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.

On Questions and Intelligence

Well, it’s a story with many levels. But first, let me point out—we’re spending enormous amounts of money for something that gives us nothing.

There’s a theory among economists called the broken window theory. It goes like this: if I throw a brick through the plate glass window of the store below, I’m actually improving—according to some—the economy. Why? Well, a cop will have to come and arrest me (or investigate the incident), and an employee will have to come to secure the store (that’s overtime, which he’ll spend at the mall), a boarding-up service will be called, a new glass window installed. My toss of a brick has caused a lot of money to be spent, and so is wonderful for the economy.

The problem? All that money could have been spent on teaching a kid to read, researching how to eliminate cancer, and do a host of other useful things. We don’t get anything of value from a broken window.

And I’m beginning to think that our obsession with security is nothing more than that old American paranoia that we do so well. That would be fine, but is it worth spending 53 billion dollars, as we did in fiscal 2012?

Maybe it’s time to say it—the rest of the world, or at least much of it, has lived with terrorism for a long time. The British had the IRA, Spain has ETA—every country has its enemies. And it might be worth it to spend some money guarding against terrorism—but shouldn’t we at least do it well? Is there any reason to think that data mining will make us safer?

I think what will make us safer is to stop dropping drones on civilians in places like Yemen. I also think that doing intelligence the old-fashioned way, instead of relying on the bells and whistles of technology, would yield more results.

And it’s curious—how did a 29 year-old dropout get a job paying $200,000 a year?

Well, the New York Times has the answer—security companies are desperate to get people who can run their sophisticated systems. And that means kids, nerds, geeks.

And apparently, also according to the Times, Snowden was a classic geek—he refused to chat with neighbors; he spent endless hours with his computer. That, says one Time’s columnist, is the problem: too many kids are growing up in a world mediated with technology. They’ve lost the ability to interact in person with the world. And they’re increasingly isolating themselves, and falling prey to paranoia and libertarianism.

Might be. But I’m not so sure that that’s all there is to it. As I understand neurology today, the current thinking is that the brain is still growing at age thirty. In that case, Snowden, with his 29 years, is at the very end of what we called adolescence.

Which means that he is thinking abstractly, not concretely (as he did when he was a child) or as adults do.

Remember that time of your life when you branded your mother a hypocrite because she had said, “sure, you don’t have to go to church, if you don’t believe in God,” and then there she was, begging you to go to church just because her mother was visiting and she was too tired to argue with her mother whom she couldn’t stand anyway?

It’s a very principled time of life, young adulthood, which is why it’s also a time a lot of zealots are made. So I’m not sure that technology has created Snowden, though it certainly played a part.

It’s also easy to see why Snowden is concerned, especially when confronted with headlines like this, in the liberal New York Times:

 Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy

Guys? Are you seriously telling me that we cannot know what programs and activities our government is engaged in, because that would breach secrecy and thus endanger us?

Look, do you think our enemies don’t know, or operate under the presumption, that we are carrying out domestic espionage? Did any al Qaeda operative wake up this morning and say, “wow, I’ll have to think about using my cell phone, now that the US….?”

It’s screwy, any way you look at it. There’s also the fact that this is a contractor, who has access—according to him—to vast sources of information. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that even giving access has been outsourced to third parties. So Booz Allen has decided who could look at my telephone use.

And inevitably, politics comes into play. The coauthor of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is horrified that the act is being used in this way. Well, yesterday I read the letter he wrote in The Guardian, and very virtuous it seemed. However, the Times this morning threw a little ice water on that with a link to an editorial from 2005:

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

So it’s another mess, though an interesting one. One last thought—remember what I said about the young thinking abstractly, ideologically, reading to sacrifice anything for their ideals? Well, here’s the woman Snowden left behind….

1984 Is Not Behind Us

There’s something screwy about it. The United States government has collected this enormous amount of information about whom we’ve called, how long we’ve talked; it also has connections to the largest servers in the country, and so it knows—minimally—who we’ve emailed. And if the government has access to servers, it seems logical to me that it can also monitor Internet use.

We cannot have, says Obama, 100% safety and 100% security: there has to be a trade-off. And he says that these programs have thwarted terrorist attacks in the past. What he doesn’t say is what attacks, and how the information helped identify the threat.

And according to at least one guy, Shane Harris, this kind of data mining is really only useful when you have a specific lead. And where do those leads come from? Here’s Harris on the subject:

Those leads tend to come from more pedestrian investigative techniques, such as interviews and interrogations of detainees, or follow-ups on lists of phone numbers or e-mail addresses found in terrorists' laptops. That shoe-leather detective work is how the United States has tracked down so many terrorists. In fact, it's exactly how we found Osama bin Laden.

So we have an enormous pile of data, and yet we’re still relying on tips, interrogations, or information found on terrorists’ laptops. Why collect all this information? Couldn’t the government get a court order when needed?

It’s also a little screwy that the government, with all this data on its hands, was unable to prevent a couple Boston kids from making bombs, killing several people, maiming scores more, and shutting down a major American city for a day. The Russians had told the FBI—watch out for this guy. That said, why wasn’t the government looking at all Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Internet usage, which presumably is where he was “radicalized” and / or where he learned to make the bombs?

I also understand that the last thing Obama wants is to have a terrorist attack on his watch. And God knows, I would have continued the program, too—what president wouldn’t? But the real question is whether a president, with the help of Congress and the Supreme Court, should be making these decisions.

And let’s be honest, if given the power, the government will use it. But is it legal, collecting all this data? Well, here’s what James Sensenbrenner wrote in the Guardian last Saturday:

In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as "two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress". But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting.

To obtain a business records order like the one the administration obtained, the Patriot Act requires the government to prove to a special federal court, known as a Fisa court, that it is complying with specific guidelines set by the attorney general and that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Intentionally targeting US citizens is prohibited.

The point should also be made—how do you get the genie back in the bottle? We have invested billions to obtain the technology to spy on our citizens. Is it likely that the government will walk away and leave it rusting there?

We went nutso after September 11. But actually, our freedoms had been eroding for years before. Am I the only person in the US who thinks that being asked to pee into a plastic cup in order to get a job stocking cereal in Wal-Mart is an unjustified invasion of privacy? And why is it that I am photographed countless times a day, sometimes without my knowledge? Since when did walking out onto the street mean implied consent?

“If you’re not doing anything wrong,” goes the line. Yeah? What if a major al-Qaeda figure dials my phone number by mistake? What if he emails the wrong person? Or what if my vengeful ex-wife, working away for our homeland security, decides to tap into the system, read my emails, and then start stalking my girlfriend?

Even if I trust this president not to misuse the information, will I trust the next one? Oh, and by the way, what if I write the sentence, “It is completely untrue and without basis that I want to kill Obama?” Will that ring alarms bells for Homeland Security? Am I to expect a knock on the door shortly?

The guy who leaked the information is 29, and though making a pot of money, wasn’t particularly high up in the hierarchy. He’s intelligent and speaks well; I believe him when he says that his intention was to force the issue onto the national stage.

Guess what.

He has.