House Speaker Nancy Pelosi answers questions during a Netroots Nation convention in Las Vegas on July 24. (AP Photo) “Did you have a nice summer recess?” smirked Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) just before the House Rules Committee convened Monday night. “Mine just flew by.” Ten days ago, the House of Representatives hung out its “Gone Fishin’” sign until September 14. The House figured it had completed all of its work for the summer. Meantime, the Senate, saddled with the requirement of offering the president advice and consent on cabinet and judicial appointments, lingered for a week in the sweltering Washington heat to approve the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan

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As President Obama touted the benefits to Medicare from his new health care law, Republicans criticized federal spending and the prospect of tax increases.  In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said Medicare will exist for many more years, thanks to new legislation that helped put the health care program for America’s seniors on stronger financial footing. Seniors already are benefiting from that new health care law, said Obama, noting that many have received $250 rebates to help buy medicine, for example. Obama said the law and efforts by his administration to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse both in Medicare and across government generally are making the program stronger and cutting health care costs for seniors. “Medicare isn’t just a program,” Obama said.”It’s a commitment to America’s seniors — that after working your whole life, you’ve earned the security of quality health care you can afford.” “As long as I am president, that’s a commitment this country is going to keep” he said. An annual report this week from the trustees who oversee Medicare, including the Treasury and Health and Human Services secretaries, said the program will stay afloat for a dozen years longer than previously projected, due to the sweeping health care overhaul Obama signed in March. But the added solvency also depends on cuts that ultimately may not be carried out. In their weekly address, Republicans focused on the economy and taxes. Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam criticized the government’s spending and the prospect of higher taxes at a time of continued high unemployment. Obama wants to let a series of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that were enacted during the administration of Republican President George W. Bush expire on schedule in January. Republicans argue that such a move would further damage the economy. “At a time of serious economic challenges, massive new tax increases are a surefire way to stall growth and prevent businesses from creating jobs,” Roskam said. “That’s because every dollar in new taxes owed is a dollar that can’t be used to pay current employees or hire new workers.” “Hobbling the small businesses that are the backbone of our economy will further delay a robust recovery,” he said.

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Representative Michael Capuano (D-MA) has succeeded in ushering his Shareholder Protection Act of 2010 through the House Financial Services Committee.  In reality the bill does little to protect shareholders, but does protect Washington lobbyists. The legislation is a response to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC .  Citizens United restored the First Amendment protection of political speech for speakers of all kinds, including small businesses, corporations, labor unions, and non-profit organizations.  Many self-interested legislators fear what the citizens may say now that their voice has been restored.  As a result we’ve seen efforts to chill political speech advanced in Congress. First came the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act (“DISCLOSE Act”).  The DISCLOSE Act would have imposed onerous disclosure and disclaimer provisions on speakers that choose to exercise their First Amendment rights.  The bill passed the House of Representatives but has not been passed by the Senate. The embattled legislators have now turned to another piece of legislation designed to curb political speech – the Shareholder Protection Act of 2010. Rather than protect shareholders, the legislation strips them of their ability to effectively speak.  Mr. Capuano’s bill will require that corporations set a political agenda at the beginning of the fiscal year laying out their proposed expenditures.  This must be approved by the shareholders. Even the most prescient strategist cannot determine what political spending should be made twelve months in advance.  As campaigns have adjusted to the twenty-four hour news cycle and the ability to rapidly and effectively distribute material via the internet, decisions on political spending must be made in a timely fashion in order to be relevant.  By requiring a corporation to approve and telegraph its annual political spending it will blunt its effectiveness.  This will in effect silence corporations and their shareholders. The intent of the Shareholder Protection Act is to silence corporate speech.  While celebrating the committee vote Mr. Capuano noted: “We should be working to limit outside influence on elections, not giving corporations a louder voice.” Political speech and outreach can be just as beneficial to a corporation and its shareholders as lobbying efforts.  A corporation may only engage in political advocacy if it is in the best interests of the corporation.  This standard is known as the business judgment rule and it governs to the actions of the Board of Directors and leadership of a corporation.  If shareholders believe that political advocacy is not in the best interest of a corporation they can prevent the corporation from engaging in advocacy. Shareholders already have the ability to place limits on the political advocacy of corporations.  They may advance amendments to a corporation’s charter and bylaws to regulate the corporation’s political activity.  They could even advance measures to eliminate a corporation’s political advocacy altogether.  In short, shareholders already have the power to choose how their corporations exercise their right to political speech.  Representative Capuano’s bill undermines shareholder’s rights by imposing a burdensome one size fits all federal regulatory regime in order to stifle a corporation’s ability to speak in a timely and effective manner. Capuano’s legislation also embraces a flawed premise that lobbying should be treated differently than other forms of political advocacy.  In practice, one finds both can be effective tools for advancing the interest of  a corporation and its stockholders. Corporations had the ability to spend substantial funds to influence legislators regarding the vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.  Obamacare can and will increase the costs of doing business in the United States.  Lobbying efforts to prevent the bill from becoming law are a permissible use of corporate funds and under Mr. Capuano’s legislation would still be protected. Corporations, after Citizens United , also had the ability to run political advertisements regarding Obamacare and could have advocated for or against the legislators that supported the bill.  Just like a lobbying effort, a savvy political campaign would have been in the best interests of a corporation and its shareholders.  Mr.

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From the Associated Press : Andrew Breitbart strips off his blazer, windmills it over his head and lets it fly to the stage with a matador’s flourish. He booms into a microphone, sneering, taunting. Breath sprints to keep up with words. A Breitbart boil is under way, before a cheering throng of tea partiers on a moonlike strip of Nevada desert back in March. A finger stabs overhead as the conservative online publisher declares Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a racist. An arm lances outward as he decries Republican leaders as apologists. Voice rising, Breitbart pledges $10,000, then $20,000, then $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund if proof is found to corroborate claims of racial name-calling during tea party protests on Capitol Hill. “They decided to play lowball, hardball tactics,” Breitbart seethes. “Well, we’re going to have to play it right back at them.” You could argue he has done just that. Two weeks ago, Breitbart posted an edited video that left the impression that Shirley Sherrod, then a little-known black federal employee, was racist. Within days she was out of a job, the doctored tape (whose source Breitbart will not name) proved wildly misleading, and President Barack Obama was on the phone with her trying to make things right. Sherrod says she plans to file a lawsuit against Breitbart, and he’s being blamed for committing the same online sins that he says are endemic in the U.S. media: political bias and lack of fairness. But despite calls, even from some conservatives, for Breitbart to apologize to Sherrod, he has done nothing of the sort

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President Obama is going after Senate Republicans who have stymied his proposal to create a $30 billion fund to help unfreeze lending for credit-starved small businesses. His election-year push for additional job measures suffered a fresh setback this past week when the GOP blocked the small-business plan. The president used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday to accuse Republicans of “holding America’s small businesses hostage to politics.” He said the bill has the support of business groups and contains many ideas favored by both parties. “Understand, a majority of senators support the plan. It’s just that the Republican leaders in the Senate won’t even allow it to come up for a vote,” Obama said. “That isn’t right.” Obama made clear that it’s not only a policy disagreement, but a reason for voters to steer away from Republicans in November’s pivotal congressional elections, which will determine whether Democrats keep their majorities in the House and Senate. “When America is just starting to move forward again, we can’t afford the do-nothing policies and partisan maneuvering that will only take us backward,” he said. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky would have none of that talk. He said Democrats have put the bill aside six separate times so they could move on to something else. “So from the beginning this bill clearly wasn’t a priority to them — until they realized that they didn’t have anything to talk about when they go home in August,” McConnell said. “Nearly every major piece of legislation this Congress has considered has had painful consequences for small businesses. Attempting to create a controversy isn t going to hide that from anyone,” he said. Democrats wanted to pass the bill before Congress left town for summer vacation, but that won’t happen with House members already headed home for its August break and the Senate in session for another week before its recess begins. The proposed fund would be available to community banks with less than $10 billion in assets, to help them increase lending to small businesses. The bill would combine the fund with about $12 billion in tax breaks aimed at small businesses. Democrats say banks should be able to use the lending fund to leverage up to $300 billion in loans, helping to loosen tight credit markets. Some Republicans, however, likened it to the unpopular bailout of the financial industry. Congress has extended unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for long stretches and passed a measure that gives tax breaks to businesses that hire unemployed workers. But many other initiatives stalled, in part because of concerns they would add to the growing national debt. The vote to end a Republican filibuster on the latest measure was 58-42. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., joined all Republicans to vote to continue the filibuster, but only as a procedural step that allows him to call up the bill again.

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WASHINGTON — Invasion of privacy in the Internet age. Expanding the reach of law enforcement to snoop on e-mail traffic or on Web surfing. Those are among the criticisms being aimed at the FBI as it tries to update a key surveillance law. With its proposed amendment, is the Obama administration merely clarifying a statute or expanding it? Only time and a suddenly on guard Congress will tell. Federal law requires communications providers to produce records in counterintelligence investigations to the FBI, which doesn’t need a judge’s approval and court order to get them. They can be obtained merely with the signature of a special agent in charge of any FBI field office and there is no need even for a suspicion of wrongdoing, merely that the records would be relevant in a counterintelligence or counterterrorism investigation. The person whose records the government wants doesn’t even need to be a suspect. The bureau’s use of these so-called national security letters to gather information has a checkered history. The bureau engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority to issue the letters, illegally collecting data from Americans and foreigners, the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded in 2007. The bureau issued 192,499 national security letter requests from 2003 to 2006. Weathering that controversy, the FBI has continued its reliance on the letters to gather information from telephone companies, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses with personal records about their customers or subscribers — and Internet service providers. That last source is the focus of the Justice Department’s push to get Congress to modify the law. The law already requires Internet service providers to produce the records, said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division. But he said as written it also causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation as some Internet companies have argued they are not always obligated to comply with the FBI requests. A key Democrat on Capitol Hill, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, wants a timeout. The administration’s proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act “raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns,” Leahy said Thursday in a statement. “While the government should have the tools that it needs to keep us safe, American citizens should also have protections against improper intrusions into their private electronic communications and online transactions,” said Leahy, who plans hearings in the fall on this and other issues involving the law. Critics are lined up in opposition to what the Obama administration wants to do. “The FBI is playing a shell game,” says Al Gidari, whose clients have included major online companies, wireless service providers and their industry association. “This is a huge expansion” of the FBI’s authority “and burying it this way in the intelligence authorization bill is really intended to bury it from scrutiny,” Gidari added. Boyd, the Justice spokesman, said the changes being proposed will not allow the government to obtain or collect new categories of information; rather it simply seeks to clarify what Congress intended when the statute was amended in 1993, he argued. Critics, however, point to a 2008 opinion by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel which found that the FBI’s reach with national security letters extends only as far as getting a person’s name, address, the period in which they were a customer and the numbers dialed on a telephone or to that phone. The problem the FBI has been having is that some providers, relying on the 2008 Justice opinion — issued during the Bush administration — have refused to turn over Internet records such as information about who a person e-mails and who has e-mailed them and information about a person’s Web surfing history. To deal with the issue, there’s no need to change the law since the FBI has the authority to obtain the same information with a court order issued under a broad section of the Patriot Act, said Gregory Nojeim, director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit Internet privacy group. The critics say the proposed change would allow the FBI to remove federal judges and courts from scrutiny of its requests for sensitive information. “The implications of the proposal are that no court is deciding whether even that low standard of `relevance’ is met,” said Nojeim. “The FBI uses national security letters to find not just who the target of an investigation e-mailed, but also who those people e-mailed and who e-mailed them.”

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WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s once solid support among Hispanics is showing a few cracks, a troubling sign for Democrats desperate to get this critical constituency excited about helping the party hold onto Congress in November’s election. Hispanics still overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party over the Republicans, and a majority still think Obama is doing a good job, according to an Associated Press-Univision poll of more than 1,500 Hispanics. But the survey, also sponsored by The Nielsen Company and Stanford University, shows Obama gets only lukewarm ratings on issues important to Hispanics — and that could bode poorly for the president and his party. For a group that supported Obama so heavily in 2008 and in his first year in office, only 43 percent of Hispanics surveyed said Obama is adequately addressing their needs, with the economy a major concern. Another 32 percent were on the fence, while 21 percent said he had done a poor job. That’s somewhat understandable, given that far more Hispanics have faced job losses and financial stress than the U.S. population in general. An unfulfilled promise to overhaul the nation’s patchwork immigration system, which Hispanics overwhelmingly support, also may be to blame. That’s despite the fact that Obama is challenging an Arizona law that requires police, while enforcing other laws, to question a person’s immigration status if officers have a reasonable suspicion he or she is in the country illegally. Still, 57 percent of Hispanics approve of the president’s overall job performance compared with 44 percent among the general population in the latest AP national polling. “It’s been tough, but I think he’s been doing a fair job,” says Tony Marte, 33, a physical education teacher in Miami who is a Nicaraguan native. He voted for Obama in 2008 and, so far, likes how Obama has handled the economy. But Marte’s not satisfied with Obama’s work on immigration reform. “Nothing has been done,” he says and adds that between now and 2012, Obama should, “be looking out for the groups that put him up there. The Latinos. The minorities.” He says he’ll likely back Obama again but “we’ll see.” The political power of Hispanics now and in the future cannot be overstated. They are the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S. and the government projects they will account for 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size from today. Democrats long have had an advantage among Hispanics and maintained it even as George W. Bush chipped away at that support. Obama erased the Republican inroads during his 2008 campaign, winning 67 percent of their vote to 31 percent for Republican nominee John McCain. And Hispanics consistently gave Obama exceptionally strong marks in his first year as president. With the first midterm congressional elections of Obama’s presidency in three months, the poll shows a whopping 50 percent of Hispanic citizens call themselves Democrats, while just 15 percent say they are Republicans. Among Hispanics, 42 percent rate the economy and the recession as the country’s biggest problem; unemployment and a lack of jobs come in at 23 percent. Ascencion Menjivar, an Honduran native who is a cook in Washington, isn’t sold on the administration’s approach to creating jobs and is waiting for a solution to get the economy back on track. “I think it’ll be a long process,” says Menjivar, 30. Still, he says Obama — “a genius” — eventually will make it happen. Patricia Hernandez Blanco of Miami, 38, is less confident that recovery is under way. “I’m not sure it’s improving,” she says. Even so, this Cuban who voted for McCain, says she would now cast a ballot for Obama. Re-electing Obama would be “really stupid,” counters Carlos Toledo of Puerto Rico, an independent voter, a clothing store manager and a self-defense instructor in Washington. Toledo, 35, disagrees with Obama’s economic policies and says he worries about joblessness as budgets are cut and money is spent on wars despite the country’s debt. Behind economic woes, immigration comes in second in importance. Since the controversy over the Arizona law erupted in April, Hispanics who mostly speak English at home gave Obama higher marks on his handling of their top issues than did Hispanics who primarily speak Spanish and who tend to be more recent immigrants or non-citizens. Analysts say it’s possible that the more English-dominant Hispanics rallied around the president following the enactment of the Arizona law and his challenge to it; some 40 percent of them approved of his performance on their key issues before Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law in April but the figure rose to 52 percent in the weeks after. The poll also showed that two years after witnessing Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House bid, Hispanics are twice as likely to expect to see a woman than a fellow Hispanic become president. Some 59 percent said it is likely that a woman will be elected president sometime in the next two decades while just 29 percent thought it likely that a Hispanic will be elected president over that period. And, 34 percent of non-citizen Hispanics thought the country is likely to have a Hispanic president, compared with 27 percent of citizens. Also, a significant percentage of Latinos — 41 percent — said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who is Hispanic. The AP-Univision Poll was conducted from March 11 to June 3 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Using a sample of Hispanic households provided by The Nielsen Company, 1,521 Hispanics were interviewed in English and Spanish, mostly by mail but also by telephone and the Internet. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Stanford University’s participation in the study was made possible by a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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June 13: Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a gathering in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan (AP). U.S. and allied forces fiercely denied Afghan charges Monday that a NATO-led rocket attack last week killed as many as 45 civilians. A senior U.S. official called those allegations “premature at best.”  Earlier in the day, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s office released a statement that claimed a NATO rocket attack during military operations last Friday killed 52 civilians, maybe more, including women and children, in Helmand province.  President Karzai strongly condemned the attack and called for international troops to increase their efforts to stop civilian casualties.  “While deeply saddened by the heartbreaking incident which is both morally and humanly unacceptable, the president condoled via phone with the mourning families and called on NATO troops to put into practice every possible measure to avoid harming civilians during military operations,” reads a statement in English issued by the Afghan government.  “The president stressed that the recent documents leaked out to media clearly support and verify Afghanistan’s all-time position that success over terrorism does not come with fighting in Afghan villages, but by targeting its sanctuaries and financial and ideological sources across the borders,” the statement continues.  But those comments have drawn sharp criticism from NATO following a joint investigation between the International Security Assistance Force and the Afghanistan government that so far has revealed no evidence of any civilians having been injured or killed.  “Any speculation at this point of an alleged civilian casualty in Rigi Village is completely unfounded,” ISAF Communication Director Rear Admiral Greg Smith said, referring to the site of the alleged attack. “We are conducting a through joint investigation with our Afghan partners and will report any and all findings when known.”  The investigation reviewed a joint operation that occurred just south of the village last week, when both ISAF and Afghan National Army forces came under fire from machine guns and RPGs.  The joint force responded with attack helicopters and precision-guided missiles against the insurgents. Senior U.S. officials insist all fires were observed and accounted for and struck the intended target. A ground report verified six insurgents were killed in the strike, including a Taliban commander.         The tensions come as more than 90,000 secret U.S. military reports on the Afghanistan war were posted on the Internet by a group known as Wiki Leaks. Some of those documents included unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings.        But U.S. officials have been quick to point out the reports only cover the years 2004 through 2009, and do not reflect the recent efforts to curb civilian casualties.     “Coalition forces are very actively trying to avoid and to minimize civilian casualties, as opposed to the Taliban and Al Qaeda who actively go after civilians and who indiscriminately kill civilians in large numbers,” Defense Department spokesman Col. Dave Lapan told reporters at the Pentagon Monday.  “You’ve seen reports that have come out in recent months that show that the number of civilian casualties attributed to coalition forces is on the decrease and the number of civilian casualties attributed to the Taliban is on the increase. So the idea that they are somehow being underreported doesn’t seem to match up,” he said.  

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Tell Chuck Norris to stand down. Invasion USA never happened. I contacted both the Laredo Police Department and the Webb County Sheriff yesterday and debunked claims that Los Zetas gunmen from the Gulf Cartel has crossed the border from Mexico and took over two ranches in Texas. The Laredo Morning News also refuted the claim . Pro 8 News, the NBC affiliate, didn’t think enough of the absurdity to even comment on it… they found the installation of a new traffic light more newsworthy. Absurdly, the same trio of sites that cried wolf are still sticking by their story, utter lack of credible evidence aside. Cypress News publisher John G. Winder is sticking with the story , not because any additional evidence has been produced, but because the two sources for his version of the story, blog Digger’s Realm and Examiner.com’s San Diego (CA) County Political Buzz Examiner blogger Kimberly Dvorak are standing by their militiamen and anonymous police sources. The original Cypress Times story? A re-publication of the original Digger’s Realm story. The Digger’s Realm story? Two anonymous Laredo police sources and a San Diego California Minuteman named Jeff Schwilk who claims he got his information from… an anonymous Laredo PD officer. San Diego County Poltical Buzz Examiner Kimberly Dvorak? She claims her information also comes from two anonymous Laredo PD sources. Are we noticing a pattern here? Every bit of of this claim, which has now scattered far and wide across the Internet, can be traced back to two anonymous police department sources of a police department that does not even have jurisdiction where the alleged invasion is taking place. I invite Digger and Kimberly Dvorak to provide me with the names and contact information of their anonymous police sources. Perhaps the officers will provide me with the answers to two simple questions that neither blogger has apparently thought to establish yet. What are the physical addresses of the two ranches Los Zetas are said to have taken over? What are the names of the ranchers that have been displaced from their ranches by Los Zetas? It seems rather odd that the stories promoting this claim say that people were forced out, but that neither has thought to name, locate, or try to interview the best possible eyewitnesses. That is what you would expect from competent journalists. We’re not seeing it here. Instead, we’re offered a conspiracy theory where law enforcement at every level, the media, and the citizens of Webb County are conspiring to cover up an invasion by a handful of drug dealers. * * * As bizarre as the Invasion of Laredo is as a story, the most disappointing thing about it thus far isn’t that a handful of conspiracy theorists could concoct such a story, but that our federal government has created the conditions for such a flight of fancy to appear absolutely possible. We are a nation governed by generations of Republicans and socialists that desire an open border for nefarious political reasons, led by a President, U.S. Attorney General, and Congress that do not every pretend to care about the lives of American citizens or the sovereignty of our nation. We are citizens abandoned, adrift, and worried about our future, threatened by a very real and very violent war between Mexican authorities and powerful drug cartels. Given all this context, all the evidence of failure of a government unwilling to protect our national sovereignty or our citizens, and it isn’t difficult to understand how a story like the Laredo ranch invasion seems entirely plausible. Barack Obama, Janet Napolitano and Eric Holder have failed us. This invasion may have been a hoax, but at the same time, it serves as a very real reflection of their incompetence.

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WASHINGTON — Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.  As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.  But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents.  “The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet,” Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.  Napolitano’s comments suggest an effort by the Obama administration to reach out to its more liberal, Democratic constituencies to assuage fears that terrorist worries will lead to the erosion of civil rights.  The administration has faced a number of civil liberties and privacy challenges in recent months as it has tried to increase airport security by adding full-body scanners, or track suspected terrorists traveling into the United States from other countries.  “Her speech is sign of the maturing of the administration on this issue,” said Stewart Baker, former undersecretary for policy with the Department of Homeland Security. “They now appreciate the risks and the trade-offs much more clearly than when they first arrived, and to their credit, they’ve adjusted their preconceptions.”  Underscoring her comments are a number of recent terror attacks over the past year where legal U.S. residents such as Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad and accused Fort Hood, Texas, shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, are believed to have been inspired by the Internet postings of violent Islamic extremists.  And the fact that these are U.S. citizens or legal residents raises many legal and constitutional questions.  Napolitano said it is wrong to believe that if security is embraced, liberty is sacrificed.  She added, “We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable.”  As an example, she noted the struggle to use full-body scanners at airports caused worries that they would invade people’s privacy.  The scanners are useful in identifying explosives or other nonmetal weapons that ordinary metal-detectors might miss — such as the explosives that authorities said were successfully brought on board the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He is accused of trying to detonate a bomb hidden in his underwear, but the explosives failed, and only burned Abdulmutallab.  U.S. officials, said Napolitano, have worked to institute a number of restrictions on the scanners’ use in order to minimize that. The scans cannot be saved or stored on the machines by the operator, and Transportation Security Agency workers can’t have phones or cameras that could capture the scan when near the machine.

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