I chose the wrong day to disengage from the internet. There is too much to digest in the new Washington Post revelations about the NSA tapping into the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Trust me, I will work through it and have something to say.
What I want to say as a preliminary and general statement is that we’ve been at war for 12 years and this is one of the consequences of that. Relatedly, we’ve made some rather dedicated enemies, and this is also a consequence of that. Privacy is a casualty of policies that make so many people want to harm us. It’s not a coincidence that we enacted the FISA laws and reopened the assassination investigations and made all kinds of reforms of the intelligence community as soon as the Vietnam War ended. There was no possibility that we would make those reforms while the war was ongoing. Every year that we’re at war is probably a year in which our privacy is diminished.
Yet, the pendulum can swing back. It did in the 1970’s. And it can happen again, perhaps near the end of this decade.
By my reading, we are at war with any nation or organization that aided or harbored al Qaeda before September, 2001.
Perhaps all declarations of war look like that, I don’t know. But it seems perfectly open-ended. The Long War, indeed.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
the oil and economy and climate are all downhill from here, so the resource wars, and all they entail, will continue, unabated by wishful thinking. Not that I expect that to sink in anytime soon.
Obama 2016!
Awww, man…all’s I can say is BULLSHIT!!!! This has been PermaGov business as usual for several decades. DemRats and RatPubs both. The UniParty. Wake the fuck up.
Yeah.
Right.
You’ll “work through it” and come up with yet another set of excuses for your execrable DemRat employers.
Duh!!!
If “we” have so many “…policies that make so many people want to harm us,” fer chrissakes…change those policies!!!
“We”…??? Not me, for sure!!!
Please!!!
“Reforms [in] the intelligence community!!!???”
“…as soon as the Vietnam War ended???!!!”
Whaddayou? Kiddin’ me or what?
Do you really think that the U.S. “intelligence community” is is somehow weaker now than it was in the late 70s?
Please.
Wake the fuck up.
Please.
AG
Arthur, is that we are walking straight into this with our eyes wide open (emphasis alarmingly added:)
It doesn’t take much imagination to connect these dots once one understands the dominant mind-set of the agencies. No wonder they chuckle when we wonder which investigation inspired each successive overreach. There is only one investigation and it is ongoing… Forever.
I know, Shaun. But it is not “we.” It is “them.” Also not “we?” Not me, anyway…is the vast sleepledom/sheepledom/media-blinded population of the United States of Omertica. Fast asleep. So-called liberals, progressives, centrists, conservatives, libertarians (except for a very few of them), Republicans, Democrats…the works.
Eyes wide open?
Hardly.
Eyes wide shut.
I sincerely do not know what I or anybody else can do about the situation. I have been telling people about this media-enforced slumber for almost 10 years now in various ways…live, face to face, in thousands of posts on various so-called progressive sites…and I swear to you, 99% of the time I might as well be whispering to people wearing sound-deadening earphones turned all the way up and tuned to CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. They all react differently…some smile and nod in a friendly manner; others tell me everything’s gonna be just fine because we have a “good” preznit now while yet other others get in my face and tell me to leave them the fuck alone, and the vast majority of them don’t even notice me…meanwhile the situation just gets worse and worse.
Even the collectors are fast asleep. There is no “forever” in human affairs. Everything goes away eventually. Individual humans, societies, countries, empires…the works. This particular digitally-enabled house of cards will fall just as has every other construct of mankind, and when it does it is going to make both a mighty noise and a very large mess.
Bet on it.
Exactly how it will fail? Damned if I know, but I can make a guess or two.
Either an enemy of some sort will find one way or another to completelky shut off the grid and all of that info will return to whence it came…to nofuckingwhere…or else the collection system itself will grow so large that no matter how many technological advances we might make (“advances” that themselves only serve to allow more and more information to be collected and stored) and it will completely outstrip its own ability to sort or use that information. A feedback system of some sort will then occur…it will have nothing left to collect except itself… and it will blow itself up. The saga of the Boston Marathon bombers…if the story that we are receiving is anywhere near true, an idea in which I do not have a great deal of faith…is evidence that the collection machine is already way overloaded. The collectors claim that they had a great deal of worrisome prior information about those two fools, but they no doubt have similar information about thousands (or quite possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands) of others in the U.S. What good is information if you have so much that you cannot use it? Like packrats or compulsive collectors, eventually there’s no more room to live. The great comic philosopher Steven Wright pretty well summed it up more than a decade ago when he asked the magic question:
Yup.
And what would you do with it?
Amen.
AG
They are awash in data; and mistakes will inevitably be made. But you can’t say we weren’t warned; the now-unfunded IAO of 2003 had the creepiest logo ever.
I just read this somewhere:
“We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit networkadvertising.org.”
People are data-mining all the time. Why should anyone be able to do it for business purposes, and the government can’t do it for community safety?
We allow it when it suits us. Sign a petition online and be on a list. Sign up for Facebook and they send you emails like “Do you know …….. (your neighbor).” Don’t even give it a second thought.
Technological advancement is what has eroded privacy, not war (or not solely war). And there is no stopped the technology.
And you know what? Those businesses disclose what they’re doing. Some even let you opt out. Sure, you have to read the fine print, but that’s still an improvement over no transparency at all. Which is still an improvement over a government that is supposed to be working for us, not investigating us.
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that privacy has been a joke in this country for some time; all the computer and the Internet have done is make the government’s (and big business’s) jobs easier, more efficient, and more comprehensive. It’s a fact of life. In this case, it’s more the rational that disturbs me.
With all respect to Boo, we have not been at war for 12 years. (Or, to paraphrase AG, BULLSHIT. Oh, wait, that’s a direct quote…) We responded to a monstrous crime by unilaterally and by, perhaps, or the first time in history, declaring a “war” on a tactic, not an enemy. And then used that weak-assed rationale to grant itself sweeping powers (some of which were already being done illegally) having virtually nothing to do with the rationale.
None of this is new – but it will be new to the vast majority of Americans who haven’t been political junkies. This will be a big, big deal. This is the scandal that will actually outrage a lot of Americans, and expect the Republicans to jump all over it – never mind that they would (and will) do exactly the same, or worse. Welcome to funhouse democracy.
Maybe there would be outrage if this wasn’t leaked on the heels of the Boston bombing.
But it’s hard for people to get outraged over something they don’t actually feel.
After all, the general public was never outraged over the Patriot Act, FISA, or warrantless wiretaps.
Even the liberal Elizabeth Warren has been refused to comment on this matter and supports FISA and the Patriot Act.
Uhhh…maybe the “liberal” Elizabeth Warren ain’t so liberal after all?
Ya think?
I mean…she works for and with that other “liberal” question mark, Barack “Blow “em Up Real Good” O’Bomber, right?
Oh.
What’s that you say?
They are “liberal” in their support of American exceptionalism? In the right of Americans to bump 90% of the rest of the world right offa the feed trough and gobble up alla the goodies while U.S. armed forces (overt and covert both) patrol the barnyard to make sure that nobody interferes with the slobberfest?
Oh.
Nevermind.
I understand now.
Yore freind,
Emily Litella
People are data-mining all the time. Why should anyone be able to do it for business purposes, and the government can’t do it for community safety?
Because the government can use that data to put you in jail. That’s why there needs to be a higher level of protection against the government doing this.
Is there any reasonable expectation of privacy on the items you post on public/commercial web sites like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook?
What you post on public websites has nothing to do with this, does it?
According to the WaPo article, they are “extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs.” From your ISP. The love notes you email to your married lover, the porn you download, the journal you keep: not just YouTube comments and Facebook ‘likes.’
Look, I was shocked when courts held that cordless phones used at home didn’t have reasonable expectation of privacy. I always felt my cell phone and cordless phone conversations were private (certainly from the confines of my own home), but they said otherwise.
it’s hard to see how wireless networks and unsecured communications are any different.
The Court has held cordless phones do not have a justifiable expectation of privacy. The government can eavesdrop and record such conversations without warrant.
SCTOUS has also held that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information you have knowingly exposed to a third party, like bank records, even if you intended for that third party to keep the information secret.
Also too, “the Smith ruling gives the government the power to monitor every piece of electronic mail that is sent through the internet since this communication travels to and through third parties to reach the recipient.” So this means the porn I download isn’t private since it travels through third parties.
What I’m saying is once the Court set the precedent that wireless voice communications and bank records were not private under the reasonable expectation of privacy standard, then it will be impossible to say wireless data communications (texts to my married lover) and crap I download are private.
I don’t agree with this. It blew my mind when I first read about it 20 years ago. I doubt most people know this. But that is how the courts view communications.
That’s amazing. I didn’t know any of that–and I’m sure that I’m in the vast majority.
Which is why it’s important to treat the current issue as hugely important and–even if it’s not–as groundbreakingly awful, don’t you think? How else does, as Boo says, the pendulum start swinging the other direction, absent a loud shocked public outcry?
Oh, and we don’t even know if it’s just the various shadowy arms of the federal government. It’s possibly also, say, your local police department and your friendly global hedge funds from whom you have no expectation of privacy. (That’s probably overstated, but who knows? And for how long? But apparently this isn’t much of a problem…)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/is_this_who_runs_prism.php?ref=fpblg
Appears to be a question of how and where the communication is intercepted. No direct recording with bugs near the speaker without a real warrant. Those Bush admin phone trunk line intercepts probably weren’t legal either. But anything running through the internet may be fair game since privacy isn’t guaranteed.
Don’t see how we back away slowly from this; if the CIA was illegally opening US mail from 1952 what makes anyone think this is new or news? It’s the confirmation which unnerves us.
I’m more curious to know how and why it was leaked to the Post; agencies kill for less. Are we now supposed to know about this now some compelling reason? Are we about to have some really bad news about cyber-security?
Well .. the Chinese(and possibly Iran) have hacked all sorts of corporate networks
Read a piece in the New Yorker recently which gave me the shivers, it sounded like we’ve already had our cyber-Pearl Harbor and they’re just getting around to telling us.
Good one, BM! Had I a drum kit, I’d give you a rim shot for that.
Gee 12 years of war, and we’ve made more enemies than ever, our privacy is a wistful memory, and our own government views its citizens with unbridled suspicion and beady-eyed scrutiny. The banksters and the charlatans who made so much coin off all this are not just free, but whining that they didn’t get even more money out of the Treasury.
Thank the deity or demon of your choice we didn’t listen to those tree-hugging hippies 12 years ago who said the 9/11 attacks should be treated like a crime instead of an act of war. No telling what might have happened, but I bet not nearly as much stuff would’ve gotten blowed up.
What I want to say as a preliminary and general statement is this: we are seeing one more step in the amassing of control of the public among the very few.
I was on the streets during Occupy protests. I saw the militarization of the police force with my own eyes, and the mobilization of that force against a peaceful but dissenting public. There’s no excuse for illusions or delusions any more. Our government is afraid of us, and it’s acting accordingly. Privacy is a constraint on the control of the public and has to be destroyed.
I wouldn’t have said this at the dawn of Obama’s administration, but I have no hope after seeing four years of this Democratic presidency. Our party is our only hope and it is mired in collusion.
and mired in corruption.
If I could ask one question of President Obama, it would be this:
Rand Paul’s questions about what the President believes he can and cannot do don’t seem quite so crazy any more.
But they were accountable to Congress and the judiciary. A judge signed off on the warrant, and members from the intelligence and judiciary committees said they were brought in.
Only a very few legislators are informed of the policy, and I believe that only the one judge who signs the warrant is aware of it. And that one judge is aware of only that one piece. Who is there who can review that judge’s decision or appeal the administration’s position? Absolutely no one. Wyden can only allude to it obliquely, in the vaguest of terms: “If people knew how Obama interprets the law…” What if we didn’t have Wyden, or if it were Ted Cruz saying those things?
But all of this gets away from the point: how does a President justify keep an interpretation of law secret from the public who elects him?
The President can keep a treaty with a foreign power secret.
Doesn’t a super majority of the Senate have to consent to a treaty before it’s law?
Sorry, I should have said “executive agreements.”
What makes you say “very few legislators” were informed. Merkley was informed and he only had 2 years of seniority. So obviously, it was broadly shared with legislatures of those committees if it was reaching the members with lowest seniority.
Matters of national security are kept confidential. If budgetary appropriations are kept confidential why wouldn’t any other deliberations, including legal analysis be kept confidential.
Are you saying it was wrong for Roosevelt to secretly appropriate funding for the Manhattan Project from taxpayers who elected him?
You’re right that Senators were informed (in fact, all of them) of the Verizon court order regarding the metadata of phone calls.
This doesn’t appear to be true about PRISM, the program that keeps the content of communications:
Only a very few legislators are informed of the policy,
…by Congress’s own design.
Who is there who can review that judge’s decision or appeal the administration’s position? Absolutely no one.
False. In addition to the FISA court, the FISA law sets up a court of appeals.
as far as I can tell, only the executive can take an appeal. Who’s the other party in the room?
That “pendulum” was a feel-good story written in the 80s by the winners of the counterrevolution.
Knowing what we know now about Bob Woodward, thinking that “All The President’s Men” is anything more than a purposeful rewriting of history should be suspect.
Woodward was likely not much more than a stenographer in the Watergate expose. Bernstein likely had a better grasp of the whole enterprise and was definitely the better writer. Mark Felt was a nasty character and for his own personal reasons decided to leak to Woodward. Felt was later indicted by the Carter admin for his COINTELPRO activities. Not a stretch to conclude that that helped Woodward to clarify which side he was on. (Somewhat amusing that Nixon testified on behalf of Felt.)
How about asking anyone who lived through World War Two about whether civil liberties come back when the war ends.
You remember World War Two: it was that period when the government interred the Japanese-American population, rationed food, and could order you to turn your lights off.
As does capitalism. And capitalism feeds off war and together they feed off the people and natural resources. At one time, war meant austerity and there were limits to how long the people would tolerate sacrificing for war. Now we can have our wars without obvious sacrifice — in fact quite the opposite as GWB said “go shopping.” Given a choice between privacy and the ability to purchase endless amounts of crap, privacy would be preferred by about the same percentage of people that opposed the wars.
isn’t at war. However, if it claims the right to kill anyone anywhere without providing any justification, then it is raping the whole planet.
I don’t think the all volunteer Army has anything to do with it. But if we are at war with stateless entities, doesn’t that make us the same as stateless entities? If we assert the right to kill anyone anywhere, how does that make us any different from the Mafia? As I read the news, Mafia Dons have more restraint over their actions than POTUS, who is only answerable to himself.
In this respect, how is Obama different from Louis XIV (l’ etat c’est moi!)? He differs from Caligula only in that he has not publicly proclaimed his godhood and (perhaps) his sexual practices.
But if we are at war with stateless entities, doesn’t that make us the same as stateless entities?
No. Do the anti-piracy patrols in the Indian Ocean make us pirates?
If we assert the right to kill anyone anywhere, how does that make us any different from the Mafia?
If we had ever asserted the right to kill anyone anywhere, that would make us little different from the Mafia, but that never happened. Some overwrought people on the internet decided it would be cool to say that, but there has never been any such assertion made.
In this respect, how is Obama different from Louis XIV
Because Obama isn’t doing anything that wasn’t authorized by a democratically-legitimate legislature? Because Obama isn’t doing anything that an independent judiciary has forbidden?
Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us in an effort to win a game of rhetorical oneupsmanship.
Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us in an effort to win a game of rhetorical oneupsmanship.
Apart from that, and cat photos, why the hell is there an internet in the first place?
“Apart from that, and cat photos, why the hell is there an internet in the first place?”
To give the NYPD a way of determining exactly what sort of porn you prefer, and if you’ve written a short story based on Columbine, set on a school trip to the Statue of Liberty.
Apart from that, and cat photos, why the hell is there an internet in the first place?
Goat play? Hey, baby goats are cute. Click!
…
My eyes!
You forgot porn.
(as does any sane person). Der Spiegel, tweaking Google Translate:
Even Huffington Post, one of the last Obama apologist Web sites, gets it.
Google Translate translated Überwachungsstaat as “police state”, but a more literal translation is “surveillance state”.
That merged portrait should give everyone pause.
At all the data gathering and sorting is probably as effective at catching a real nutball ready to blow something up as SDI is at shooting down a real missile. SDI has trouble shooting down fake US missiles. Have to wonder if the NSA is 100% effective at catching the FBI/CIA/??? terrorist stings.
But it’s not being used as predictive device, it’s being used as retrospective tool.
Once they have someone, like the Tsarnaevs or the Times Square bomber, they analysis all their stored data to see if they have any connections.
I suspect that it is being used both ways. With some analysis of patterns on new data as it enters the database.
The network analysis of the metadata, legal through a FISA court order allows the identification of potential threats based on some profile established by correlating huge amounts of data from past threats with pattern analysis. That reduces the scope of the content data that has to be searched to identify potential threats. So far this capability appears not to be working that well, despite Congressional touting of it as the justification–helping keep us safe. Congress thinks that it is being used as a predictive device, in other words.
The other use is mine already stored data (or directly search ISP server data) for specific information based on evidence from a case. So you search anything connected with the Tsarnaevs to look for patterns of complicity. Remember it was photos from the scene, not this billion-dollar operation that identified the Tsarnaevs as suspects. In in the case of the Boston Bomber investigation, we have seen several cases already of false positives (known to you and me as innocent people being treated as criminals by police and the media). We don’t know to what extent that was the result of the conventional investigation and to what extent it was from these supposed Palantirs.
The fundamental fact is that big-data correlation does not constitute evidence of anything in itself. It requires supporting evidence to determine whether a threat exists or whether a subject of a search is in fact a suspect. And the temptation of the users of a system like PRISM is to treat the information that is delivered with less skepticism than it deserves just because it “came from the computer”.
Yes. And that’s because it’s very, very difficult to predict human behavior that is unprecedented for an individual. That’s why the rightwing assertion that mental health professionals can stop armed nutters from shooting up schools, theaters, etc. is ignorant.
But my how easy it will be to convict anyone of any crime, either major or minor, if their past communication behavior can be pulled by the authorities. Behaviors that would also not be particularly unusual for many people that haven’t committed or aren’t suspected of having committed any crime.
Let’s just mull over this gem from the Washington Post article that broke the PRISM story:
And with no hint of irony. Seems privacy is an anachronism of the analogue age.
That’s because they’re not analyzing or accessing the data in real time as it happens.
They review the data retrospectively once an event has occurred, to trace any associates or associated acts.
So for example the government wanted to put identifying markers in gun power, so if a power bomb was used they could trace where it was purchased and who made the purchase. If they simply registered everyone buying bullets on a ongoing basis you would raise privacy concerns. But if you only looked retrospectively after a act occurred you minimize those concerns.
So they do this with other data. If they find a crock-pot wire to explode intact, they want to screen every available data point to narrow down who may be the criminal.
They are accessing it as soon as it flows from the computers of your telecom or other service provider to the computers of the NSA. They might be viewing it retrospectively with searches but they are accessing it and applying some sort of extract-transform-load processing on it as soon as it comes in the door. And the order to Verizon was to deliver all data; therefore, NSA accessed data on all connections for all the customers who connected during the specified time period.
NSA public statements are playing word games to minimize the appearance of what they are doing. It is clear that they are implementing Total Information Awareness hoarding on a piecemeal basis contrary to the explicit instructions from Congress in 2003. Why else have a huge file cabinet being built in Utah?
Tagend registration, which is not occurring incidentally, would be done with the purchaser’s knowledge. The same with bullet registration. In both cases, the state would still have to prove continuity of custody by the purchaser in order to connect them with a crime.
This court order was done in secret. Users of Verizon were not aware that their information was being monitored, and the network analysis is making assumptions of terrorist connections that can be very wrong — as seen by the inflated Do-Not-Fly list the TSA maintains. And there is no way for someone wrongly suspected to clear their name.
It seems to me that you are the one playing word games, by using the term “accessing” to mean two very different things: data stored in a box as pure ones and zeros, the contents of which are unknown to anyone vs. information that is looked at and read.
It is clear that they are implementing Total Information Awareness hoarding on a piecemeal basis contrary to the explicit instructions from Congress in 2003.
No, it is not. The TIA program involved doing the latter: actually looking at the information being communicated in the data packets, without a court order. This program does not appear to to be doing that.
OK, I will grant that the Verizon program is not sniffing data packets. And likely, the PRISM program by accessing third-party servers doesn’t need to sniff the packets as they are capturing data before in is in packets.
But NSA is getting access to anything on the servers of third parties, whose customers are unaware of this invasion of privacy except the “lawful government orders” small print of their privacy notices. That is accessing, whether it is viewed or not.
If NSA is using PRISM to do remote searches of third-party data, it can be minimized to specific targets. But it is not clear one way or the other what NSA is doing.
It is possible (and likely) that if NSA is bulk loading any data from third parties, that data is subject to some sort of search and transform routines on entry. That would provide access to pattern information whether it is viewed immediately or just logged.
Clapper was using “accessed” as a synonym for “viewed”, which is technically true in a sense but also an evasion. It is highly likely that NSA has accessed records of millions of people or legal entities from its Verizon order, combined that data with PRISM data and stored it with records of tens of millions of people, causing records on tens or hundreds of thousands of people to be prioritized through various profiles and searched only a thousand or so times within a year.
Just because we don’t know of a packet sniffing program at NSA does not mean that one does not exist.
You state that the government is using this data only retrospectively with a confidence that I believe is unwarranted.
From Clapper’s own rationalization of the Verizon court order:
Clapper goes on to state categorically that
But we know he’s lying, if not about the Verizon court order specifically, then about what the government is actually doing.
As to estimating the number of Americans caught up in this vacuum:
The NSA is reviewing many more communications than it’s issuing reports for. It has a way to estimate and extrapolate how many are accidentally (giving the NSA the benefit of the doubt) from Americans. The NSA won’t do this any more than Rumsfeld’s Pentagon would estimate the number of civilian Iraqis killed by our troops. As our government did during the Iraq War, it will hide behind the paradoxical choices of inability (that information is unavailable to us) and omniscience (if a person’s communications were swept up, that means he/she isn’t an American/fits the profile of a terrorist).
You are mixing and matching pieces of the Verizon program and the PRISM program.
You claim that Clapper is lying in his description of the Verizon program, but you cite a statement from the WaPo story about the PRISM program as evidence.
The two programs are different, are based on different court orders, and collect different information.
No mixup present. Please reread:
Senator Wyden is also correcting the record that Senators were informed:
We have been at war since 1776 and before. Western civilization has been at war since forever.
But the real intrusions began with World War I and the creation of the FBI, whose self-appointed mission was to lop off a huge part of the political discussion and to disguise it with half-hearted suppression of organized crime.
We lost oversight after World War II with the establishment of the CIA and the creation of black budgets and secret laws. And with US v. Reynolds, which formallized the absolute legitimacy of the US government to claim state secrets even when the facts in the case showed that nothing about national security was at risk, only the liability of a defense contractor for negligence in the death of its employees.
We went completely off the rails during the Allen Dulles era at CIA and only Watergate exposed how much secret misguided and dangerous crap was being done in our names–the Church Commission finally bringing sunlight to the misdeeds. After the “reforms” that were to fix those agencies, rogue personnel joined the Reagan campaign in order to ensure the defeat of Jimmy Carter. In exchange Bill Casey and his boys got to run wild until Iran-Contra exposed the corruption.
But the mood of the personnel and leadership left at FBI and CIA is that the Constitution gets in the way of their doing their jobs. So at every opportunity, they seek to go around the Constitution. When courts and Congress turn un-Constitutional actions into para-Constitutional perfectly legal actions as they did with the PATRIOT Act, we are in trouble. And Cheney-Bush ran as fast as they could to undo every last scrap of Constitutional protection in hopes of having that power and a permanent Republican majority.
There are increasing suspicions, most recently documented by Mondoweiss, that President Obama is having his foreign policy dictated by the national security establishment and intelligence community, and that departure from their agenda could result in another unfortunate lost President. If there is that intimidation going on in addition to the infringements of Constitutional rights, it might explain some of the behavior of members of Congress as well.
“Quod custodiet ipsos custodes?” is a long-held question of government.
Are we at the point at which JPMorgan-Chase drives our economic policy through contributions, Koch Industries our energy policy through contributions and drafting of state legislation, and SAIC, Lockheed, CSC, CACI, and others are driving what Constitutional rights we still possess.
PRISM exists because some contractor pitched the idea to the NSA and NSA bought it. NSA whistleblowers like John Kiriakou tried to warn of this boondoggle and infringment on Constitutional rights but were prosecuted for their leaks of NSA financial misdoing. Kiriakou is now serving a jail sentence.
Once again, I maintain that the only way to deal with this is through complete rethinking of all of our national security institutions and their legal basis, much as was done in 1947–but in this case aiming at minimalization and protection of Constitutional rights.
Misguided wars like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan produce a kind of popular PTSD that makes the next war inevitable and soon unless something is done to prevent it. The current Obama administration policy (regardless of who is driving it) is one of endless war because hamhanded military action will create and endless stream of terrorists and over-expensive military budgets will gradually weaken the US, reducing the ability of psychological deterrence.
Unless we come to grips with these issues now, we will continue to see erosion of our Constitutional rights, privacy being only one among many.
War is the true nurse of executive aggrandizement–James Madison
I agree with Madison, but as you say our elites have opted for an intentional “policy” of permanent war while happily seeding endless future conflicts, a tactic which apparently only a small percent of citizens can see through. And don’t forget that a large section of the country adores militarism and soldier boyz, and has for generations innumerable.
At this point in our sad state of affairs, it is not even the “opponent” which determines whether we are “at war”, but rather whether our soldier boyz are deployed somewhere, anywhere, indefinitely. If the imperial soldiery is deployed somewhere and getting shot at, we are “at war”. And now our computer game drones are a stand in for the soldiery! Very convenient, and about the only way to define our current War of Terra as being “at war” with anyone.
Our deeply unserious nation and people could not undertake the sort of debate and reform you (sensibly) envision and which is our only hope of “keeping the republic”. We have no Franklins left, that’s for sure. Reform is quite beyond us, for a variety of reasons, the existence of the braindead “conservative” movement being only one…
Emphasis mine:
Tarheel…are you thinking of changing your handle here?
To maybe…”Tarheel Libertarian?”
Let us pray.
AG
That is “democrat”, AG. There used to be some in the Democratic Party, but they have gotten scarce of late.
Not a libertarian for the same reason I’m not an anarchist. Some institutions of governance are necessary and some control of institutional force is necessary. Also, public expenditures on infrastructure are in fact the least-cost and most effective way of delivering common services to society.
That requires checks and balances and especially checks and balances in the hands of the people. It also requires an informed citizenry. I don’t see libertarians as advocating either of those. And in my neck of the world, libertarian is just another brand of racist bigot. That might be different in your more enlightened environment, but that’s the way it is here.
‘Twas a joke, Tarheel.
Half a joke, anyway…
There are racist bigots in every party.
Some of ’em are even black. “Racism” goes both ways, y’know…
Ron Paul’s definition of racism is as follows:
That’s not politics talking, that’s plain talk from an honest man. The politics part? He has no control over his followers or any other knucklehead who gloms onto the “Libertarian” label and barely any control over his alliances if he wants…wanted…to get elected. As Mark Twain said…
That idea includes politics as well.
Bet on it.
You’re in North Carolina?
No shortage of racist bigots down there, right? Dems, RatPubs, Libertarians, Tea Party fools, KKK killers and God only knows what else.
You write:
I agree.
I am a serial nonarchist, myself. Every form of government works for a while, then it’s time for a change. And all changes of that sort need a “party,” just as all forms of governance need a name. The only even remotely viable “party” that is advocating real change in the U.S. is named Libertarian, so unless people of like mind manage to take over the RatPublican Party…a slim chance of that, I think, (Slim to none, and what would they do w/all the racist bigots in that party?)…I am advocating that people pay attention to what the Libs are saying and try to keep an open mind. I will flat out guarantee that they are not all racist pigs. Bet on it.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
Yep, every so often you have to change the game just to rescue the truth.
A serial archist
Your comments are consistently some of the most insightful stuff I’ve ever read. Thanks TD.
Mondoweiss quotes Ray McGovern to that effect:
As comments on Mondoweiss say, that’s just Obama making excuses for himself. It’s not as if he actually cares about things like civil liberties, and that the reason he doesn’t do anything to protect them is his fear for his life.
People will never stop coming up with rationalizations for why Obama is just another George Bush.
Bruce Schneier, The Atlantic: What We Don’t Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know
Schneier is a cybersecurity blogger, concerned about the US apparent interest in intrusion and lack of interest in cybersecurity. That is, he is concerned that the US seems more interested in offensive cyberwarfare capabilities and less interested in defensive cyberwarfare capabilities–which essentially make the most cyber-dependent country on earth a sitting duck for attacks on commercial infrastructure.
For what it’s worth:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/behind-surveillance-flap-plunging-trust-government-16553
1696.html