Edward Snowden 2.0

Following the September release of Snowden, a biographical movie about the ex-Central Intelligence Agency employee turned traitor, information surfaced in the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream publications about yet another former government employee stealing classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA).

In early October, authorities released details to the public about a former NSA contractor who, according to the Justice Department (DOJ), amassed millions of pages of government records over the past two decades, including top-secret information about military operations.

Prosecutors arrested and charged Maryland resident Harold “Hal” Martin III with theft of government property and unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents. A new Department of Justice filing will also likely charge Mr. Martin with violating the Espionage Act, an offense that could result in the death penalty.  

Martin, a former naval officer, most recently worked as a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., a job that placed him inside some of the government’s most secret programs at the NSA and the Pentagon. According to the DOJ, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Martin’s home and car back in August, they found “thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers and other storage devices and media containing, conservatively, fifty terabytes of information.” Fifty terabytes is more than enough space to hold up to 500 million pages of stolen information. Additionally, the FBI found that much of the stolen information was stored in plain sight. For instance, documents, including an e-mail chain marked “top secret,” containing “highly sensitive information,” was found in Martin’s car parked outside his home.

Before a recent federal court hearing, the DOJ released a 12-page document detailing new allegations about the scope of Martin’s theft. The document also states that he had become heavily armed, accumulating ten weapons, and had taken sophisticated steps to cover his tracks.

Meanwhile, his attorney, Jim Wyda, maintains that Mr. Martin is a patriotic American who has served his country. Former associates describe Martin as a harmless hoarder who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

His actions, however, raise questions about his motives and suggest that he was capable of sharing U.S. secrets with the nation’s adversaries and may have put American lives at risk. It is not yet clear whether Martin stole the classified information with, or for, another person or country. Nor have authorities uncovered his plans for the stolen information.

In an effort to get Martin released from custody, his legal team has argued that he “is neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, and to the extent either of these factors is a concern, they can be sufficiently addressed with specific release conditions.” However, the DOJ is worried that Martin “presents a high risk of flight, a risk to the nation, and to the physical safety of others.” He worked on highly sensitive programs, including those involving an arsenal of cyber tools the government has amassed to use against other countries as well as cyber weapons that were in development.

This case, like Edward Snowden’s which preceded it, brings much needed attention to the dilapidated state of informational security in our government agencies. If those agencies do not find a way to stop hacking and espionage attacks, our enemies will eventually get their hands on classified information that could threaten the very existence of our nation. 

Actions Speak Louder than Words

Americans are in the throes of a national conversation about sexual assault, and yet somehow they are collectively missing the point. Earlier this month, President Obama signed into law a sexual assault survivors’ “Bill of Rights,” meant to formally acknowledge survivors’ rights concerning sexual assault evidence collection kits. This piece of legislation establishes the federal standard that survivors do not have to pay for their sexual assault kits, that they must be notified of any test results from the kits, and that these kits must be preserved for the length of the applicable statute of limitations, whether or not survivors pressed assault charges.

For the first time, sexual assault survivors now have clearly enumerated rights under federal law. Admittedly, this bill does not go very far in the short term. But it establishes a precedent for handling evidence kits that will, hopefully, influence sexual assault laws at state and county levels, thereby effecting concrete change for sexual assault survivors and in the treatment of their evidence kits.

Instead of becoming a national discussion on the future of sexual assault legislation or prevention, the conversation about this historic bill was overtaken by the scandal of a leaked audio clip from 2005 of an Access Hollywood reporter and the future Republican presidential candidate, in which Donald Trump bragged about his ability to sexually assault women due to his celebrity status.

Since the breaking of this audio clip, at least fifteen women have stepped forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault or harassment. Several celebrities and politicians, notably Michelle Obama, Robert De Niro, and Senator Mitch McConnell, have also publicly condemned Trump for his statements and past actions concerning women.

Unfortunately, the majority of discourse about this scandal centers on what it means for the state of American politics or the fate of the Republican Party. Those are serious concerns, of course, but what of the women whom Donald Trump sexually assaulted, who felt silenced by his power, money, and celebrity status? What of other sexual assault survivors across the country, men and women, who are fighting to be believed by their families, by society, and by the law?

Exposing Trump’s repulsive acts and rejecting his “locker room talk” about pursuing women is incredibly important to ensuring that rape culture is not normalized in our society. It is time, however, to shift the spotlight from Donald Trump and instead focus on bringing justice to sexual assault survivors. This scandal could be the opportunity America needs to publicly address its sexual assault problem and offer meaningful solutions and help to survivors of sexual assault.

According to the Department of Justice, 284,000 Americans are sexually assaulted per year. This number does not even account for those crimes that go unreported.

State governments could be diverting more resources into the handling of rape kits, the subject of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, which wait in huge backlogs across the country. The slowness in testing this evidence potentially allows rapists to roam the country free. American schools could also introduce sexual assault prevention education, among other courses of action.

Donald Trump’s disgusting comments and actions should not be just another excuse to talk about him or to bemoan the state of American politics. Instead, Americans should use this opportunity to address their prevailing attitudes about sexual assault and to have open conversations about consent, respect, and prevention. It would be irresponsible to let this moment become just another of the many instances of public outrage over Trump’s actions, which resulted in neither change nor solutions.

Flannery O’Connor Takes Us For A Ride

The percentage of people who say they believe in God, pray, go to religious services, embrace religious practices or find their faith meaningful has declined over the last 50 years. A growing group of Americans do not believe in God or any organized faith whatsoever. In many communities, unbelief is even considered smart: religious conviction is perceived as strange, burdensome and outdated.

This is the context in which American Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor penned her fictional books and short stories, many of which are set in the 1950s and 1960s rural South. O’Connor wrote about the human condition and the state of the weak and the faithless. She wrote about unbelievers, lukewarm souls, narcissists and the spiritually illiterate. She wrote about racists, white trash, busybodies, snobs, fake intellectuals, poor folks, and beaten down and marginalized African Americans. Above all, O’Connor wrote about the unraveling of faith in America.  

O’Connor’s works reveal that she believed America, particularly the South, was haunted by religion, but that its people were experiencing spiritual mediocrity, cynicism and emptiness – a rough-and-tumble nihilism. She argues that people might attend services or preach that their faith matters, but that many are just lying to their neighbors and to themselves. To her, they are just checking the box with a faith bordering on the tepid or the pathetic. God is deemed irrelevant. She suspects that many people would not recognize a theophany, or sign from God, if it slapped them in the face, and that countless souls are existentially lost and fumbling in the dark.

Through her works, O’Connor tries to show people what the world would look like without faith and religion. Nothing would be of real consequence – beauty, truth, sacrifice, love, history, death, honor and sex wouldn’t matter in the least. O’Connor was also determined to show the results of that prevailing attitude in the faces of the despairing, the fallen, the pretenders, the depraved and the lost.

Flannery O’Connor’s method of accomplishing this is not subtle; she knocks her readers over the head and tries to open them up to the frozen depths of their lethargy through comedy, tragedy and sometimes even violence. She writes: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and startling figures.” Throughout her life, O’Connor was bent on making her readers understand the importance of faith by shocking them with outlandish characters, striking scenes and painful revelations, as in her book Wise Blood.

She populates this work with an over-the-top cast of characters: peculiar loners, false preachers, rudderless souls, unabashed skeptics, spiritual zombies, men in gorilla suits, killers, zookeepers, sex addicts, mummified dwarfs, prostitutes and con men – the grotesque, the ignorant, the humorous, the marginalized and the saved, sometimes one and the same. Reading Wise Blood is akin to watching a Mad Hatter with Southern, fundamentalist tendencies hold a revival, or an Alice stand-in slither down the rabbit hole while running an illegal moonshine operation. Her characters are bigger than life, sometimes amusing, sometimes violent, and downright biblical in their ability to fail over and over again in a multitude of ways. Her characters are more than memorable; they are unforgettable.

In Wise Blood, as in all her writing, O’Connor asks her readers to pay attention to their intentions. At the time, religious understanding and conviction were already on the decline and indifference abounded. But O’Connor was staunch in her belief that apathy and nihilism wouldn’t give a person any hope, just a bucket of despair. Wise Blood and the rest of her works were her literary offering to those who found themselves like Dante: “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of” (Dante’s Inferno).

Not much has changed since O’Connor passed away in 1964. Religious practices and church attendance are still on the decline. Perhaps there is also now a more virulent strain of atheism or disdain for the demands of belief flowing through American culture. Reading Flannery O’Connor, however, is still wildly popular. She tapped into something, then and now, of the American dissatisfaction with what the culture and the cultural elites have failed to offer – the mysteries and revelation of faith. She remains the “voice crying out in the wilderness.”

GOP: Forget Trump, Save the House & Senate

The greatest reality television show in human history is over. The overwhelming majority of data reveals that Hillary Clinton has virtually secured the presidency. The latest polling data from the Real Clear Politics average shows Clinton leading nationally 48.1 percent to Donald Trump’s 41.4 percent: a gap of 6.7 percent. Just one month ago, Trump had gotten within striking distance and was trailing by only one point.

Additionally, the current Real Clear Politics electoral college map has Clinton solidly with 256 Electoral College votes and only 170 for Trump, while 112 votes remain a toss-up. Pennsylvania and Virginia, two crucial states for Trump, both lean in Clinton’s favor. She leads Trump by 6.7 percent in Virginia and 8.4 percent in Pennsylvania. In order to be competitive, Trump would need to secure victories in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio; Clinton currently leads by about 2-3 percent in all three states. According to New York Times data from The Upshot, Clinton now has an 89 percent chance of winning compared with just 11 percent for Donald Trump. Unless Wikileaks’ Julian Assange releases further incriminating information or she has another major medical episode, we’ll have a President Clinton in January.

Interestingly, Trump has ceased campaign activity in Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine’s home state of Virginia. Trump’s former Virginia campaign chairman, Corey Stewart, expressed outrage regarding the decision to concede the state: "I think it's totally premature for the campaign to be pulling out of Virginia after so much work and all the hundreds ... of hours of volunteer time and thousands and thousands of volunteers." Historically, Virginia has been a solidly Republican state for every presidential election from the 1970s until the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. However, changing demographics and urbanization in Northern Virginia have transformed it into a swing state. President Obama won it in 2008, the first time a Democrat won Virginia since Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964. Obama went on to win there again in 2012.

Following the release of Trump’s 2005 lewd comments about women, a number of prominent Republicans have withdrawn their support for him. His former primary opponents Carly Fiorina and Governor John Kasich no longer endorse him. Senators John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, Lisa Murkowski, and Rob Portman, and Congressman Jason Chaffetz have all retracted support shortly after the release of the tape. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put out a statement expressing utter disgust with Trump: “Enough! Donald Trump should not be President. He should withdraw. As a Republican, I hope to support someone who has the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth.”

Let’s be practical: it’s time for the Republican National Committee to stop devoting its precious time, money, and resources to Trump’s hopeless campaign. Instead, top GOP officials should direct all resources to maintaining the Senate majority. The Real Clear Politics polling averages indicate that the Democrats and Republicans each have 46 Senate seats that are safe or not up for election, leaving eight toss-ups, seven of them currently held by the Republicans. It appears Republicans will maintain control over the House of Representatives. 218 seats are needed to secure a majority, and the GOP currently has 231 safe seats. There are 15 toss-up seats, 11 currently controlled by Republicans. It’s unlikely the GOP will lose control of the House, but current polling shows that their majority will weaken.

A spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan recently stated: “The speaker is going to spend the next month focused entirely on protecting our congressional majorities.”  It’s also time for more GOP elected officials to publicly denounce Trump in order to salvage the legitimacy of the party going forward.

Political Murder in Russia

“Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has made no secret of his ambition to restore his country to what he sees as its rightful place among the world’s leading nations,” writes New York Times columnist Andrew Kramer. “Indeed, Putin has invested considerable money and energy into building an image of a strong and morally superior Russia.”

“Morally superior,” however, is far from the image many Western nations have of the former U.S.S.R. Under Putin, the Russian government has treated muckraking journalists, rights advocates, opposition politicians, and government whistle-blowers with disdain and worse, imprisoning them on trumped-up charges and smearing their names in the news media at every opportunity.

More alarming, Putin and his government have decided to re-implement the tactic of political murder, which played a distinct role in the Kremlin’s foreign policy during the Soviet era. Now, instead of simply imprisoning or chastising those who threaten Putin’s carefully crafted image of the Russian state, the Russian government is killing these individuals with increasing frequency.

Political murders, and particularly those accomplished with poisons, are nothing new in Russia: they have been a favorite tool of Russian intelligence for more than a century. Beginning in 1928, a biochemist named Grigory Mairanovski worked in secret for the K.G.B. to develop tasteless, colorless and odorless poisons. Since then, the K.G.B. and other government agencies have developed an arsenal of lethal, hard-to-trace poisons, which are still in use today.

In 1995, for instance, Russian banker Ivan K. Kivelidi died after coming into contact with cadmium. In 2008, Karinna Moskalenko, a Russian lawyer specializing in taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights, fell ill in Strasbourg, France, from mercury found in her car.

While typically not traceable to any individuals and denied by government officials, poisonings leave little doubt of the state’s involvement, according to experts. “Outside of popular culture, there are no highly skilled hit men for hire,” explains Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and an authority on the Russian security services. “If it’s a skilled job, that means it’s [done by] a state asset.” Former member of parliament and onetime lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B. Gennadi V. Gudkov corroborated Galeotti’s claim when he admitted in an interview that “the government is using the special services to liquidate its enemies.”

This past summer, another whistle-blower, Yulia Stepanova, who’s hiding with her husband in the United States, was forced to move amid fears that hackers had found her location. “If something happens to us,” she said, “then you should know that it is not an accident.”

While other countries, notably Israel and the United States, pursue targeted killings, it is only in a strict counterterrorism context. No other major power employs murder systematically and ruthlessly, as Russia does against those seen as betraying its interests at home and abroad. Certainly, this tendency toward murder is no mark of moral superiority.

Looking Ahead for the Supreme Court

More than nine months after Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden passing, his seat on the Supreme Court remains vacant. Instead of allowing President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, to take his place, Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have undertaken what the Obama administration is calling “an unprecedented level of obstruction.”

McConnell and his fellow Republicans see Garland’s nomination as an effort by Obama and his supporters to liberalize the Supreme Court. In response, these senators are refusing to hold a confirmation hearing at least until a new president takes office in January. They hope that a President Trump would nominate a more conservative judge in Garland’s place.

In fact, Donald Trump has already presented a list of potential nominees, including federal and state judges. One prominent prospect is Utah Senator Mike Lee, a staunch conservative and close friend of Senator Ted Cruz.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton would have two options if elected – to push Obama’s choice through Congress or to propose her own appointee. Last month on the Tom Joyner radio show, she stated that she would cast a broad net for “common-sense” justices with some “real-world experience.” The worry among conservatives is that Clinton will yield to demands to nominate a younger and more liberal judge: California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker have already been identified as being among those who may be on Clinton’s shortlist.

Although the Senate has the power to refuse to confirm a new justice indefinitely, the strong possibility of a Clinton victory in November means that Senate Republicans should hear the case for Merrick Garland before it is too late to prevent her from filling Scalia’s seat with an appointee further to the left than this reputed moderate. Senate Republicans need to hear the case for Merrick Garland before it is too late. With three justices in their late seventies or early eighties, it is likely that there will be more than one vacancy to fill during the coming presidential term. It is particularly important that the Senate maintain the centrist nature of the court in filling these vacancies. If the vacancies were to be filled by liberal judges, some of the recent high-profile cases that were decided on a 5-4 vote may be overturned, including Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes.

Approving Garland before the next presidential inauguration will both fill the open seat and keep the court from becoming too liberal. If Clinton gets even one vacancy in addition to Scalia’s seat – or if Garland is not confirmed, meaning she can appoint someone in his place – the court is more likely to move strongly to the left. This is even likelier if the Democrats control the Senate after this year’s election, of which there is probably a 50-50 chance. Waiting for the next president, which by all measures could be Hillary Clinton, may end up backfiring on Republicans holding out for the inauguration of Trump.

Until then, Chief Justice Roberts will have to do his best to mitigate the ideological conflict on the court as it tackles cases involving restricted voting rights and gerrymandering in the term that began October 3.