Wrong, Again

Hmmmm—so maybe I was wrong, signing that petition in my knee-jerk fashion this morning. You know, the online petition supporting Edward Snowden, the 29 year-old guy now somewhere—supposedly—in Hong Kong.

I’m thinking this way because of Thomas Friedman and his column this morning, “Blowing a Whistle,” in The New York Times. Here’s the crux of his argument:

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

Friedman argues as well that, to date, there have been no known abuses of the data mining programs and goes on to quote David Simon:

The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.

Simon makes a point: there’s a big difference between collecting data—in this case collecting phone numbers or emails—and actually analyzing the data—that is, listening to the calls or reading the emails. To listen / read, the government has to go before a judge and give good reasons. Yes, the public won’t know—no suspected terrorist should be reading in The New York Times that the feds are on to him. And yes, it’s a little difficult to ascertain that the government is really playing by the rules. But still, it’s a system.

OK, you say, but why not go after the data when you have a suspect, and a court order to do so? Are you seriously going to give me the have-to-have-a-haystack argument?

Looks like I will. Why? For reasons of time and space.

Look, let’s pretend there a terrorist with a dirty bomb that he intends to put in Times Square at 9AM on Monday. He knows that; you don’t. Do you collect his phone history while the clock is ticking, or do you have the material at hand and then race to analyze it?

OK—that’s time, what about space? Well, you may be dealing with foreign governments, some of whom may not be in any hurry at all to comply with or honor requests from the US government for data. Which, by the way, they may not even have.

“Nobody is listening to your calls,” said Obama, who went on to say that if we don’t trust the executive, judicial and congressional branches of the government…um, don’t we have a problem?

Two thoughts.

As I wrote a day or two ago, the analysis of data tends to come in to an investigation after a tip is received, a laptop is discovered, and interrogation reveals a plot or a suspect.

Now two cases.

First case took place in Orlando shortly before September 11, 2001, when José Meléndez Pérez, a US Custom and Border Protection agent, confronted a Saudi national, Mohammed al Qahtani, and smelled a rat. Al Qahtani didn’t have a place to stay, he didn’t have a return ticket, didn’t have a credit card, but guess what? He had $2800 in cash. Some of his answers were contradictory; he was hostile.

Remember, now we know—no credit card because he didn’t want the trail, hence the large amount of cash. And probably a member of his cell was picking him up and giving him shelter, and as for the return ticket? Meléndez Pérez didn’t know any of that. But Melendez Perez said no way: the story didn’t add up, and he denied Qahtani entry. And that’s why Flight 11 had four, not five hijackers.

Second story—Russia tells the FBI about a guy in Cambridge, MA, who may need a bit of looking into. They do, they drop the ball, and two years later, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, completely unscrutinized by our sophisticated systems, drops the bombs at the finish line to the Boston Marathon.

So my first thought? A system is as good as the people who use it, and I worry that the bells and whistles of technology will dazzle people and delude them into thinking that that’s enough.

And my second thought?

It’s so damn hard to believe a president who says, “trust me,” when his director of national intelligence tells a lie to a congressman. Wyden asked a simple question, and deserved an honest response.

So did we all.

Popes, Presidents and Lies

Right, so now we know. The pope—the new one, not the old one—has come out and said it, and the Vatican has not denied it; so that’s pretty high on the credibility scale. Now then, hold on to your seats, take a deep breath, and prepare for the unimaginable.

There is a gay lobby in the Vatican.

Also, of course, many many saints, said the pope. But yes, in addition to that gay lobby, there is a “stream of corruption.”

You remember the question of Ratzinger, the old pope, who retired last February and trotted off to Castel Gondolfo, to spend pleasant days and nights with his personal secretary, Padre Georg, a hunk who makes Clooney look like Archie Bunker. Here’s a sweet photo of them together:

Right, I’d be grinning too, if I had that guy that close to me. Well, the old pope is proposing to live the rest of his days in the Vatican; Padre Georg will be secretary during the day for the new pope, and then walk home where he will be secretary during the evenings for the old pope.

People in Italy found this situation unusual; as one reporter put it, the pope routinely enjoys robust health until the day he dies. For a man not known as a trailblazer, Ratzinger caused millions of jaws to drop the day he decided to retire.

The press then speculated—was there any reason that the pope decided to retire? Age and frail health are nothing new to the papacy—what had changed that had made it necessary for the pope to retire? Two things came up, two very old things: sex and money.

There was talk of a secret report written by three cardinals; the report, it was said, would be given to the new pope personally by the old pope. The Vatican press agent, of course, completely dismissed the idea of a “gay lobby,” essentially calling the idea absurd.

Well, chatting in Spanish to the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious (CLAR), Francis dropped the news, and the press office, declaring the event private, had no comment.

I’m thinking a lot lately about secrecy and deception. The Vatican knew about a situation and lied; the head of our national security agency, James R. Clapper, looked a congressman straight in the eye and lied. And I am trying to remember—when was the last time I lied?

Well, I’m either a completely dishonest person—and thus incapable of seeing the terrible truth that I’m prevaricating at a prodigious rate—or I’m pretty honest. Barring social lies, I really can’t remember the last time I lied to anyone.

Cancel that—I pleaded a headache recently to get out of an engagement. But I did feel guilty about it. Which, perhaps, is more than Clapper feels; here’s his justification for lying to Senator Wyden:

 "I have great respect for Senator Wyden," Clapper said in an interview with NBC on Sunday. "I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked-- 'When are you going to start-- stop beating your wife' kind of question, which is meaning not-- answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no."

This is an insult. A senator asked you a question, Clapper, and there was nothing of a trick or ruse about it. It was a simple, direct question that made you uncomfortable, and so you decided that it couldn’t be answered by a simple yes or no. But what did you do? You said, “no, Sir.” And then weaseled around by saying, “not wittingly.”

What’s worse is the White House’s response to the controversy. Here’s CBS News on the subject:

President Obama "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he's given" Congress, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday, adding that Clapper has been "aggressive in providing as much information as possible to the American people, to the press." 

Well, Clapper certainly was straight and direct. “No, Sir,” is both; unfortunately, it wasn’t true.

That said, no one really gets off the hook. Obama says that all the activities of the National Security Agency have been vetted both by congress and by federal judges. If true—and it hurts to write those words—then everybody knew, and it took a 29 year-old kid, now branded as a traitor, to tell the people the truth. But if true, why was Senator Wyden asking the question in the first place?

And tell me, how does it jeopardize national security by telling the public in general terms how we’re going about doing national intelligence?

The Obama administration is saying, as did the Bush administration, “trust us.” Unfortunately, neither administration has proved worthy—on this issue—of trust.