Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow

Monday July 1, 2013  Wikileaks

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

NSA whistleblower: They’re assembling information on every U.S. citizen

By Muriel Kane - RAW Story
Friday, July 13, 2012

NSA whistleblower William Binney was interviewed by internet journalist Geoff Shively at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York on Friday.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.”

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.

Shively and livestreamer Tim Pool, who was filming the interview, concluded by noting that videos of Binney’s keynote address will be available shortly.

This video was uploaded to Youtube by Timcasts on July 13, 2012.

Too Big to Jail

Brandon Garrett and Corporate Crime

by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

 

Brandon Garrett has pulled together a database of all the deferred and non prosecution agreements and plea agreements since 2001. And he’s sliced and diced them.

And now he’s writing a book for Harvard University Press about what he’s finding.

The working title?

Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Take On Corporations.

Garrett is a Professor at the University of Virginia Law School.

Garrett wonders, for example, why the Justice Department secures guilty pleas for environmental crimes while getting primarily deferred and non prosecution agreements in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases.

“There is nothing inherent in environmental crimes that requires guilty pleas and FCPA that requires deferred prosecution agreements, right?”

“No, if anything they are kind of similar,” Garrett said in an interview last week.

“For environmental cases – are customers going to stop buying the products of a company that makes plastics or steel because their factory was out of compliance with the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act? Customers may not know.”

“It may not hurt the company’s reputation so that it will be the death knell.”

“And we know that there have been companies convicted multiple times, seemingly without significant effect.”

“But the same might be true of foreign bribery. When Siemens was convicted for bribery around the globe, did that affect whether someone bought a Siemens coffee maker or not? Probably not. It might cause a government to have doubts when walking into negotiations for a major contract.”

“The difference in the way FCPA and environmental cases are handled just has to do with different divisions at Main Justice that are handling those cases and how they have developed their own practices over the years.”

And Garrett is troubled by the wording and details of the deferred and non prosecution agreements.

“The fines are sometimes not particularly impressive at all,” Garrett says. “There are many agreements with no fines.”

“And if the purpose of these agreements is to not necessarily impose the most severe penalty or fine to a corporation, but to instead trade off of that to insure compliance, to rehabilitate the company – I’m not convinced that rehabilitation is being taken seriously enough either.”

“The bargain reflected in these agreements may not be strong enough. Some of these agreements have pretty detailed terms about what compliance is supposed to look like going forward, but in plenty of them, it is quite vague.”

“Some of these agreements impose monitors, but even there, the duties of the monitors are left somewhat vague.”

“And we have no idea what the monitors are doing – or even who the monitors are in many cases.”

“So, it’s pretty hard to tell from the outside whether these agreements are performing or not.”
Do we get access to monitor reports?

“No one has ever seen monitor reports, except for a prologue that was released in one case, but that was really more of an extended press release,” he says.

“My understanding is that in most of the cases, the company retains the monitor. The agreement typically says that the monitor reports are to remain confidential, that they will be disclosed to prosecutors and maybe regulators, but to no one else.”

“And there may be portions of those reports dealing with employment matters and the like that shouldn’t be public.”

“But the public should know more about what the companies have done and what has happened.”

“When the deferred prosecution agreement is entered, there is a lot of detailed information describing the nature of the alleged crimes – what employers did, what employees did, maybe without naming them – describing the pattern of criminal behavior, what was the breakdown in corporate governance that permitted it to happen.”

“And then identifying, sometimes specifically, what needed to be done to repair the company.”
“And you would think that there could be a similar report at the end of the agreement – maybe not every monitor’s quarterly report – but some detailed accounting of – this is where things stand now – two or three years after the agreement was entered into.”

Garrett says corporate crime cases differ from street crime cases in fundamental ways.

“One of the many ways corporations are not like regular criminal defendants is that in regular criminal cases, prosecutors and police have access to some of the best information about what really happened,” Garrett said.“In violent crimes that I have been looking at, you worry about Brady violations, you wonder whether prosecutors and police are doing a good investigation and getting accurate evidence.”

“But it all gets flipped around in these corporate cases, where the corporation may have the best information about what really happened. They all have access to e-mails and documents, to any interviews their own lawyers did investigating it.”

“And the cases can be incredibly complicated with millions and millions of documents. They are incredibly difficult cases for prosecutors to bring. If you have conduct that occurred around the globe, can the FBI really take on the job of sorting through it all or trying to get a hold of millions of documents distributed around the globe?”

“Both the corporations and the executives can afford brilliant top lawyers.”

“In regular criminal cases, it is the defendant that may find out later – what evidence did the police gather? When the police are investigating the crime scene, there might not even be a defendant who has a lawyer. There might be a suspect later.”

“It is all reversed in corporate cases. In some ways, you have to applaud prosecutors for taking more of these on. And you can understand why they need to negotiate these agreements. Without the cooperation of the companies, they might not easily get access to those documents and records to find out what happened.”

“It’s not a surprise that in the hardest cases to bring, in these antitrust cases where there is a cartel, they need special tools like the leniency program to crack that nut and encourage defection, encourage corporation-on-corporation snitching.”

“What you see is that prosecutors are able to bring more and more of these cases in areas where they can leverage their admittedly sometimes thin resources to produce more self-reporting and cooperation.”

“How are they supposed to find out about ocean dumping at sea? The statute has whistleblower provisions to encourage shipmates to come forward, take pictures on their cell phones and get a share of the fine.”

“And prosecutors offer companies similar rewards. They can say – we can offer you significant leniency if you come forward, self-report and cooperate – give us the documents and help us prosecute individual employees that committed wrongs.”

“If we really are going to take these difficult cases more seriously, it’s going to be a question of resources.”

“You would think those resources should flow to the prosecutors working on these cases, since they are, after all, bringing in significant fines and money.”

“I would like to learn more about the degree to which some of that can be sent back to the people doing these cases – so they have the resources to get more agents working on future cases.”

A Remarkable Week for Corporate Crime

The 10 Ten Stories

by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

 

It’s been a remarkable week in corporate crime.

And it’s only Wednesday.

This week drives home the reality – corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined.

Once again, it’s not the black kid with the hood on the street.

It’s the corporate executive with the lawyer in the suite.

So, without further ado, let’s go to the Top Ten Corporate Crime Stories of the Week.

Number Ten: Sunoco to Pay $2.2 Million to Resolve Double Dipping Charge. The Massachusetts Attorney General alleges that the oil company falsely sought reimbursement from a state reimbursement fund when it was also seeking reimbursement from its insurers.

Number Nine: Merck to Pay $322 Million Criminal Penalty. A federal judge in Boston ordered Merck to pay a $322 million criminal penalty for improperly marketing its Vioxx painkiller a decade ago.

Number Eight: Pharmacy Fraud Kills Three. Gary D. Osborn and his corporation, ApothéCure Inc., pled guilty in federal court in Dallas to criminal violations of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA). The pleas are in connection with ApothéCure’s interstate shipment of two lots of misbranded colchicine injectable solution that led to the deaths of three people in the Pacific Northwest.

Number Seven: Walgreens to Pay $7.9 Million to Settle Whsitleblower Lawsuit. Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain in the nation, has paid the United States and participating governments $7.9 million to settle allegations that it paid kickbacks to illegally induce the transfer of prescriptions to its pharmacies.

Number Six: Minnesota AG Takes Down Medical Debt Collection Agency. The Minnesota AG said that Accretive – one of the nation’s largest medical debt collectors – overstepped its bounds by embedding debt collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment.

Number Five: Military Contractor Rips Off the Army. ATK Launch Systems will pay $36,967,160 to resolve allegations that ATK sold dangerous and defective illumination flares to the Army and the Air Force.

Number Four: Freeport-McMoRan Pays $6.8 Million to Settle Pollution Charge. Freeport-McMoRan Morenci will pay $6.8 million to settle allegations that it polluted areas around its Morenci copper mine in southeastern Arizona. Federal officials alleged that surface waters, terrestrial habitat and wildlife, and migratory birds have been injured, destroyed or lost as a result of releases sulfuric acid and metals at the site.

Number Three: Giant Construction Company Ripped Off NYC. Australian construction giant Lend Lease Construction LMB Inc. – formerly Bovis Lend Lease LMB Inc. – and James Abadie, the former executive in charge of Bovis’s New York office, were criminally charged in a major fraud scheme. The company will pay $50 million and get a deferred prosecution agreement. Federal officials alleged that Abadie explicitly and fraudulently directed his subordinates to carry out the practice of adding unworked hours to labor foremen’s time sheets, knowing that these unworked hours were billed to clients who were unaware that they were the victims of fraud. Affected projects included – the United States Post Office/Bankruptcy Court in Brooklyn, New York, the Bronx Criminal Courthouse in the Bronx, New York, Grand Central Terminal, the Deutsche Bank building deconstruction in New York, New York, Citifield in Queens, New York, and the very United States Courthouse in which Bovis was charged and Abadie pled guilty.

Number Two: First Criminal Prosecution in BP Case is an Individual, not a Corporation. Kurt Mix, a former engineer for BP plc, was arrested on charges of intentionally destroying evidence requested by federal criminal authorities investigating the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon disaster. David Uhlmann, the former head of the Environmental Crimes Section at he Justice Department is puzzled why the government has yet to bring criminal charges against BP and the other companies involved. “The government has a slam dunk criminal case against BP, TransOcean and Halliburton for the negligence that caused the Gulf oil spill,” Uhlmann told Marketplace Radio yesterday “They should bring those criminal charges.”

Number one: Wal-Mart Bribery. The number one slot goes to Wal-Mart. In a shocker, New York Times reporter David Barstow penned a major investigative report on Wal-Mart bribery in Mexico. Paying $24 million in bribes to fuel Wal-Mart expansion in Mexico is a big deal. How Wal-Mart covered up the bribery in Mexico is a big deal. Wal-Mart had a state of the art anti-bribery compliance program. The New York Times story will likely put an end to the Chamber of Commerce’s drive to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and drive public support for more corporate crime prosecutions.

One lesson after living through this week in corporate crime?

Support your local police. Urge a crack down on corporate crime.

Whistleblower: BP Oil Platform Faces 'Present and Imminent Danger'

Saturday, March 17, 2012 by Common Dreams
Whistleblower claims about BP's Atlantis filed this week argue against Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's claims platform is safe

A whistleblower who has a standing lawsuit against BP has argued this week that the company's Atlantis Project, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, faces "present and imminent danger."

The whistleblower, Kenneth Abbott, is a former BP contractor on the Atlantis. His lawsuit says that BP failed to keep required records of the safety systems for the Atlantis.

Back in 2010, Food & Water Watch, which joined Abbott's lawsuit, warned that the massive Deepwater Horizon oil disaster foreshadowed another Gulf of Mexico disaster caused by BP's Atlantis platform. At that time, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, said, “We have evidence that Atlantis is unsafe and is in danger of creating an even worse spill than the one caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion.”

* * *

The Times-Picayune: BP Atlantis whistleblower alleges imminent safety threat for first time

BP Atlantis in 2006 (photo: munchicken) 

A whistleblower is alleging for the first time in a yearslong lawsuit against BP that its massive Atlantis oil platform operation off the Louisiana coast faces present and imminent danger. 

Kenneth Abbott first complained in 2009 that BP had failed to keep required records of the design of pressure-relief systems and other safety mechanisms onboard the Atlantis. [...] 

[T]he U.S. government joined in some of his claims when an independent reviewer justified many of Abbott's complaints. But BP, and later the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, determined that the lack of safety records did not pose any imminent threat. 

Abbott's latest filing in the Houston court this week argues otherwise. [...] 

[T]he Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released a report in March 2011 that declared the Atlantis rig safe, in spite of its failure to maintain proper records on board.

* * *

Food & Water Watch: Deepwater Horizon Accident Foreshadows a Potential Disaster Waiting to Happen in the Gulf

WASHINGTON - April 22 - Following Tuesday's explosion on the Deepwater Horizon Platform, leased and operated by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico, the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch is warning of the possibility of a similarly tragic disaster involving the company's Atlantis Project- one of the world's deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platforms, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Last year, a whistleblower and former company contractor alleged that the Atlantis platform has been operating without a large percentage of the engineer-approved documents needed for it to operate safely. An independent engineer later substantiated these concerns, concluding that a BP database showed that over 85 percent of the Atlantis Project's Piping and Instrument drawings lacked final engineer-approval, and that the project should be immediately shut down until those documents could be accounted for and are independently verified. 

"The tragic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon platform is an urgent reminder of the calamity that could occur if BP's Atlantis platform is operating without the approved documents necessary for ensuring its safety," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "This accident and the recent Massey mine disaster in West Virginia underscore a complete lack of regulatory oversight over the operations of the fossil fuel industry." 

BP has denied the whistleblower's assertions regarding Atlantis, going so far as to write a letter to Congressional staff saying that they are "unsubstantiated," even though internal documents show that in August 2008, BP management was aware of the problems and believed that the document deficiencies "could lead to catastrophic Operator error." An investigation conducted by the company's Ombudsman in April 2009 seems to substantiate the charges, although the investigation's results did not become known until this month. BP has never acknowledged that the Ombudsman conducted an investigation of the project's document deficiencies. 

"BP's recklessness in regards to the Atlantis project is a clear example of how the company has a pattern of failing to comply with minimum industry standards for worker and environmental safety," said Mike Sawyer, an Engineer at Apex Safety Consultants, who verified the contractor-turned-whistleblower's concerns about the company's lack of proper documents. 

In March 2010, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with overseeing the nation's offshore oil and gas platforms, announced that it would investigate these allegations in response to a letter from Representative Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and 18 of his colleagues calling for an investigation and a report on the findings issued to Congress. Food & Water Watch brought the situation to Representative Grijalva's attention in October of 2009. 

Last week, Food & Water Watch submitted a letter to MMS detailing the key issues that need to be addressed with MMS's investigation, highlighting the recently-surfaced information about BP's own Ombudsman investigation. The organization called on MMS to conduct a thorough investigation of the situation, including interviewing the contractor-turned whistleblower who unearthed these potential safety hazards, and to penalize BP to the fullest extent of the law. 

"The accident on the Horizon platform further highlights the importance of MMS's investigation of the Atlantis Project, as well as its regulation of offshore drilling activities in that area. As energy companies push to open more of the Outer Continental Shelf, MMS needs to make sure that companies like BP are operating safely and adhering to the law. If the agency does not adequately do so with its investigation of the BP Atlantis Project, the House Natural Resources Committee needs to hold oversight hearings and ensure that the explosion and mishap of the Horizon platform is not replicated," said Zach Corrigan, Food & Water Watch's senior staff attorney. 

Read Food & Water Watch's full timeline of the problems associated with the BP Atlantis Project here.

Whistleblower says BofA defrauded HAMP

By Jessica Dye - NEW YORK, March 7 | Wed Mar 7, 2012

(Reuters) - Bank of America NA prevented homeowners from receiving mortgage-loan modifications under a federal program in order to avoid millions of dollars in losses while benefitting from financial incentives for participating in the program, according to a complaint unsealed in federal court Wednesday.

The suit is the second whistleblower complaint unsealed so far with apparent ties to the $1 billion False Claims Act settlement announced by Bank of America and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York on February 9.

The Bank of America settlement is also part of the sweeping $25 billion agreement reached between state and federal authorities.

Final settlement documents have yet to be filed in the BoA settlement, which the U.S. Attorney's Office said was the largest ever False Claims Act payout related to mortgage fraud.

The settlement resolved claims that Bank of America's Countywide Financial subsidiaries defrauded the Federal Housing Administration by inflating appraisals used for government-insured home loans, as well as claims involving the Home Affordable Modification Program, a federal program to help American homeowners facing foreclosure.

The complaint unsealed Wednesday was filed by whistleblower Gregory Mackler, a Colorado resident who said he worked alongside Bank of America executives while an employee at Urban Lending Solutions, a company to which Bank of America contracted some of its HAMP work.

While working at Urban Lending, Mackler said he saw BofA and its loan servicing subsidiary, BAC Homes Loans Servicing LP, implement "business practices designed to intentionally prevent scores of eligible homeowners from becoming eligible or staying eligible for permanent HAMP modification."

The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners' documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged.

BoA let through just enough HAMP modifications to avert suspicion and allay congressional critics, while not enough to incur any substantial losses to its own bottom line, according to the complaint.

"In other words, BoA has had it both ways. BoA has continued to maximize the value of its mortgage portfolio with anti-HAMP modification practices and managed to make money by committing fraud on homeowner," the lawsuit said.

A lawyer for Mackler could neither confirm nor deny that the complaint was tied to the settlement. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office and a representative for Bank of America declined to comment.

In February, a whistleblower complaint was unsealed from Kyle Lagow, a former employee in a Countrywide appraisal unit which detailed allegations of Countrywide's "corrupt underwriting and appraisal process." Bank of America purchased Countywide in June 2008.

Under the False Claims Act, successful whistleblower complaints can earn that whistleblower up to 25 percent of the settlement amount.

According to the docket, the U.S. Department of Justice has until March 16 to decide whether to intervene in both the Mackler and Lagow case. The case is United States of America v. Bank of America NA et al., in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, no. 11-3270.