One of the unfortunate side effects of the push for legalizing online poker in the United States is the rise of astroturf groups like FairPlay USA. Bankrolled by some of the world’s biggest casino companies, FairPlay USA says it’s only interested in protecting people. That sounds great until you start digging a little deeper into their proposals, which include the use of biometric information just to allow you the privilege of gambling online. It seems the only “people” FairPlay USA is interested in protecting are the corporations who would benefit from legislation that corners a very profitable market for them.
Then there’s the presence of two former government officials on its Board of Directors. These two men – former FBI director Louis Freeh and former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge – are the names that get trotted out anytime FairPlay USA decides to pop its head up and make a statement about “protecting” consumers. Almost without fail, those statements go unchallenged – both by the mainstream media, which has an allergy to challenging the statements of well-known former government officials, and by the poker industry’s in-house media, which has an allergy to challenging just about anything. It’s a shame, too, since a deeper look at the careers of Ridge and Freeh shows that they’re not primarily interested in protecting people.
From the Department of Who Needs Enemies?, here are five reasons not to trust these two public faces of FairPlay USA.
1. Louis Freeh doesn’t understand technology.
Louis Freeh became the fifth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1993. Computers were beginning to become commonplace throughout American society and the roots of today’s internet were taking hold. Yet Freeh’s gaze looked backward, not forward. He didn’t place any priority on upgrading the Bureau’s outdated computer systems; in fact, the National Geographic special The FBI says that upon assuming his position at the head of the Bureau, Freeh actually had the computer in his office removed. Some critics charged that the outdated computer systems in place when he left the FBI in the summer of 2001 contributed to the FBI’s inability to “connect the dots” and foresee the 9/11 attacks.
Freeh couldn’t see the usefulness of computers in solving crimes while heading up the country’s top law enforcement agency. Why, then, should anyone believe that he understands the kinds of deeply technical issues that lie at the heart of online gambling?
2. Tom Ridge has a history of obfuscation.
When Tom Ridge was the head of the Department of Homeland Security on the eve of the presidential election in 2004, the nation’s terror alert level was set to yellow. Ridge wrote in his 2009 book The Test of Our Times that he was pressured by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft to raise the terror alert level to orange, hinting that their desire for the change was based on political reasons. Ridge said this incident was one of the factors leading to his decision to resign from the government on November 30, 2004. But in his resignation letter, he made no mention of his principled stand against the manipulation of the terror alert for political ends. Instead he said fell back on the time-tested reason of giving “personal and family matters a higher priority,” only five years later revealing his true motives for leaving the government.
Later, Ridge was named to the board of Exelon Corporation, one of the largest nuclear power corporations in America. By 2010 he had received compensation of more than $530,000 and held nearly $250,000 in the company’s stock. Yet when he appeared on cable TV channel MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews to promote nuclear power as part of a “green energy” plan that would help the economy, he never let on that he could receive a huge windfall if the government were to begin spending heavily on nuclear power.
Tom Ridge has a history of not telling the whole truth. That means he shouldn’t be trusted to present a well-rounded picture of the wide range of issues surrounding the legalization of online gambling.
3. Louis Freeh’s tenure at the FBI was marked by scandal.
For nearly his entire tenure as its director, Louis Freeh’s FBI was plagued by scandals, political infighting, and public relations nightmares:
- A Justice Department inquiry recommended that Freeh be censured for the FBI’s mishandling of the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho, which resulted in the deaths of two civilians and one Deputy US Marshal.
- The FBI’s handling of the investigation of the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was highly criticized and led Attorney General Janet Reno to send US Marshals to FBI headquarters to seize undisclosed tapes of federal agents “asking for and receiving authorization to fire” heat-generating tear-gas rounds into the compound.
- Freeh’s FBI also oversaw the investigation of Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee. Lee was arrested and held without trial for 278 days while the FBI tried to . In an internal Justice Department report, federal prosecutor Randy I. Bellows called the Lee case “a paradigm of how not to manage and work an important counterintelligence case.”
It’s not hard to understand why one former White House staffer from the Clinton years has called Freeh “a guy who was wholly incompetent but who held on to power by making himself useful to the press and Republicans on the Hill” and “a political opportunist who played Clinton, and managed to escape the judgment of history for his mismanagement of the FBI.”
4. Freeh is weak on electronic privacy.
Though he wasn’t big on using computers, Louis Freeh was plenty willing to seize the authority to spy on citizens’ computers. In 1997 the FBI began using the Carnivore system, a system installed at the ISP level to spy on email and web traffic. Demonstrating a lack of understanding of how the internet works, the FBI claimed that Carnivore was analogous to old-school wiretapping technology despite fundamental differences between the technologies. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation testified before Congress in 2000 that Carnivore was “collecting more information than it is legally entitled to collect” because of the FBI’s equation of the old and new technologies. Either Freeh and his subordinates didn’t understand the difference between telephone systems and the internet, or they played dumb because they wanted to lay claim to broader powers than the law allowed.
With Americans’ online privacy now at its nadir, the last person online poker players should want in their corner is Louis Freeh.
5. Ridge and Freeh are serial corporate consultants.
All that’s being considered when either Tom Ridge or Louis Freeh makes a statement on behalf of FairPlay USA is what the corporations backing that group want. Beyond their necessity to make any online poker system successful, player considerations never even enter the conversation. As it turns out, there’s good reason for that: both Freeh and Ridge have a long history of using their status as former government officials to become consultants to, and board members of, large corporations.
Freeh served as a director for credit card issuer MBNA before that company was acquired by Bank of America, and also as a director for pharmaceutical corporation Bristol-Myers Squibb. He also worked with the Gavel Consulting Group, which offered to corporations the expertise of “current and former federal judges and high-ranking government officials,” before later forming the similar Freeh Group International Solutions.
Ridge, meanwhile, has been even more active in selling himself and his connections to the private sector. He has served as a consultant or board member for no less than seven corporations since entering the private sector in late 2004, including several companies whose main line of business is in selling products to the federal government. Like Freeh, Ridge founded his own “advisory firm,” Ridge Global.
