Today's Washington Post has an article on "TechExpo Top Secret," an intelligence community job fair. The "meal ticket" to getting a job with a company doing intelligence work for the U.S. or under U.S. government contracts: a top-secret security clearance.

Part of what makes this such an exercise in absurdity is that, in the ever-expanding top-secret world created to respond to 9/11, approximately 854,000 people -- 1.5 times as many people live in Washington, D.C. -- hold top-secret security clearances.

So while unemployment surges and the housing market tanks around the rest of the country, the fat secrecy industry of the Intelligence Industrial Complex has kept D.C. and the surrounding regions afloat.

I've been blogging here, to mixed reception, about the alarming increase of "leak" investigations and prosecutions under President Obama.

Yesterday, the L.A. Times had a lead editorial on "The Obama Administration's Attacks on the Media."

[T]his administration has pursued a quiet but malicious campaign against the news media and their sources, more aggressively attacking those who ferret out confidential information than even the George W. Bush administration did.

It specifically mentions the cases of James Risen, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the warrantless wiretapping story, and Thomas Drake, a former NSA official indicted for supposedly leaking details of NSA secret surveillance programs to the Baltimore Sun.

Risen and Drake are bookends of a disturbing trend of the "Transparency President": keeping information from the public.

The indictment of Tom Drake under the Espionage Act weaves a sordid tale of intrigue about how Drake committed dastardly deeds by leaking classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter.  But Drake never gave classified information to a reporter. Upon a close read of the indictment, he is not charged with "leaking" (there is no such crime) anything at all.  Rather, he is charged with retention of classified documents for the purposes of distribution (there is no such crime).

The L.A. Times nails what this is prosecution is really about:

The [Baltimore Sun] reported extensively on technical problems with an NSA program that Drake was involved with; that reporting embarrassed the government, which indicted the individual it says brought about that embarrassment.  That smacks of retaliation, not legitimate protection of sensitive information.

Tom Drake is a whistleblower we would have applauded during the Bush years, but now he is facing 35 years in jail.

I have an article today in The National Law Journal reviewing what would otherwise be a trifling book by a Bush-era neocon . . . but for the fact that President Obama is following its recommendation to prosecute whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.  It's bad enough that Obama's Justice Department is on its way to setting a record for leak prosecutions, but the fact that they are doing so under the Espionage Act--which is meant to prosecute spies not whistleblowers--is especially pernicious.

Real lives are at stake.  Thomas Drake, a former senior NSA official who blew the whistle on an astronomically expensive and unconstitutional secret surveillance program, is facing 35 years in jail.

Gabriel Schoenfeld's book, Necessary Secrets, identifies a problem--the publication of true facts that are secret--but he never plumbs the deeper and more salient question:

What if the true and secret facts are illegal?

He is particularly incensed by the New York Times article that revealed that President Bush's NSA had been spying on American citizens without warrants.  He views this as a program the government had initiated to avert the repetition of another 9/11, but fails to mention that it became one of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration.

Schoenfeld's solution is that newspaper sources and reporters should face prosecution, be fined, or even be sentenced to jail under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Today's Washington Post reports that the Obama Administration is seeking further expansion of the FBI's power to issue National Security Letters (NSLs) and spinning the expansion as a "technical fix":

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. . . . But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters.

The Obama administration's "look forward" mentality apparently also means ignoring the FBI's dismal track record when it comes to NSLs.

The U.S. Attorney Massacre of late 2006 was something that broke largely in the blogosphere--and was the subject of hundreds of diaries here at Daily Kos--before the MSM caught on to one of the bigger scandals of the Bush administration.

I know, I know.  I should not be surprised. The Justice Department's decision yesterday that no criminal charges will be filed in the Bush administration's dismissal of 9 U.S. Attorneys is part of the whole looking forwards, not backwards mantra.

But if we are going to look past the most horrific crimes of the Bush administration--torture, warrantless wiretapping, political firings--then it makes it particularly grotesque and obscene that the Obama administration is willing to continue--and ratchet up--Bush-era investigations into people who tried to do the right thing, like NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and reporter James Risen.

A solid piece that was buried in The New York Times today takes a look at the Obama administration’s enactment (or proposal of) tougher worker safety and consumer protection standards across a host of federal agencies. Sure, regulation buttressing is not really sexy, but its tremendously important. And the administration deserves some credit here.

What kind of regulations are we talking about here? Everything from construction site water runoff to safeguarding eggs. These include (from the article and its corresponding piece):

SALMONELLA AND EGGS

Final rule, July 2009

Mandates measures to prevent salmonella on eggshells during production, storage and transportation, like refrigeration of eggs or rodent-control efforts, to prevent an estimated 79,179 illnesses a year.

STOPPING DISTANCE FOR TRUCKS

Final rule, July 2009

Cost: At least $50 million a year. Savings: at least $169 million a year. New tractor-trailers will be required to be able to break from 60 m.p.h. to a complete stop within 250 feet, a 30 percent reduction, a change that is estimated to prevent 227 deaths annually and 300 serious injuries.

GREENHOUSE GASES

Final rule, October 2009

The first federal requirement to report and monitor greenhouse-gas emissions from about 10,000 industrial facilities representing 85 percent of such emissions in the United States.

The piece also talks about the upticks and generally favorable trends of inspection rates across agencies. FDA inspections are up significantly (still nowhere near what they should be, [example, example] but still headed in the right direction).

But what caught GAP’s eye today was the heavily-increasing number of inspections coming out of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC). That agency has the not-so-insignificant task of making sure products on store shelves don’t kill or significantly hurt people. Like toys from China with oodles of lead parts.