A U.S. federal appeals court on Monday upheld nondisclosure rules that allow the FBI to secretly issue surveillance orders for customer data to communications firms, a ruling that dealt a blow to privacy advocates.

A unanimous three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco sided with a lower court ruling in finding that rules permitting the FBI to send national security letters under gag orders are appropriate and do not violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s free speech protections.

Content distribution firm CloudFlare and phone network operator CREDO Mobile had sued the government in order to notify customers of five national security letters received between 2011 and 2013.

Andrew Crocker, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented the companies in the consolidated case, said no immediate decision whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court had been made. He called the ruling disappointing.

Several major technology firms, including Microsoft and Twitter, have mounted a variety of legal challenges in recent years to U.S. government restrictions limiting what they can disclose, both to affected users and to the public, about the surveillance requests they receive.

National security letters, or NSLs, are a type of government subpoena for communications data sent to service providers. They are usually issued with a gag order, meaning the target is often unaware that records are being accessed, and they do not require a warrant.

Tens of thousands of NSLs are issued annually, and some gag orders last indefinitely.

Writing for the panel, Judge Sandra Ikuta said the gag orders meet a compelling U.S. government interest, are sufficiently narrow and allow for appropriate judicial review.

Ikuta, appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush, said recent changes to the law passed by Congress in 2015 bolstered oversight of NSL use.

The FBI’s use of NSLs has drawn increased scrutiny from privacy groups in recent years as new transparency laws have allowed companies to publish some of them.

In June of last year the U.S. Senate narrowly rejected a Republican-backed proposal to expand the kinds of telephone and internet records the FBI could request under an NSL to include senders and recipients of emails, some information about websites a person visits and social media log-in data.

The legislation failed, but lawmakers have said they intend to pursue the expansion again.
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Filmmaker Ken Burns views the Vietnam War as a virus that infected Americans with an array of chronic illnesses — alienation, a lack of civil discourse, mistrust of government and each other. And he hopes his new documentary can be part of a cure.

“What if the film was just an attempt at some sort of vaccination, a little bit more of the disease to get you immune to the disunion that it has sponsored?” Burns said in a recent interview. “It’s important for us to begin to have creative but courageous conversations about what took place.”

Burns and co-director Lynn Novick had just finished work on their World War II documentary a decade ago when he turned to her and said, “We have to do Vietnam.” The result is their 10-part, 18-hour series that will air beginning Sept. 17 on PBS.

“For me, it was the sense that Vietnam was the most important event for Americans in the second half of the 20th century, yet we had done almost everything we could in the intervening years to avoid understanding it,” Burns said. “As horrible as they are, wars are incredibly valuable moments to study, and I thought what Vietnam lacked was a willingness to engage in that.”

The film brings together the latest scholarly research on the war and features nearly 80 interviews, including Americans who fought in the war and those who opposed it, Vietnamese civilians and soldiers from both sides. Burns and Novick have been showing excerpts of the film around the country in recent months, most recently at Dartmouth College on Thursday night.

“I think this will be for a general American audience a kind of revelation, a cascade of new facts and new figures, and I don’t mean numeral figures, but biographical figures that will stagger their view of what was, and hopefully get everybody, regardless of political perspective to let go of the baggage of the superficial and the conventional,” Burns said.

Having been blamed for the war itself, many Vietnam War soldiers were understandably reluctant to share their stories, the co-directors said. But compared to his earlier series on World War II and the Civil War, Burns said there was one challenge he didn’t face.

“One of the great tasks for us as filmmakers — amateur historians if you will — was how to cut through all the nostalgia and sentimentality that had attached itself to the Civil War and World War II,” he said. “There’s no such problem with Vietnam.”

After watching the hour-long preview, U.S. Army veteran David Hagerman, of Lyme Center, said he can’t wait to watch the entire series.

“It was powerful,” said Hagerman, who spent his nine months in Vietnam running a treatment center for soldiers addicted to heroin. While strangers now approach him and thank him for his service, he said coming home in 1972 was traumatic.

“I walked into the Seattle airport, and I was in my Army outfit,” he said. “The reception I received was so negative and so powerful that I walked into the nearest men’s room, took my uniform off, threw it in the trash, and put on a T-shirt and a pair of pants.”

Burns said while he doesn’t buy into the notion that history repeats itself, it’s clear that human nature doesn’t change. And he acknowledges that many of the themes his series explores are uncannily relevant to the present.

“If I backed up this conversation and said, ‘OK, I’ve spent the last year working a film about a White House in disarray obsessed with leaks, about a huge document drops into the public of classified information … about a deeply polarized country, about a political campaign accused of reaching out to a foreign power during an election, about mass demonstrations across the country,’ you’d say, ‘Gee, Ken, you stopped doing history, you’re doing the present moment,’” he said.

At Dartmouth, Novick and Burns were joined by U.S. Army veteran Mike Heaney, of Hartland, Vermont, who is shown in the film describing losing fellow platoon members in a 1966 ambush and spending the night paranoid that a dead Viet Cong soldier lying next to him was just faking it and would rise up to kill him.

After the screening, he told the audience about returning to Vietnam in 2008, where he compared war wounds with former enemies turned fellow “grandpas.” He said he’s been able to cope thanks to the support of his family, as well as both Americans and the Vietnamese people.

“I don’t expect to ever get closure on this kind of experience that I had,” he said. “And that’s OK.”
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Nine people have drowned and a teenaged boy is missing after a flash flood swept over a popular swimming spot in a river in the western U.S. state of Arizona, authorities said Sunday.

The flood swept through a canyon on the Verde River inside Tonto National Forest, about 145 kilometers northeast of Phoenix, late Saturday.

There was no warning before a wall of water hit the swimmers.

“They had no warning. They heard a roar, and it was on top of them,” said Ron Sattelmaier, chief of the fire and medical district around Water Wheel Falls, Arizona.

Rescuers recovered three bodies Saturday and six more on Sunday, when they also said a 13-year-old boy was still missing.

Four adults and five children drowned. The Arizona Republic said officials on the scene believed all were members of the same extended family.

Up to 4 centimeters of rain from an intense thunderstorm had fallen during one hour in a remote area about 14 kilometers upstream, local authorities said. The storm surge of water, swollen by debris from recent wildfires, reached a narrow canyon where people were taking refuge from the summer heat. The river burst its banks and overwhelmed the swimmers.

One of the first responders told a reporter a black wall of water almost two meters high and more than 10 meters wide rushed through the narrow canyon at nearly 80 kilometers per hour.

A hundred or more people people may have been relaxing in the water at the time, but authorities said late Sunday they were confident everyone had been accounted for, apart from the missing teenager. Witnesses said survivors clung to trees as the water rose around them.

The severe thunderstorm that caused the sudden flood pounded down on an area charred by a recent wildfire, which left a deep burn scar on ground where pine trees, foliage and ground dust would normally absorb rain.

“If it’s an intense burn, it creates a glaze on the surface that just repels water,” said Darren McCollum, a meteorologist.

The National Weather Service had issued a specific flash-flood warning about an hour and a half before the tragedy in Tonto National Forest unfolded.

Most of Arizona is under flash flood watch until Monday evening, and the regional NWS center in Phoenix warned that “heavy rains can produce flash flooding of low lying, normally dry areas such as washes.”

 

 
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Deborah Chenault Green is 62, a writer. But 50 years ago she was a pre-teen, sleeping on the porch to escape the oppressive heat, awakening to see a sky that glowed unnaturally.

 

Azerine Jones is a retired baker. But in 1967 she was the 12-year-old daughter of a barber who watched his business go up in smoke.

 

Girard Townsend is 66 now, living in a seniors building near the Detroit waterfront. But a half century ago, he was just a kid on a city bus.

 

The bus stopped near 12th and Clairmount streets. Townsend stepped off — and into the very start of the Detroit riot.

 

“I saw all these guys with masks and shields,” he said — city police officers, most of them white, far outnumbered by a seething black crowd.

In the days that followed, he would witness — and take part in — an epic eruption of violence that still reverberates in his life and the life of this city.

 

Five days of violence would leave 33 blacks and 10 whites dead, and more than 1,400 buildings burned. More than 7,000 people were arrested.

 

A decline that had already begun would accelerate; Detroit was the nation’s fourth biggest city in 1960, but would rank 21st by 2016. The middle class fled, and a proud city fell into poverty, crime and hopelessness.

 

There are signs of rebirth in Detroit. But the men and women who lived through the riots are getting older, and most doubt they will live to see Detroit reclaim its former glory, when its very name was synonymous with American know-how and industry.

 

“Detroit still hasn’t come back to where it was,” Townsend said sourly, sorting through 50 years of memories.

 

Not the Only Summer Riot

 

Detroit wasn’t the first of the riots in the summer of 1967, and it was far from the last. Buffalo, New York, and Newark, New Jersey, preceded it; in the course of the summer, more than 150 cases of civil unrest erupted across the United States.

 

Detroit’s started after a July 23 police raid on an illegal after-hours’ club — a “blind pig” — at 12th and Clairmount.

 

The raid, though, was just the spark. Many in the community blamed frustrations blacks felt toward the mostly white police, and city policies that pushed families into aging and over-crowded neighborhoods.

“We had a fear and kind of a hatred toward the police department,” Green said. “They would harass people, especially young black men. Stop them for no reason. A lot of men and women were beaten. A lot of that led up to the city exploding.”

 

When Girard Townsend got off the bus that night, he stumbled into the immediate aftermath of the blind pig raid. By the next day, the riot was in full bloom: “I got up the next morning and the whole west side was on fire. Everything was burning. People were running around with clothes in their hands, TVs and all kinds of stuff.”

 

Townsend was among them. He made off with a television from a furniture store.

 

“We stole liquor and stuff,” he said. “I watched it. I lived it. I was part of it.”

 

There is general agreement that the rioters did not focus their fury on whites. Theresa Welsh and her husband, David, rented an apartment early that summer about eight blocks from where the riot started. “Nobody bothered us. We were a couple of white people wandering around,” said Welsh, 71.

 

Deborah Chenault Green recalls she was at a cousin’s home. They slept on a mattress on the porch because it was such a hot night.

“The noise, I think, is what woke us up,” she said. “You could hear cars and people and police sirens. I looked in the sky and I saw red. There was looting. It was mayhem everywhere. Everybody was just going crazy.”

 

National Guard tanks and other armored vehicles rumbled through the streets. There were reports of snipers firing on law enforcement, the National Guard and even firefighters from rooftops and other secreted spots. Authorities fired back.

 

The city lost more than 2,000 shops to fires or looting, many of them owned by blacks. Among them was the barbershop on Warren Avenue owned by Azerine Jones’ father.

 

“They were burning some of everything,” she said “It wasn’t a matter of them saying this was white-owned or black-owned. Stuff just got caught on fire.”

 

Bruised and Battered

 

When the smoke cleared and the military rolled out, Detroit stood bruised and battered.

“A lot of the fires may have started in white-owned business and spread,” Green said. “A lot of black businesses were destroyed. A lot of people had jobs in those shops. The majority of them didn’t reopen. After the riot, it looked like a war zone and the burnt smell still lingered.”

 

Jones said her father never rebuilt his barbershop. He took on other jobs after the riot.

 

“Owning your own business as a black in the 1950s and ’60s was an accomplishment in itself,” she said.

 

“Before the riot it was a really good comfortable neighborhood,” added Jones, who now lives west of Detroit in Farmington Hills. “We had the things that we needed there: A theater, a butcher shop, dairy shop, shoe store. Since my mother didn’t drive it was nice having everything in walking distance. That’s what really got us when they burned everything down. She had to take a bus with the groceries. It just really killed everything.”

 

In the end, it was Detroiters hurting themselves, she said.

 

“The silly people who did this didn’t really realize they were burning down their neighborhoods,” Jones said. “The [white] business owners were able to pick up and go somewhere else. The people who lived there lost a lot. We lost a lot.”

 

The departure of white residents and businesses to the suburbs that had started years earlier accelerated. Between 1970 and 1980 more than 400,000 more people would leave.

 

“Some white people were rooted in Detroit,” Townsend said. But after the riot, “they moved out. They didn’t want to be here anymore.”

After the riot, David Welsh took a job as a photographer in a town just north of Detroit. He and his wife moved from the riot zone.

 

“It didn’t make sense for us to be down there anymore, all things considered,” said David Welsh, 74. “We didn’t feel comfortable there anymore.”

The couple would move to other parts of the city and eventually settled north of the city limits.

 

So did many middle-class blacks. Altogether, Detroit’s population has fallen by about 1.1 million people since the 1950s.

 

Even as the Motor City was diminished, Murder City grew. More than 700 homicides were committed in 1974.

 

Within a decade of the riot, the car plants that provided jobs and helped keep the city running were hiring fewer people. Three years after the riot, Detroit’s unemployment rate was just over 7 percent. It reached 25 percent by 1990.

 

Green was hired by Chrysler in 1978 to work on one of the automaker’s assembly lines.

 

“That job didn’t last long,” she said. “I got laid off.”

 

Today, nearly four in 10 Detroit residents live in poverty compared to about 15 percent nationally. The city’s $26,000 median income is less than half of the national figure.

 

City Works on Image

 

Now, two years out of insolvency and free of billions of dollars of debt, Detroit is working to fix up its battered neighborhoods and its image.

Though more than twice the national number, unemployment is down to 11 percent. Downtown is thriving and some nearby neighborhoods are filling up. The city, 80 percent black, even elected Mike Duggan, Detroit’s first white mayor since the 1970s.

 

The population is leveling out at around 670,000 people and families are taking advantage of special home buying programs through the city’s land bank.

 

Between 2010 and 2014, the city’s white population grew from just under 76,000 residents to more than 88,000.

“We’re in the first period of growth in 50 or 60 years — people are moving back,” Duggan recently told business, philanthropic and elected leaders at a statewide policy conference. “Our principle is this: It’s one city for all of us.”

 

To get there, Detroit has had to correct mistakes of the past that led to the 1967 riot and eventually bankruptcy.

Duggan said many of those decisions were “rooted in racial discrimination” and included forcing poor black residents into ever smaller areas where housing stock already was aging or substandard. Loans backed by the federal government allowed whites to buy homes in the suburbs in the years leading up to 1967.

 

“Few loans were given to blacks to buy or improve houses in Detroit,” Duggan said. “By 1970, half of the population of Detroit was African American — and it still was segregated. This is our history and it’s something we have to overcome.”

 

But some who lived through the riots say any progress will not wipe away their distress in those five days of violence, and in the 50 years that followed.

 

“It’s part of everyone’s story,” Green said. “I look at the people who suffered through the riot as going through a war-like environment. What happens when you go through a war? A lot of people come out with post-traumatic stress disorder. We were traumatized. We never got the help we needed.”
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After months of delay, the Trump administration is finalizing plans to revamp the nation’s military command for defensive and offensive cyber operations in hopes of intensifying America’s ability to wage cyberwar against the Islamic State group and other foes, according to U.S. officials.

Under the plans, U.S. Cyber Command would eventually be split off from the intelligence-focused National Security Agency.

Details are still being worked out, but officials say they expect a decision and announcement in the coming weeks. The officials weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter so requested anonymity.

The goal, they said, is to give U.S. Cyber Command more autonomy, freeing it from any constraints that stem from working alongside the NSA, which is responsible for monitoring and collecting telephone, internet and other intelligence data from around the world – a responsibility that can sometimes clash with military operations against enemy forces.

Making cyber an independent military command will put the fight in digital space on the same footing as more traditional realms of battle on land, in the air, at sea and in space. The move reflects the escalating threat of cyberattacks and intrusions from other nation states, terrorist groups and hackers, and comes as the U.S. faces ever-widening fears about Russian hacking following Moscow’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 American election.

The U.S. has long operated quietly in cyberspace, using it to collect information, disrupt enemy networks and aid conventional military missions. But as other nations and foes expand their use of cyberspying and attacks, the U.S. is determined to improve its ability to incorporate cyber operations into its everyday warfighting.

Experts said the command will need time to find its footing.

“Right now I think it’s inevitable, but it’s on a very slow glide path,” said Jim Lewis, a cybersecurity expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But, he added, “A new entity is not going to be able to duplicate NSA’s capabilities.”

The NSA, for examples, has 300 of the country’s leading mathematicians “and a gigantic super computer,” Lewis said. “Things like this are hard to duplicate.”

He added, however, that over time, the U.S. has increasingly used cyber as a tactical weapon, bolstering the argument for separating it from the NSA.

The two highly secretive organizations, based at Fort Meade, Maryland, have been under the same four-star commander since Cyber Command’s creation in 2009.

But the Defense Department has been agitating for a separation, perceiving the NSA and intelligence community as resistant to more aggressive cyberwarfare, particularly after the Islamic State’s transformation in recent years from an obscure insurgent force into an organization holding significant territory across Iraq and Syria and with a worldwide recruiting network.

While the military wanted to attack IS networks, intelligence objectives prioritized gathering information from them, according to U.S. officials familiar with the debate. They weren’t authorized to discuss internal deliberations publicly and requested anonymity.

Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter sent a plan to President Barack Obama last year to make Cyber Command an independent military headquarters and break it away from the NSA, believing that the agency’s desire to collect intelligence was at times preventing the military from eliminating IS’ ability to raise money, inspire attacks and command its widely dispersed network of fighters.

Carter, at the time, also pushed for the ouster of Adm. Mike Rogers, who still heads both bodies. The Pentagon, he warned, was losing the war in the cyber domain, focusing on cyberthreats from nations such as Iran, Russia and China, rather than on countering the communications and propaganda campaigns of internet-savvy insurgents.

Officials also grew alarmed by the growing number of cyberattacks against the U.S. government, including several serious, high-level Defense Department breaches that occurred under Rogers’ watch.

“NSA is truly an intelligence-collection organization,” said Lauren Fish, a research associate with the Center for a New American Security. “It should be collecting information, writing reports on it. Cyber Command is meant to be an organization that uses tools to have military operational effect.”

After President Donald Trump’s inauguration, officials said Defense Secretary Jim Mattis endorsed much of the plan. But debate over details has dragged on for months.

It’s unclear how fast the Cyber Command will break off on its own. Some officials believe the new command isn’t battle-ready, given its current reliance on the NSA’s expertise, staff and equipment. That effort will require the department to continue to attract and retain cyber experts.

Cyber Command was created in 2009 by the Obama administration to address threats of cyber espionage and other attacks. It was set up as a sub-unit under U.S. Strategic Command to coordinate the Pentagon’s ability to conduct cyberwarfare and to defend its own networks, including those that are used by combat forces in battle.

Officials originally said the new cyber effort would likely involve hundreds, rather than thousands, of new employees.

Since then, the command has grown to more than 700 military and civilian employees. The military services also have their own cyber units, with a goal of having 133 fully operational teams with as many as 6,200 personnel.

Its proposed budget for next year is $647 million. Rogers told Congress in May that represents a 16 percent increase over this year’s budget to cover costs associated with building the cyber force, fighting IS and becoming an independent command.

Under the new plan being forwarded by the Pentagon to the White House, officials said Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville would be nominated to lead Cyber Command. Leadership of the NSA could be turned over to a civilian.

Mayville is currently the director of the military’s joint staff and has extensive experience as a combat-hardened commander. He deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, leading the 173rd Airborne Brigade when it made its assault into Iraq in March 2003 and later heading coalition operations in eastern Afghanistan.
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