Pat McCrory Prepares For 2012 GOP Victory: Leading Perdue In Polls

Pat McCrory Leads Perdue In Rematch


PPP's first poll of the 2012 Governor's race in North Carolina finds Pat McCrory well ahead of Bev Perdue in a hypothetical rematch of their 2008 contest, 49-37. Perdue also trails NC GOP chair Tom Fetzer in a possible contest, although only by a 42-40 margin.

Part of the reason for Perdue's dicey early standing is her continued poor approval ratings. Only 33% of voters in the state approve of the job she's doing while 49% disapprove. But the other part is that Pat McCrory is a pretty well liked politician. Although a lot of folks have already forgotten who he is- 45% of voters in the state have no opinion of him- those who do remember him from 2 years ago generally look upon him fondly. 34% have a favorable view of him to only 20% with a negative one.

Republicans (49/11 spread) and independents (34/18) are pretty overwhelmingly positive toward him and even with Democrats there are almost as many- 24%- with a positive opinion of him as there are- 27% with a negative one.

McCrory leads Perdue 58-27 with Independents.

By comparison PPP's final 2008 poll found him up just 7 points on Perdue with them.




McCrory is also getting 25% of Democrats, compared to 17% we found him with on our final 2008 poll. And McCrory also does a good job of keeping Republicans in line- Perdue gets only 5% of the GOP vote at this point in time, compared to 10% she was receiving at the end of the last election.

There's not a lot of doubt that McCrory would defeat Perdue if the election was held today. But of course it's not. Earlier this month the Governor of Arizona, who had trailed by a good deal in polling throughout much of 2009, and the Governor of Illinois, who trailed by a good deal in polling throughout pretty much all of 2010, were both reelected. Perdue has a lot of work to do with Democrats and independents between now and November of 2012, but it's not impossible for someone in her current position to win reelection.



The most interesting thing about Fetzer's numbers might be that as many press conferences as he held this year, 70% of voters across the state don't know who he is. And when you get outside the Triangle that number rises closer to 80%. Democrats dislike Fetzer more strongly (8/27) than Republicans like him (16/9). Independents have a dim view of Fetzer as well at 9/16. Given McCrory's strength Fetzer's electoral prospects in 2012 might look brighter in a race for Lieutenant Governor than the big office.

Full results here




Pat McCrory Prepares For 2012 Rematch As Bev Perdue Continues To Screw Up


Pat McCrory's calendar seems penciled with listings for someone ready for a rematch with Gov. Beverly Perdue.

McCrory, who stepped down as Charlotte mayor after 16 years last fall, has become a popular speaker statewide on the Republican Party's chicken dinner circuit, headlining many GOP fundraisers. He's been a frequent visitor on local and even national television political roundtables after narrowly losing to Perdue in November 2008.

Now he has started a political action committee to raise money for legislative candidates and highlight issues he promoted in the 2008 race, including transportation, criminal justice and getting rid of what he called "a culture of corruption" in state government.

"North Carolina state government is in a mess," the 53-year-old McCrory said in a video announcing his New Leadership PAC and identifying Democrats, including Perdue, whom he believes are part of the problem. "It's time for new leadership in our state and it must start now in 2010."

What about 2012?

McCrory said in an interview he's going to strongly consider a repeat gubernatorial bid. A longtime observer of his political career is more certain.

"He's going to run for governor," said Ted Arrington, a political science professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Arrington said it's a challenge for McCrory to keep his name in front of the general public now that he's the ex-mayor. He also needs to avoid negative publicity that could harm him politically while satisfying both the business community that backed him for years and the new tea party movement to avoid a bruising GOP primary.

"I think he's still popular, but he's just disappeared from everything," Arrington said. "He's behind the scenes. He's working the party leaders."

McCrory almost became just the third Republican since 1901 to move to the Executive Mansion in Raleigh when he lost to Perdue by 3 percentage points in the closest governor's race in 36 years. A month later, he announced he wouldn't seek an eighth two-year term as mayor in 2009.

Since leaving the mayor's post, McCrory joined a Charlotte law firm as a public policy consultant in addition to working with his brother's business and boosted his outside political involvement. He kicked off the New Leadership PAC this spring with a mass fundraising letter. The PAC's treasurer is Jack Hawke, McCrory's chief political consultant in the 2008 campaign.

A political action committee is a common tool for someone interested in running for federal office such as president. John Edwards had one, as does current Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. But it's unusual for someone seeking a North Carolina state government office.

McCrory said he plans to use social networking, electronic town hall meetings and other technology to communicate with supporters about candidates and issues. He said President Obama's use of technology during the 2008 campaign played a role in helping Perdue win by energizing Democrats to vote.



"I felt the impact first hand in my race, and I want to help other candidates not be behind the 8-ball in that area," McCrory said.

The political committee collected nearly $25,000 by mid-April. Retired accountant Ken Collins of Monroe gave $100 to McCrory's new venture because he said the ex-mayor "seems to be a guy that can get along across political lines. You can't say that about everybody."

State Democratic Party executive director Andrew Whalen said the ex-mayor's New Leadership PAC "seems to be nothing more than an attempt to repackage those same failed ideas from his failed gubernatorial campaign."

McCrory also went on the defensive in February when the campaign committee acknowledged it failed to report two helicopter flights in the waning days of his 2008 bid. Perdue and former Gov. Mike Easley have taken heat for dozens of flight disclosures over the past year. The Democratic Party made one of those flights the centerpiece of a news conference.

The PAC is not the only effort by McCrory to stay on the political radar screen. During his last year as mayor, McCrory was asked to speak to large crowds in person and on the air about his concerns with the federal stimulus package and President Obama's health care overhaul.

McCrory was the only speaker to get a standing ovation from more than 1,000 conservative and tea party supporters meeting last September in Raleigh to hear Obama's address on health care to a joint session of Congress. Helping social and fiscal conservative feel comfortable with McCrory could help him win over the Republican base and avoid a tough primary in 2012.

Arrington said McCrory's strategy to attempt to remain salient after his failed gubernatorial shows he's not the same guy who won a Charlotte city council seat as a relative political unknown in 1989.

"He started out in politics a very naive fellow," Arrington said. "He's learned a lot."






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Sources: McClatchy Newspapers, Public Policy Polling, WCNC, WRAL, Youtube, Google Maps

GOP vs Obama's Bi-Partisan Congressional Meeting: Tax Cuts Or White House Gimmicks?

Tax Cut Battle Looms Over Bipartisan Summit As Obama Looks For Reset With GOP


President Obama, at a face-to-face meeting Tuesday with bi-partisan congressional leaders, will have his first chance since his party's Election Day "shellacking" to reset relations with congressional Republicans and potentially crack the impasse over the Bush tax cuts.

The White House dialed down expectations ahead of the summit, which had been postponed from earlier this month. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs described the meeting, which could last an hour or more, as "the beginning of a conversation" and predicted participants would not emerge with a "full agreement" on the tax cuts.

But with the cuts set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts -- affecting just about every taxpaying American -- Gibbs said Obama "absolutely" does not want to see taxes rise for the middle class.

"And if others in Congress don't want to see that, then ... we're going to be forced to make a series of decisions that prevent that from happening. That's going to be the basis for and the beginning of those conversations starting tomorrow," Gibbs said.

The meeting will be the first post-election test of whether the White House and the incoming Republican House majority are able to find common ground on virtually anything.

Republicans and Democrats agree that taxes should not rise on the middle class -- the sticking point is whether the wealthy should be included in that extension.

Republicans want the tax cuts extended for everybody. Democrats originally called for taxes to rise on those households making over $250,000 a year -- some Democrats have since started talking about increasing that salary threshold to $1 million a year.

Obama, who proposed a two-year federal pay freeze Monday, said that he hopes the sit-down Tuesday will mark "a first step toward a new and productive working relationship."

But the White House did not prescribe a compromise Monday, and top Republicans so far have shown little sign of budging.

The official blog for House Republican Leader John Boehner, in line to be the next speaker of the House, slammed Democrats on Monday following reports that they were standing by a partial tax increase.

"All this dithering and doubling-down only validates the American people's repudiation of Washington and politicians who refuse to listen," the blog said, urging Congress to "stop all the tax hikes and start cutting spending."

As for the possibility of only raising taxes on those making above $1 million, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said in a written statement to The Washington Post that any tax increase is a "horrible idea."

Still, he said, "it's not too late for both parties to work together." Some have said a temporary extension for the wealthy is possible.

Despite the drama over the tax cuts, the agenda for the lame-duck session of Congress is much broader. Gibbs said the ratification of the arms reduction treaty with Russia known as START is the other top item on the table for Tuesday's meeting.

And Congress is tasked with belatedly approving the fiscal 2011 budget or face a shutdown, and it must decide whether to extend long-term jobless benefits and repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy banning gays from serving openly in the military. Democrats also want to push a bill that would give some young illegal immigrants a path to legal residency provided they attend college or join the military.

Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said the tax cuts debate could easily become a "game of chicken" between the two parties. He predicted that Congress would ultimately extend the tax rates for the middle class, but questioned whether the critical debate over the burden on the wealthy would spill into next year.

"Hopefully, tomorrow's meeting will come to some agreement," he said.


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Sources: Fox News, White House, Youtube, Google Maps

China Losing Patience With N. Korea Wikileaks Reveal

WikiLeaks: China Weary Of North Korea Behaving Like A "Spoiled Child"


New documents posted on the websites of the Guardian and The New York Times suggest Chinese officials are losing patience with long-time ally North Korea. Senior figures in Beijing have even described the regime in the North as behaving like a "spoiled child."

According to cables obtained by WikiLeaks, South Korea's then vice foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, said earlier this year that senior Chinese officials (whose names are redacted in the cables) had told him they believed Korea should be reunified under Seoul's control, and that this view was gaining ground with the leadership in Beijing.

Chun was quoted at length in a cable sent by the U.S. ambassador in Seoul, Kathleen Stephens, earlier this year. He is reported as saying that "the North had already collapsed economically and would collapse politically two to three years after the death of (leader) Kim Jong-il."

CNN has viewed the cables posted on the newspapers' websites and on the WikiLeaks website.

Chun, who has since become South Korea's National Security Adviser, dismissed the prospect of China's military intervention in the event of a North Korean collapse, noting that "China's strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan, and South Korea -- not North Korea."

He said that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.

In a separate cable from January this year, then-South Korean Foreign Mnister Yu Myung-Hwan is quoted as telling U.S. diplomats that "the North Korean leader [Kim Jong Il] needed both Chinese economic aid and political support to stabilize an 'increasingly chaotic' situation at home."

The cables suggest China is frustrated in its relationship with Pyongyang. One from April 2009 quoted Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei as saying that "North Korea wanted to engage directly with the United States and was therefore acting like a "spoiled child" in order to get the attention of the "adult." The cable continued: "China therefore encouraged the United States, 'after some time,' to start to re-engage the DPRK."

In October 2009, a cable sent from Beijing recounted a meeting between U.S. diplomats and Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo, who had recently met Kim Jong Il. According to the leaked cable, Dai noted that Kim had lost weight when compared to when he last saw him three years earlier, but that Kim appeared to be in reasonably good health and still had a "sharp mind."

Dai also spoke about Kim's liking for alcohol. The cable continued: "Kim Jong-il had a reputation among the Chinese for being 'quite a good drinker,' and, Dai said, he had asked Kim if he still drank alcohol. Kim said yes."

The North Koreans told Dai that they wanted to have dialogue with the United States first and that they would consider next steps, including possible multilateral talks, depending on their conversation with the United States. North Korea held "great expectations for the United States," said Dai.

Further evidence of China's unease at Pyongyang's behavior came in a cable in June 2009 from the U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, Richard Hoagland. He reported that the Chinese envoy there was "genuinely concerned by North Korea's recent nuclear missile tests," and saw its nuclear activity a 'threat to the whole world's security.'" Hoagland reported that China's objectives were "to ensure they [North Korean leaders] honor their commitments on non-proliferation, maintain stability, and 'don't drive [Kim Jong-il] mad.'"

It seems the Russians were similarly frustrated by North Korean obduracy. In April 2009, a U.S. diplomatic cable quoted a senior Russian official as saying that "Foreign Minister Lavrov had a difficult trip to North Korea that did not reveal any flexibility in DPRK's position." The Russian official assessed that Pyongyang was "hunkering down for a succession crisis."


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Sources: CNN, Wikileaks, Google Maps

Assange Vows To Expose A Major U.S. Bank Next Year: Forbes Interview

Exclusive: WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal


First WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government. Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.

In an exclusive interview earlier this month, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange wouldn’t say exactly what date, what bank, or what documents, but he compared the coming release to the emails that emerged in the Enron trial, a comprehensive look at a corporation’s bad behavior.

“It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he told me.


Read Forbes’ full interview with Assange and our cover story on what he and WikiLeaks means for business here.


“You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” Assange added. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”

WikiLeaks recent priority has clearly been the publication of hundreds of thousands of government documents: 76,000 classified documents from the war in Afghanistan, another 392,000 from Iraq, and on Sunday, the first piece of an ongoing exposure of what will likely be millions of diplomatic messages sent between the U.S. State Department and its embassies.

But that government focus doesn’t mean WikiLeaks won’t embarass corporations, too. Since October, WikiLeaks has closed its submissions channel; Assange says the site was receiving more documents than it could find resources to publish. And half those unpublished submissions, Assange says, relate to the private sector. He confirmed that WikiLeaks has damaging, unpublished material from pharmaceutical companies, finance firms (aside from the upcoming bank release), and energy companies, just to name a few industries.

Whether and when those secrets come out is solely a matter of Assange’s discretion. “We’re in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first.”





WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets


Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings.

The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

(For the full transcript of Forbes’ interview with Assange click here.)

When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats.

Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”

This is Assange: a moral ideologue, a champion of openness, a control freak. He pauses to think—a process that occasionally puts our conversation on hold for awkwardly long interludes. The slim 39-year-old Wiki­Leaks founder wears a navy suit over his 6-foot-2 frame, and his once shaggy white hair, recently dyed brown, has been cropped to a sandy patchwork of blonde and tan. He says he colors it when he’s “being tracked.”

“These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them,” he says, then pauses again.

“Megaleaks?” I suggest, trying to move things along.

“Yes, that’s good—megaleaks.” His voice is a hoarse, Aussie-tinged baritone. As a teenage hacker in Melbourne its pitch helped him impersonate IT staff to trick companies’ employees into revealing their passwords over the phone, and today it’s deeper still after a recent bout of flu. “These megaleaks . . . they’re an important phenomenon. And they’re only going to increase.”

He’ll see to that. By the time you’re reading this another giant dump of classified U.S. documents may well be public. Assange refused to discuss the leak at the time FORBES went to press, but he claims it is part of a series that will have the greatest impact of any WikiLeaks release yet.

Assange calls the shots: choosing the media outlets that splash his exposés, holding them to a strict embargo, running the leaks simultaneously on his site. Past megaleaks from his information insurgency over the last year have included 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war. Those data explosions, the largest classified military security breaches in history, have roused antiwar activists and enraged the Pentagon.

Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors’ wells.

Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will.

Long gone are the days when Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy thousands of Vietnam War documents to leak the Pentagon Papers. Modern whistleblowers, or employees with a grudge, can zip up their troves of incriminating documents on a laptop, USB stick or portable hard drive, spirit them out through personal e-mail accounts or online drop sites—or simply submit them directly to WikiLeaks.

What do large companies think of the threat? If they’re terrified, they’re not saying. None would talk to us. Nor would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks “is high profile, legally ­insulated and transnational,” says former Commerce Department official James Lewis, who follows cybersecurity for the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “That adds up to a reputational risk that companies didn’t have to think about a year ago.”

Already U.S. laws wrapped into financial reform this year expand whistleblower incentives to offer six- and seven-digit rewards to staffers in any industry who report malfeasance. Wiki­Leaks adds another, new form of corporate data breach: It offers the conscience-stricken and vindictive alike a chance to publish documents largely unfiltered, without censors or personal repercussions, thanks to privacy and encryption technologies that make anonymity easier than ever before.

Wiki­Leaks’ technical and ideological example has inspired copycats from Africa to China and rallied transparency advocates to push for a new, legal promised land in the unlikely haven of Iceland. It’s also fueling a race in the cyber­security industry and in Washington to find technology that can plug information leaks once for all.

Today Assange looks tired, his eyes narrowed and the skin beneath them puffy, as if he’s unused to even England’s gloomy daylight. He has no permanent home. “We’re like a traveling production company; everyone moves somewhere, and we put on a production,” he sighs. “We haven’t had any rest since April.”

In Sweden, where many of the group’s servers are based, a warrant has now been issued for his arrest on rape charges. He’s denied the accusations, arguing they amount to smear tactics. He’s also afraid to set foot in several other countries, including the U.S., fearing that officials will find reasons to detain him. No question that Wiki­Leaks would be in trouble if he were jailed: A spokeswoman says it has a “contingency plan,” but without Assange there is no public face. Meanwhile, his resources have been drained by defections from his organization; some old friends and associates have taken issue with his autocratic style.

None of which has stopped him from picking new fights. The promised release of bank documents would be the largest assault by WikiLeaks on the corporate sector, and Assange says the business community should expect plenty of sequels. In early October the site shut down its document-submission system; Assange says it was receiving more information than it could find resources to publish, thousands of additions a day at some points. The total is more gigabytes of data than he can count. “Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises,” he says, drawing a curve upward in the air with one hand.

If even a fraction of his claims are borne out, he’s already sitting on a crypt of data any three-letter spy agency would kill for. The world’s most vocal transparency advocate is now one of the world’s biggest keepers of secrets. And about half of those revelations, says Assange, relate to the private sector.

Over the last four years he has been so busy embarrassing various governments, from Washington to the corrupt Kenyan regime of Daniel arap Moi, that many forget the corporate scandals already on WikiLeaks’ trophy wall. In January 2008 the site posted documents alleging that the Swiss bank Julius Baer hid clients’ profits from even the Swiss government, concealing them in what seemed to be shell companies in the Cayman Islands.

The bank filed a lawsuit against WikiLeaks for publishing data stolen from its clients. Baer later dropped the suit—but managed to stir up embarrassing publicity for itself. The next year WikiLeaks published documents from a pharma trade group implying that its lobbyists were receiving confidential documents from and exerting influence over a World Health Organization project to fund drug research in the developing world. The resulting attention helped crater the WHO project.

In September 2009 commodities giant Trafigura filed an injunction that prevented British media from mentioning a damaging internal report. The memo showed the company had dumped tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, chemicals that allegedly sickened 100,000 locals. But it couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from publishing the information. Trafigura eventually paid more than $200 million in settlements.

How can an American corporation respond to a Wiki attack? Lawsuits won’t work: WikiLeaks is legally shielded in the U.S. by its role as a mere conduit for documents. Even if a company somehow won a judgment against WikiLeaks, that wouldn’t shut it down. Assange spreads the site’s assets over many countries. “There’s no single target to drop a bomb on,” says Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University.

The best protection? With a dash of irony Icelandic Wiki­Leaks staffer Kristinn Hrafnsson suggests that companies change their ways to avoid targeting. “They should resist the temptation to enter into corruption,” he says. Don Tapscott, coauthor of The Naked Corporation (Free Press, 2003), agrees. His simplistic conclusion: “Open your own kimono. You’re going to be naked. So you have to dig deep, look at your whole operation, make sure that integrity is part of your bones.”

Most corporations, instead, are turning to cybersecurity to shield their private parts. Despite dozens of calls to companies in tech, energy and finance, none wanted to talk about antileaking strategies. But a Forrester Research study found that about a quarter of companies in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Canada were implementing leak-­focused security software in 2010, and another third are considering that option. A study last year by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy-research consultancy in Traverse City, Mich., found that 60% of employees admit to taking sensitive data before they leave a company.

***

SOME OF THE MORE INTRIGUING ANTILEAK work is being done by Uncle Sam. In an unmarked government building on the edge of a residential Arlington, Va. neighborhood, a cybersecurity researcher named Peiter Zatko shows just how easily leaks can occur. He lays out a blow-by-blow history of one insider data theft: The suspect searched broadly over the network to find anything related to critical infrastructure, then returned to manually probe a few interesting files.

“Then he walked away with enough information to shut down big chunks of the telephone systems in the United States,” Zatko says matter-of-factly.

Who was that shadowy data smuggler? “That was me,” says the 39-year-old researcher, giggling bashfully.

Zatko is not your typical Department of Defense employee. Even in his new Beltway digs, he prefers to be called “Mudge,” the hacker handle he used during decades of exploring the dark corners of the Internet. Frank Heidt, a former security staffer at MCI and several military contractors, says that when he first read Zatko’s exploit research in mid-1990s hacker zines, he thought that Mudge must be the pseudonym of a group. “He was so prolific that I thought he couldn’t be one person,” Heidt says. In 1998, as part of the L0pht hacker think tank, Zatko testified in a congressional hearing that he and his friends could shut down the Internet in 30 minutes.

Since March Zatko has also been a lead cybersecurity researcher at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the mad-scientist wing of the Pentagon devoted to projects that occasionally result in breakthroughs like the Internet and GPS. Zatko’s new pet project may be equally ambitious: He aims to rid the world of digital leaks.

The telephone system theft case that Zatko dissected in a Darpa conference room was a test, demonstrating that anyone with access to a network could steal data without detection, despite the system’s expensive security software. Now his challenge is to fix the problem. Since August he has led a project known as the Cyber Insider Threat, or Cinder.

Like most Darpa initiatives it’s an X-Prize-style open invitation for ideas; recipients typically get tens of millions of dollars in government funding. Thirty-five entrants, mostly tiny companies, have already publicly signed up, many more in secret. “We’re looking to everyone from academia to startups to large government contractors,” says Zatko. “We’re not looking for evolutionary improvement. We want to pull the rug out from the problem altogether.”

It’s a well-worn carpet. Since late 2007 every major security software vendor, from McAfee to Symantec to Trend Micro, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire companies in the so-called Data-Leak Prevention (DLP) industry—software designed to locate and tag sensitive information, and then guard against its escape at the edges of a firm’s network.

The problem: DLP doesn’t work. Data is simply created too quickly, and moved around too often, for a mere filter to catch it, says Richard Stiennon, an analyst for security consultancy IT-Harvest, in Birmingham, Mich. “For DLP to function, all the stars have to align,” he says. “This is a huge problem that can’t be stopped with a single layer of infrastructure.”

More fashionable now is network forensics: the process of constantly collecting every fingerprint on a company’s servers to trace an intruder or leaker after the fact—and, perhaps, deter the next one. That’s a bit like fighting the next war according to the last one. Still, revenue at NetWitness, a prominent Herndon, Va. startup in that budding field, has leaped from $250,000 to $40 million since 2006. While the software generally gathers data and makes it easily available to queries, it doesn’t pinpoint culprits. “There’s nothing in current technology that can do this in an automated fashion,” says Shawn Carpenter, principal forensics analyst at Net­Witness. “You need a Columbo.”

Or, better yet, a robo-Columbo. Darpa’s Zatko has been working on a system of automatically identifying what he calls “malicious missions”: insider activity aimed at stealing data from inside a company’s firewall, whether it’s a Dell PC remotely hijacked by a Chinese cyberspy or Bradley Mannings, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified documents about combat in Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Zatko’s system would monitor networks in real-time for just the sort of data-stealing behavior he would perform himself: steps like scouring large areas of the network for a certain file, dumping piles of data to external storage hardware or sending encrypted files out over the Internet.

No single episode would signal a leak; instead, the software would link acts in a probabilistic chain, triggering an alert only if a string of events points to purposeful data theft.

Some of that leaky behavior isn’t what a casual observer might expect. Consider the cyber footprints left by Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison for selling intelligence to the Soviets over two decades. Every few days Hanssen would stop his normal activities and make a single query to a server across the network, a pattern he repeated for years. That server, Zatko says, held the counterintelligence database. Hanssen was searching for himself, a routine check to see if he’d finally been found out.

“You put all these things together into the different components of the mission,” says Zatko. “I’m looking for these new rhythms, new tells, new interrelations and requirements.”

Cinder wasn’t created to combat WikiLeaks—in fact, it predates WikiLeaks’ biggest military scandals. But Zatko has nonetheless found himself squarely in opposition to Assange’s mission—a strange face-off, given that the two men once traveled in the same hacker circles, during the years when Assange went by the hacker handle Mendax (a Latin reference to the “splendidly deceptive” in the poet Horace’s Odes) and reveled in accessing corporate and government systems without authorization. Neither will reveal much about their past encounters, but Assange says that they “were in the same milieu.” Asked about Assange, Zatko says only, “I have very pleasant memories of those old days.”

WikiLeaks’ founder, in fact, seems to have trouble accepting that Mudge is working for the other side. “He’s a clever guy, and he’s also highly ethical,” says Assange. “I suspect he would have concerns about creating a system to conceal genuine abuses.” He dismisses Cinder as just another system of digital censorship. And those systems, he says, will always fail, just as China’s Great Firewall can’t stop well-informed and determined dissident Internet users. “Censorship might work for the average person but not for highly motivated people,” Assange says. “And our people are highly motivated.”

***

SHUTTING DOWN WIKILEAKS WOULDN’T STOP the growing movement of transparency agitators. They now have a nation-size ally: Iceland. Since WikiLeaks scored a major scoop unearthing the corrupt loans that helped destroy that country’s largest bank, the volcanic island is fast on its way to becoming the conduit for a global flood of leaks.

It began when Kaupthing Bank collapsed in October 2008—a calamitous chain reaction that has strapped Iceland with $128 billion in debts, around $400,000 per capita. Ten months later Bogi Agustsson, a Walter Cronkite-ish anchor for Icelandic national broadcaster RUV, appeared on the evening news and explained that a legal injunction had prevented the station from airing a prepared exposé on Kaupthing. Viewers who wanted to see the material, he suggested, should visit a site called Wikileaks.org.

Those who took Agustsson’s advice found a summary of Kaupthing’s loan book posted on the site, detailing more than $6 billion funneled from Kaupthing’s coffers to its own proprietors and companies they owned, often with little or no collateral; $900 million went to Olafur Olafsson, a major investor in Kaupthing who, on his birthday, flew in Elton John from England, along with a grand piano, for a one-hour concert. “The banks had been eaten from the inside out,” says Kristinn Hrafnsson, a former investigative reporter in Reykjavik who now works with WikiLeaks.

A government investigation is still going on; no criminal charges have been filed. But WikiLeaks became a household name in Iceland. In December 2009 Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who then worked with Wiki­Leaks, were invited to keynote a free-speech conference in Reykjavik.

Their talk echoed an idea from American cyber­libertarian John Perry Barlow, calling for a “Switzerland of bits.” Iceland, with its independent spirit and recent taste of explosive whistle-blowing, they suggested, could become the digital doppelgänger of a tax haven: a safe harbor for transparency, where it’s open season on government and business secrets—and leakers are protected by law.

The idea might have gone nowhere if not for Birgitta Jonsdottir. Assange’s message captivated the 43-year-old poet and self-styled “realist-anarchist.” She wasn’t just another idealistic protester with a goth wardrobe and hipster haircut. In the chaotic political environment that followed the national financial crisis, Jonsdottir had been elected to Iceland’s parliament, the Althingi, in April 2009.

Working with the country’s transparency activists, she pulled together the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or Immi. The initiative would bring to Iceland all the source-protection, freedom of information and transparency laws from around the world and even set up a Nobel-style international award for work in the field of free expression. Jonsdottir pushed through a unanimous resolution to create a series of bills to implement Immi. They would also make Iceland the most friendly legal base for whistleblowers on Earth.

Velkomin, as Icelanders would say, to Leakistan.

“The more that companies resist, the more information will get out about them,” says Jonsdottir when we meet in Reykjavik’s Hressingarskalinn café, around the corner from the parliament building. “They can’t hide anymore. The war is over. They lost.” In Jonsdottir’s vision Iceland will attract both mainstream media and Wiki­Leaks-like organizations to move their data to Iceland, enjoying legal protection, just as another firm might incorporate in a tax-sheltering island in the Caribbean.

She may be getting a bit ahead of herself. Immi has yet to become law, though it has backing from powerful figures, including both Iceland’s minister of justice and the head of its progressive party. Even if it does, Immi likely wouldn’t offer much legal protection to organizations whose assets and staff aren’t physically in the country; they could still be sued anywhere else in the world, given that their digital and print publications could appear globally.

Immi could also face resistance from the U.S. and the EU—particularly when it comes to military matters. As Marc Thiessen, a conservative pundit, wrote on the blog of the American Enterprise Institute in August, “Immi calls into question Iceland’s seriousness as a NATO ally, and Iceland needs to realize there will be consequences for its actions.” There could be a backlash for exposing corporate secrets, too. Alastair Mullis, a professor of law at East Anglia University in Britain, says, “It’s possible that Iceland will become the defamation capital of the world.”

Jonsdottir and fellow Immi creator Smari McCarthy are pushing ahead anyway. Immi, they say, doesn’t fashion new laws; it cherry-picks existing statutes from around the world (source shields from Sweden, libel protection from New York State, protected communications with journalists from Belgium, among them). “We’re basing our legislation on laws that have already withstood attacks,” says Jonsdottir. Defamation and other concerns like child pornography and copyright violations, she argues, would still be illegal in Iceland and wouldn’t be sheltered.

Nor is the idea to protect WikiLeaks itself, Jonsdottir points out. The site doesn’t need help: Its data and submissions process are carefully encrypted, and its infrastructure is spread over enough countries—including some servers in a bombproof, underground bunker in Sweden—that taking it offline is already nearly impossible.
Instead Immi would foster a new wave of media organizations and whistleblower outlets that don’t rely on Wiki­Leaks’ technical savvy or resources. Already a handful of smaller, leak-focused conduits—regional sites like Africa-focused SaharaReporters or Thaileaks.info—have published damning data. Immi’s McCarthy says he’s been approached by media organizations from Rwanda to Chechnya.

German WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg, disgruntled with Assange’s laser focus on infrequent megaleaks, has left the organization along with several others to create his own spinoff. “In the end there must be a thousand WikiLeaks,” he told Der Spiegel in September.

Iceland certainly has the infrastructure for a lot of informational mischief. Half an hour outside Reykjavik, on a landscape that resembles Mars covered in snow, the Thor Data Center is preparing for an influx of bytes. By 2011 it hopes to have thousands of servers in its aluminum-plant-turned-server-farm, powered by ultracheap geothermal energy and cooled by free arctic air.

Iceland’s biggest Web host, ironically named 1984 Web Hosting, is excited about the boost Immi could give its business. “I created this company to prevent thought control,” says Mordur Ingolfsson, its chief executive. “In my humble opinion, Immi is the most important thing to happen to this godforsaken island since the Sagas were written.” (That’s 600-plus years.)

Jonsdottir agrees: “WikiLeaks was an important icebreaker. It was the tip. Immi is the rest of the wedge, and it will open up everything.” (She is less thrilled to learn that Assange speaks of Immi as his personal creation.)I ask Assange how he expects companies to cope with a world where hundreds of WikiLeak-alikes may soon exist. His three-part prescription is earnest—if a bit patronizing: “Do things to encourage leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat your employees well.”

He also wants to clear up a misunderstanding. Despite his revolutionary reputation, he’s not antibusiness. He bristles at the media’s focus on his teenage years as a computer hacker who broke into dozens of systems, from the Department of Defense to Nortel, and was eventually convicted on 25 charges of computer fraud and fined thousands of dollars.

Instead, he prefers to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He tells the story of a free-speech-focused Internet service provider he cofounded in 1993, known as Suburbia. It was, to hear him tell it, the blueprint for WikiLeaks—in one instance, when the Church of Scientology demanded to know who had posted antichurch information on one site, he refused to help. (“He has titanium balls,” says David Gerard, that site’s creator.) “I saw it early on, without realizing it: potentiating people to reveal their information, creating a conduit,” Assange says. “Without having any other robust publisher in the market, people came to us.”

Leaks merely lubricate the free market, he says, settling into the couch and clearly enjoying giving me a lecture on economics. (Later, as a 45-minute interview pushes into two hours, he ignores his handler, who keeps urging him to leave for his next appointment.) He cites the example of the Chinese Sanlu Group, whose milk powder contained toxic melamine in 2008. While poisoning its customers, Sanlu also gained an advantage over competitors and might have forced more of them to taint their products, too, or go bankrupt—if Sanlu hadn’t been exposed in the Chinese press. “In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies,” he says.

Of course, Assange’s tax isn’t as equitable as it sounds. He alone decides where to apply the penalty, choosing the targets and when to expose them with a touch of theatrical grandstanding—and with zero accountability. For better—and worse—WikiLeaks has become the Julian Assange Show. As a photographer begins shooting, Assange wonders aloud if the coat he’s wearing might have been produced by a labor-exploiting company. A few minutes later he jokes about his “messiah complex.”

Like any true believer, Assange sees his work in simple terms. Markets, he reminds me, can’t exist without information. Business will come to appreciate what he offers. And if that requires a few painful scandals in the process?

Assange doesn’t miss a beat. “Pain for the guilty.”





WikiLeaks Claims Next Target Is Big U.S. Banks


WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed a fresh "megaleak" will target a Major U.S. bank "early next year," according to an interview published Monday.

Speaking to Forbes magazine, Assange said that he was ready to unleash tens of thousands of documents that could "take down a bank or two."

Comparing the documents to the emails that exposed Enron's dealings amid its collapse, the controversial Australian said an existing "big US bank" was the subject of a pending data dump.

Asked about any future leaks, he said: "Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that's a megaleak. It's not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it's either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it."

The interview was conducted in early November, before Sunday's publication of around a quarter of a million leaked United States embassy cables from WikiLeaks that have caused consternation in Washington and capitals around the world.

Assange said the bank leak would "give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

"Usually when you get leaks at this level, it's about one particular case or one particular violation."

Amid the economic crisis a handful of "too big to fail" US banks have come under scrutiny for their dealings, particularly with mortgaged-backed securities that helped fuel the meltdown.

Executives from Goldman Sachs and the now-defunct Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns have been hauled before Congress to explain their bank's actions.

Assange mentioned Goldman Sachs by name in the interview, but did not confirm the Wall Street giant will be the target of the leak.

Goldman has recently agreed a $550 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle fraud charges.

Facing allegations of defrauding investors, the storied investment bank admitted it had made a "mistake" and given "incomplete" information to clients.

Assange said that "about 50 per cent" of the documents that the nonprofit organization holds relate to the corporate world.


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Sources: Emirates247, Forbes, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

Julian Assange Exposed: Good Or Evil? (Interview Videos)

Paranoid, Anarchic... Is WikiLeaks Boss A Force For Good Or Chaos?



Just imagine that D-Day is only weeks away.

Months of secrecy and disinformation have succeeded in confusing the Germans about when or where the inevitable invasion will come.

Then an anarchist activist, insisting that in a democracy everyone has the right to know everything, publishes the secret plans for Operation Overlord.

Inconceivable then, but today that is precisely what WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, would do in a similar situation.

In the past, it has released documents relating to Swiss banks, the Church of Scientology, corruption in the Kenyan government, British climate change scientists and even a video taken by a U.S. Apache gunship as it machine-gunned civilians, including two journalists, in Iraq.

Assange - who describes himself as an 'information activist' - insists he is performing an important public duty.

And there is no doubt that WikiLeaks can help to expose dictators and keep democracies honest.

But as his fame and self belief grows, is Assange allowing his unreasoning hatred of authority to colour his approach to vitally important national security judgments?

He says that of the 90,000 documents released this week, WikiLeaks looked at only 2,000 of them.

If that's the case, then he couldn't possibly have known how much information which could endanger U.S. and British soldiers they contained.

Although Assange claims to be driven by the desire for freedom, his attitude - profoundly paranoid and politically anarchist - has more to do with his dysfunctional personal history than any political principle.

Born in Australia in 1971, to two peace activists who met at a demonstration against the Vietnam War, Assange had an unstable childhood.

He is variously reported as having been home schooled or having attended 35 different educational establishments, but there's no doubt that his mother, convinced that she was being stalked by a vengeful former lover, moved home constantly.

By the time Assange was 16, he had developed an obsession with computers.

He appears to have been part of an early group of hackers who named themselves International Subversives and broke into a series of U.S. computer networks including Nasa and the Department of Defence.

As a result, he was pursued by the Australian Federal Police.

Although the prosecution ended with a small fine, Assange had a breakdown and briefly checked himself into hospital. The lead investigator, Ken Day, said recently: 'I think he acted on the belief that everyone should know everything.'

At around this time Assange split up with his girlfriend, with whom he had a child, and then pursued a long and unsuccessful custody battle which further embittered him towards authority. By the end, his mother says, the strain had turned his hair from brown to white.

In the Nineties he founded Wiki-Leaks, a group whose organisation and technology owe more to the hi-tech security services it sees as its enemies than to the anarchist movement from which it springs.

It has no offices and no paid employees.

Key members - except for the increasingly high-profile Assange - are usually known by code letters. Anyone sending information to its website is directed to a computer in Sweden, then bounced to another internet server in Belgium, before the material is finally downloaded at other locations, a process designed to conceal the origin of the leaks from intelligence agencies.

All this computer expertise can also be used the other way round; the leaked U.S. military material was originally encrypted and had to be decoded over many months by Assange and other volunteer codebreakers.

Assange himself is convinced that he is under surveillance by U.S. spies, and won't travel to America for fear of arrest by the government.

He lives a bizarre peripatetic life, with no house and few belongings, moving in recent years between Tanzania, Belgium, Iceland, Sweden and many other countries, given lodging and help by like-minded activists.

His only luggage is a blue backpack containing mobile phones, computer hard drives and a large collection of socks.

But for all the otherworldliness of Assange and his disciples, he ruthlessly manipulates the conventional media that he claims to despise in order to obtain maximum publicity, carefully editing the video footage of the shooting by an American helicopter of Iraqi civilians to achieve maximum impact and choosing a title - Collateral Murder - which encouraged viewers to prejudge the material they saw.

His critics says he's motivated by a desire for personal publicity - he says his aim is 'maximum political impact'.

Assange's supporters invite comparison with the so-called Pentagon Papers in the early Seventies - exposing presidential double dealing on the Vietnam War - but those were published by the New York Times and the Washington Post only after careful consideration of the implications.

Assange, by contrast, makes no such ethical judgments.

Pressed on whether his actions risk harming the innocent - soldiers on active service for example - he says, in a scary echo of the kind of the language used by the military that he despises, that 'collateral damage' is inevitable, and concedes that WikiLeaks might end up with 'blood on our hands'.

Would we be so understanding about the activities of a man if he were exposing facts about a war that we all believed to be just - and not the moral and military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Also troubling is his essential hypocrisy.

Assange claims to believe in making available every piece of information about the military operations, to ensure that the powerful are accountable for their actions.

But he himself operates amid a cult of secrecy, with no accountability to anyone.

There is no doubt that the eccentric Assange has made himself a powerful force in the world today, but whether he is a force for good remains to be seen.


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Sources: CNN, Daily Mail, ITN News, RT News, Youtube, Google Maps

Asia Bibi Awaits Pardon After Death Sentence For Blasphemy Of Islam

CNN Christian Asia Bibi faces death (blasphemy, 5:51)
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Christian Woman Faces Death For Blasphemy


In early November, in the dusty city of Sheikhupura in Pakistan’s heartland, Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian woman and mother of five, was sentenced to death by hanging under the country’s blasphemy laws.

Her crime? She allegedly insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

Almost immediately, the death sentence unleashed international condemnation, and put pressure on Pakistan’s government to overturn the verdict and amend the country’s blasphemy laws – a holdover from a 19th century penal code designed to protect minority religious sects during British colonial times.

The law was radicalized during the 1980’s under the military dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq. He imposed life sentences, even death, for blasphemy to appease the mullahs and legitimize his grip on power.

Pope Benedict XVI appealed for Clemency but hard-line Islamic groups have threatened civil war if the government pardons Bibi or attempts to amend the law.

Bibi’s husband, 48-year-old Ashiq Masih, is desperate, convinced radical Islamic groups are aiming to kill the family. He has gone into hiding, along with his children, sheltered inside a Christian colony in an outlying district of Sheikhupura. Masih insists his wife was framed, a victim of old score-settling in their village of Ittan Walli, where his family was just one of two Christian families.

Bibi’s lawyer has filed an appeal with the High Court in Lahore and Pakistan’s President Asif Zardari may consider an unconditional Pardon if the appeals process takes too long.

So far, the Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti submitted a report on the case to Zardari. He concluded that the charges were baseless. In an interview with NBC News, he said that Bibi could be released on appeal in the high court. “We should wait for the court proceedings but if the court delays then the president may pardon her on the basis that she is innocent,” he said.

Bhatti is well aware of the possible consequences of an acquittal. Judges have been assassinated for freeing victims and several accused persons have been gunned down inside prisons or outside courtrooms as they walked free.

“We will protect Asia and her entire family,” the minister said. “No harm will come to them.”

Sidra, Bibi’s 18-year-old daughter, takes her younger sisters to the jail every Tuesday to visit their mother. “My mother tells us not to cry and to be strong,” she said. “But now, my mother is crying, so how can we be strong.”

With media reports of a possible pardon for Bibi, hard line Islamic groups have held demonstrations in cities across Pakistan. They’ve warned Zardari of a severe backlash if he commutes her death sentence.

At one rally, organized by “The Movement for the Protection of the Prophet’s Honor” denounced any attempt to change the law. “We are ready to sacrifice our life for the prophet,” they chanted.


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Sources: CNN, Daily Motion, MSNBC, Youtube Google Maps

Jimmy Carter On Wikileaks: Restricts Diplomacy & Hurts Trust

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Jimmy Carter: WikiLeaks "Helps No One, But Hurts Diplomatically"


In an exclusive interview with CBS News, former President Jimmy Carter said WikiLeaks' release of secret government documents is not as damaging to the United States as it is to Iraqis and Afghanis helping the United States in the Middle East.

"To have their names revealed as associated with the United States government might put their lives in danger if they are still there, or their families in danger," Mr. Carter told CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante on Monday.

"It's damaging to people who have been revealed as helping the United States, particularly those who are vulnerable," the former president said. "That's a serious negative aspect to it."

The administration and many members of Congress have condemned the release of documents by WikiLeaks.

"When something is finally released -- when I was president and I'm sure it's the same under President Obama -- it's very carefully vetted to make sure that you eliminate all the off-hand remarks and preliminary discussions and you just reveal what the final conclusion was," Mr. Carter said.

"When you take things like that out of context, I think it helps no one, but hurts diplomatically," Mr. Carter said.

Watch the video of Mr. Carter at left. And for more of Plante's interview, watch CBS News' daily politics webcast, "Washington Unplugged," on Tuesday and Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. ET on CBSNews.com. In his first interview since Election Day, Mr. Carter also discussed midterm election results and Republicans' responsibility, his advice for Mr. Obama, and his newest book, "White House Diary."


Sources: CBS News, MSNBC

Obama Freezes Pay Of 2M Federal Employees But Not Bonuses

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Obama Freezes Federal Worker Pay


President Barack Obama on Monday called for freezing the pay of 2 million federal employees, saying the move is the first of many difficult decisions that must be made to slash the nation's mounting deficits.

"The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice, and that sacrifice must be shared by the employees of the federal government," Obama said.

The two-year freeze would apply to all civilian federal employees, including those working at the Department of Defense, but would not affect military personnel. The freeze is expected to save more than $5 billion in savings over two years, $28 billion over five years and more than $60 billion over 10 years, White House officials said.

Federal pay is determined by Congress, and lawmakers must approve Obama's call for a freeze.

Congress is not covered by Obama's order, but lawmakers voted last April to freeze their pay, with the House and Senate opting to forgo an automatic $1,600 annual cost-of-living increase. House members and senators now are paid $174,000 a year. Their last pay increase was $4,700 a year at beginning of 2009.

The president's pay of $400,000 a year was fixed by Congress in January 2001. It has not changed since then.

While Obama said the federal employee salary freeze was necessary to put the nation on sound fiscal footing, he also said that he didn't reach the decision lightly. "This is not just a line item on a federal ledger," he said. "These are people's lives."

The savings from the pay freeze make only a small dent in the nation's $1 trillion-plus budget deficit. But with voters voicing their anger over Washington's spending during the midterm elections, even a symbolic gesture would show the White House got the message.

Obama and bipartisan congressional leaders will meet at the White House Tuesday for the first time since Republicans gained control of the House and increased their strength in the Senate during the midterm elections. Obama said he hopes the move to freeze federal pay sets a serious tone for the meetings. "We're going to have to budge on some deeply held positions, and compromise for the good of the country," Obama said.

California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, said that while the pay freeze was "long overdue," the president and congressional leaders should take additional steps to reduce spending, including imposing a federal hiring freeze of non-security employees.

The co-chairmen of Obama's bipartisan deficit commission have proposed a three-year freeze in pay for most federal employees as part of its plan to reduce the nation's growing deficit. The commission's proposal also suggested cuts to Social Security benefits and higher taxes for millions of Americans to stem the flood of red ink that they say threatens the nation's very future. The popular child tax credit and mortgage interest deduction also would be eliminated.

The commission's final report is due to be released later this week.

Shortly after taking office in January 2009, Obama froze salaries of top White House aides. He proposed extending that freeze to political appointees across the government in last year's budget, and also eliminated bonuses for political appointees.

The pay freeze would not affect bonuses or step increases for federal employees.

Labor leaders assailed Obama's decision as bad for the economy and the middle class. "We need to invest in creating jobs, not undermining the ones we have," AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said in a statement.

John Gage, president of the 600,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, called the decision "a slap at working people."

"Working people's wages are not the issue with this deficit or what is going on in our country," Gage said. "To symbolically hit at federal employees I think is just wrong."

Gage said the White House was using federal workers as scapegoats for the nation's deficit problems. He said the move would not really save as much as the White House claims because federal employees often get just a fraction of projected raises. Federal workers received a 1.9 percent pay increase this year.


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Sources: MSNBC, TIME, White House, Youtube, Google Maps