TBR News May 5, 2016

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. May 5 2016: “Now that Donald Trump has emerged as the Republican candidate for President, the once-hostile media is grudgingly shifting course. Ten years ago, Trump’s candidacy wouldn’t have lasted more than a week but the American public is so unhappy with its leadership and growing economic problems that Trump’s persona and messages resonate very loudly. Hillary Clinton is, by every account, a thoroughly unpleasant person and her unquestioned support of Israel will not endear her to the American public who has had enough of Israel’s vicious and disruptive conduct and her crude attempts to compel unquestioned support of her actions and her needs. There are two countries in the Middle East whose consistent aggressive conduct has created, and is creating destructive havoc. One is Israel and the other Saudi Arabia. If Trump is elected, one hopes that unquestioned and slavish support of these two irritants will cease.”

 

The Müller Washington Journals   1948-1951

At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office, also known as the Gestapo.

His name was Heinrich Müller.

Even as a young man, Heini Müller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.

This work is a translation of his complete journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.

When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland, James Kronthal in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.

Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.

The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.

 

Monday, 6 December 1948

The first week in Washington. I think I would have preferred to go to the tropics but it appears not to be. Impressive white buildings in one part of the city and terrible Negro slums in the rest. Contrasts are indicative of the attitude towards the social position of the former slaves. Ignore them. On the 8th the President will be talking to the President of Cuba about nothing but I am to see him as soon as my new chiefs of office will allow it. To begin to work on background material as soon as we have selected a proper house. Not considered a good idea for me to work in a regular office but at home.

Wednesday, 8 December 1948

Will move into a pleasant house in the Georgetown area. It is for sale but the government will rent it for me. It is an older house, more of a villa than a small house, but with a few servants and much better furniture, it will suffice. Thick piles of papers on the Chambers business to go over as well as preparing some material for the Justice Department based on my own papers. I will interview Colonel Hoover soon enough. It will be interesting to meet my opposite number, especially since I know a great deal about him but he knows almost nothing about me. Advantages are always better if you have them. Winter is not as bad here as it was in Munich but there are no mountains to hike in although they tell me that “out West” there are more than enough. I will have to wait on that.

Sunday, 12 December 1948

I went to Mass this morning. Should take up where I left off and establish my good relations with the Church. Three of my people will arrive here tomorrow. The State Department spy ring is far more extensive than I would have thought. Apparently, Roosevelt was fully aware of the penetration by communists and permitted it. The entire agency is filled from cellar to attic with Lenin-lovers. Typical pseudo-intellectual assholes; they are everywhere in Washington. Totally ignorant but well-born fools or intelligent radicals. I have no choice…I have to associate with the former and destroy the latter. The lease is signed, money paid and I am now awaiting the furniture. The crated paintings are safe enough here. Insisting on bringing them with me prevented some official thief from taking them home with him. The money situation is not at all bad but we must be careful not to let the idiots know how much I have or they will try to reduce my salary. Most of them don’t know the difference between an original Raphael and a Klee so I am more or less safe there although I cannot hang anything where it can be seen. The new place is bigger than the one in Geneva but I know there is a cemetery nearby. Well, we all end up in one sooner or later.

Oakhill Cemetery lies on the edge of Georgetown. Müller had a large and very expensive collection of rare art, much of which had been looted during the war by the Germans and after the war by the OSS and the CIA. He supplemented his income by dealing in such art, both for himself and his American friends.

Monday, 13 December 1948

The arrival of my staff people has been delayed for a week, making things rather difficult. Typical military stupidity. Someone obviously couldn’t read the papers correctly. I have set up a camp bed in the best bedroom and brought over all of my paintings. Even if I can’t hang them yet, it is pleasant enough to look at the crates. I have told T. (Truman, ed.) that there is no doubt at all that Hiss is the one the Soviets called ‘Alexi’ at least in the reports I have. He fits all the points very well. Such unhappiness.

I am told the President is not happy about the amount of espionage we have uncovered here. He thinks that by firing Wallace and closing down the OSS (which T. says stands for “Oh So Social” because it was full of socially prominent fools) he can clean up the Roosevelt sewer. I think not. I will have to talk to him about this…that is if they ever let me see him. I am told he is curious. Also that I must play the piano for him like a street musician’s pet monkey! Well, I can play a little Strauss and perhaps some simple Chopin.

This Chambers is a fat homosexual idiot but he put everyone right into the fire with his papers. Now they tell me that even before the war, he told the State Department about high-level espionage in the State Department but that Berle shut him up. When I told them that Berle worked with the Soviets, there was much head scratching and long faces.

We knew all their diplomatic codes were broken before the war by us, the British and the Soviets. That’s why I never liked to send coded messages and I refused to use our telephone system because it was like an old garden hose. Too many leaks. They tell me Hoover listens to everyone, or used to. Truman hates him and considers him to be a debased timeserver and informer. Who isn’t? Truman did not receive a majority in the election, only 49% but he did win which is important. I remember a conversation with Ribbentrop once about hunting. He said he had missed an elk by “just a centimeter” but he did miss and the distance isn’t important.

FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, is called “Colonel” by Müller. Hoover was offered this rank by Roosevelt during the war but declined the honor, expecting to be made a General at least. Hoover, at Roosevelt’s instruction, tapped the telephones of official Washington and rushed the results to Roosevelt. He attempted to do this with Truman but was ordered to cease this practice at once and Truman refused to have any dealings with Hoover. Adolf Berle, Jr. was one of the “Brain Trusters” of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Undersecretary of State under Hull. He has been identified as a Soviet source.

 

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2016, Issue No. 39

May 3, 2016

PUNISHING LEAKS THROUGH ADMINISTRATIVE CHANNELS

The Obama Administration has famously prosecuted more individuals for unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media than all of its predecessors combined. But behind the scenes, it appears to have sought administrative penalties for leaks — rather than criminal ones — with equal or greater vigor.

“This Administration has been historically active in pursuing prosecution of leakers, and the Intelligence Community fully supports this effort,” said ODNI General Counsel Robert S. Litt in testimony from a closed hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2012 that was released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

But, he said, “prosecution of unauthorized disclosure cases is often beset with complications, including difficult problems of identifying the leaker, the potential for confirming or revealing even more classified information in a public trial, and graymail by the defense.”

Therefore, Mr. Litt said, in 2011 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper ordered intelligence agencies “to pursue administrative investigations and sanctions against identified leakers wherever appropriate. Pursuant to this DNI directive, individual agencies are instructed to identify those leak incidents that are ripe for an administrative disposition….”

Administrative penalties could include termination of employment, loss of security clearance, fines, or other adverse consequences. The number of individuals who were in fact sanctioned as a result of the ensuing “emphasis on administrative dispositions of leak investigations” was not disclosed. But “by advocating for administrative action in appropriate cases, the DNI hopes that more leakers will be sanctioned, and others similarly situated will be deterred,” he said at that time.

The 2012 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing pre-dated the classified disclosures in 2013 by Edward Snowden, who was obviously not deterred.

In a 2014 memorandum, Homeland Security Advisor Lisa O. Monaco said that “Recent unauthorized disclosures have unfortunately underscored the need to vigilantly safeguard our Nation’s most sensitive intelligence information.” The memo detailed numerous “near-term measures… aimed at further reducing the risk of additional high-impact disclosures.”

Yet “technical fixes alone cannot fully mitigate the threat posed by a determined insider,” she wrote. “As a result, [the corrective steps] include measures to improve business practices, enhance the security culture across the workforce, and reduce the unique risks associated with ‘privileged’ users.”

See “Near-term Measures to Reduce the Risk of High-Impact Unauthorized Disclosures,” memorandum from Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco, February 11, 2014.

The actual efficacy of the measures described, some of which are still being gradually implemented, has not been publicly reported.

JUDGE GARLAND’S JURISPRUDENCE, AND MORE FROM CRS

A new report from the Congressional Research Service examines Judge Merrick Garland’s approach to various domains of the law in an attempt to assess what the impact would be if his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court were ever confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

“The report focuses on those areas of law where Justice Scalia can be seen to have influenced the High Court’s approach to particular issues, or served as a fifth and deciding vote on the Court, with a view toward how Judge Garland might approach that same issue if he were to be confirmed.”

The report addresses Judge Garland’s treatment of 14 topical areas of law, including civil rights, environmental law, and freedom of the press. See Judge Merrick Garland: His Jurisprudence and Potential Impact on the Supreme Court, April 27, 2016.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

The First Responder Network (FirstNet) and Next-Generation Communications for Public Safety: Issues for Congress, updated April 28, 2016

Dominican Republic: Update on Citizenship and Humanitarian Issues, CRS Insight, April 27, 2016

Oman: Reform, Security, and U.S. Policy, updated April 26, 2016

Private Flood Insurance in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), CRS Insight, April 25, 2016

Clean Power Plan: Legal Background and Pending Litigation in West Virginia v. EPA, April 27, 2016

Corporate Expatriation, Inversions, and Mergers: Tax Issues, updated April 27, 2016

The Buy American Act–Preferences for “Domestic” Supplies: In Brief, updated April 26, 2016

Zika Response Funding: In Brief, updated April 28, 2016

Traditional and Roth Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs): A Primer, updated April 27, 2016

U.S. Manufacturing in International Perspective, updated April 26, 2016

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative: Lessons Learned and Issues for Congress, April 27, 2016

 

Inside the Assassination Complex

Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance

May 3 2016

by Edward Snowden

The Intercept

“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)

We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting — in other words, in a way that empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that “state secrets” are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won’t always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote killing operations, as “cutting the grass.”)

A single act of whistleblowing doesn’t change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society — if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that injustice — they might still be held to account. The thread by which good governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.

Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has existed for as long as our government.

Not all leaks are alike, nor are their makers. Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, provided his illicit lover and favorable biographer information so secret it defied classification, including the names of covert operatives and the president’s private thoughts on matters of strategic concern. Petraeus was not charged with a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but was instead permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Had an enlisted soldier of modest rank pulled out a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend to secure so much as a smile, he’d be looking at many decades in prison, not a pile of character references from a Who’s Who of the Deep State.

There are authorized leaks and also permitted disclosures. It is rare for senior administration officials to explicitly ask a subordinate to leak a CIA officer’s name to retaliate against her husband, as appears to have been the case with Valerie Plame. It is equally rare for a month to go by in which some senior official does not disclose some protected information that is beneficial to the political efforts of the parties but clearly “damaging to national security” under the definitions of our law.

This dynamic can be seen quite clearly in the al Qaeda “conference call of doom” story, in which intelligence officials, likely seeking to inflate the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, revealed to a neoconservative website extraordinarily detailed accounts of specific communications they had intercepted, including locations of the participating parties and the precise contents of the discussions. If the officials’ claims were to be believed, they irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of learning the precise plans and intentions of terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a news cycle. Not a single person seems to have been so much as disciplined as a result of the story that cost us the ability to listen to the alleged al Qaeda hotline.

If harmfulness and authorization make no difference, what explains the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?

The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it’s not seen as a threat, as a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all of the disparate components of the institution — not just its head but its hands and feet, every part of its body — must be assumed to have the same power to discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern political monopoly of information control, particularly if we’re talking about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful activities. If you can’t guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world’s unmentionables — including your own — begins to look more like a liability than an asset.

Truly unauthorized disclosures are necessarily an act of resistance — that is, if they’re not done simply for press consumption, to fluff up the public appearance or reputation of an institution. However, that doesn’t mean they all come from the lowest working level. Sometimes the individuals who step forward happen to be near the pinnacle of power. Ellsberg was in the top tier; he was briefing the secretary of defense. You can’t get much higher, unless you are the secretary of defense, and the incentives simply aren’t there for such a high-ranking official to be involved in public interest disclosures because that person already wields the influence to change the policy directly.

At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior enlisted soldier, who was much nearer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the professional career path. I sat down at the table with the chief information officer of the CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief technology officer when they were publicly making statements like “We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” and everybody still thought that was a cute business slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems they would use to do precisely that. I wasn’t briefing the policy side, the secretary of defense, but I was briefing the operations side, the National Security Agency’s director of technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all levels of insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.

Reaching those individuals, helping them realize that their first allegiance as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the challenge. That’s a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government worker today.

I’ve argued that whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It’s not a virtue of who you are or your background. It’s a question of what you are exposed to, what you witness. At that point the question becomes Do you honestly believe that you have the capability to remediate the problem, to influence policy? I would not encourage individuals to reveal information, even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe they can be effective in doing so, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.

This is simply a pragmatic, strategic consideration. Whistleblowers are outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political force, it’s critical that they maximize the amount of public good produced from scarce seed. When I was making my decision, I came to understand how one strategic consideration, such as waiting until the month before a domestic election, could become overwhelmed by another, such as the moral imperative to provide an opportunity to arrest a global trend that had already gone too far. I was focused on what I saw and on my sense of overwhelming disenfranchisement that the government, in which I had believed for my entire life, was engaged in such an extraordinary act of deception.

At the heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing is a radicalizing event — and by “radical” I don’t mean “extreme”; I mean it in the traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue. At some point you recognize that you can’t just move a few letters around on a page and hope for the best. You can’t simply report this problem to your supervisor, as I tried to do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous. They think about the structural risk to their career. They’re concerned about rocking the boat and “getting a reputation.” The incentives aren’t there to produce meaningful reform. Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to flow from the bottom to the top.

As someone who works in the intelligence community, you’ve given up a lot to do this work. You’ve happily committed yourself to tyrannical restrictions. You voluntarily undergo polygraphs; you tell the government everything about your life. You waive a lot of rights because you believe the fundamental goodness of your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the sacred. It’s a just cause.

And when you’re confronted with evidence — not in an edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program — that the government is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you’ve sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?

One of the extraordinary things about the revelations of the past several years, and their accelerating pace, is that they have occurred in the context of the United States as the “uncontested hyperpower.” We now have the largest unchallenged military machine in the history of the world, and it’s backed by a political system that is increasingly willing to authorize any use of force in response to practically any justification. In today’s context that justification is terrorism, but not necessarily because our leaders are particularly concerned about terrorism in itself or because they think it’s an existential threat to society. They recognize that even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of resources to respond to those more significant threats.

What it really comes down to is the political reality that we have a political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism — of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously — than they are of the crime itself.

As a result we have arrived at this unmatched capability, unrestrained by policy. We have become reliant upon what was intended to be the limitation of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are suddenly charged with much greater political importance and impact than was originally intended, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of the executive in the national security context and setting restrictive precedents that, even if entirely proper, would impose limits on government for decades or more. That means the most powerful institution that humanity has ever witnessed has also become the least restrained. Yet that same institution was never designed to operate in such a manner, having instead been explicitly founded on the principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, “Though we are mighty, we are voluntarily restrained.”

When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.

These disclosures about the Obama administration’s killing program reveal that there’s a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.

Traditionally, in the context of military affairs, we’ve always understood that lethal force in battle could not be subjected to ex ante judicial constraints. When armies are shooting at each other, there’s no room for a judge on that battlefield. But now the government has decided — without the public’s participation, without our knowledge and consent — that the battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who don’t represent an imminent threat in any meaningful sense of those words are redefined, through the subversion of language, to meet that definition.

Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the technology that enables officials to promote comfortable illusions about surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance. Take, for instance, the Holy Grail of drone persistence, a capability that the United States has been pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put any typical signals collection device on the bottom of it to monitor, unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route. Once you know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over several cities, you’re tracking the movements not just of individuals but of whole populations.

Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American.

By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it’s so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.

Here we see the double edge of our uniquely American brand of nationalism. We are raised to be exceptionalists, to think we are the better nation with the manifest destiny to rule. The danger is that some people will actually believe this claim, and some of those will expect the manifestation of our national identity, that is, our government, to comport itself accordingly.

Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American. It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.

The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they have seen that they’re willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.

And there are more of us than there are of them.

 

Blame it on the Zodiac killer: did social media ruin Ted Cruz’s campaign?

For the first time in the election cycle, community-generated memes have played a significant role in political discourse – similar to the classic printed cartoon

May 4, 2016

by Leigh Alexander

The Guardian

When Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race after losing in Indiana, he said there was no “viable path to victory”. But, really, anybody who isn’t a Republican would probably tell you something different: it was the handshake. And probably also that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer.

This Vine of Cruz fumbling toward a “triumphant” hand clasp with running mate Carly Fiorina has been viewed more than 3.5m times (even though we assume most people viewed it more than once). It’s been edited from the original video to highlight the strangeness: tendril fingers slithering and grasping awkwardly for each other, like Cthulhu hand puppets. It takes an unbearably long time for the pair to get their fists into the air.

There are so many incarnations of the original moment constellating across Twitter, Facebook and other platforms that it’s impossible to track its penetration – but empirically, it’s quite difficult to avoid.

It’s probably absurd to assume that one internet meme could end someone’s political career. But what about lots of them?

“Skewered by social media memes” is the essential story of the Cruz campaign, and the gleeful and prolific satires of the ordinary citizens’ online community surely played a role in exaggerating the candidate’s inherent strangeness, sketching him as a grotesque figure vulnerable to his rivals.

Aside from the persistent and fascinating Zodiac killer meme galleries, here are 13 characters and animals that purportedly look like Cruz, including a blobfish, Grandpa Munster, the Penguin from Batman, and “dogs stung by bees”. Let’s add one more: this famous drawing of France’s King Louis Philippe, in a political cartoon by Honore Daumier dating all the way back to 1803. The unflattering lithograph, called Gargantua, was a protest of corruption and was obscene for its time, depicting Philippe gobbling bags of gold that flow uphill to his gaping mouth. The artist was jailed for his trouble – but the work remains an example of the early impact of political cartoons, which came into their own as a form during the 1800s.

For the first time in a US election cycle, community-generated memes have grown to play a significant role in political discourse, similar to the classic printed cartoon. The anarchic, youth-led online shorthand – which can encompass images with text captions, familiar iconography repurposed in multiple contexts, or even short animations such as gifs and Vines – is no longer just for young people on image boards and in closed groups. In fact, it may even be a sign of how politically engaged young people are today: they’re generating their own image-based political satires. In these memes, the political figure is exaggerated, his context made grotesque or fantastical, just as in traditional political cartooning.

If we agree that memes have played some role, even a small one, in dispossessing the Cruz campaign of dignity, then we can also look at how memes have helped rally disenfranchised youth around progressive candidate Bernie Sanders. A Facebook group called Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash (where “dank” is an ironic synonym for cool) has close to 450,000 members devoted mostly to pro-Sanders memes – and to those skewering Cruz, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in mostly equal measure.

One of the most popular meme formats that went viral thanks to the group is called “Bernie or Hillary?”, which depicts a fake campaign poster comparing the two candidates’ stances on popular culture topics: Bernie is usually depicted as being relatable or knowledgeable on the issue, while Hillary gives an embarrassing stock answer.

Hillary believes the Olive Garden is “An authentic Italian restaurant for the whole family” while Bernie’s view is “Only when I’m high.” My personal favorite incarnation depicts Bernie with a traditional Royal Dansk tin full of actual butter cookies, while Hillary classically uses hers to hold sewing equipment. It’s so subtle, recapturing the childhood disappointment of finding something boring instead of a treat.

The memes are funny, but they’re also precise and insightful caricatures of actual reservations regarding one liberal candidate versus another. Ultimately the community is more than a humor group; the idiosyncratic satirist CARLES not-so-jokingly suggested that Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash could be “a safe haven for those who need reinforcement from non-establishment media streams”.

According to the online meme library Know Your Meme, the Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash was created in October 2015 by college students Will Dowd and Sean Walsh. Meme scientist Ari Spool, who spent many years researching and cataloguing memes at Know Your Meme (though she recently joined Giphy as community curator), has studied the BSDMS closely and notes that age polls that take place in the group seem to suggest participants “overwhelmingly” volunteer their age as 18 to 21.

“It’s a completely different generation than those who voted for Obama the first time,” she says. “These kids don’t remember 9/11; all they have felt were aftershocks, and the effects on their older siblings, the millennials. Our college debt is something they see and understand the full breadth of before they even get into a school, and our difficulty in finding quality work is something they see, too. Let’s not even get started on institutional racism; I didn’t have a newsfeed in high school but they do, and it’s making them ‘woke af’.”

The engagement around memes as political cartoons may even suggest a more passionate youth vote than ever. “Young people are incredibly engaged in political speech, but they are very often thwarted by a system that refuses to support them physically. … You have to show up in person to vote, the system favors the old and stable over the young and unstable,” says Spool, who once campaigned for mayor in New York City. “I think if you analyze what these memes are saying about Bernie, it’s that people are excited because he doesn’t reflect the system that’s currently in place.”

Nonetheless, there are memes alternately celebrating and denigrating any candidate; the Texts From Hillary meme, in contrast to the tenor of the BSDMS, uses an image of Clinton wearing sunglasses and texting to present her as competent and in charge (“Hi Hil, whatchu doing,” Obama texts; “Running the world,” she replies). There’s even a Ted Cruz Meme Page that up until now has been dedicated to earnestly pro-Cruz memes (Keep Calm and Cruz On is one) but as of the candidate’s exit is devoted to anti-Trump ones.

These new communal political cartoons are a clear component of the present landscape – though their impact is harder to quantify (while Facebook networks swelled with anti-Trump memes and disturbing gifs, he imperviously became the presumptive Republican nominee).

“The meme universe is all about mutability, and the flexibility to express your opinion,” Spool says. “It’s not just about Bernie and Hillary, but whatever the other element in the meme is. That’s what makes it fun.”

 

‘Islam does not belong in Germany’: 60% agree with AfD

May 5, 2016

RT

Political rivals may brand the right-wing German party AfD xenophobic for claiming that there is “no place for Islam in Germany” in its political program, but 60 percent of the country’s citizens agree with the idea, according to a new poll.

Conducted by the newspaper Bild together with research institute INSA, the poll showed a dramatic change in the attitude of the German population to Islam over the past year. In January 2015, 37 percent of people said that Islam had a place in Germany, but the figure in the latest poll dropped by 15 percentage points to just 22 percent.

The suspicion towards Islam is overwhelming among AfD voters, 92 percent of whom supported their party’s stance, but was spread among members of other parties as well. Only supporters of the Green party were more in favor of Islam than against it (42 percent vs 39 percent).

The negative attitude toward the religion does not directly translate into mistrust toward those adhering to it however. Less than 30 percent said they would not like to live alongside Muslim people, while almost half said they were fine with it.

What the attitude toward Islam does appear to reflect is the fear of so-called “Islamization.” Forty-six percent of Germans said they were concerned that their country could be taken over by proponents of political Islam.

The AfD, or Alternative for Germany, adopted its new party program last week, which has an entire section called “Islam is not part of Germany.” Among other things, the party wants to ban the construction of mosques and public wearing of the burqa, the full-cover clothing women wear in some Muslim countries.

Critics accuse AfD of playing the xenophobic card and preying on people’s fears. The Council of Muslims in Germany has compared the party’s ideas to Nazi ideology. Still, the AfD won elections in three regions recently.

Germany is among the European countries hit hardest by the ongoing refugee crisis. Last year, over 1 million asylum seekers arrived in the country from the Middle East. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government declared an open door policy towards refugees, but as problems and costs associated with the inflow of impoverished foreigners started to escalate, the EU sought help from Turkey to curb and reverse the inflow. Brussels promised financial aid and political concessions to Ankara in exchange for halting the flow of refugees and agreeing to take back those whom the Europeans want to deport.

 

Majority of Germans oppose TTIP, survey shows

A new survey shows that most Germans are concerned about the trade deal between the European Union and the US. As anger over the agreement rises, police have ordered a TTIP reading space in Berlin to be shut down.

May 4, 2016

DW

A new poll published on Wednesday assessing German attitudes toward the government found that a clear majority of people view the trade deal as harmful and worry it could undermine consumer protection.

According to the survey, conducted by German broadcaster ARD, 70 percent of the participants said they believe the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has more disadvantages than it does advantages. That’s a steep increase from the 2014 survey, which found that 55 percent of Germans viewed the agreement negatively.

Seventeen percent of participants said they saw the deal as being advantageous for Germany, while 13 percent said they didn’t know or had no position.

Additionally, 79 percent of the survey’s participants said they believed the agreement would hurt consumer protection, while 83 percent expressed dissatisfaction with the secretive way in which the government handled the negotiations.

Growing anger over leaked documents

The poll comes several days after the Dutch chapter of the environmental organization Greenpeace leaked secret documents showing the US vantage point of the deal. The organization highlighted the heavy pressure the US was putting on the EU to allow genetically modified food, known as GMOs, into Europe.

During an internet conference in Berlin, Greenpeace trade expert Jürgen Knirsch emphasized that EU legislation couldn’t be adopted if there were clear negative consequences on humans, animals or the environment.

This past weekend, Greenpeace set up a special “TTIP reading space” in front of the Brandenburg Gate so that passersby could read the documents, which were authenticated by journalists and researchers.

On Wednesday, German police shut down the reading space, something confirmed by Greenpeace on Twitter. “Berlin police close “TTIP reading room”, we’ll keep you posted!” the organization said.

Negotiations over the trade agreement between the US and the EU have been ongoing for years, but have met with controversy in Europe over issues ranging from labor standards to its harmful environmental impacts. Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, has remained optimistic that the agreement will be approved sometime this year.

 

 

Ted Cruz, the master strategist, was no match for Trump’s cult of personality

Cruz achieved many ambitious goals before dropping out of the race after his loss in Indiana – but he had no way to cope with the strange allure of Trump

May 5, 2016

by Ben Jacobs

The Guardian

Ted Cruz did everything right in his campaign for the White House. He built a happy campaign operation that achieved all of its ambitious goals. Cruz elbowed out candidate after candidate to consolidate support among social conservatives, Tea Partiers and libertarians in the Republican field. He raised considerable amounts of money to build a political apparatus unrivalled in the GOP field.

There was only one problem. Every successful move, every stratagem that took Cruz – who dropped out of the presidential race on Tuesday night after a disastrous loss in Indiana – from an ambitious Ivy Leaguer to one of the final three Republican candidates for the presidency prevented him from attaining the ultimate goal.

The Texas Republican was elected to the Senate in 2012 after winning a bitter primary as a Tea Party candidate. He was positioning himself for a White House bid almost from the get-go, travelling to Iowa for presidential cattle calls less than six months into taking office. In a legislative body that values tradition, Cruz’s undisguised ambition didn’t help him make friends. But what really alienated colleagues was his push to shut down the government in October 2013 in an attempt to defund Obamacare, the president’s signature healthcare reforms. The quixotic effort alienated almost all of his colleagues who were left calling him a “wacko bird” and viewed him as an amoral opportunist who would do anything for his own political gain.

Cruz did nothing to alter his image when he became the first candidate for the White House in 2016 to announce his campaign, in an event at Liberty University in Virginia in March last year. He was then racing to beat competitors with stronger roots in Iowa – such as Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee – to be the first out of the starting gate.

Cruz’s message that day was consistent with what the Texas senator would say every day on the campaign trail until the moment he withdrew from the race in Indianapolis on Tuesday. He told a crowd of college students: “I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America” and pledged to “reclaim the Constitution”.

In fact, Cruz’s campaign was remarkable for its consistency. There was only one key issue on which Cruz changed his message significantly in the course of the campaign – Donald J Trump.

For months after Trump’s entry into the race, Cruz engaged in a virtual bear hug with the New York billionaire. Immediately after Trump said that Cruz’s Senate colleague John McCain, a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, was not a hero, Cruz called him a friend.

He told reporters in Iowa in July 2015: “I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican on Republican violence. So you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump or bad about John McCain or bad about anybody else. I am not going to do it. John McCain is a friend of mine. I respect and admire him. He is an American hero. Donald Trump is a friend of mine.”

In contrast, then-candidate Rick Perry immediately condemned Trump and called on him to drop out of the race.

This pattern continued throughout 2015. As late as December, Cruz even tweeted that he thought Trump was terrific – long after other candidates had begun to condemn the frontrunner’s rhetoric.

But eventually, after Cruz’s win in the Iowa caucuses, the two turned to focus on each other. Cruz targeted Trump as a “New York liberal” who was no more a conservative than Hillary Clinton. After Trump had endured months of attacks for failing to adhere to conservative orthodoxy, this had little impact.

But Trump’s labeling of Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted” – based on the campaign rushing to inform Iowans that Ben Carson might drop out of the race after misconstruing a report on CNN just minutes before the caucuses were scheduled to begin – did have some effect.

The result was that exit poll after exit poll showed that voters thought Cruz ran a dirtier campaign than Trump and the Texas senator’s favorability numbers dropped with Republicans.

This happened even though the most personal attacks came from Trump, not Cruz. Trump tweeted an unflattering image of Cruz’s wife and threatened to “spill the beans on her” and, on the day of the Indiana primary, implied Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy. A campaign surrogate even repeatedly referenced a totally unproven tabloid story about Cruz’s personal life at multiple Trump rallies

In contrast, Cruz insisted that he was merely going after Trump’s record when he slammed the frontrunner’s past support for abortion rights and gun control and current support for allowing grown men “alone in bathrooms with little girls”, ie his contention that transgender people should use whichever bathroom they felt appropriate.

Like other candidates in the race, Cruz had no way to cope with Trump’s strange political jujitsu. Even as Cruz out-organized Trump on the ground, it was to little avail. The Texas senator’s campaign concentrated on Illinois in the final days before the 15 March primary after poll numbers showed him solidly ahead in North Carolina and Missouri.

However, the backlash among Republican voters after unrest at a canceled Trump rally in Chicago led to the frontrunner surging in the polls there, and Cruz was shut out in those crucial primaries as a result.

Cruz’s only hope was to somehow unite the GOP behind him. As the last remaining opponent to Trump, he should have been the standard bearer for the Stop Trump forces, and indeed some longtime detractors like Lindsey Graham – who had joked about him being murdered on the Senate floor just a week earlier – begrudgingly endorsed him.

As Jimmy Kimmel joked to Cruz in late March: “Yeah, what you did is you kind of held out until they found someone that they liked less than you.”

Cruz responded by saying: “There you go. It is a powerful strategy.” The problem was the strategy didn’t work.

The antagonism Cruz inspired among many mainstream Republicans made this a near impossible task. They sat on their hands and viewed Cruz as just as bad as Trump. The same factors that got him to the brink of the Republican nomination, his disdain for the “Washington cartel” and impatience with politics as usual, kept him from grasping the ring.

After a campaign in which he appealed to conservatives who were tired of voting for the lesser of two evils, Cruz could never win over those establishment Republicans he had spent the past year calling the lesser evil. That became undeniable this Tuesday.

 

Turkish economy in hard times with bad debt and bankruptcies

May 4, 2016

RT

Boosted by credit and domestic consumption for years, Turkey’s economy faces a slowdown due to rising bad loans and bankruptcies.

The country’s economy is expected to grow 3.5 percent this year, well below the peak of near double digits in the early years of Erdogan’s government.

Foreign investors are struggling with banks hesitant to extend new credit, pinching the most indebted companies. Some 240 companies have appealed for relief from creditors in the first months of the year, almost as many as in the whole of 2015, according to sirketnews.com, which compiles the data.

Last year, Istanbul-based pulses manufacturer Sezon Pirinc filed for bankruptcy as banks had called their loans early.

Dairy firm Aynes Gida applied for bankruptcy in January defaulting on payment of its $18 million (50 million lira) bond. Supermarket chain Begendik filed for bankruptcy after a deal fell through to purchase 10 stores from the Turkish unit of Britain’s Tesco. Atalar Giyim, a century-old clothing retailer, went out of business in April.

Smaller companies are struggling after the government sharply lifted the minimum wage by 30 percent.

The number of registered employees declined by 379,000 or 2.7 percent in January, according to the data provided by think tank TEPAV, with two-thirds of the drop in small and medium-sized businesses.

The government promised to boost productivity and investment in industry, but reforms are too sluggish, according to the economists.

“The decline in companies’ profits indicates we have to take new steps,” said Finance Minister Naci Agbal last month, adding that the reasons lie not only in circumstantial factors but also in structural ones.

The average NPL (non-performing loans) ratio rose to 3.3 percent in the first quarter from 2.8 percent a year ago. Small and medium-size companies showed the biggest surge in bad debts totaling 4.4 percent.

Turkey saw a sharp decline in tourism revenues due to a significant decrease in the number of holiday makers from Russia and Germany amid rising security concerns. The country’s tourism sector decreased by 16.5 percent in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period of 2015.

 

Turkey’s President Erdogan attacks Barack Obama for criticising press crackdown ‘behind my back’

Obama had voiced criticism of Turkey’s media clampdown

April 3, 2016

by Will Worley

The Independent/UK

President Tayyip Erdogan has hit back at comments made by Barack Obama about press freedom in Turkey, saying the US President spoke out “behind my back”.

Mr Obama said on Friday that he was “troubled” by the Turkish government’s control of the media, while attending the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.

Turkey ranks 149th out of 180 countries on the 2015 World Press Freedom Index and has been subject to strong criticism by media advocacy groups over the clampdown on journalism.

“I was saddened to hear that statement made behind my back,” Mr Erdogan told reporters. “During my talk with Obama, those [press freedom] issues did not come up.”

He added: “You cannot consider insults and threats [to be covered by] press freedom.”

On Friday, Mr Obama admitted he was concerned by the crackdown.

“It’s no secret that there are some trends within Turkey that I have been troubled with,” Mr Obama said.

“I think the approach they have been taking toward the press is one that could lead Turkey down a path that would be very troubling.”

Mr Obama said he had expressed these sentiments to Erdogan “directly” but this was denied by Mr Erdogan.

Mr Erdogan also referred to a mysterious foreign ‘mastermind’ seeking to destroy Turkey.

He said criticism of Turkey’s press record was an attempt to “divide, shatter and if they could, swallow up Turkey”. “This is what I mean by mastermind. A mastermind is playing games over Turkey.”

Recently, the Turkish state has seized control of opposition newspapers and TV channels and cut the satellite feed of a pro-Kurdish channel, accusing them of terrorism-related activities.

Turkey has also drawn international condemnation for charging two journalists with treason for publishing footage that allegedly showed intelligence officers shipping truckloads of weapons to opposition fighters in Syria in early 2014. Can Dundar and Erdem Gul of Cumhuriyet newspaper face life in prison if found guilty, but their court hearing will be done in secret.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said at least 13 reporters are in jail in Turkey for their reporting and spoken of a “massive crackdown” and harassment of media-business owners.

Mr Erdogan has personally brought more than 1,800 criminal suits against individuals, including journalists and children, for insulting him since becoming president in 2014.

Even on the trip to Washington, there were reports of journalists trying to cover the summit being physically and verbally assaulted by Mr Erdogan’s security team

 

Gender-Neutral Draft Registration Would Create Millions of Female Felons

It’s unlikely any would face prison, but jailed draft resisters and former officials urge caution.

May 3, 2016,

by Steven Nelson

US News

A key congressional committee voted last week to require young women to register for potentially compulsory military service, but the gender-equalizing reform threatens to make felons out of women who refused to participate.

Though prosecutions currently appear unlikely, men jailed for not registering with the Selective Service System and some former authorities who participated in the cases are concerned about criminalizing a large swath of the population.

Enforcement wasn’t always lax, and the law that may be applied to women allows for five-year prison sentences for “knowing and willful” non-registration with an equally long statute of limitations.

“It will inevitably lead to massive resistance, whether visible in the streets or women just blowing it off the way men have,” says Edward Hasbrouck, prosecuted for not registering in the 1980s. “Congress is smoking crack if they think women can be forced to register.”

Hasbrouck served more than four months in prison after catching the eye of an ambitious federal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, who went on to be FBI director. He originally received a suspended sentence, but recalls an unamused judge sending him to prison in late 1984 for doing peace activism to satisfy court-ordered community service.

Hasbrouck considers himself an areligious anarcho-pacifist, but his explanation for refusing to register could come from a run-of-the-mill libertarian: “I had no intention of enslaving myself to the government.”

Young men were forced to register by President Jimmy Carter, who issued Proclamation 4771 in 1980 requiring all men age 18 to 26 to register within 30 days of their 18th birthday. Carter did so in response to the Soviet Union sending troops to shore up local communists in Afghanistan, reversing President Gerald Ford’s earlier proclamation ending registration.

Current registration compliance rates hover around 90 percent among young men nationally, but in the ’80s authorities hit a road bump trying to re-establish the conscription tool not used since 1973. Just 70 percent of the 1.5 million young men who were supposed to have registered in the first 10 months of 1981 did so.

The government was “faced with far more people who had initially refused to register in the start-up period than they had ever imagined — it was beyond their worst nightmare — they were self-deluded in the way people today who think they can just wave their wand and women will sign up for the draft are self-deluded,” Hasbrouck says.

“They thought the best way to create the impression they had scared everyone into registering was to go after a small group and have well publicized prosecutions of the most vocal non-registrants,” he recalls. “So they seized upon the people who already wrote them letters and said they won’t register.”

Dan Rutt, a Christian pacifist raised a Methodist but with Mennonite family history, says he was targeted after writing letters to officials and giving an interview to a local newspaper. He says he can’t recall anyone else in Michigan self-publicizing their refusal.

“In my book, I couldn’t register under any circumstances. I’m just not going to participate in the war machine, it’s as simple as that,” he says. “I’m a Christian who believes the example and commandment of Jesus is very specific.”

Conscientious objectors and people with physical disabilities still must register with the Selective Service, and if there’s a war can later apply to avoid combat.

Rutt ended up being sentenced to a few months in a federal detention facility in Detroit, but says he was allowed work release and drove 70 miles to work every day.

In all, 20 men were prosecuted in the 1980s for not registering, a diverse and geographically scattered group including ideological advocates of individual rights and members of the historical peace churches.

The last indictment came in 1986 when Terry Kuelper of Arkansas was slapped with the felony charge. He agreed to register before trial and the charge was dismissed. Court proceedings ended when Gillam Kerley of Wisconsin was released  from a three-year prison sentence after four months, with the case ending in 1988.

In practice, all of the men prosecuted, with the exception of a Laotian refugee, wrote officials letters announcing their decision, allowing the Justice Department to pick low hanging fruit from the masses of men who had not registered. In 1985 the Supreme Court found in Wayte v. U.S. prosecutions did constitute unconstitutional selective prosecution stemming from the exercise of First Amendment rights.

“Since I was the one who was testifying I was seen as a real bad guy,” says former Selective Service associate director Edward Frankle, who developed a process for passive enforcement of the registration law.

Men who wrote letters or were informed on by others were entered into a Suspected Violator Inventory System and were given a chance to reconsider before being referred to the Justice Department if they refused.

Frankle says he understands the impulse to treat women like men, but says it’s unlikely there’s a military need and it may not be worth the drama.

“What are the actual chances of that being needed?” he says. “Is it worth whatever kerfuffle you build up from starting it and having the potential of turning people into criminals?”

Frankle says he believes the Selective Service System received fewer letters from registration resisters after successful prosecutions, and that he’s not sure if he would have done anything different.

“We did what we had to to keep at least some level of credibility in the system,” he says. “You couldn’t just totally ignore it — how could you do that and still with a straight face say, ‘Yeah that’s the requirement’?”

Frankle says he was shown the door by the Reagan administration, perhaps on the grounds he was too keen on due process for law-breakers. He went on to be NASA’s long-serving general counsel.

In the late ’80s the Justice Department discontinued prosecutions. Dick Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service who was with the agency at the time, recalls the Justice Department “decided that since there was no draft and there was high compliance, there are limited resources and the FBI’s time would be better spent chasing white collar crime than some Mennonite kid through Pennsylvania.”

“We said, ‘Fine, we understand,’ and that’s why it ended in ‘88,” he says. “The agency did agree to what the Justice Department proposed, a suspension of prosecutions [during peace time]. Since they did the prosecutions we didn’t have much leverage anyways. However, it’s still illegal, it’s still a felony if convicted.”

Flahavan says the Selective Service had hoped for a much stronger approach from federal prosecutors, but was rebuffed. Compliance had risen above 90 percent and new non-criminal penalties were in place.

“What we would have preferred was every year in all 95 judicial districts there be a prosecution to keep the heat on and the publicity going,” he says. “But they couldn’t sustain that.”

If someone registered just before trial, the prosecution would be dropped, Flahavan notes, making the pursuit of resisters “really a losing proposition for the feds” and often “a big waste of time.”

In 1987 a Justice Department spokesman told The New York Times it was preparing a policy through which the Selective Service System would periodically refer 200 names for prosecution. But that never happened.

“I think they were happy to walk away from it and we understand why,” Flahavan says. “It was very labor intensive and very little came of it, although the government won.”

Nowadays, he says “there are some practical penaltiesbut they’re civil. They may screw you up if you want to go to law school, but you won’t go to a federal penitentiary.”

In 1982 the Solomon Amendment tied registration to federal student aid. The 1985 Thurmond Amendment required certification of registration for federal jobs. Some states passed similar laws, and 27 automatically register young men when they apply for a driver’s license, permit or ID card.

But Flahavan points out “if you go in there with a halfway credibly story” pleading ignorance about draft registration rules, financial aid officers have discretion to dole out assistance, though he says acquiring a federal job is more difficult for people who cannot prove they registered before age 26.

Wilfred Ebel, acting director of the Selective Service System in 1987, when further waves of prosecutions were being considered, says he can’t recall the precise discussions that led to abandonment of new cases. Former Attorneys General Ed Meese, who left the department in 1988, and successor Dick Thornburgh did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Mueller.

The office of Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who authored the amendment that passed the House Armed Services Committee, also did not respond to a request for comment. He voted against the amendment, which he apparently proposed to poke the Obama administration in the eye for expanding the possible roles of women in the military.

It’s not yet clear if the amendment will become law. Though it has bipartisan support, some congressional leaders have expressed doubts, and it may quietly be dropped in a deal standardizing House and Senate versions of the larger bill before final passage.

“It’s possible it will stir up enough action that Congress might decide to just eliminate the Selective Service System and forget about having a draft at all in times of peace,” Ebel says.

Ebel’s suspicion that the amendment could kick off the system’s undoing is reflected in statements from House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who said “we need to take a comprehensive look at the entire Selective Service process, and we shouldn’t just deal with one issue at a time” after the amendment’s passage. Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, made similar comments.

For the moment, Selective Service spokesman Matthew Tittmann says, the publicity has been helpful to the agency, which doesn’t regularly receive press coverage, resulting in many young people either not knowing they must register or that they have to notify the agency of all their address changes until they turn 26.

“You can’t wait until the barn’s burning down to wish you had a fire department,” says Tittmann, who travels the country helping raise awareness about registration. “Forty-five seconds online to register can save you 45 years of hassles,” he says, reciting his sales pitch to teens.

He says young immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission cannot apply for deferred action and a job permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program without registering, and that it’s worthwhile for young men to register in case they’re ever interested in a federal job.

But Hasbrouck, now a San Francisco-based international travel author, journalist and activist, says registration helps normalize fighting and creates an improper relationship to the state. Rutt says it trains young people to be compliant with government demands.

Rutt, who worked in public health and now runs his own design company, says his felony conviction didn’t have many downsides. He says it’s viewed as a badge of honor by some people and “if anything it’s been helpful to me.” He and Hasbrouck say being felons doesn’t bring much stigma, in part both say because they’re white and middle class.

The felonious registration resisters say there are many young men are unknowingly doing their part to render any future draft useless, given required notice to the Selective Service every time they move.

Though hard numbers are elusive, Hasbrouck says with confidence “compliance with the address update requirement is and has been since 1980 essentially zero.” Rutt says with a laugh that millions of people are breaking the law just like he did. “You could say mine was more egregious, but you’re either in violation or you are not,” he says.