OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Cannon Beach, meet WikiLeaks
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
AP Photo/Don Ryan
The new session of the state Legislature opens Wednesday in Salem.
Lawmakers are
heading into
difficult session
T
he 2017 Oregon Legislature will convene Wednesday amid
acrimony, political silliness and dire predictions.
This is all part of the ritual dance that launches each leg-
islative session, as the Republicans and Democrats, House and
Senate, and individual lawmakers jockey for political leverage.
Gov. Kate Brown and legislative leaders from both parties pre-
dict this could be the most difficult legisla-
tive session in years, as lawmakers strug-
THE 2017
gle to balance the state budget, develop a
OREGON
transportation package and provide needed
LEGISLATURE
funding for educational improvement.
State House and
At some point — probably late spring,
committees
if this session follows the usual pattern — Senate
start meeting at 8 a.m.
legislators will begin the difficult compro- Wednesday. The House
mises on the budget and other contentious and Senate will convene
floor sessions at 11 a.m.
issues. No one wants a repeat of the era
in which the Legislature repeatedly was
called back to the Capitol to revise the state budget.
As state Senate Majority Leader Ginny Burdick, D-Portland,
said last week, “I think everybody just needs to take a deep
breath.”
Legislators can speed the political process by abandoning
some of their political silliness, especially in the House, where
Republicans are threatening to slow daily business.
Democrats outnumber Republicans 35-25 in the House and
17-13 in the Senate. Those numbers give Republicans little influ-
ence except on tax measures, which require a supermajority for
approval.
That is why Republicans may demand that the House devote
far more time to publicly reading legislation aloud, word-for-
word. That would slow the legislative process to a crawl, ensuring
fewer bills become law, which some Oregonians might see as a
blessing. But that threat also gives Republicans a bargaining chip:
Give us more of what we want and we won’t slow the process.
Whether that is obstructionism or pragmatism is in the eye of
the beholder. House Republican Leader Mike McLane of Powell
Butte had a fair point when he noted that the Democratic leaders
in Congress also now employ such “obstructionist” tactics because
their party is in the minority.
Congress is an awfully low bar for comparison though.
Oregonians expect more of their Legislature. That includes hav-
ing the majority party make concessions to work well with the
minority party, and vice versa.
Republican leaders have admitted that the 2017-19 state bud-
get will be untenable without more revenue. Democrats need
Republican votes for any tax increases, which require a superma-
jority for passage. In return, Democrats should accept the need for
continued reforms to hold down the cost of government, including
the bloated Public Employees Retirement System.
Some people want to delay PERS discussions, possibly until a
special session. That is a very bad idea. Special legislative sessions
come with no guarantees.
Likewise, the 2017 Legislature should meet both Democrats’
and Republicans’ needs in putting together a transportation-fi-
nance package. There is widespread agreement that Oregon
must reinvest in its roads and bridges, and make its public tran-
sit systems more effective. But the majority Democrats should
heed Republicans’ desire for flexibility in the state’s low-carbon
fuel standards for vehicles — a flawed program that Democrats
rammed through the 2015 Legislature. They also must develop a
sustainable funding mechanism to support statewide educational
improvement.
Those are real issues. The sooner that legislators can get past
the acrimony and obstructionism, the sooner they can make prog-
ress on the problems.
T
his column could get me
arrested.
Something only a little
more extreme happened to journalist
Barrett Brown, released in Novem-
ber after serving three years in fed-
eral prison for sharing a link to
hacked emails from the intelligence
group known as Stratfor. He was
released from prison in late Novem-
ber 2016.
In a video on Brown’s website,
Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the
Press Foundation says Brown “took
information that may have been
stolen or leaked and used it to do
investigative journalism in the pub-
lic interest.”
While originally facing up
to 100 years in prison for shar-
ing other Strat-
for hacked links in
a chat room with
other journalists,
11 of 12 charges
were dropped
and Brown ended
up pleading guilty to transmitting
threats, aiding hackers and obstruct-
ing authorities from carrying out a
search warrant resulting in his three-
year incarceration. Many of the
charges were a result of the leak of
credit-card numbers — six months
after the hack was revealed, giv-
ing, Brown’s defense argued, credit
companies plenty of time to protect
the accounts.
“This was a failure on our part,”
Stratfor CEO George Friedman told
investigators eight days after the
hack and months before the leaks
were shared by Brown.
Unwisely, Brown, who said he
was withdrawing from heroin at the
time, threatened an FBI agent prior
to his arrest in 2012. Along with
jail time, Brown was ordered to pay
more than $829,000 in fines.
On a journalist’s salary, he’ll still
be paying that back when Donald
Trump Jr. is in the White House.
Data dumps
I can assure you I am not with-
drawing from heroin, printing any
leaked credit-card numbers or issu-
ing any challenges. But as any
self-respecting muckraking local
journalist would do, I poked around
on WikiLeaks and typed in the
search term “Cannon Beach.”
Who knew what juicy items I
might stumble on?
Two particular items caught my
attention.
One document was obtained by
WikiLeaks from the U.S. Congres-
sional Research Service.
According to the WikiLeaks site,
the research service is a congres-
sional “think tank” with a staff of
around 700. Reports are commis-
sioned by members of Congress on
topics relevant to current political
events.
Despite taxpayer costs of more
than $100 million a year, its elec-
tronic archives are, as a matter of
policy, not made available to the
public.
The link to Cannon Beach?
Pretty tenuous, a mere footnote,
referring to a 2005 opinion by U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor on the subject of property
takings — usually involving dis-
putes between property owners and
municipalities.
A 1994 Supreme Court decision
held that Cannon Beach’s denial of
an oceanfront property owners’ per-
mit application to construct a sea-
wall in the dry sand area of their
property “does not constitute an
Submitted Photo
A link to a Supreme Court case involving Cannon Beach is included
in this document released by WikiLeaks.
Washington Post and others.
Protections needed
Submitted Photo
Thomas Paine, whose “Com-
mon Sense” is still considered a
model of journalistic dissent.
uncompensated taking under the
Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Con-
stitution.” It affirmed the state’s
goals of limiting development on
“conditionally stable dry sand and
the implementing city ordinances
and department regulations do not
constitute taking of the owners’
property.”
This is not the stuff of Cold War
espionage — it can also be found at
supremecourt.gov.
The second WikiLeaks refer-
ence to Cannon Beach comes in a
hacked email from Stratfor, a global
intelligence agency based in Aus-
tin, Texas.
In February 2012, WikiLeaks
began publishing the Global Intelli-
gence Files, more than five million
hacked emails from the Texas head-
quartered Stratfor. The emails date
between July 2004 and late Decem-
ber 2011. These were the leaks that
got Brown, then a contributor to The
Guardian and Vanity Fair, in trouble.
According to WikiLeaks, the leaked
Stratfor emails reveal “the inner
workings of a company that fronts
as an intelligence publisher, but pro-
vides confidential intelligence ser-
vices to large corporations, such as
Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lock-
heed Martin, Northrop Grumman,
Raytheon and government agen-
cies, including the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security, the U.S.
Marines and the U.S. Defense Intel-
ligence Agency.”
The WikiLeaks site says “the
emails show Stratfor’s web of
informers, pay-off structure, pay-
ment laundering techniques and
psychological methods.”
Among the material was sev-
eral thousand emails exchanged by
staff members between 2004 and
2011, including a short wire service
report about the crash of a U.S. F-15
fighter jet into the ocean 35 miles
off Cannon Beach. The single-seat
aircraft, based at the Portland Air
Base, was from the 142nd Fighter
Wing of the Oregon National Guard,
and went down while on a training
mission.
The incident was nationally
reported by United Press Interna-
tional (cited in the leaked document)
and results of the investigation
— that the pilot became disori-
ented during flight — published by
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The
Releasing hacked emails from
WikiLeaks became a characteristic
of the 2016 presidential campaign,
contributing to the demise of Hillary
Clinton and her top aides, notably
campaign vice chairwoman Huma
Abedin (wife of the notorious nude
Tweeter Anthony Weiner) and John
Podesta, former chairman of the
Clinton campaign.
To me, the email revelations
were about as exciting as somebody
else’s Chinese food order. But they
upset a lot of people on both sides
and arguably led to a Trump win,
along with a nudge-nudge wink-
wink from the nation’s FBI chief
James Comey.
What do the Cannon Beach
WikiLeaks reveal?
That a federal agency and inter-
national think tank really may not
know much more than the rest of
us: analysis of a 1994 Supreme
Court decision and the rehashing of
old news. Intelligence agencies, it
appears, get the news from … the
newspaper.
With huge data dumps available
to anyone with an internet connec-
tion, secrecy is only as good as your
encrypted software.
Even Stratfor’s intelligence
information is available to the public
with a subscription — $39 a month
or $349 a year. A year of the Can-
non Beach Gazette is a lot less and
apparently has much of the same
information.
According to FreeBarrettBrown.
com, Brown is now working at D
Magazine in Dallas, living in a half-
way house while out on parole.
Brown’s defenders seek to turn
him into a cause célèbre, but he is
far from the only journalist at risk
for doing their job.
An arrest warrant was issued for
Democracy Now! host Amy Good-
man when she covered the Dakota
Pipeline protest story — charges
later thrown out by a North Dakota
judge. The Committee to Protect
Journalists lists 259 jailed reporters
worldwide; 81 of those are in Tur-
key, a U.S. ally.
On Jan. 10, we observed the
anniversary of “Common Sense,”
Thomas Paine’s classic plea for
independence and a model of jour-
nalistic dissent.
Shockingly, the United States is
listed as No. 47 out of 180 coun-
tries in the world in terms of press
freedoms, described by the interna-
tional journalists’ group Reporters
Without Borders as especially weak
in terms of federal protections for
whistleblowers and lacking a federal
shield law to protect sources.
Maybe I’m watching a little too
much “Homeland,” but I’m wonder-
ing if a little more public informa-
tion just might make us a lot safer.
R.J. Marx is The Daily Astori-
an’s South County reporter and edi-
tor of the Seaside Signal and Cannon
Beach Gazette.