House Questions Homeland Security Program on Social Media

The manual, a 2011 reference guide for analysts working with the department’s Media Monitoring Capability program, raises questions about recent claims by Homeland Security officials who portrayed the program as limited to gathering information that would help gain operational awareness about attacks, disasters or other emerging problems.

Last month, a previous disclosure of documents related to the program showed that in 2009, when it was being designed, officials contemplated having reports produced about “public reaction to major governmental proposals with homeland security implications.”

But the department said it never put that category into practice when the program began in 2010. Officials repeated that portrayal in testimony last week before an oversight hearing by a a House Homeland Security subcommittee.

“I am not aware of any information we have gathered on government proposals,” testified Richard Chavez, the director of the office that oversees the National Operations Center, which runs the program.

Still, the 2011 manual, which was disclosed this week as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, lists a series of categories that constitute an “item of interest” warranting a report. One category is discussion on social media networks of “policy directives, debates and implementations related to DHS.”

It is not clear whether the department has produced such reports. Matthew Chandler, a department spokesman, said Wednesday that in practice the program had been limited to “social media monitoring for situational awareness only.”

He also said the department would review the reference guide and related materials to make sure they “clearly and accurately convey the parameters and intention of the program.”

Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group that filed the lawsuit and obtained the document, argued that the manual shows that the monitoring may have gone beyond its limited portrayal by department officials.

“The D.H.S. continues to monitor the Internet for criticism of the government,” she said. “This suspicionless, overbroad monitoring quells legitimate First Amendment activity and exceeds the agency’s legal authority."

A federal statute cited by officials last week as the legal basis for the program gives the National Operations Center the authority “to provide situational awareness” for officials “in the event of a natural disaster, act of terrorism or other man-made disaster” and to “ensure that critical terrorism and disaster-related information reaches government decision makers.”

Officials have stressed that the program does not collect personally identifying information, like the names or Twitter account handles of the people making comments, and that it does not monitor, review or collect First Amendment-protected speech.

Still, the program also monitors articles and broadcasts by traditional media outlets. The 2011 manual says that analysts, in addition to flagging information related to matters like terrorism and natural disasters, should also identify “media reports that reflect adversely on D.H.S. and response activities” and collect “both positive and negative reports” on department components as well organizations outside of the department.

The manual includes keywords that analysts should search for. A list of agencies in the keyword section includes not only those in the department dealing with matters like immigration and emergency management, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, several law enforcement agencies in the Justice Department, the Red Cross and the United Nations.

At the hearing last week, lawmakers of both parties said it made sense for the department to use the Internet to gather information about emerging events, but they voiced concerns that if it went further than that, the program might chill people’s freedom of speech and willingness to express dissent online.

“Other private individuals reading your Facebook status updates is different than the Department of Homeland Security reading them, analyzing them and possibly disseminating and collecting them for future purposes,” said the chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania.

Mary Ellen Callahan, the department’s chief privacy director, testified that the program was interested only in events within the department’s mission — like disasters, attacks or continuing operational problems. As an example, she cited a situation in which people post to Twitter about an unusually long line at a particular airport checkpoint.

She also played down the use of keyword searches the program uses for articles and postings on social networks, portraying them as simply related to disasters — “you know, flood, tornado and things like that.”

The 2011 manual contains a fuller list. Many keywords are closely related to various disasters. But a handful are potentially more sweeping, like China, cops, hacking, illegal immigrants, Iran, Iraq, marijuana, organized crime, police, pork and radicals.

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The Lede Blog: China Blocked Access to White House News Conference With Xi, Reporter Says

Zhao Yan, a Chinese journalist and dissident living in New York, said on Friday that he was prevented by Chinese officials from entering a room at the White House for a news conference on Tuesday with President Obama and the likely future leader of China, Xi Jinping.

In an interview with The Lede, Mr. Zhao said he had been granted access by the White House to cover the event for Boxun.com, a Chinese-language news site based in the United States. But once inside, he said, officials from China’s delegation identified him and asked that he be barred from the room where the two leaders were delivering prepared remarks.

Mr. Zhao said through an interpreter that he wanted to ask Mr. Xi whether he would do more to support human rights in China than his predecessors have.

The White House disputed his account, saying that the incident was the result of a miscommunication and that Mr. Zhao was simply not among the limited number of American and Chinese pool reporters approved for the small event. He had been granted entry into the White House only for the daily briefing, later that afternoon.

In 2005, Mr. Zhao, then a researcher for The New York Times in its Beijing bureau, was jailed in China as part of an investigation into the sources used for a Times article about the Chinese leadership. He was acquitted of the main charge of revealing state secrets, but spent three years in jail on unrelated charges and subsequently left China for the United States.

At the later press briefing with the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, he posed his question and it appeared as part of the transcript published on the White House site:

Q I’m a political journalist and political analyst from China. I have been here for two and a half years, and I have always seen the American government, the Obama government, place much more importance on the appreciation of the renminbi.

MR. CARNEY: On the appreciation of the renminbi?

Q Yes, place much more importance on the appreciation of the renminbi. Our readers are very concerned whether the U.S. government is much less interested in the human rights situation in China. And our readers are also interested to know whether the U.S. government will center on the human rights issue and policy between Middle East region and China. Can you talk to our readers about these two issues?

MR. CARNEY: Well, I would simply say that we have, in our relationship with the People’s Republic of China, a whole host of issues, as I was saying before. And we always raise human rights concerns at the highest levels when we have meetings with senior members of the Chinese leadership, and we will continue to do that. It is simply not the case that we emphasize one aspect of our relationship over the other. They are all important — both the areas where we agree, and the areas where we disagree. And we certainly express ourselves openly when we have concerns about human rights issues, as we do in this case.

President Obama is very aware of that issue, as is Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton and others.

Mr. Zhao provided an e-mail chain between himself and the White House press office that documented his application to cover the event and its approval. “All set, thanks!” read the last message, signed, “The White House Press Team.”

Mr. Zhao captured video on his iPhone in which a White House press officer can be heard telling him that he would only be allowed to cover the later press briefing. “There are very strict numbers for this,” the man can be heard saying.

The editor of Boxun, an independent news site run out of North Carolina, confirmed that Mr. Zhao had gone to the White House as its representative. He said that if Mr. Zhao was in fact stopped, it could have been because of his association with the site or his own history of dissident activities. “If the person there recognized him as he says, it’s likely he was blocked for himself,” the editor, who goes by the pseudonym Wei Shi, said in a telephone interview. “He has a face that is recognized.”

Mr. Zhao said on Friday that if he had been allowed into the room with Mr. Xi, and had not been formally allowed to ask a question, “I would have stood up anyway and asked.”

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White House Sees Buffett Rule More as a Guide

The Buffett Rule has become a signal piece of election-year political rhetoric. It featured heavily in Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address last month. It has become a favored talking point on the campaign trail. And Mr. Obama underscored his support of it in his budget proposal.

But the White House says it is a “guideline,” rather than a legislative initiative. And it says it prefers not to establish the Buffett Rule without a broader overhaul of the tax code, though it would support a Congressional effort to carry it out alone.

“This is the guiding principle of tax reform,” said Jason Furman, principal deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council. “To some degree, it’s a specific policy, where we set a floor, a minimum rate. And to some degree, it is a statement of principle of how you would like to design the tax system.”

The Buffett Rule is named for Warren E. Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway billionaire who made a point of saying that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his hard-working secretary, Debbie Bosanek, who sat in Michelle Obama’s box at the State of the Union address.

It seems like an appealingly simple way to ensure that the rich do not pay a smaller proportion of their earnings than many members of the middle class. But tax experts and even the White House itself contend it might be hard to carry out. 

The White House asked for numerous changes to raise more revenue from the wealthiest Americans in its budget proposal. Those include allowing the high-end Bush administration tax cuts to expire and taxing dividend earnings as regular income.

But the proposal stops short of suggesting an application of the Buffett Rule on top of that, instead listing it as a “principle” for future reform, alongside a repeal of the alternative minimum tax.

The much-hated alternative minimum tax was initially designed to do just what the Buffett Rule would: prevent the wealthy from using loopholes and deductions to lower their tax rates. But the tax was not indexed for inflation, and therefore, each year it ensnares more and more middle-class Americans.

Congress has “patched” the tax to prevent it from hitting the more than 30 million tax filers who should hypothetically pay it. Still, 4.3 million tax filers paid the alternative minimum tax last year, raising $39.1 billion in revenue.

Tax experts say creating a new alternative minimum tax for the wealthy might make for good political argument, but it is less compelling as policy.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to have one set of rules that applies to some people and one set of rules that applies to everyone else,” said Leonard E. Burman, a tax expert and professor at Syracuse University.

“It’s really complicated,” Professor Burman said. “I’m very sympathetic to taxing capital gains like ordinary income; that’s the issue this proposal is ostensibly addressing. But the idea that we have different sets of rules for different people? It undermines the tax code.”

William G. Gale, a director of the Tax Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: “A well-designed tax system would as an artifact be consistent with something like the Buffett Rule. But trying to glom the Buffett Rule onto the current tax system? That’s going to be a mess.”

There is a second reason for not proposing the Buffett Rule in the budget: It would significantly reduce revenue if installed alongside a repeal of the alternative minimum tax.

According to Internal Revenue Service data, 236,883 tax filers made $1 million or more in 2009, and they paid an average rate of about 24 percent. Bringing that up to 30 percent would raise billions of dollars over time — but not nearly as much as the alternative minimum tax, experts say.

While the White House has declined to make the Buffett Rule a concrete proposal, Democrats in Congress have forged ahead. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, independently came up with the idea for a minimum tax for the wealthy, and made a proposal after Mr. Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union address.

The proposed law, the Paying a Fair Share Act, eliminates all deductions for the wealthy except their charitable contributions. After that, they must pay a 30 percent minimum tax on the balance of their income.

The law includes a phase-in, to avoid taxing Americans making $1 million at much higher rates than others making $999,999. If the taxpayer makes between $1 million and $2 million, the tax bill is only a fraction of the difference between taxes owed under current law and taxes as determined by the Buffett Rule.

The administration consulted with Senator Whitehouse’s office on the proposal, and has said it backs it. “We’re broadly comfortable with the approach Senator Whitehouse laid out in his proposal,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday. “You can do it different ways, but no concerns about not going ahead with something in that broad neighborhood.”

Testifying about the budget proposal on Capitol Hill this week, Mr. Geithner defended the administration’s requested tax changes and its choice not to include a comprehensive tax reform plan.

He said the White House strongly recommended broad tax reform to broaden the tax base and simplify the dizzyingly complex tax code. But it recommends enacting changes in the meantime to help reduce the deficit and raise revenue from the wealthy. “We think the better way to get there is through comprehensive tax reform,” he said.

“We took a run at trying to negotiate a framework like that with Republican leadership in the House,” Mr. Geithner said of comprehensive reform. “We found no basis for agreement on even the broad framework.”

“We’re just trying to be realistic,” he added.  

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Birth Control Coverage Rule Debated at House Hearing

Lutheran and Baptist clergymen and an Orthodox rabbi joined a Roman Catholic bishop in telling lawmakers that Mr. Obama’s latest policy of shifting the responsibility for paying for the contraceptives from religious institutions to their health insurers was unworkable and did not allay concerns about government entanglement with religion.

“There is no real difference” between the original requirement and the attempted compromise, said John H. Garvey, president of the Catholic University of America, where 81 percent of undergraduates and 59 percent of graduate students are Catholic.

The first of two lineups of witnesses at a House committee hearing on Thursday consisted of five men.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, asked: “Where are the women? It’s outrageous that the Republicans would not allow a single individual representing the tens of millions of women who want and need insurance coverage for basic preventive health care services, including family planning.”

The witnesses, who testified at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had different views about contraception, but all said they were uneasy with the federal policy.

“The putative accommodation is no accommodation at all,” said the rabbi, Meir Soloveichik of Yeshiva University and Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York City. “Religious organizations would still be obligated to provide employees with an insurance policy that facilitates acts violating the organization’s religious tenets.”

With his proposal, Mr. Obama may have tamped down the public furor over mandating contraceptive coverage. But in Congress, it appears, the election-year debate is just beginning.

Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, told the witnesses that they were being “used for a political agenda,” to embarrass Mr. Obama. “Today’s hearing is a sham, a shameful exercise,” Mr. Connolly said.

Representative Joe Walsh, Republican of Illinois, insisted: “This is not about women. This is not about contraceptives. This is about religious freedom.”

The Senate and the House plan to vote soon on legislation to block Mr. Obama’s policy.

Under the policy, most health insurance plans must cover birth control for women — all contraceptive drugs and devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration — as well as sterilization procedures. Church-affiliated universities, hospitals and charities would not have to provide contraceptive coverage to female employees, nor would they have to subsidize its cost. Coverage for birth control would be offered to women directly by their employers’ insurance companies, “with no role for religious employers who oppose contraception,” the White House said.

Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, described this as “an accounting gimmick.”

In a rule published Wednesday in the Federal Register, the Obama administration reaffirmed, “without change,” the narrow exemption for churches and other houses of worship. The administration said it would allow a “safe harbor from enforcement” for one year, while it revises the rule to address concerns of church-affiliated organizations that have religious objections to covering contraceptive services.

The Rev. Dr. Matthew C. Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, said he had no ill will toward the administration. “I pray for the president every day,” Mr. Harrison said, even as he expressed “deep distress” over the new policy and complained of “government intrusions into Christian conscience and practice.”

Representative William Lacy Clay, Democrat of Missouri, said both sides were distorting the facts. “I’m disappointed in some who suggest that the Catholic bishops’ stance represents something sinister, that it is an attempt to deny all women, of any faith, access to any contraception or reproductive health care of any kind,” Mr. Clay said. “I don’t think that’s the case. I’m also disappointed in those who claim that the administration has an agenda: to increase abortions, sterilizations and contraceptive use by Catholics. The facts don’t back that up, not in the slightest.”

The committee heard testimony from two women, both opposed to the administration policy.

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, said women who could testify to the need for contraceptive coverage had been excluded. “What is it that men don’t understand about women’s health?” Ms. Pelosi said. “And how central the issue of family planning is to that?”

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White House Proposes $5 Billion in Grants to Overhaul Teaching

The new program, which needs Congressional approval, is part of President Obama’s budget proposal and expands upon a call in his State of the Union address last month to give schools more resources “to keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones.”

Federal education officials said the program would seek to bring together state and district officials, union leaders, teachers and other educators to address a range of issues, among them tightening tenure rules, increasing salaries and improving professional development.

The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, will formally unveil the proposal at a meeting with teachers on Wednesday in Washington. He plans to enlist teachers from an Education Department fellowship program to help promote the proposal, called the Respect (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project.

“Our goal is to work with teachers in rebuilding their profession and to elevate the teacher voice in federal, state and local education policy,” Mr. Duncan said in a statement.

The new program would follow the general format of Race to the Top, with states designing their own proposals for teacher improvement and the federal Education Department selecting the most promising ones for multiyear funding. It would focus only on teaching, though, while the Race to the Top program had a broader agenda for kindergarten to 12th-grade education.

Officials said the new program, which has been in development for a year, was not a response to any current efforts to install teacher evaluation systems in specific states, including New York. They said it was intended to address the needs of experienced teachers and to make the teaching profession more appealing over all — through salary increases, more selective teacher colleges and other measures — to attract a new generation of teachers.

“We need to change society’s views of teaching from the factory model of yesterday to the professional model of tomorrow, where teachers are revered as thinkers, leaders and nation-builders,” Mr. Duncan said. “No other profession carries a greater burden for securing our economic future.”

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union of teachers and education professionals with more than three million members, said he supported the Obama administration’s wide-ranging approach to a systemic problem. He said he had long emphasized the need for attracting top-tier teaching candidates, maintaining competitive salaries and promoting professional development.

“It incorporates what we believe is necessary to transform the system,” Mr. Van Roekel said. “We need to do all of these things.”

Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that recruits new teachers for school districts, including New York City, said the use of a competitive grant program would encourage states to come up with innovative ideas.

“Teachers are treated as interchangeable parts — they’re not honored as highly skilled professionals — and this has gone on for decades,” he said. “Everyone knows we have to make teaching better, but they have put their money where their mouth is.”

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White House Memo: Obama Balancing Donors in Hollywood and Silicon Valley

First, the soothing. Mr. Obama is flying to Los Angeles on Wednesday to attend three fund-raisers, including one hosted by the actor Will Ferrell and Bradley Bell, a soap opera executive (“The Bold and the Beautiful”). The Foo Fighters will be on hand to perform; expect to see a number of other glitterati.

Problem: Mr. Obama is in the doghouse with the show-business people, who are mad because the White House didn’t support them on the antipiracy bill that got squashed in Congress in January after Google and other Internet high fliers descended on Washington to pressure the White House and Congress to oppose it in a standoff that left Hollywood reeling. But the president has also come to rely on cash from Hollywood, which contributed $9.2 million to his 2008 campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Christopher J. Dodd, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, created a stir — and ruffled White House feathers — just after the drubbing last month when he threatened to turn off the spigot, saying in an interview with Fox News: “Those who count on quote Hollywood for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them.” The White House acknowledged privately that his comment was not received warmly.

But, as if to prove Mr. Dodd’s point, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that money for Mr. Obama from Hollywood was down last year, coming in at just $1.2 million, compared with $2.8 million during the same period in 2008.

White House officials have been doing some stroking of Hollywood to prevent a further erosion; Mr. Obama began the effort during his State of the Union speech last month when he threw the motion picture association a bone, promising to work to protect intellectual property in China. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. picked up the effort on Tuesday, using a lunchtime toast at the State Department with China’s vice president, Xi Jinping, to further raise the intellectual property protection issue — giving his boss the perfect entrée to say at Mr. Ferrell’s fund-raiser that the White House is fighting hard for Hollywood.

But at the same time, administration officials say they don’t plan to reverse their position that major elements of the piracy legislation sought by Hollywood go too far.

On that battle, Google and the techies, so far, have been the clear-cut winner, and they will be able to thank Mr. Obama on Thursday when he heads to San Francisco for Part 2 of his balancing act: he is headlining a fund-raiser at the home of Nicola Miner, daughter of the Oracle co-founder Robert Miner.

And there, Mr. Obama must assure well-heeled attendees that he will take the interests of the new economy to heart. And the high-tech industry at the heart of that new economy has surpassed Hollywood in fund-raising muscle, not to mention overall contribution to the national economy.

In many ways, the fight puts Mr. Obama in a script that could be conceived only in Hollywood. An online piracy bill backed by the big studios was chugging along until it ran into a firestorm in January when Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts. The White House had a few days earlier released a statement that some parts of the bill went too far, adding wind to the Web storm. By the time the dust cleared, lawmakers had backed off, and the old guard in Hollywood was fuming.

“It’s the Rebellion versus the Empire,” said Donnie Fowler, a Democratic consultant who was Al Gore’s national field director in the 2000 campaign, with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as Luke Skywalker and Mr. Dodd as Darth Vader.

“The problem for Hollywood here,” Mr. Fowler said, “is that they contribute only about 1/10th as much to the national economy” as technology. “Plus their stars and starlets can’t match up against hundreds of thousands of netizens who go nuts when their Wikipedia and Google go dark for a day.”

Despite Mr. Dodd’s comments about payback, some political observers note that at the end of the day, it is unlikely that Hollywood will suddenly turn to the Republicans.

“I think this is yet another large industry that has been a consistent supporter of Obama, that has to handle some disappointment from time to time,” said Matt Bennett, a vice president at Third Way, a Democratic policy institute. “They’ll swallow hard and contribute.”

But they may not contribute quite so much.

Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Dodd’s spokeswoman, did offer up a clarification of his remarks. Mr. Dodd, she said, “was making the obvious point that people tend to support politicians whose views tend to match their own.”

Mr. Dodd himself has since been more circumspect. “We hope the president will use this opportunity in both communities,” he said in an e-mailed statement, “to reiterate the important point that he made in the State of the Union: that online content theft is a problem, that it harms U.S. workers and U.S. business and that now is the time to come together to find meaningful solutions to protect American intellectual property from foreign criminals.”

He added that Hollywood and the tech industry “need each other to succeed and grow.”

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