Military spending is not right way to boost America's economic security

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That Washington is holding defense cuts responsible for slow economic growth is a specious argument at best. War spending is unproductive and inflationary. Modern defense costs are capital intensive, not labor intensive, making the industry inefficient as a job creator.  

The defense industry has a presence in congressional districts across this country, so cuts affect every member. But every district in the U.S. has pressing infrastructure, education, health and environmental needs, and the return on the taxpayer’s dollar is much higher when invested on these areas.

Instead of concentrating money on capital intensive, military hardware purposed for destruction, and causing long term economic drain, our very limited and valuable economic resources should be invested in building the true strength and capacity of our economy, our nation, and her people.

In prioritizing military spending, Congress is cutting the very programs that can actually strengthen our economy.

During the heightened banking crisis in 2009, Rep. James Oberstar, then Chair of House Transportation Committee, called for a massive Eisenhower-level of investment in transportation infrastructure. He was right.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the U.S. requires $3.6 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2020 to bring our grade D+ standards to safe standards.  

This is exactly what we need: to put bridge-builders to work rather than funding technology and personnel to destroy bridges, and to take tank-making factories and repurpose them to build high-speed trains.

In prioritizing military spending, Congress is cutting the very programs that can actually strengthen our economy: Cutting federal assistance to the states, forcing them to lay off teachers, firefighters, and social workers; cutting opportunities for job creation, training, and placement programs; and eviscerating funding for children’s programs and assistance for seniors.

These actions make no economic sense. 

Military spending generates fewer jobs per billion dollars spent than many other kinds of investments:  For every 100 jobs created by Pentagon spending, the same investment would create 251 jobs in education, 169 jobs in health care, or 147 jobs in clean energy.  

Conversely, every $1 billion cut in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program means 13,718 jobs lost. Many teachers, social workers, first responders, and other government workers have already lost their jobs from the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts since 2010.  

Even if $1 trillion were to be cut from the military budget over the next 10 years, America would still be spending at the peak levels of the Vietnam War and the Cold War. It is time to gather our senses.

In order to facilitate economic growth and development in America, defense spending is the wrong bellwether.  America's increasing number of military expeditions abroad, in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, has undermined the long-term stability of our economy at home. It has neither resulted in an economically vibrant, healthy, and well-educated nation, nor has it made us safer.

Both our progressive and conservative representatives should be joining forces, restraining waste and investing wisely. The key is to conserve, as a good housekeeper would, and invest in that which supports the family and home -- our nation and people.

It is time for our representatives and the Obama administration to seriously address the nature of the structural reforms that need to take place in order for our economy to get back on track.

We understand that the nation cannot spend its way out of this current economic crisis, in the same way that it cannot save or tax its way out. 

Congress needs to address the cyclical nature of our debt-based monetary system, which perpetuates inflation and crashes, and reform it meaningfully while massively cutting wasteful spending and, instead, investing in necessary infrastructure improvements that will create millions of productive jobs – all of which will help improve America’s health, education and prosperity.

Michael Shank is director of foreign policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

Elizabeth Kucinich was a framer of 112th congress' HR 2990, the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act.

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Immigration bill would increase Social Security trust fund

A bipartisan immigration bill pending in the Senate would strengthen the Social Security trust fund by adding millions of workers to tax rolls, and provide a boost to the overall economy, according to an analysis Wednesday by the Social Security Administration.

The finding came in a letter to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who requested the analysis, from Stephen C. Gross, chief actuary for the agency.

It could provide a boost for the immigration bill, which has been attacked by some conservatives as overly costly, as the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to take up the legislation for amendments and votes beginning Thursday. Meanwhile, a separate dispute loomed as religious leaders warned that adding a gay rights provision to the immigration legislation could cost their support.

Gross' analysis said the immigration bill would boost Social Security's coffers by more than $240 over the coming decade and add $64 billion in new tax revenues to Medicare. It also would increase the size of the economy by a full percentage point by 2017, and increase employment.

Gross wrote that the overall effect of the bill on the long-range trust fund balance "will be positive."

Social Security has long-term financial problems because, as more people retire and live longer, there will be relatively fewer workers paying into the system. In 1960, there were 4.9 workers paying Social Security taxes for each person getting benefits. Today, there are about 2.8 workers for each beneficiary, a ratio that will drop to 1.9 workers by 2035 under current law, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

The actuary's letter suggests the immigration bill would slow this trend. Under the bill, there would be nearly 6.6 million more workers paying Social Security taxes in 2024, the actuary projects. That same year, there would be an additional 683,000 people getting benefits. That's nearly 10 additional taxpayers for each new beneficiary.

The Social Security analysis is the first government analysis to quantify economic impacts from the far-reaching bill authored by Rubio and seven other senators, both Democratic and Republican.  The legislation came under attack earlier this week in a disputed report from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which claimed the bill would cost $6.3 trillion over 50 years as newly legalized immigrants consume government benefits without paying an equal amount in taxes.

The Social Security analysis doesn't attempt to determine the overall cost of the bill. That figure will be provided by the Congressional Budget Office, which has not yet released its projections.

But the analysis does measures some impacts of the bill, which aims to secure the border, create new avenues for workers to come legally to the U.S., ensure employers don't hire workers here without legal status, and give a path to citizenship to the millions already here illegally.

The analysis finds that of about 11.5 million immigrants here illegally who would be eligible under the bill, around 8 million would apply for and be granted legal status. Many would immediately become taxpayers, but the bill prevents them from receiving government benefits for over a decade.

In the longer term most of these new taxpayers would eventually receive benefits, but the actuary said he still expects the bill to improve the long-term health of Social Security.

The analysis also said that provisions in the bill would reduce by about a half-million per year the future number of people entering the country illegally.

On the gay rights issue, religious leaders issued a warning Wednesday about the impact on the immigration bill if Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., moves forward with an amendment to allow gay Americans to sponsor their foreign partners for U.S. residence like straight married Americans can.

"We're extremely hopeful that this bill will remain an immigration bill and not get tangled up with the issue of gay rights," Richard Land, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, told reporters on a conference call. "But if it did, if it did, the Southern Baptist Convention would not be able to support the bill."

Other religious leaders on the call echoed Land's warnings. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, labeled the gay rights provision "a divisive distraction that must not derail immigration reform."

Rubio and the three other Republican authors of the immigration bill have said that such a provision could cost their support and kill the bill.
  "If that issue is injected into this bill, this bill will fail. It will not have the support. It will not have my support," Rubio said last week in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

If Leahy were to offer a gay marriage amendment, attention would turn to Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to see whether they would support it. Schumer and Durbin are among Democratic authors of the bill and both sit on Leahy's committee. Both have expressed support for Leahy's goals on the gay marriage issue without saying how they would vote on his amendment.

Gay rights groups are lobbying aggressively for the gay marriage language to be included and they dispute suggestions that it would jeopardize the bill.

"It's not something that should be considered a poison pill or a hot potato," said Gregory T. Angelo, who runs the gay GOP group Log Cabin Republicans.

"There are 11 states and the District of Columbia that recognize relationships between committed same-sex couples," Angelo said in an interview. "These are individuals who are here legally, who are in marriages and who are denied the rights of their straight counterparts."

President Barack Obama included a provision recognizing gay partnerships in his own immigration bill, but he has made it clear in recent comments that the Senate measure meets his criteria for an immigration overhaul, even without the provision.

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Obama, Mexican president discuss border security

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  May 2, 2013: President Barack Obama, left, and Mexicos President Enrique Pena Nieto, right, arrive for a news conference at the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City.AP

MEXICO CITY –  President Barack Obama sought on Thursday to tamp down a potential rift with Mexico over a dramatic shift in the cross-border fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, acceding that Mexicans had the right to determine how best to tackle the violence that has plagued their country.

Since taking office in December, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has moved to end the widespread access that U.S. security agencies have had in Mexico to tackle the violence that affects both sides of the border. It's a departure from the strategy employed by his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, which was praised by the U.S. but reviled by many Mexicans.

Obama said the shifting security relationship would not hurt cooperation between the neighboring nations.

"I agreed to continue our close cooperation on security, even as the nature of that cooperation will evolve," Obama said during a joint news conference at Mexico's grand National Palace. "It is obviously up to the Mexican people to determine their security structures and how it engages with the other nations -- including the United States."

Pena Nieto as well downplayed the notion that the new, more centralized arrangement would damage its security partnership with the United States. He said Obama agreed during their private meeting earlier in the day to "cooperate on the basis of mutual respect" to promote an efficient and effective strategy.

Obama arrived in Mexico Thursday afternoon for a three-day trip that will also include a stop in Costa Rica. Domestic issues followed the president south of the border, with Obama facing questions in his exchange with reporters about the potential escalation of the U.S. role in Syria, a controversy over contraception access for teenage girls, and the delicate debate on Capitol Hill on an immigration overhaul.

The latter issue is being closely watched in Mexico, given the large number of Mexicans who have emigrated to the U.S. both legally and illegally. More than half of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally are Mexican, according to the Pew Research Center.

For Obama, the immigration debate is rife with potential political pitfalls. While he views an overhaul of the nation's patchwork immigration laws as a legacy-building issue, he's been forced to keep a low-profile role in the debate to avoid scaring off wary Republicans.

In an effort to court those GOP lawmakers, the draft bill being debated on Capitol Hill focuses heavily on securing the border with Mexico, and makes doing so a pre-condition for a pathway to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally. But Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the bill's architects, said Thursday that unless the border security measures are made even tougher, the legislation will face tough odds not only in the GOP-controlled House but also in the Democratic-led Senate.

The president acknowledged there were some areas along the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico where security needs to be tightened. But he gently chided Rubio and other Republicans for putting up obstacles that would derail final legislation.

"I suspect that the final legislation will not contain everything I want. It won't contain everything that Republican leaders want, either," Obama said. He added that "what I'm not going to do is to go along with something where we're looking for an excuse not to do it as opposed to a way to do it."

Despite the intense interest in the immigration debate among Mexicans, Pena Nieto carefully avoided injecting himself in the issue. While he commended the U.S. for tackling the challenge, he said the congressional debate "is a domestic affair."

The new Mexican leader was purposely seeking to avoid the perceived missteps of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, who irked conservatives in the U.S. by lobbying for an immigration overhaul in 2001.

Pena Nieto's election brought Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, back to power after a decade on the sidelines. The security changes are emblematic of the party's preference for centralized political and bureaucratic control.

The arrangement means all contact for U.S. law enforcement will now go through a "single door," according to Mexico's federal Interior Ministry, the agency that controls security and domestic policy. Under the previous policy, FBI, CIA, DEA and border patrol agents had direct access to units of Mexico's Federal Police, army and navy. U.S. agents worked side by side with those Mexican units in the fight against drug cartels, including the U.S.-backed strategy of killing or arresting top kingpins.

Obama lauded his Mexican counterpart for launching bold reforms during his first months in office, not only on security but also the economy. Both leaders have said they want to refocus the U.S.-Mexico relationship on trade and the economy, not the drug wars and immigration issues that have dominated the partnership in recent years.

In a nod to that effort, Obama and Pena Nieto announced a new partnership for closer cooperation between top officials in both countries. Vice President Joe Biden will also participate in that process, Obama said.

Already the economic relationship between the two countries is robust, with Mexico accounting for $500 billion in U.S. trade in 2011 and ranking as the second-largest export market for U.S. goods. A stronger Mexican economy would result in even more trade and job growth on both sides of the border, Obama aides say.

On Friday, Obama will speak to an audience of Mexican students before heading to Costa Rica for talks with Central American leaders. His meetings there are expected to focus on bolstering regional economic cooperation, as well as security issues.

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Security casts shadow over Obama's Mexico trip

President Barack Obama is seeking to refocus economic relations between the U.S. and Mexico, even as fresh questions about security cooperation threaten to cast a shadow over the president's visit to the southern neighbor.

Obama also will use his three-day trip, which begins Thursday and includes a stop in Costa Rica, to highlight the immigration overhaul moving through Capitol Hill, both for an audience in Latin America and for those back home in the U.S.

The president is scheduled to arrive Thursday afternoon in Mexico City for meetings with President Enrique Pena Nieto and members of Mexico's business community.

Since taking office in December, Pena Nieto has moved to end the widespread access it gave U.S. security agencies helping fight drug trafficking and organized crime. The changes mark a dramatic shift from the policies of Pena Nieto's predecessor, Felipe Calderon, who was lauded by the U.S. for boosting cooperation between the two countries as he led an aggressive attack on Mexico's drug cartels.

The White House has tried to downplay a potential rift, with officials emphasizing Mexico has kept the U.S. informed about the changes. Obama on Tuesday said he would wait to hear directly from his Mexican counterpart before assessing the changes.

Despite the intense focus on security issues, Obama advisers say the president will try to show that the ties between the two countries are broader than the drug wars that defined the relationship in recent years.

"Security has been so front-and-center in the public discussion of the U.S.-Mexico relationship that lost in that is the enormous commercial relationship between the two countries," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser.

Obama is expected to call for the U.S. and Mexico to deepen trade ties to promote job creation on both sides of the border. However, he is not expected to announce any major new economic initiatives.

Mexico was the second-largest export market for U.S. goods in 2011, according to the office of the U.S. trade representative. U.S. trade with Mexico totaled $500 billion in 2011.

White House aides say they also see strengthening Mexico's economy as a way to address one of the root causes of much of the illegal immigration to the U.S.

Rhodes said the U.S. expects Pena Nieto and other regional leaders to be largely supportive of the immigration overhaul being debated on Capitol Hill, which includes provisions to strengthen security at the 2,000-mile long border with Mexico.

However, Carl Meacham, a former senior Latin America adviser on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.S. immigration effort is viewed with "skepticism and confusion" in the region.

"They've been brought to the altar so many times by different American administrations that there's a bit of a lack of trust," said Meacham, who now works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Getting Mexico's buy-in, particularly on border security, could help Obama sell the immigration overhaul in the U.S., particularly to wary Republicans. GOP lawmakers have long insisted the U.S. must focus its efforts on securing the border before addressing the legal status of the more than 11 million immigrants in the country illegally.

The immigration bill being debated in the Senate would strengthen border security, allow tens of thousands of new high- and low-skilled workers into the country, require all employers to check their workers' legal status and provide an eventual path to citizenship for most of the immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

More than half of the immigrants in the U.S. illegally are from Mexico, according to the Pew Research Center.

Following a speech Friday to Mexican entrepreneurs, Obama will travel to Costa Rica, his first visit as president to the Central American nation. In addition to meetings with Costa Rican President Laura Chincilla, Obama will attend a gathering of leaders from the Central American Integration system. The regional network also includes the leaders of Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.

On Saturday, Obama will attend a business conference aimed at fostering economic cooperation between the U.S. and Central American nations. The president is due back in Washington Saturday night.
  

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The false security of surveillance cameras

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    Public circulation of surveillance images a good thing?

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    Surveillance video, photos key to Boston breakthrough?

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, which saw the use of footage from cell phones and closed circuit TV cameras to help identify the suspected bombers, pundits and elected officials alike have been singing the praises of urban camera networks—and suggesting that ever more such government surveillance is the key to stopping future attacks. 

But a closer look at the facts suggests just the opposite: Dispersed “Little Brother” monitoring by private cameras can provide many of the benefits of centralized  “Big Brother” surveillance by governments—but without the public expense or risks to civil liberties.

Slate’s Farhad Majoo led the call for more surveillance in a column titled “We Need More Cameras, and We Need Them Now.” 

Lamenting that Boston boasts fewer than 60 law-enforcement-controlled CCTV cameras (excluding those in the subway system), Manjoo suggested that more at the scene of the bombing might have given police “a chance to see something” before the explosions that killed three and wounded scores more.

Elected officials got in on the act as well. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg called the bombings “a terrible reminder” of the need for “investments” in technologies like the city’s $200 million “Ring of Steel,” comprising some 3,000 cameras just in lower Manhattan. 

Rep. Mike King (R-NY) told MSNBC that we “need more cameras” in order to “stay ahead of the terrorists…who are constantly trying to kill us.”

Realistically, surveillance cameras are typically going to be valuable after an attack, in helping the authorities identify and apprehend the perpetrators.

Random acts of violence inevitably make us feel anxious and helpless, and it’s only natural to want to believe that if we only figure out the right policy, we can somehow prevent such events from ever recurring. 

But this particular control fantasy seems especially implausible here. 

Between the throngs of spectators and police on the scene and the television cameras broadcasting the event, the Boston Marathon must have been one of the most monitored spots in the country on that grim afternoon. 

That we can identify suspects from video footage after the fact—knowing the time, location and method of the attack—does not make it realistic to suppose an observer at a monitor station could have identified the impending attack and intervened in time when those on the ground did not, however comforting that supposition might be. 

Terror attacks are (thankfully) so rare and varied that any system with the slightest chance of detecting a real one would necessarily yield a vast, paralyzing number of false positives.

It is also unlikely that cameras will be especially helpful in deterring such attacks.  Even when it comes to ordinary crime—where the perpetrators are generally motivated by the desire to make a quick buck without getting caught—studies have been mixed and inconclusive about the value of CCTV cameras as a crime deterrent. 

Some show significant declines in crime in some regions of cities with camera networks, which may be attributable to the cameras—but many show no discernible effect at all. 

If the deterrent power of cameras against ordinary criminals remains in question, how much more doubtful is it in the rare case of the individuals unbalanced and committed enough to spend weeks plotting mass murder?

Realistically, surveillance cameras are typically going to be valuable after an attack, in helping the authorities identify and apprehend the perpetrators. 

Yet we don’t need costly public camera networks for that—as the Boston investigation shows.

The most useful footage of that heavily-recorded bomb site came from a nearby Lord & Taylor department store. 

Days later, when a botched 7-Eleven robbery was erroneously ascribed to the bombers, footage from the store itself that helped clarify facts.  And back in 2011, it was a Safeway grocery store’s camera that captured the shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson. 

It may be slightly less convenient, but police routinely use video from private security cameras to investigate serious crimes.

Does it really matter who’s recording us if we’re on tape everywhere? It surely might. A diffuse array of privately-owned “Little Brothers” provide much of the same value to police as a centralized and networked Big Brother system—but without posing serious civil liberties concerns. 

Citywide networks are far more susceptible to abuses, ranging from the merely crass—as in the case of the British operators convicted of using public cameras to peep through a young woman’s bedroom window—to the politically disturbing—as when New York police used cameras and license plate scanners to track attendance at local mosques. 

As face recognition technology improves, centralized systems should raise even more concerns: It may soon be possible to create detailed retroactive records of particular individuals’ activities—a type of monitoring so intrusive the Supreme Court recently suggested it could implicate our Fourth Amendment rights even if limited to “public” spaces.

It is tempting to believe a sufficiently omniscient government can keep us safe from all harm—but it is not realistic,  and when it comes to public camera networks, succumbing to wishful thinking is likely to be both costly and perilous to civil liberties. 

Instead of yearning for a protective Big Brother, we should attend to the ways the proliferation of Little Brothers can aid police without the need for an expensive and dangerous architecture of centralized surveillance. 

Julian Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

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AT&T to sell 'Digital Life' home automation and security packages in 15 markets

NEW YORK –  AT&T Inc. is launching its home security and automation service in 15 cities Friday, with an eye toward getting customers hooked on security cameras, thermostats and locks they can control from phones and tablets.

AT&T's "Digital Life" packages will be sold in cellphone stores in markets including Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Miami. The company plans to roll the offering out to 50 markets by the end of the year.

The home monitoring and automation field is dominated by security firms such as ADT Corp. Other phone and cable companies sell security packages, but AT&T is going further than competitors by developing its own technology and selling it nationwide, not just where it provides local phone service. It has set up monitoring centers, in Dallas and Atlanta.

The entire U.S. home security market is worth about $18 billion per year, said Glenn Lurie, who is in charge of expanding the reach of AT&T's network to new types of devices. That's small compared to AT&T's $127 billion in annual revenue. But only 20 percent of homes have security systems, so there's an opportunity to expand the market, Lurie said.

The initiative comes as the wireless industry has slowed after a decade of heady growth. Now that nearly everyone has a cellphone, wireless companies are looking for other sources of growth.

"We see huge opportunity here. This is a significant, billion-dollar opportunity for AT&T," Lurie said.

AT&T is also hoping to get customers to pay more than the typical $40 per month for home security alone, by providing connections to wireless cameras and other sensors.

AT&T will charge $250 for the equipment and installation of a home security package, plus $40 per month. Options include a camera package for $10 per month plus equipment and installation, climate control for $5 per month, and a remote water main shutoff control for $10 per month.

The equipment ties into a central control panel which can be programmed through the app or Web interface to, for instance, shut off the water main if the water sensor detects a leak.

A basic, security-only package will cost $150, plus $30 per month.

Ralph De La Vega, head of AT&T's wireless division, said employees who tested Digital Life in Atlanta and Dallas last year bought a lot more cameras than the company had been expecting. One of them set a camera to be triggered by motion sensor on the front porch, and nabbed a thief who had been stealing packages.

Only about 1 percent of homes have automation systems, and De La Vega said this could be a big opportunity as well. He's happy he can now check whether his garage doors are open and close them from his phone.

"It's just getting people used to living a different way ... We haven't even begun to tap into the available marketplace. I think the idea is huge," De La Vega said.

The central panel connects to AT&T's wireless network, but should also be connected to a wired Internet modem for redundancy, AT&T said. Any Internet connection will work — it doesn't have to be AT&T's.

Two years ago, AT&T bought Xanboo, a smart-home technology startup. Last year, AT&T announced its plans to launch Digital Life nationwide, and ran trials with employees in Dallas and Atlanta.

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Secret Service expands security at White House after Boston explosion

Published April 15, 2013

Associated Press

The Secret Service says it has expanded its security perimeter at the White House following the explosions at the Boston Marathon. 

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan says the measure was taken "out of an abundance of caution." He says it is not unusual to expand or contract the security perimeters. 

Shortly after the explosions Monday, Secret Service shut down Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House, cordoning off the area with yellow police tape. Several Secret Service patrol cars also blocked off the entry points to the road. 

The White House was not on lockdown and tourists and other onlookers were still able to be in the park across the street from the executive mansion.

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NSA data center front and center in debate over liberty, security and privacy

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Twenty-five miles due south of Salt Lake City, a massive construction project is nearing completion.  The heavily secured site belongs to the National Security Agency.

"The spy center" -- that's what some of the locals like Jasmine Widmer, who works at Bluffdale's sandwich shop, told our Fox News team as part of an eight month investigation into data collection and privacy rights that will be broadcast Sunday at 9 p.m. ET called "Fox News Reporting: Your Secrets Out.”

The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5's-- that stretches past the moon.

One man we hoped would answer our questions, the current director of the NSA General Keith Alexander, declined Fox News's requests to sit down for an interview, so we stopped by the offices of a Washington think tank, where Alexander was speaking at a cyber security event last year.

Asked if the Utah Data Center would hold the data of American citizens,  Alexander said, "No...we don't hold data on U.S. citizens," adding that the NSA staff "take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation."

But critics, including former NSA employees, say the data center is front and center in the debate over liberty, security and privacy.

"[It] raises the most serious questions about the vast amount of data that could be kept in one place for many, many different sources,"  Thomas Drake told Fox News.  

Drake -- who worked at the NSA from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2008 and was unsuccessfully prosecuted on espionage charges -- says Americans should be concerned about letting the government go too far in the name of security.

"It's in secret so you don't really know," Drake explained. "It's benign, right. If I haven't -- and if I haven't done anything wrong it doesn't matter. The only way you can have perfect security is have a perfect surveillance state. That's George Orwell. That's 1984. That's what that would look like."

Fellow NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, who worked at the NSA for nearly four decades, says it's about the possibility that the government's stunning new capacity to collect, store and analyze data could be abused.

"It's really a-- turnkey situation, where it could be turned quickly and become a totalitarian state pretty quickly," he said. "The capacities to do that is being set up. Now it's a question of if we get the wrong person in office, or if certain people set up their network internally in government, they could make that happen quickly."

According to NSA's chief compliance officer John Delong, whose job is to make sure the laws and policies designed to protect the privacy of U.S. persons is being enforced, part of the frustration is that the rules are specific and secret.

"I think that's sort of the collision, is you have classified rules," DeLong explained during an hour long meeting with Fox News at the NSA. "You now have a somewhat more public data center,"  

"These aren't just, like, general policy pronouncements of 'You shall protect privacy.'" he said.  

DeLong added that another misconception is that there is only internal oversight, when he says there is "a tremendous amount of external oversight" from the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and others.

In an email, Vanee' Vines, a public information officer for the NSA, said that the Utah Data Center will be "a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the Intelligence Community’s efforts to further strengthen and protect the nation. NSA is the executive agent for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and will be the lead agency at the center.”

Because the Utah Data Center is a "secure facility" and you cannot go inside without the needed security clearances, Fox News rented a helicopter and took to the skies, where the depth and breadth of the Utah Center were stunning.

The aerial video footage is exclusive to the Fox News investigation and posted here.  Two weeks after our filming, the helicopter pilot reported to our Fox News team that he had been visited by the FBI on a "national security matter."

The pilot said, according to the FBI agents, that the NSA had taken photos of the helicopter once it made several flyovers.  These photos allowed the NSA to identify the make and manufacturer of the helicopter in California who, in turn, told the NSA who operates it in the Salt Lake City area.

The FBI wanted to know if we had the proper air space clearances to flyover the site, which the Fox News team did.   Satisfied that the pilot was not flying "terrorists" over the site, the questioning concluded.  While the pilot passed along the Fox News contact information, there was no further inquiries.

Binney said the helicopter incident "showed the capability of the U.S. government to use information to trace people, their relationship to others and to raise suspicions about their activities and intentions."

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House committee votes in favor of pro-business cyber security bill

WASHINGTON –  A House panel voted overwhelmingly Wednesday in favor of a new data-sharing program that would give the federal government a broader role in helping banks, manufacturers and other businesses protect themselves against cyberattacks.

The bill, approved 18-2 by the House Intelligence Committee, would enable companies to disclose technical threat data to the government and competitors in real-time, lifting antitrust restrictions and giving legal immunity to companies if hacked, so long as they act in good faith. In turn, companies could get access to government information on cyberthreats that is often classified.

It's a defiant move by pro-business lawmakers who say concerns by privacy advocates and civil liberties groups are overblown. But even while the panel's approval paves the way for an easy floor vote next week, the legislation has yet to be embraced outside the Republican-controlled House. Last year, a similar measure never gained traction and eventually prompted a White House veto threat.

"We've struck the right balance," said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the committee's chairman. "It's 100 percent voluntary. There are no big mandates in this bill, and industry says under these conditions they think they can share (information), and the government can give them information that might protect them."

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, is widely backed by industry groups that say businesses are struggling to defend against aggressive and sophisticated attacks from hackers in China, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Privacy and civil liberties groups have long opposed the bill because they say it opens America's commercial records to the federal government without putting a civilian agency in charge, such as the Homeland Security Department or Commerce Department. That leaves open the possibility that the National Security Agency or another military or intelligence office would become involved, they said. While the new program would be intended to transmit only technical threat data, opponents said they worried that personal information could be passed along, too.

Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff of California and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois were the lone dissenters. At a press conference, they said they would push for amendments on the House floor next week that would specifically bar the military from taking a central role in data collection and instead put the Homeland Security Department in charge. They also want a requirement that industry scrub any data of personal information before giving it to the government -- a stipulation that Rogers and business groups say would be too onerous and deter industry participation.

Rogers, who co-sponsored the bill with Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., the panel's top Democrat, said they altered the bill to address other concerns by privacy groups raised last year. But a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, Michelle Richardson, said the bill is still objectionable because it could allow the military to review data on private commercial networks.

"A couple of cosmetic changes is not enough to address the concerns of members" in the Senate, Richardson said.

Rogers says the political calculus has changed and that China's hacking campaign was too brazen for the White House to justify the status quo.

"There's a line around the Capitol building of companies willing to come in and tell us in a classified setting (that) `my whole intellectual property portfolio is gone,"' Rogers said. "I've never seen anything like this, where we aren't jazzed and our blood pressure isn't up."

In February, Obama signed an executive order that would help develop voluntary industry standards for protecting networks. But the White House and Congress agreed that legislation was still needed to address the legal liability companies face if they share threat information. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., promised at the time to advance a bipartisan proposal "as soon as possible," although one hasn't emerged.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, is expected to take the lead on a cybersecurity proposal that would likely address the issue of information sharing. A panel spokesman said Rockefeller plans to work with Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., to introduce a plan to committee members "in the near future."

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Obama's move to change Social Security inflation rate riles supporters on left

President Obama seemed to be coaxing Republicans back to the negotiating table by offering to change the inflation adjustment in Social Security and other government programs -- but his offer also has had the unwanted side effect of riling many of his supporters on the left.

The group Campaign for America's Future said it collected two million signatures from people opposed to such changes to entitlement programs and delivered the petition to the White House on Tuesday.

Roger Hickey, the group's co-director, calls Obama's move "really bad policy and bad politically for the Democratic Party. So we are sending a message that Democrats had better not vote for this," he told Fox News.

What the president proposed is to shift the inflation adjustment for federal programs from a broad measure of the Consumer Price Index to a more narrow one called the "chained CPI," which Hickey dismisses.

"This is a camouflage operation designed to easily -- they think it's going to be easy -- to cut government expenditures across the board and they hope people won't notice," Hickey said.

Supporters of such a change, however, say the chained CPI is based on a simple premise, that people change their purchases depending on prices.

"When the cost of one good goes up by a lot, we shift into another good," said Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "If apples become more expensive, we'll buy a couple more bananas. So the chained CPI is a more accurate measure of inflation."

The change would only reduce future increases in benefits by .25 percent a year, according to the non partisan Congressional Budget Office. But over 10 years, it would lower the deficit by $339 billion.

That's because the change in the CPI wouldn't just be for Social Security, but for all federal programs adjusted for inflation, including federal pensions and tax brackets.

"This is a government-wide chain CPI," Doug Holtz Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said. "And as a result, that is how you get the tax increases, that's how you get the Social Security impacts, but you also get the other pension impacts."

A chained CPI would increase taxes by pushing people into higher tax brackets sooner than the current measure of inflation would.

The Obama administration says the money it saves in Social Security will be kept within the program, to help sustain it when it starts to run short of money in the early 2030s.

But liberal groups question the necessity.

"It's almost like taking a whack out of Social Security as a way of symbolizing our ability to do something," Hickey said.

And in the eyes of deficit hawks, entitlement reform still would have a long way to go.

"This is $340 billion over 10 years," Holtz Eakin said of the money raised by the switch to the chained CPI. "We'll spend $10 trillion on Social Security, $8 trillion on Medicare, $6 trillion on Medicaid. So we are not in the ballpark of the kinds of changes we need to really fix these programs."

With with social security, "the trustees tell us every year the program is unsustainable," MacGuineas said. "You need to make changes now so that we can phase them in gradually."

And less painfully, because small changes made now can make a big difference two or three decades from now.

The CPI shift would save $127 billion in Social Security. By law, the program can only pay out what it takes in. And in 2033, it will have to reduce benefits an estimated 25 percent across the board -- a potentially crushing blow for the poor.

The system's actuaries say even the change in the CPI will move that date back by only two years.

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NASA locks out foreigners, orders security review following concerns of Chinese spying

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  A vintage logo for NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.NASA

NASA has locked its facilities to foreigners, disabled online research databases and ordered a complete review of access by foreign nationals to its facilities, as allegations swirled of foreign spies within the space agency.

The reports came to a head this weekend with the arrest of former consultant Bo Jiang as he was leaving the country with a one-way ticket to China -- carrying several data storage devices, including hard drives, flash drives and computers that likely contained sensitive information.

“I’ve ordered a complete review of the access that foreign nationals are granted at NASA facilities.'

- NASA administrator Charles Bolden

In testimony Wednesday before Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the space agency, NASA chief Charles Bolden said associate administrator Robert Lightfoot would head a complete investigation into the issue. External investigations would likely follow.

“We don’t anticipate having a Chinese visitor to a NASA facility any time soon,” he said.

“I’ve ordered a complete review of the access that foreign nationals are granted at NASA facilities,” Bolden said. “Within a week we probably will ask [the National Academy of Public Administration] to do an external review,” he added.

Jiang was far from the only foreign national working in NASA facilities around the country. There are 281 foreign nationals with physical access to the agency’s facilities including 192 Chinese nationals, he said.

The number of U.S. citizens working in Chinese facilities?

“To my knowledge, we have no NASA personnel … who are working in the People’s Republic of China,” Bolden said.

In addition to the security review, Bolden announced that he had closed down a publicly available NASA technical reports database due to the risk of confidential information leaking out. A message on the site indicates that “until further notice, the NTRS system will be unavailable for public access. We ... anticipate that this site will return to service in the near future.”

NASA also instigated a moratorium on access to NASA facilities and data from several foreign countries, including China, Burma, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

Remote computer access from those countries will be terminated as well, he added.

“This is about national security, not NASA security. And I take that seriously. I will hold myself accountable once the review is completed,” Bolden said.

Prior to Bolden’s testimony, Rep. Chaka Fattah -- the co-chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee -- praised Bolden and NASA for the agency’s many accomplishments, notably the 2012 landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA is well positioned in terms of the president's goal of seeing a human flight to Mars in the not too distant future, he said.

“Late President John Kennedy would have been proud,” Fattah said.

NASA has great big plans, despite the security issues. Bolden said the first test flight of the planned Orion space capsule would come in 2014, a first-ever, year-long stay on the International Space Station was in the works, and the landmark James Webb space telescope would be launched in 2018.

“NASA remains the world’s premier space science organization,” he said.

Perhaps it’s the ambitions of the space agency that make it such a target for espionage. Wolf told Discovery News earlier this week that “the Chinese have the most comprehensive spying program in Washington that has ever been. They make the KGB look like they were the junior varsity or freshman team.”

Citing Robert S. Mueller, the director of the FBI, Wolf said NASA centers are significant targets for this espionage -- a risk that is more substantial today than it was a decade ago.

“NASA and the Congress have to work together to heed his words,” he said.

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Ambassador Susan Rice top contender to become next national security adviser

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice is the leading contender to become the White House’s new national security adviser, following a failed bid to become secretary of state, a senior Obama administration official told Fox News this weekend.

President Obama could appoint Rice without the Senate confirmation needed for a Cabinet post. Rice withdrew herself from consideration for the secretary of state post in the face of withering criticism by congressional Republicans and others for her handling of the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, Libya terror attacks.

Five days after the attacks that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, Rice said the attacks appeared spontaneous and sparked by an anti-Islamic video.

Rice, 48, later said she gave an incorrect account, based on intelligence reports at the time. However, subsequent meetings with leading Senate Republicans appeared only to increase her lack of support for the Cabinet post.

This weekend, the administration official told Fox a Rice appointment is not imminent because the president still has to find an ambassadorship or another post for current national security adviser Thomas Donilon.  

Fox first reported last year, shortly after the outcome of the November elections, that Rice might get the NSA post –- under the assumption Donilon might become the new White House chief of staff.

Donilon did not get the job so the president must first find a new post for him before moving Rice.

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Former security officials to Obama: Cancel nuke cuts

A group of 18 former military and national security officials wrote to President Barack Obama on Friday urging the administration to cancel plans for further cuts in United States nuclear warheads, warning that new arms reductions would undermine U.S. security. 

The ex-officials, including two former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in the letter to Obama that North Korea's recent underground nuclear test, and concerns about growing Pyongyang-Tehran nuclear arms cooperation, undermines any further disarmament sought by the president. 

"In our professional judgment, born of decades of experience with national security policy and practice, America's 'triad' of nuclear-armed land-based and submarine-launched missiles and bomber-delivered nuclear weapons have promoted strategic stability and discouraged proliferation," the former officials stated. 

"Steps that raise uncertainty about the viability, reliability and effectiveness of our deterrent will have the opposite effect." 

The letter followed a report this week that the new strategic arms cuts with Russia will be announced soon. U.S. officials said the president is preparing for a new round of arms reduction talks with Russia that will seek a one-third cut in U.S. nuclear warheads, beyond the levels set in the 2010 New START arms treaty. The treaty requires cutting the U.S. arsenal to 1,550 warheads. 

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