senator Sanders, at a Vermont town hall style meeting with the other two members of the Vermont congressional delegation and an audience of about 1,000 people, said:

We have got to end the international disgrace of being the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a right not a privilege. Within a couple of weeks I am going to be introducing legislation calling for a Medicare-for-All, single-payer program.

Over two months earlier, on January 24, 2017, Michigan’s Democratic congressman John Conyers introduced exactly such a bill in the House, HR 676 – Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Act, that went unmentioned by Sanders, or even by Vermont’s Democratic congressman Peter Welch, who is one of the bill’s 72 current co-sponsors. As summarized by Congress.Gov, in part: “This bill establishes the Medicare for All Program to provide all individuals residing in the United States and U.S. territories with free health care that includes all medically necessary care, such as primary care and prevention, dietary and nutritional therapies, prescription drugs, emergency care, long-term care, mental health services, dental services, and vision care.” The bill is currently before four House committees, none of which have yet voted on it. Media coverage of the Sanders initiative often ignored the Conyers bill, as if Sanders were doing something new. On Democracy Now, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler summed up HR 676 and its long history:

HR 676, would be, you know, everyone just pays their taxes, and everyone is automatically eligible for a program like Medicare, only it would have no copayments, no deductibles for covered services, no participation by the private health insurance industry, so an expanded and improved Medicare, expanded to everyone, improved so it doesn’t have the kind of gaps in uncovered services that do—you know, do exist in the current Medicare program. We’ve been advocating that plan for decades. Frankly, Congressman Conyers and Senator Sanders have, as well.

Most of Washington’s “leadership” class is way behind the Democratic minority, and way behind the country on single payer health care – not least because it requires the constitutionally mandated general welfare of “we, the people” to take priority over the profits of insurance and drug companies. But maybe, out of opposition to Trump if not for better reasons, Democrats can unite around single payer. That would give them the policy high ground by supporting the medical consensus best choice for health care. And it would position them nicely as offering Trump a way, as he put it, to “work out a great healthcare bill for the people of this country,… a truly great healthcare bill in the future,… get a great healthcare bill or plan that’s really great for the people of our country. And I think that’s going to happen.”

The likelihood of that happening is probably increased by the threat of impeachment over failure to enforce Obamacare, assuming that Democrats have the courage to stand behind the Constitution. That should be made easier by the reality that President Trump has been impeachably in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause (Article I, Section 9) since the moment he took office. Democrats’ timidity to date is hardly reassuring, but perhaps they’ll be more motivated by the President’s weekly trips to promote Trump properties, or the cost of security for Trump family vacationers at Aspen, or the nepotism that puts un-elected millionaires like his daughter Ivanka in one White House office and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in another with apparent czar-like powers derived not from the Constitution nor the Congress, but only from his marriage to the president’s daughter. Presumably, at some point, already long overdue, Democrats (and even Republicans with respect for the Constitution) will find the courage and integrity to say enough is enough, but this is too much.

And if those impeachable offenses aren’t enough, maybe others will be, such as the resumption of US torture, kidnapping, and black sites – or the mountain of revelations about the conspiratorial nexus of agents of the Trump campaign with agents of the Russian power structure – or maybe just the stink of innocent dead victims of war crimes like the escalating slaughter of local civilians by American forces in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and likely other defenseless places. There must be a limit. Mustn’t there?

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Five Ways Cybersecurity Will Suffer If Congress Repeals the FCC Privacy Rules

By Peter Eckersley and Jeremy Gillula, Electronic Frontier Foundation

28 March 17

ack in October of 2016, the Federal Communications Commission passed some pretty awesome rules that would bar your Internet provider from invading your privacy. The rules would keep Internet providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable from doing things like selling your personal information to marketers, inserting undetectable tracking headers into your traffic, or recording your browsing history to build up a behavioral advertising profile on you—unless they got your permission first. The rules were a huge victory for U.S. Internet users who value their privacy.

But last Thursday, Republicans in the Senate voted to repeal those rules. If the House of Representatives votes the same way and the rules are repealed, it’s pretty obvious that the results for Americans' privacy will be disastrous.

But what many people don’t realize is that Americans’ cybersecurity is also at risk. That’s because privacy and security are two sides of the same coin: privacy is about controlling who has access to information about you, and security is how you maintain that control. You usually can’t break one without breaking the other, and that’s especially true in this context. To show how, here are five ways repealing the FCC’s privacy rules will weaken Americans’ cybersecurity.

Risk #1: Snooping On Traffic (And Creating New Targets for Hackers)

In order for Internet providers to make money off your browsing history, they first have to collect that information—what sort of websites you’re browsing, metadata about whom you’re talking to, and maybe even what search terms you’re using. Internet providers will also need to store that information somewhere, in order to build up a targeted advertising profile of you. So where’s the cybersecurity risk?

The first risk is that Internet providers haven’t exactly been bastions of security when it comes to keeping information about their customers safe. Back in 2015, Comcast had to pay $33 million for unintentionally releasing information about customers who had paid Comcast to keep their phone numbers unlisted. “These customers ranged from domestic violence victims to law enforcement personnel”, many of who had paid for their numbers to be unlisted to protect their safety. But Comcast screwed up, and their phone numbers were published anyway.

And that was just a mistake on Comcast’s part, with a simple piece of data like phone numbers. Imagine what could happen if hackers decided to target the treasure trove of personal information Internet providers start collecting. People’s personal browsing history and records of their location could easily become the target of foreign hackers who want to embarrass or blackmail politicians or celebrities. To make matters worse, FCC Chairman (and former Verizon lawyer) Ajit Pai recently halted the enforcement of a rule that would require Internet providers to “take reasonable measures to protect customer [personal information] from unauthorized use, disclosure, or access”—so Internet providers won’t be on the hook if their lax security exposes your data.

This would just be the fallout from passive data collection—where your Internet provider simply spies on your data as it goes by. An even scarier risk is that Internet providers want to be able to do much more than that.

Risk #2: Erasing Encryption (And Making it Easier for Hackers to Spy On You)

Right now, your Internet provider can only spy on the portion of your traffic that isn’t encrypted—in other words, whenever you visit a site that starts with https (instead of just http), your Internet provider can’t see the contents of what you’re browsing. They can still see what domain you’re visiting, but they can’t see what specific page, or what’s on that page. That frustrates a lot of Internet providers, because they want to be able to build advertising profiles on the contents of your encrypted data as well.

In order to accomplish that, Internet providers have proposed a standard (called Explicit Trusted Proxies) that would allow them to intercept your data, remove the encryption, read the data (and maybe even modify it), and then encrypt it again and send it on its way. At first blush this doesn’t sound so bad. After all, the data is only decrypted within the Internet provider’s servers, so hackers listening in on the outside still wouldn’t be able to read it, right?

Unfortunately not. According to a recent alert by US-CERT, an organization dedicated to computer security within the Department of Homeland Security:

“Many HTTPS inspection products do not properly verify the certificate chain of the server before re-encrypting and forwarding client data, allowing the possibility of a MiTM [Man-in-The-Middle] attack. Furthermore, certificate-chain verification errors are infrequently forwarded to the client, leading a client to believe that operations were performed as intended with the correct server.”

Further, a recent study found that 54% of connections that were intercepted (i.e. decrypted and re-encrypted) ended up with weaker encryption.

Translating from engineer-speak, that means many of the systems designed to decrypt and then re-encrypt data actually end up weakening the security of the encryption, which exposes users to increased risk of cyberattack. Simply put, if Internet providers think they can profit from looking at your encrypted data and start deploying these systems widely, we’ll no longer be able to trust the security of our web browsing—and that could end up exposing everything from your email to your banking information to hackers.

Risk #3: Inserting Ads Into Your Browsing (And Opening Holes In Your Browsing Security)

One of the major threats to cybersecurity if the FCC’s privacy rules are repealed comes from Internet providers inserting ads into your web browsing. Here we’re talking about your Internet provider placing additional ads in the webpages you view (beyond the ones that already exist). Why is this dangerous? Because inserting new code into a webpage in an automated fashion could break the security of the existing code in that page. As security expert Dan Kaminsky put it, inserting ads could break “all sorts of stuff, in that you no longer know as a website developer precisely what code is running in browsers out there. You didn't send it, but your customers received it.”

In other words, security features in sites and apps you use could be broken and hackers could take advantage of that—causing you to do anything from sending your username and password to them (while thinking it was going to the genuine website) to installing malware on your computer.

Risk #4: Zombie Supercookies (Allowing Hackers to Track You Wherever You Go)

Internet providers haven’t been content with just inserting ads into our traffic—they’ve also tried inserting unique tracking tags as well (the way Verizon did two years ago). For Internet providers, the motivation is to make you trackable, by inserting a unique ID number into every unencrypted connection your browser makes with a website. Then, a website that wants to know more about you (so they can decide what price to charge you for a product) can pay your Internet provider a little money and tell them what ID number they want to know about, and your Internet provider will share the desired info associated with that ID number.

At first you might be tempted to file this one away as purely a privacy problem. But this is a great example of how privacy and security really are two sides of the same coin. If your Internet provider is sending these tracking tags to every website you visit (as Verizon did originally), then every website you visit, and every third party embedded in websites you visit, can track you—even if you’ve deleted your browser’s cookies or enabled Incognito mode.

This means that more people will be able to track you as you surf the Web, you’ll see more creepy and disconcerting ads based on things you’ve done in the past, and many of the tools you might use to protect yourself won’t work because the tracking is being added after the data leaves your machine.

Risk #5: Spyware (Which Opens the Door for Malware)

The last risk comes from Internet providers pre-installing spyware on our devices—particularly on mobile phones, which most of us purchase directly from the company that provides our cell service, i.e. our Internet provider. In the past, Internet providers have installed spyware like Carrier IQ on phones, claiming it was only to “improve wireless network and service performance.” After a huge blowback, many Internet providers backed down on using Carrier IQ. But given that software like Carrier IQ could record what websites you visit and what search terms you enter, it would be pretty tempting for Internet providers to resurrect that spyware and use it for advertising purposes. So where’s the cybersecurity risk?

As we’ve explained before, part of the problem with Carrier IQ was that it could be configured to record sensitive information into your phone’s system logs. But some apps transmit those logs off of your phone as part of standard debugging procedures, assuming there’s nothing sensitive in them. As a result, “keystrokes, text message content and other very sensitive information [was] in fact being transmitted from some phones on which Carrier IQ is installed to third parties.” Depending on how that information was transmitted, eavesdroppers could also intercept it—meaning hackers might be able to see your username or password, without having to do any real hacking.

But the even bigger concern is that for spyware like Carrier IQ to function effectively, it has to have fairly low-level access to your phone’s systems—which is engineer-speak for saying it needs to be able to see and access all the parts of your phone’s operating system that would usually be secure. Thus, if hackers can find a vulnerability in the spyware, then they can use it as a sort of tunnel to get access to almost anything in your phone.

In the end, the cybersecurity implications of repealing the FCC’s privacy rules come from simple logic. If the privacy rules are repealed, Internet providers will resume and accelerate these dangerous practices with the aim of monetizing their customers’ browsing history and app usage. But in order to do that, Internet providers will need to record and store even more sensitive data on their customers, which will become a target for hackers. Internet providers will also be incentivized to break their customers’ security, so they can see all the valuable encrypted data their customers send. And when Internet providers break their customers’ security, you can be sure malicious hackers will be right on their heels.

The net result is simple: repealing the FCC’s privacy rules won’t just be a disaster for Americans’ privacy. It will be a disaster for America’s cybersecurity, too.