rigorousintuition.ca

WASHINGTON --
A federal appeals court has reversed a lower court's decision that dismissed a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA, ruling on Friday that it was
neither "logical nor plausible" for the government to contend the agency had no
interest in drone strikes.
"It is hard to see how the CIA Director could have made his Agency's knowledge
of -- and therefore 'interest' in -- drone strikes any clearer," the ruling
states. "And given these statements by the Director, the President, and the
President's counterterrorism advisor, the Agency's declaration that 'no
authorized CIA or Executive Branch official has disclosed whether or not the CIA
... has an interest in drone strikes,' ... is at this point neither logical nor
plausible."
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing for information about the CIA's
drone program. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that
President Barack Obama "has himself publicly acknowledged that the United States
uses drone strikes against al Qaeda" and that the government's position in the
case was therefore unsustainable. A lower court will now have to sort out just
what the government must disclose.
ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who argued the case before the appeals
court in September, called the decision "an important victory" that "requires
the government to retire the absurd claim that the CIA's interest in the
targeted killing program is a secret."
He also said the decision in ACLU v. CIA will make it "more difficult for the
government to deflect questions about the program's scope and legal basis."
"We hope that this ruling will encourage the Obama administration to
fundamentally reconsider the secrecy surrounding the targeted killing program,"
Jaffer said in a statement released by the ACLU. "The program has already been
responsible for the deaths of more than 4,000 people in an unknown number of
countries. The public surely has a right to know who the government is killing,
and why, and in which countries, and on whose orders. The Obama administration,
which has repeatedly acknowledged the importance of government transparency,
should give the public the information it needs in order to fully evaluate the
wisdom and lawfulness of the government's policies."

Alchemy wrote:Been trying to familiarize myself with the drone program various types of drones how one can protect oneself from spy drones etc, but one thing I dont yet understand is, can we see these drones in the sky, what I mean is if they were to actually put thousands of drones in the skies over the United States for the purpose of watching everything, I know they can see in pretty good detail a person on the ground but can we see the drones from the ground just by looking up without ant binoculars, telescope etc, are they visible to the naked eye or are they way too high up there and unable to be seen or known to be above us when they are?

Thanks for any help.

EPIC FOIA - US Drones Intercept Electronic Communications and Identify Human Targets
New records obtained by EPIC under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection is operating drones in the United States capable of intercepting electronic communications. The records also suggest that the ten Predator B drones operated by the agency have the capacity to recognize and identify a person on the ground. Approximately, 2/3 of the US population is subject to surveillance by the CBP drones. The documents were provided in response to a request from EPIC for information about the Bureau's use of drones across the country. The agency has made the Predator drones available to other federal, state, and local agencies. The records obtained by EPIC raise questions abut the agency's compliance with federal privacy laws and the scope of domestic surveillance. For more information, see EPIC: Domestic Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Drones.

GPS Quadcopter Camera Follows Your Every Move: DJI Phantom (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbFg_l3HAEc
http://www.theadrenalist.com/geargadget ... ro-camera/
Sam Brand February 11, 2013

The day has arrived when we all can have our very own unmanned aerial vehicle. Early this year, Hong Kong-based UAV manufacturer DJI Innovations began shipping the DJI Phantom, a battery-powered quadcopter that promises to revolutionize aerial photography. For $700, you get a lot of zoom for your buck. The DJI Phantom reaches horizontal speeds of about 22 miles per hour, climbs at nearly 15 mph, and can reach an altitude in excess of 1,000 feet – high enough to reach a window on the 83rd floor.

This UAV has brawn (one charge provides 15 minutes of flight – enough juice to record several terrain park sessions), but where the Phantom really excels is in its brains. Unlike other commercially available drones, the Phantom is outfitted with GPS. It communicates with satellites to stabilize itself mid-air, and can remember where it took off so it can return home with just the press of a button.

Did we mention the Phantom was designed to hold a camera? Slide your GoPro into the camera mount and make your personal adventure videos sizzle like big-budget blockbusters. Check out video of the GoPro quadcopter action here.

We can’t wait to see the videos you come up with. Share with us on Facebook and @DegreeMen on Twitter.

elfismiles wrote:I'm not 100% sure but one of the last shots in this video looks an awful lot like a certain place in Austin:



... meh! I guess it really could be anywhere.

Boeing Helps Kill Proposed Law to Regulate Drones

by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog
March 30th, 2013


Boeing X-45A combat drone. Photo by cliff1066™. Used under Creative Commons license.
Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing giant from Seattle, helped defeat a Republican proposal in Washington state that would have forced government agencies to get approval to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as drones, and to obtain a warrant before using them to conduct surveillance on individuals.

Local authorities in Seattle and in King county experimented with conducting surveillance from Draganfly Innovations drones last year, only to cancel both programs in the fact of public protest. "I'm not really surprised that people are upset," said Jennifer Shaw from the American Civil Liberties Union, a human rights group that campaigned against the drones. “It's a frightening thing to think that there's government surveillance cameras overhead.”

On February 7, 2013, David Taylor, a Republican member of the state legislature, introduced a bill to regulate drone use. The proposed law quickly won support from several Democratic party politicians on the state Public Safety Committee.

Alarmed by the growing bipartisan coalition, Boeing jumped into the fray. “We believe that as the technology matures, best practices and new understanding will emerge, and that it would be counterproductive to rush into regulating a burgeoning industry,” Boeing spokeswoman Sue Bradley wrote in a statement. (The company makes a variety of drones from the Unmanned Little Bird and the A160 Hummingbird helicopters to the ScanEagle which has been used in Iran and Iraq and the proposed new X-45C combat aircraft)

After the company approached several lawmakers, Frank Chopp, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington state, canceled a scheduled March 13 vote on the bill. Instead Jeff Morris, another Democrat who chairs the House Technology and Economic Development Committee, was asked to lead a “more comprehensive study of surveillance issues.”

“This is all about profit,” said a disappointed Taylor. “This is about profit over people’s rights.”

While local and state use of drones has been limited to short pilot projects so far, concern about the federal use of drones has been on the rise in the last few months especially as the Obama administration has refused to divulge details on how drones are used by government authorities like the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection agency. Republicans in the U.S. Congress have even voted to ask the Pentagon to reveal whether it is using drones inside the U.S.

Privacy groups have raised questions about what might be legally possible. "We don't believe that there are actually any federal statutes that would provide limits on drone surveillance in the United States," says Amie Stepanovich, director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "The privacy laws that do exist are very targeted [and] don't encompass the type of surveillance that drones are able to conduct."

To date lawmakers in some 32 states have introduced bills to restrict drone use. While none have been voted into law (North Dakota and Oklahoma both opposed such laws in order to attract more investment in their states), last month the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, pledged not to conduct drone surveillance and voted in favor of a resolution that calls on the federal and state governments to adopt laws banning “information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court.”

Some believe that the use of drones for surveillance is just the first step towards using them for more deadly purposes within the U.S. “The belief that weaponized drones won't be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It's not just likely but inevitable,” writes Glenn Greenwald, the UK Guardian columnist and former constitutional lawyer. “Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones ‘could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun.’

Greenwald applauds the proposed new laws to regulate drones that are being introduced in states from Texas to Massachusetts which he says “affords a real opportunity to forge an enduring coalition in defense of core privacy and other rights that transcends partisan allegiance, by working toward meaningful limits on their use.”

Navy Wants Lasers on Marines’ Trucks to Shoot Down Drones
BY SPENCER ACKERMAN03.28.133:27 PM
If there was any doubt that the military has new confidence in its forthcoming laser arsenal, the Navy’s top geeks want to outfit Marines with a laser cannon to shoot small drones out of the sky.

Specifically, the Office of Naval Research thinks that Marine air-ground task forces are too vulnerable to adversaries flying cheap, small spy drones overhead, like the four-pound Raven the Marines themselves used in Iraq. Its answer: outfit Marine ground vehicles with laser guns.

It’s all part of a new Office of Naval Research program, formally unveiled Thursday, with the clunky name of Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy on the Move. For the time being, it’s just a research effort, but the office expects to award grants and contracts for it worth up to $400,000. And it’s doable.

So, the specs. The idea is to get a laser cannon weighing less than 2500 pounds mounted onto a Marine Humvee or comparable truck. The cannon needs to provide a “minimum optical output power” of 25 kilowatts, with an eye toward scaling up to 50 kilowatts, for a two-minute full-power blast. Hardware that can adjust for all “environmental conditions” Marines operate in — from a muggy beach to the arid climes of Helmand Province — is encouraged; the Office is agnostic on how researchers get there.


Is the effort realistic? Yes, but it’s also ambitious.

The Navy is making a big push during 2013 to get its laser arsenal finally out of the lab and into the fleet. The first task anticipated for the laser arsenal is exactly the one envisioned here for Marine trucks — shooting down small drones hovering too close for comfort. The Navy’s had solid-state lasers capable of burning through a boat’s outboard motor at sea for two years, and those models generated 15 kilowatts worth of power. In tests three years ago, an MK-15 Phalanx cannon tricked out to host a laser successfully shot down small drones.

The hard part is going to be generating the power necessary for the laser beam either from a truck or portable within it. The generators on board ships are massive things that can divert enough power to a sub-100 kilowatt laser without jeopardizing propulsion. It’s unclear from the outline the Office of Naval Research provides just how a generator capable of generating 25 kilowatts worth of pew-pew-pew for two minutes and “followed by a 20 minute recharge to 80% of total capacity (power and thermal)” (!) is going to either fit in a Humvee or, more problematically, draw from the truck’s electrical systems. Then there’s the problem of cooling the thing down so it’s safe to drive. (Also, be careful where you point that thing.)

Those are engineering problems that the Office of Naval Research feels confident its industry partners and associated geeks can crack. The effort underscores one of the drawbacks of small surveillance drones, even as they proliferate and generate angst within defense circles: they’re slow and easily shot down — particularly by a line of sight weapon that can burn through them. And the Marines definitely want to demonstrate that as the drones just get cheaper.

US made secret deal with Pak on drone strikes: Report
PTI | Apr 7, 2013, 12.45 PM IST

NEW YORK: In a secret deal, Pakistan allowed American drone strikes on its soil on the condition that the unmanned aircraft would stay away from its nuclear facilities and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India, according to a media report.

Under secret negotiations between Pakistani intelligence agency ISI and America's CIA during 2004, the terms of the bargain were set, the New York Times reported today.

"Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan's nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India," the paper said.

Pakistani officials also insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets, the NYT added.

The "secret deal" over drone strikes was reached after CIA agreed to kill tribal warlord Nek Muhammad, a Pakistani ally of the Afghan Taliban who led a rebellion and was marked by Islamabad as an "enemy of the state," the NYT reported, citing an excerpt from the book 'The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth'.

A CIA official had met the then ISI chief Ehsan ul Haq with the offer that if the American intelligence agency killed Muhammad, "would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas," the report said.

The ISI and CIA also agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the American agency's "covert action authority", which meant that the US would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.

While Pakistani officials had in the past considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, it was Muhammad's rise to power that forced them to reconsider their line of thought and eventually allow Predator drones.

The ISI-CIA's "back-room bargain" sheds light on the beginning of the covert drone war which "began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama."

The deal resulted in the CIA changing its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped "transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization."

The anti-drone hoodie that helps you beat Big Brother's spy in the sky
Unmanned surveillance drones are a global concern, but designer Adam Harvey has concocted an outlandish solution

Tom Meltzer
The Guardian, Sunday 31 March 2013 14.30 EDT


Blending in? … The anti-drone hoodie, as modelled by Tom Meltzer, keeps surveillance off your back. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
I am wearing a silver hoodie that stops just below the nipples. Or, if you prefer, a baggy crop-top with a hood. The piece – this is fashion, so it has to be a "piece" – is one of a kind, a prototype. It has wide square shoulders and an overzealous zip that does up right to the tip of my nose.

It does not, it's fair to say, make its wearer look especially cool. But that's not really what this hoodie is about. It has been designed to hide me from the thermal imaging systems of unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles – drones. And, as far as I can tell, it's working well.

"It's what I call anti-drone," explains designer Adam Harvey. "That's the sentiment. The material in the anti-drone clothing is made of silver, which is reflective to heat and makes the wearer invisible to thermal imaging."

The "anti-drone hoodie" was the central attraction of Harvey's Stealth Wear exhibition, which opened in central London in January, billed as a showcase for "counter-surveillance fashions". It is a field Harvey has been pioneering for three years now, making headlines in the tech community along the way.

It began in 2010 with Camoflash, an anti-paparazzi handbag that responds to the unwanted camera flashes with a counter-flash of its own, replacing the photograph's intended subject with a fuzzy orb of bright white light.

Then came his thesis project CV Dazzle, a mix of bold makeup and hairstyling based on military camouflage techniques, designed to flummox computer face-recognition software. It worked, but also made you look like a cyberpunk with a face-painting addiction. Which was not exactly inconspicuous.

Once again, though, that wasn't really the point. "These are primarily fashion items and art items," Harvey tells me. "I'm not trying to make products for survivalists. I would like to introduce this idea to people: that surveillance is not bulletproof. That there are ways to interact with it and there are ways to aestheticise it."

There is, I point out, no obvious target audience for anti-drone fashion. He's unfazed. "The kind of person who would wear it really depends on what drones end up being used for. You can imagine everything, from general domestic spying by a government, or more commercial reconnaissance of individuals." I suggest perhaps political protesters. "Yeah, sure. Maybe that's the actual market."

Harvey is well aware his work can seem a little before its time. "I wouldn't say many people have a problem being imaged by drones yet," he deadpans. "But it imagines that this is a problem and then presents a functional solution."

Reality, to be fair, is not so far behind. Over the next 15 years the US Federal Aviation Administration anticipates more than 20,000 new drones will appear in American skies, owned not just by law enforcement agencies and the military, but also public health bodies and private companies.

In the UK, several police forces are already experimenting with drones, and not just for thermal imaging. "They can be equipped with things called IMSI-catchers that will work out the mobile phone numbers of any people in a certain area," explains Richard Tynan, research officer at campaign group Privacy International.

"If police deploy these things for crowd control there's no issue with them figuring out every single person who's in there – and their mobile phone numbers. They can also intercept calls and send out false messages. It's not just the police either. Cybercriminals can use these, or even business opponents. This technology already exists."

Tynan is sceptical about the power of inventions such as the hoodie to protect us from such technology. "The growth in [civilian counter-surveillance] will be dependent on the kind of work we do here to uncover what surveillance is being used. They will always lag behind in the battle."

Not least because many of the people making counter-surveillance equipment are keen to keep it out of civilian hands. "The only people who really don't need to be seen," says military camouflage designer Guy Cramer, "are the ones who are doing something wrong out there."

Cramer is, in a sense, Harvey's military equivalent: another pioneer in the art of vanishing. Last year, Cramer's delightfully shady-sounding company HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp made headlines worldwide with its claim to have built a functioning "invisibility cloak", using light-bending optical camouflage to make a soldier simply disappear. So far, only various members of military top brass have been permitted to see the cloak in action – for fear, he says, that the technology will fall into the wrong hands.

Cramer has also created an "intelligent textile" named Smartcamo, capable of changing colour to match its surroundings. Unlike with the cloak, Cramer plans to make the technology available to consumers. But hopes of becoming invisible to Big Brother won't be drastically improved; when selling to the public he and many of his competitors deliberately leave civilian customers exposed.

"When we sell to the commercial market, we use special inks that actually don't work under infrared conditions. It looks identical but you show up on the infrared as a big white target." The motive is mistrust of the civilian buyer. "It would cost me pennies more to add the infrared but I wouldn't want to give the bad guys that advantage."

He, too, is sceptical about the real-world application of anti-drone fashionwear: "It doesn't matter how good your clothing is, if you're not masking every part of your body – your hands, your face, your eyes – it's going to give away your position." An anti-drone burqa, then? That, he admits, would do the trick. But it would really take the fashion out of counter-surveillance fashionwear.

New Evidence That Team Obama Misled Us About the Drone War

Official speeches are crafted to give the impression that we're mostly targeting al-Qaeda members. We're not.
CONOR FRIEDERSDORFAPR

The Obama Administration is deliberately misleading Americans about the drone war it is waging in Pakistan.

Can anyone read the McClatchy Newspapers summary of top-secret intelligence reports and continue to deny it? Set aside the morality and effectiveness of the CIA's targeted-killing program. Isn't it important for Congress and the people to know the truth about the War on Terrorism? Many Americans remain furious that the Bush Administration gave Iraq War speeches that elided inconvenient truths and implied facts that turned out to be fictions. Is the objection merely that the Iraq War turned out badly? Or is misleading Congress and the public itself problematic, especially when the subject is as serious as killing people in foreign countries?

To justify frequent drone strikes that regularly kill innocent people, risk serving as a terrorist recruiting tool, and terrorize whole communities understandably averse to drones buzzing above their homes, Obama Administration officials give the impression that al-Qaeda terrorists are the main targets. As it turns out, they haven't just helped hide the fact that the Bush Administration kicked off America's drone campaign in Pakistan by killing someone at the request of Pakistan's government -- as Jonathan S. Landay explains, Obama officials have misled us about their own behavior. "Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show," he reports.

The misleading rhetoric includes words spoken by President Obama himself:
The administration has said that strikes by the CIA's missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against "specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces" involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting "imminent" violent attacks on Americans. "It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative," President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. "It has to be a situation in which we can't capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States." Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn't adhere to those standards.

In fact, the documents "show that drone operators weren't always certain who they were killing." Under what legal theory does the Obama Administration justify that behavior? It won't tell us.

Instead John Brennan is trotted out to mislead us while acting as if he is being admirably forthcoming. "On April 30, 2012, Brennan gave the most detailed explanation of Obama's drone program. He referred to al Qaida 73 times, the Afghan Taliban three times and mentioned no other group by name," Landay writes. But the classified documents McClatchy reviewed demonstrate that, during the months about which they have information, al-Qaeda members were a minority of people killed by drones, and killing senior al-Qaeda leaders was rare.

I've written before about how the Obama Administration misleadingly invokes and twists the word "imminent." I've also complained about the effort to portray Hellfire missiles as "surgical" instruments. Proponents of drone strikes talk about how unmanned aerial vehicles can hover for hours to verify that the person in their sites is an appropriate target and avoid killing anyone else. That's a misleading account of how things sometimes work in the field, as retired Brig. Gen. Craig Nixon explained to an audience I was in last year at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The McClatchy report concludes with another example of a drone strike gone wrong:

Consider one attack on Feb. 18, 2010.

Information, according to one U.S. intelligence account, indicated that Badruddin Haqqani, the then-No. 2 leader of the Haqqani network, would be at a relative's funeral that day in North Waziristan. Watching the video feed from a drone high above the mourners, CIA operators in the United States identified a man they believed could be Badruddin Haqqani from the deference and numerous greetings he received. The man also supervised a private family viewing of the body.

Yet despite a targeting process that the administration says meets "the highest possible standards," it wasn't Badruddin Haqqani who died when one of the drone's missiles ripped apart the target's car after he'd left the funeral.

It was his younger brother, Mohammad.

Friends later told reporters that Mohammad Haqqani was a religious student in his 20s uninvolved in terrorism; the U.S. intelligence report called him an active member -- but not a leader -- of the Haqqani network. At least one other unidentified occupant of his vehicle perished, according to the report.

In its drone-strike database, the New America Foundation scores that drone strike as having killed three to four "militants," zero unknown persons, and zero civilians. I've argued that the New America data very likely undercounts the number of civilians that are killed in drone strikes.

There has long been evidence indicating the Obama Administration was misleading the country about the nature of its drone war in Pakistan. This latest report only confirms the suspicions that critics of the program have articulated. And there is reason to believe that even it understates the magnitude of executive branch deception. Says Marcy Wheeler, "This report is perhaps most interesting for the fact that CIA, in its own documents, claims that none of the 40-some people killed at Datta Khel on May 17, 2011 were civilians. In other words, the CIA is lying -- even internally -- about drone strikes as blatantly as it did about torture." The New York Times report on that strike stated that "missiles fired from American drone aircraft struck a meeting of local people in northwest Pakistan who had gathered with Taliban mediators to settle a dispute over a chromite mine. The attack, a Pakistani intelligence official said, killed 26 of 32 people present, some of them Taliban fighters, but the majority elders and local people not attached to the militants. The civilian death toll appeared to be among the worst in the scores of strikes carried out recently in Pakistan's tribal areas by the C.I.A., which runs the drones."

The appropriate response when a president is caught misleading the country about a war he's waging is more scrutiny. There's no telling what else the Obama Administration is hiding. It is the job of Congress to find out, and the prerogative of Americans to know the nature of killing done on their behalf.

A Yemeni activist and writer gave an emotional testimony to members of the Senate on Tuesday afternoon, expressing the anguish he felt after the country he had grown to love became the country that terrorized his home.

“Just six days ago, my village was struck by an American drone in an attack that terrified the region’s poor farmers,” Farea Al-Muslimi said during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on drone strikes.

Al-Muslimi explained he owed many of the happiest years of his life to the United States. He grew up in the small Yemeni village of Wessab, where his father earned less than $200 a month farming. Thanks to U.S. State Department scholarships, Al-Muslimi was able to attend a California high school and later attended American University in Beirut.

“I could never have imagined that the same hand that changed my life, and took it from a miserable to a promising one, would also drone my village. My understanding is that a man named Hameed Meftah was the target of the drone strike. Many people in Wessab know Al-Radmi and the Yemeni government could have easily found and arrested him,” he said.

“In the past, what Wessab villagers knew of the U.S. was based on my stories about my wonderful experiences here. The friendships and values I experienced and described to the villagers helped them understand the America that I know and that I love. Now, however, when they think of America they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads ready to fire missiles at any time.”

Al-Muslimi described drone strikes as the “face of America” in Yemen and warned they were creating anti-American sentiment. He gruesomely described how civilians were often killed by drone strikes on small villages.

“I believe in America, and I deeply believe when Americans know about how much pain and suffering the U.S. airstrikes have caused… they will reject this devastating targeted killing program,” he concluded.

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) held the hearing on Tuesday to investigate the use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. At the hearing, Durbin called on the Obama administration to release information about its drone strike program. He also warned the United States “may undermine our counterterrorism efforts if we do not carefully measure the benefits and costs of targeted killing.”

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube by Sen. Dick Durbin, below: