The Senate CIA torture report

http://billmoyers.com/2014/12/09/20-quick-take-aways-senate-report-cia-torture/

Some of this was already known or suspected by us, but the confirmation and surprising excesses just make me ashamed to be American. It's a black mark on all the Americans who previously or currently fight for freedom and human rights honorably, or in some cases they do it smartly/peacefully so they don't need to fight at all.

Of course the CIA regurgitated the same tired lines that this disclosure will put US personnel and interests in danger overseas, and their tactics (albeit ugly) prevented attacks. Well on the first point, there is no such thing as secrecy in our social media connected world. Even if there was no Senate report, people all over the world have experienced or know of relatives and neighbors getting kidnapped, tortured, or assassinated. Do you think they don't care and just forget? They hate us for it and it breeds new security threats for the US. So don't blame the Senate for exposing what foreigners already know. The Senate is just forcing the apathetic, aloof public to look at ourselves in the mirror - which is a critical requirement of a functional free society that we may overlook.

Re: their second point, that the ends justify the means - well we know where that argument leads. Technically, it will probably make America safer if we nuke Pakistan tomorrow. Are we prepared to do that? Of course not. From a utilitarian perspective, you have to draw the line on how much evil you are willing to commit to do good, and I think our society wants to have a very low bar for that (as we should). If the outcome is good, you can rationalize and make all the excuses you want. But what if you're wrong and you failed? You committed all that evil for no gain, and we have to deal with the consequences of the evil too. The Senate report suggested that torture did generate some actionable intel, but they weren't critical pieces of intel, and in many cases that info was also obtained through more ethical means. So it was a lot of evil for very little benefits, and there were better ways to get the same benefits. Of course intel under duress is full of lies and false leads, which wasted intel resources. The CIA is a gov't agency too - so hawkish conservatives need to remember that it's not immune to similar screw-ups as we've seen at the VA, HHS, IRS, etc.

Like the recent NSA abuses, this is what happens when we as a society get so lazy/fearful/egocentric that we let our perceived security trump everything else, and entrust it to sociopaths with little to no scruples or accountability (and plenty of ulterior motives). Maybe that is not fair; I do believe that many in our security apparatus (even the criminals) do really love America and believe that they are doing what is best for our safety. But like Wall Street, they fail to take a broader, longer view of what safety truly means. Their mission at hand is not necessarily compatible to the overall mission of the US. And maybe like US law enforcement, we give the CIA more credit than they actually deserve in terms of brainpower and competence. Because it's pretty scary to ponder - are our protectors actually inept and immoral? Well it's better that we ask and find out, rather than just hope for the best and get a rude awakening (like 9/11, or Bay of Pigs, or Iran-Contra, and the list goes on and on).

Anyone who has worked a corporate job knows how easily it is for depts and teams to get fixated on their immediate objectives and success criteria, without considering the implications/significance on the overall company's success. I think this probably occurred at the CIA and NSA. Their narrow success criteria are "intel" and kills (in the case of the CIA), and they are the ones who get to tell their "customers" how good of a job they're doing. So without due diligence, attribution, and independent scrutiny, who is to say whether their intel and kills are actually low or high value? So of course, each morsel of info they gather is a home run, and each target they murder was an immediate threat to the US. They are incentivized to get as much info as possible, by whatever means available (and under Bush and Obama, they got the keys to the kingdom).

Sure there is some federal oversight, but most of it is classified and never gets public review. I don't think that is a very smart way to structure things. But we can't really expect the CIA and NSA to not go hog wild if we give them such freedom, mandate, and budgets. The bigger blame is on our civilian leaders who let the beast out of the cage, and the US public who failed to hold any of them accountable (until it was too late). And I doubt anyone will get fired or go to jail over the report, which adds to the tragedy. 

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Regarding points 1 and 2 I would offer a less cynical approach:

1.  It will endanger Americans because the truth being exposed is ugly.  I heard some official say there really isn't a good time to release this kind of info.  So pragmatically speaking, they should expect backlash.  So not a reason to stop the release but an accepted cost of release.

2.  Whether this is true or not I can imagine an insider wanting or needing it to be true.  Not that the ends justify the means but that the means, having been done, provided something worthwhile.  The alternative is all loss and nothing redeeming.

So hopefully some of these people are making these assertions for the right reasons instead of political ones.

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Thx, M. Yeah as you said, there's never really a good time to announce bad news. But if the CIA was worried about this stuff getting out and endangering Americans, then they shouldn't have done it in the first place. It's the act, not the revelation, that is damaging. And so far, I haven't heard of any attacks on US targets. An optimistic way of looking at it might be that foreigners will respect America more for investigating its dirty laundry rather than burying/denying it like Putin or Kim might.

Like the VA hearings a while back, this is of course is prompting calls for a "total review" of the Agency and cultural change, but as we know, that stuff happens slowly or never. Congress seems upset that they were misled/not fully informed, although the CIA denies it. No president (incl. Obama) has tried to stand up and rein in the CIA. There was some talk that Kennedy wanted to after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but obviously didn't get the chance (and some believe that the CIA had a role in his death, but I don't mean to bring up conspiracies).

I think the timing of the report is slightly political, as the Dems are losing the Senate next month. But based on the sheer volume of the report, I guess it was years in the making. There was a push within the Dem party to investigate and try to hold someone accountable for the errors during the Bush years (they already did 9/11 and WMDs, so torture/Gitmo was the last one).

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Why are they beyond reproach? They were created by the state, and the state represents the citizenry. It's not like they're some rogue kingdom like North Korea that we have to handle with kid gloves. But I guess they do act like a "state within a state" at times.

Maybe our leaders don't have the stomach for it, but with a stroke of a pen, Congress and the President could require the CIA to expose its finances, data, and emails each year (to the right eyes of course), and we could appoint an independent watchdog that needs to be present at all high level intel and strategy meetings - and also has to approve any tier 1 action. Just knowing that someone is watching you is often enough to clean up behavior and reduce risk taking. And if this is done delicately, it won't degrade our security readiness at all. In fact, could be the opposite. Sure the CIA will bitch about it (no one likes a micromanager), but then they should have behaved better in the first place.

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Isn't that sort of not true though?  I mean the whole part that is in contention is whether and/or to what extent the CIA fed lies to the overseers.  The classic who watches the watchers dilemma.  So watchdog all you like there will never be a guarantee that an agency whose sole agenda is covert ops will be fully forthright with anyone but themselves.  Not to say we quit and take it but these gaps in information are sort of the cost of entry to this type of game.

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I see your point, but that is why the CIA can't be trusted to self-report truthfully (just like you have to take a defendant's testimony with a grain of salt unless corroborated by others). We have to go beyond the Congressional committees (even though they swear oaths when they testify), and have non-CIA people embedded at the Agency to watch the watchmen. It's also like SOX compliance, public companies have to hire a third-party audit firm for the accounting - they just can't tell the SEC to trust them that it's all good.  

How to find out who has a g0v't s3cur1ty cl3aranc3

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/how-one-hack-got-engineers-security-clearances

Sorry for the funky email subject... was trying to prevent PRISM from detecting keywords and flagging us! Not sure if I am being paranoid or facetious.

Remember that old movie "Sneakers" (kind of put Bay Area tech culture on the map for Hollywood)? Robert Redford led a team of hackers who are paid to try to infiltrate an org's security, in order to expose vulnerabilities. Well that job is alive and well today, but with fewer shotguns. The pros don't waste their time with high-tech hacking, they just employ the oldest confidence schemes in the book! No point taking the Rube Goldberg path when marks will give you want you want for free. But the whole point of a gov. sec. clearance is to not broadcast to the world that you have one. How to out the engineers and companies who do?

It's much easier to convince someone on the inside to give you access rather than trying to break in yourself and risk getting pinched. There's always human psychology, and the gov't contractor-tech geek types aren't exactly known for their street smarts and social skills. So these "good hackers" went on LinkedIn, and used pretty simple tricks to reel in folks with gov't clearances to improperly expose themselves (not Anthony Wiener style fortunately).

They played to their impulses and egos: impress someone who claims to be a recruiter with your super-cool classified projects, and come to the aid of an attractive damsel-in-distress who wants to get into the NatSec industry. Kind of scary that it was this easy though. Clearly these orgs need to give more security training, especially when social media are involved. Or maybe they should snoop on their own workers first before sifting through the general population.

Snowden, Syria, and Obama

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/surveillance_09-06.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?hp&_r=0

Snowden leaked that the NSA gave companies court orders to fork over their security keys so that they could access confidential financial and personal info. The made the companies sign gag orders so they couldn't complain, and we are talking about the major players like MSFT and GOOG (in fact Google is now suing the gov't for the right to tell the public about how they were forced to give access to user info). Also, the NSA just blatantly cracked other firms' encryption. Ironically the US Gov't has recently complained about China doing that to our companies. The NSA hasn't denied anything, and said that the disclosure has hurt national security. As we discussed before in the original Snowden story, maybe this invasive action is tolerable when there is a court-issued warrant (from a real court with real oversight, not some shadowy FISA BS), but they can't just arbitrarily cast a dragnet on everyone.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec13/shieldsbrooks_09-06.html

Was it a mistake for Obama to involve Congress in the Syria decision? Apart from the hard core hawks like McCain, many in the GOP have incentive to make Obama look ineffective on Syria. House leaders "support" Obama's plan, but won't round up votes for him. Congressional Dems now feel pressured to go to bat for the president, and if the Syria op goes bad, it may cost them in the midterms. The majority of Americans are apathetic or against military escalation in Syria, as are the majority of the world's people (or so it seems after the G20 summit). So it's unlikely that Obama will even be able to assemble a coalition at home and abroad to match the support for the Iraq invasion, as sad as that is (Saddam: imaginary WMDs, Assad: real WMDs and he used them). So now will Obama "go it alone" (+France), which is the type of unilateral action that he denounced when the Bushies did it. Or when is it OK to go it alone if you know you're right? Well, if you are right, it shouldn't be too hard to persuade/bribe/intimidate others into tacit approval or full support. And for all of Obama's big talk and int'l adoration, his administration has actually been pretty horrible on diplomacy. Talk is cheap now that Assad has deployed WMD. The trick is you talk to him BEFOREHAND, when better options still existed, stakes were lower, and emotions were cooler. But we tend to dither until problems get out of hand. Maybe that is also a side effect of Iraq's failed pre-emptive war strategy and resultant anti-Americanism, now we are skeptical/hesitant to swiftly engage anyone, even if it's not militarily.

I have mixed feelings about a military strike, unless we want to do it purely as formality to show that there are *some* consequences to using WMD (just lob some missiles at easy targets and that's it, no escalation plans, no what-ifs). But like Iraq, right now we don't really have an exit strategy, or any strategy, or even agreed-upon objectives (regime change, reduce Assad's ability to use WMD again, protect civilians? Not necessarily mutually exclusive). That's why it's so frustrating to see big Dems like Pelosi rubber-stamping this. Another problem is Iran has called for terror groups to strike at US targets and affiliates if we do anything to Syria, so we have to weigh the risk-benefits (and sorry Syrian victims, unfortunately your lives are less valuable to us).

Russia has moved some warships into the Eastern Med. I also don't understand that... why does Russia care so much what happens to Assad? I know he is a big trading partner and buys a lot of weapons from them (and is serving as a distraction for the US to prevent our "hegemony" in the Mideast), but is it worth losing face if Assad ends up going madman and doing something worse? According to Putin, it's not just him and China though, as India, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy have also opposed military action.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/29/world/meast/syria-iran-china-russia-supporters/index.html

But as usual, Syria is really a proxy battleground and the underlying issues are much bigger. Syria's people are unfortunately a test case to evaluate what are the int'l norms for violating sovereignty for humanitarian, political, or security reasons. Supposedly we're going to have to face similar issues with Iran as it gets closer to a functional bomb, and as the people demand more freedom from the theocracy and may revolt. What the interested parties do vis-a-vis Syria is signaling to the other parties on what will happen should Iran go down a similar path. Unfortunately the US is not sending out great signals at the moment: dithering on justification and appropriate response to WMD usage and other atrocities. Plus all this pre-warning and debate is giving Assad plenty of time to prepare and hide or shield his military assets, as well as giving Iran's proxies preparation for potential retaliations. The trick was to diffuse Syria way before we ever got to this point, but that ship has sailed long ago. You think Kennedy and Khruschev could have resolved the CMC if troops had already killed each other?

FUBAR....

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I was listening to someone on NPR about the Russian perspective and it was really interesting.  Aside from the fact that Russia has a fair amount of Russian interests at stake in Syria, they view the crisis much more on the side of Assad than they do the rebels because of their past with Chechnya.  A sub-unit of their country, Islamic terrorism, etc.  So for the ruskies this looks a lot more like a conflict they are familiar with and don't want to see the "terrorists" win.

I'm not sure why Obama is giving this to the congress.  I think, as a rule, it should.  But in his own speech at the G20 he said that these types of conflicts don't poll well.  If Rwanda were today it wouldn't poll well.  So given that he knows it is generally unpopular, why put it to a vote?  Just so posterity can be SURE that his action was against the will of the people?  

Also an onion article, I paraphrase:  "Obama debating to either proceed with missile strikes, or to strike with missiles".  It doesn't seem like there are any alternatives being considered, perhaps rightly so, but it doesn't help the idea that the congress is controlling this mess.  If they vote 'no' then what happens?

The fact that Snowden is not considered a whistle blower is ridiculous.  I don't see how anyone can, with a straight face, say that we the people don't have a right to this kind of information.  The fact that there are secret courts, massive spying networks, privacy tools currently available have been backdoor'ed or defeated entirely, is insane.  And the response is "why doesn't he let a court decide if he is really a whistle blower?"  As if history is full of examples of prosecuted whistle blowers who had nothing bad happen to them.  Get real.

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Thx, M.

I 100% agree with you on Snowden. The "official" definition of whistleblower is BS, modified by the people who stand to lose from whistleblowers. And as you said, the whole "give yourself up and you will get your chance to be heard" has probably never worked out. This NSA garbage is blatant abuse of power, and the only difference with Nixon is that the NSA hasn't been caught obstructing justice yet (because they have courts that exist to protect them, unlike Nixon). Another side effect of the terror-industrial complex. But I think the bigger tragedy is that democratically minded, progressive, and smart leaders like Obama and Feinstein are not only failing to hold the NSA accountable, but actively defending them. There was a scene from this season of Sorkin's "The Newsroom", ironically about investigating a wild claim that the US used WMD on Pakistani "terrorists". The producer was frustrated that his peers couldn't fathom this president's capacity for criminality because they liked and admired him so damn much. To me, THAT is Obama's greatest sin (not the fact that he is a Kenyan born Muslim).

Ya I can understand that Russian perspective, and China may have it too regarding their internal dissidents. But unless they really consider unarmed women and kids as "terrorists" who deserve to be gassed (assuming the evidence is solid and not the BS that Colin Powell presented to the UN), I think they are kind of full of it. Remember when Russia invaded Georgia, because Georgia was trying to put down a rebellion in South Ossetia that was trying to unify with Russia? So in that crude analogy, Georgia = Syria, Ossetian rebels = Al-Qaeda linked Syrian rebels, and Russia = the US ("peacekeepers"). So it was OK for Russia to invade then, but they oppose the US+France doing it now? There are plenty of reasons to protest Obama's plan, but Russia doesn't really have the cred to say anything.

A friend sent this interesting read on Syria (below). It is basically saying that the worst thing Obama can do is pledge a "limited" response to Assad's war crime (my bad, as that was what I suggested with some ceremonial Tomahawk strikes). That way Assad knows exactly what the cost of using WMD is, and he can make the rational choice as to when it will be worth it to use them. Uncertainty breeds fear and caution (and sometime clarity), and that is what we want to attack him with. It was no accident that Saddam and Osama looked pretty sickly and pathetic when we found them. Hiding for your life and never knowing when SEALs are going to bust down your door takes a helluva toll on a person. It might even motivate them to capitulate. So the author is saying that we shouldn't reveal our hand. We should build up massively on Syria's borders, run some major military exercises and flex our muscles, and that will scare the crap out of Assad. Maybe Obama should lose the cool veneer and act a bit unstable for the cameras. Dictators fear cowboys like Bush more than vulcans like Obama. Idiots and bullies think that violence solves problems. Clever leaders know that there are many other levers of persuasion.

And what about cyber warfare? We crashed Iran's centrifuges and we spy on our own innocent civilians. Why can't we shut down Assad's military IT and wipe our his finances? Heck we could make his warplanes fire on each other instead of strafing towns.

Syria and Byzantine Strategy

September 4, 2013 | 0900 GMT

Stratfor

In March 1984, I was reporting from the Hawizeh Marshes in southern Iraq near the Iranian border. The Iran-Iraq War was in its fourth year, and the Iranians had just launched a massive infantry attack, which the Iraqis repelled with poison gas. I beheld hundreds of young, dead Iranian soldiers, piled up and floating in the marshes, like dolls without a scar on any of them. An Iraqi officer poked one of the bodies with his walking stick and told me, "This is what happens to the enemies of Saddam [Hussein]." Of course, the Iranians were hostile troops invading Iraqi territory; not civilians. But Saddam got around to killing women and children, too, with chemical weapons. In March 1988, he gassed roughly 5,000 Kurds to death. As a British reporter with me in the Hawizeh Marshes had quipped, "You could fit the human rights of Iraq on the head of a pin, and still have room for the human rights of Iran."
The reaction of the Reagan administration to the gassing to death of thousands of Kurdish civilians by Saddam was to keep supporting him through the end of his war with Iran. The United States was then in the midst of a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and as late as mid-1989 it wouldn't be apparent that this twilight struggle would end so suddenly and so victoriously. Thus, with hundreds of thousands of American servicemen occupied in Europe and northeast Asia, using Saddam's Iraq as a proxy against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran made perfect sense.
The United States has values, but as a great power it also has interests. Ronald Reagan may have spoken the rousing language of universal freedom, but his grand strategy was all of a piece. And that meant picking and choosing his burdens wisely. As a result, Saddam's genocide against the Kurds, featuring chemical weapons, was overlooked.
In fact, the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, coterminous with the life of the Reagan administration, was a boon to it. By tying down two large and radical states in the heart of the Middle East, the war severely reduced the trouble that each on its own would certainly have caused the region for almost a decade. This gave Reagan an added measure of leeway in order to keep his focus on Europe and the Soviets -- and on hurting the Soviets in Afghanistan. To wit, only two years after the Iran-Iraq War ended, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Peace between Iran and Iraq was arguably no blessing to the United States and the West.
Likewise, it might be argued that the Syrian civil war, now well into its second year, has carried strategic benefits to the West. The analyst Edward N. Luttwak, writing recently in The New York Times, has pointed out that continued fighting in Syria is preferable to either of the two sides winning outright. If President Bashar al Assad's forces were to win, then the Iranians and the Russians would enjoy a much stronger position in the Levant than before the war. If the rebels were to win, it is entirely possible that Sunni jihadists, with ties to transnational terrorism, will have a staging post by the Mediterranean similar to what they had in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan until 2001, and also similar to what they currently have in Libya. So rather than entertain either of those two possibilities, it is better that the war continue.
Of course, all of this is quite cold-blooded. The Iran-Iraq War took the lives of over a million people. The Syrian civil war has so far claimed reportedly 110,000 lives. Even the celebrated realist of the mid-20th century, Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago, proclaimed the existence of a universal moral conscience, which sees war as a "natural catastrophe." And it is this very conscience that ultimately limits war's occurrence. That is what makes foreign policy so hard. If it were simply a matter of pursuing a state's naked interests, then there would be few contradictions between desires and actions. If it were simply a matter of defending human rights, there would similarly be fewer hard choices. But foreign policy is both. And because voters will only sustain losses to a nation's treasure when serious interests are threatened, interests often take precedence over values. Thus, awful compromises are countenanced.
Making this worse is the element of uncertainty. The more numerous the classified briefings a leader receives about a complex and dangerous foreign place, the more he may realize how little the intelligence community actually knows. This is not a criticism of the intelligence community, but an acknowledgment of complexity, especially when it concerns a profusion of armed and secretive groups, and an array of hard-to-quantify cultural factors. What option do I pursue? And even if I make the correct choice, how sure can I be of the consequences? And even if I can be sure of the consequences -- which is doubtful -- is it worth diverting me from other necessary matters, both foreign and domestic, for perhaps weeks or even months?
Luttwak himself offers partial relief to such enigmas through a meticulous and erudite study of one of the greatest survival strategies in history. In The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (2009), he demonstrates the properties by which Byzantium, despite a threatened geographic position, survived for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. This Byzantine strategy, in its own prodigiously varied and often unconscious way, mirrored Morgenthau's realism, laced as it is with humanism.
The Byzantines, Luttwak writes, relied continuously on every method of deterrence. "They routinely paid off their enemies….using all possible tools of persuasion to recruit allies, fragment hostile alliances, subvert unfriendly rulers…" He goes on: "For the Romans…as for most great powers until modern days, military force was the primary tool of statecraft, with persuasion a secondary complement. For the Byzantine Empire it was mostly the other way around. Indeed, the shift of emphasis from force to diplomacy is one way of differentiating Rome from Byzantium…" In other words, "Avoid war by every possible means in all possible circumstances, but always act as if it might start at any time [his italics]." The Byzantines bribed, connived, dissembled and so forth, and as a consequence survived for centuries on end and fought less wars than they would have otherwise.
The lesson: be devious rather than bloody. President Barack Obama's mistake is not his hesitancy about entering the Syrian mess; but announcing to the Syrians that his military strike, if it occurs, will be "narrow" and "limited." Never tell your adversary what you're not going to do! Let your adversary stay awake all night, worrying about the extent of a military strike! Unless Obama is being deliberately deceptive about his war aims, then some of the public statements from the administration have been naïve in the extreme.
A Byzantine strategy, refitted to the postmodern age, would maintain the requisite military force in the eastern Mediterranean, combined with only vague presidential statements about the degree to which such force might or might not be used. It would feature robust, secret and ongoing diplomacy with the Russians and the Iranians, aware always of their interests both regionally and globally, and always open to deals and horse-trades with them. The goal would be to engineer a stalemate-of-sorts in Syria rather than necessarily remove al Assad. Reducing the intensity of fighting would thus constitute a morality in and of itself, even as it would keep either side from winning outright. For if the regime suddenly crumbled, violence might only escalate, and al Qaeda might even find a sanctuary close to Israel and Jordan.
Such a strategy might satisfy relatively few of the cognoscenti. Though, the American public -- which has a more profound, albeit badly articulated sense of national survival -- will surely tolerate it. The Congressional debate that preceded the Iraq War did not save President George W. Bush from obloquy when that war went badly. The lack of such a debate would not hurt Obama were he to successfully execute the methods described in Luttwak's book.

Snowden's interview with the Guardian on PRISM

Here is the transcript of the leaker (Snowden) interview with Greenwald: http://www.policymic.com/articles/47355/edward-snowden-interview-transcript-full-text-read-the-guardian-s-entire-interview-with-the-man-who-leaked-prism/612597

This quote from Snowden was most salient to me:

"Because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."

In this context, it's very much a civil rights issue. Contrary to the gov't claims, Snowden says that the NSA-CIA is definitely snooping on domestic traffic and US citizens, not just foreigners suspected of terrorism by court order. But what if in the future the gov't focuses on other/more crimes? Contrary to our 1st Amend. right to free association, what if by accident you are at the wrong place at the wrong time or mistaken for a suspect (i.e. Ted Kennedy on the no-fly list)? Then the gov't has access to all your past telco and online history, and through the lens of presumed suspicion, may be able to use that data out of context to build a narrative that paints you in a very negative light. Because as we all know, if we cherry-pick various online actions from anyone, we can make a case that person X holds extreme beliefs, is mentally unstable, and could be a danger to the nation (think McCarthy meets Big Data). And the drone program makes it even more disturbing. Supposedly no US citizen can be secretly sentenced to death on US soil. But what if we travel overseas, and we are mis-identified as a terror plotter? Whoops, our bad! What impartial party is checking the data and findings before the final call? The investigator/prosecutor can't be an unbiased auditor too. And of course the suspect doesn't get to present his/her side of the case until it's too late. Heck even with our developed legal system, we erroneously incriminate, incarcerate, or even kill innocent Americans each year. So I have real concerns about judging people in secret using only "hearsay" online data.

We know gov'ts have agendas and may unfairly target certain people/groups (i.e. IRS scandal that we discussed). Therefore how can we trust them to manage these secret, sensitive, expansive data tools responsibly and ethically, with no one to play Devil's Advocate and defend those under suspicion (even people that "seem guilty")? I work in data analysis, and mistakes/wrong conclusions happen ALL THE TIME among pretty smart people. Humans want to confirm their own beliefs, and will massage/filter data and their own reasoning to get there. Like the problems in scientific research, to be truly rigorous you should use data to find all the ways your theory could be wrong, not the other way around. Databases are not perfect either, even Google's. What if a digit is switched here and there (i.e. Rogoff's "coding errors"), showing that you regularly call Pakistan instead of Paris? You can't perform QC on every data point of material, and a program of PRISM's scale is probably producing terabytes of data every day.

Frankly all these concerns can also be applied to the tech-telco companies that are the custodians of our data, and we have no choice but trust them (that is another debate for another day). Though at least with those firms, we do have channels for legal redress if they wrong us (even though it's very hard to subpoena evidence and beat their crack legal teams). Companies have messed up, apologized, and changed their practices (Google pulling out of Mainland China, Facebook terms of use, etc.). With orgs like the NSA and CIA, there is no oversight and redress, despite claims of "Congressional monitoring." The spooks show Congress only what they want them to see.

Guarding and Post break story of the NSA's PRISM domestic spying

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

We know that some quasi-legal, mostly-secret spying programs were launched post-9/11 by the Bushies, and were continued/reauthorized by Obama. The Senate Intel. Cmte. has sent a letter to AG Holder expressing concern for the magnitude of domestic surveillance that our intel. infrastructure wants legal authority to conduct. They think that there is a major gulf between what Americans think the gov't is entitled to do, and what the gov't actually interprets their authority to allow.

The FISA (Foreign Intel. Surveil. Act) was recently reauthorized and grants the gov't the power to monitor int'l and non-American comm. But recently the Guardian and WP broke the story that the NSA has had a program called PRISM since 2007 that would basically grant them direct access to the data on the servers of major internet comm. companies like Microsoft, Skype, Google, Yahoo, and most recently Apple - for the purpose of domestic spying that FISA doesn't allow (they were tired of FISA's legal red tape too). And the program was conducted with basically zero oversight. This is all described in a PowerPoint training deck that was leaked (BTW the NSA makes really crappy slides). So far the NSA has not denied the legitimacy of that source.

The Director of Nat. Intel., James Clapper, has also not denied the existence of PRISM (and its $200M/year budget). In line with the Obama admin's "war on whistle-blowers", he lashed out that leaking the story would harm national security. Right, like how Jane Fonda helped the Viet Cong. By Clapper's own words, secret surveillance has foiled one (= 1, uno) domestic terror plot on record since the program started (target unknown, potential losses averted unknown). Democrats on the Senate Intel. Cmte. say they have no evidence that surveil. stopped any plots. So the benefit of the program is 0-1 plots stopped over 12 years. I don't think exposing the program is going to matter at all, except maybe compromise their surveil. budgets and autonomy. Also, what terrorist worth his weight in salt doesn't already know to "stay off their airwaves"?

Interestingly, the tech companies issued statements saying that they have no knowledge of PRISM, and do not give the gov't a backdoor to their servers. So either they are lying and actively colluded with the gov't, or the gov't broke a ton of laws and hacked into those companies totally discreetly (eat your heart out, China). I have no data to back this up, but my suspicion is the cyber security folks at those prestigious companies are a lot better than the hackers at the NSA. So the likelihood that Google would get caught with their pants down is low. But maybe those were the terms of the agreement: they would let the gov't snoop, but in return they get full denial and release of liability, so their users don't revolt and sue.

Another revelation is that the gov't got access to the "metadata" on Verizon's telco network. So they weren't actually eavesdropping without a warrant on calls, but instead knew which #s were talking to each other, when the calls were made, and what was the closest cell tower. Tracking and call patterns in other words. While that was probably clever by "Zero Dark Thirty" standards, I am not sure if it is legal to do it indiscriminately without probable cause.

This leak comes at a horrible time for Obama, who is about to sit down with Chinese leaders to chastise them for hacking US companies (we previously blogged about this). It kind of undermines his credibility and moral high ground when our gov't is caught hacking its own people and companies too.

What I don't understand is why Greenwald was permitted to publish these articles. I saw "Bourne"... isn't he supposed to get whacked in a London train station?

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He was on DN this morning.  Amy Goodman asked him, 'Are you concerned that you will be attacked for publishing such things?'  His response was basically, 'I'm emboldened by the attacks.  Let them attack me.'  Basically, he can't be silenced.  What are they going to do?  Out him?  Um, too late.  If i was boarding a plane and saw GG and Jeremy Scahill boarding, I would take a different plane....those two will very soon NOT be seen on MSM, is my guess.  GG will never be on Bill Maher after his calling Maher out for being an Islamophobe(and, he is).   These two are the heroes of our time.  Oh, add Bradley Manning and you got the makings of a superhero cartoon!

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Yeah the Manning case is interesting. He has already pleaded guilty to some major crimes, but the gov't wants to convict him for "aiding the enemy" (presumably his leaks helped Al Qaeda? Impossible to prove unless we have a smoking gun - which we don't). And they won't even accept all his prison time up to this point as time served, to reduce his remaining sentence (not to mention the torture).

But I think what makes him ineligible for hero status is his indiscriminate data dump to Wikileaks. At least with the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg "edited" them and only leaked snippets of the docs that would tell the story with minimal exposure of gov't sources/processes (apart from the guilty parties). In Manning's case, he didn't even know all the stuff he was leaking, and just trusted Wikileaks to decide what was fit to print. I am glad that he exposed some horrible war crimes from Iraq that the gov't was trying to bury. But I think he also set back our peaceful State Dept. diplomatic efforts in other parts of the world. Clearly people like Rummy and Cheney have hurt this nation a lot worse than Manning ever could.

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201306030900




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I don't know if it helps the moral high ground but the verizon thing was signed by a judge.

I just have a hard time understanding who, anywhere in the us, thinks this should be an ok thing to do.  Who thinks it makes sense to have a secret court issue secret orders unreviewable and unchallengeable by those it affects?  And it always begs the question what are they doing we DON'T know about?

Extra embarrassing with a nominally dem president in charge.

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Yeah, though a judge also approved Bush's harsh interrogation and rendition policies too. Heck a judge ruled that Bush won the election. :)

As you said, lord knows WTF is going on that we don't know about. Makes those conspiracy guys a little more credible at times. It was embarrassing to see Obama in Si Valley today defending the programs like a stooge. Same argument with the drone kills: TRUST us that we are making these decisions carefully (in secret) and we are protecting you from the bad men. Either Obama doesn't truly believe that and is just delivering lines that will please the defense establishment (which makes him a coward, appeaser, and poor leader), or he really believes it (which makes him dumber and less moral that I previously gave him credit for). Nixon would have loved the 21st Century.

M sent me this which was thought-provoking: http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-asking/306288/?mrefid=twitter

Thanks, I haven't seen this before. I think the author has a point. 9/11 was a freaking OUTLIER. Yes the stakes are higher now with WMDs and the borderless global world, but even an event as horrific as 9/11 was not a society-ender (we'll it was... for Iraq). "Sacrifices for freedom" are often much smaller than that, and would be even smaller if our brash and unjust foreign and economic policies didn't piss off so many. Even today, Obama said "We can't have 100% security and 100% freedom." It is a false choice as many have said (http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201306070900). But we're NEVER going to have 100% security, even if we have 0% freedom. Random violence and tragic accidents are part of the human condition, even in the Utopia of Scandinavia (Brevik shooting, car accidents with reindeer, suicides inspired by 6 months of darkness). Americans are hysterical and selfish, and they don't want to fear that one day they may be the victim of a crazy bomber. So they endorse all these stupid policies to just "feel safer". The soccer mom philosophy of "I'll do anything to protect my kids", even if that means ironically supporting policies that put many other no-less-worthy people's kids in danger. And we wonder why they hate us.

Strangely this line of thinking doesn't apply to the gun debate, where the opposite psychology reigns: freedom is the precious thing worth dying for (or letting children die for), where thousands more brown-skinned youth have to be sacrificed each year just so said soccer mom's husband can dream about stopping a home invasion (perpetrated by Mookie Hernandez) with his Bushmaster. And in the gun debate, there can be no gray area; limitless magazines and no paper trails of gun purchases. Any encroachment on that is fascist tyranny. It's not like the constant pushing-of-the-envelope with the privacy-security debate as the tech evolves (that has gone on since the times of J. Edgar), where it's "OK" to secretly gather metadata, but not actual telephony content. And we promise to not cross that line. It's OK to kill Americans without trial, as long as they're overseas and saying hateful things. But we won't go past that, trust us.

Should we find new ways to use technology in uncontroversial ways to make our society safer (not just from terrorism, but from car accidents, sickness, etc.)? Certainly. Should we have a debate on when other priorities need to trump privacy? Sure. So let's talk it out in public rather than let a few scheming powerful men make all the decisions in secret, because we're too scared to live up to our civic duty.