ANTI-ANTI-DRONE WARFARE

“I have visited the UK before without incident. I have long admired British culture.”

So begins Yemeni drone warfare investigator Baraa Shiban’s description of what happened to him at London’s Gatwick Airport on September 23, published 2 days later by The Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/like-david-miranda-interrogated-british-airport

“I spent part of my education in Wales,” Shiban continues. “This time I came at the invitation of Chatham House to speak at a seminar on Yemen. Standing at passport control, bleary eyed from the long flight, I expected another routine trip.

“The border agent asked what my job is. When I explained I was the Yemen project co-ordinator for London-based legal charity Reprieve he said, ‘Sir, please come with me. We have a Terrorism Act and I have some questions I need to ask you.’"

This was Shiban’s welcome to the low-calorie version of what had happened to David Miranda, the life partner of Guardian reporter Glen Greenwald, and the business go-between for Greenwald and his investigative partner Laura Poitras.  Miranda was detained at Heathrow Airport on August 18, and dispossessed of his cellphone, his computer, and files containing more revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, detailing the agency’s surveillance and other activities in the interest, the NSA would claim, of American national security.

Miranda was held incommunicado and harshly questioned by officers of the Metropolitan Police for 9 hours before being released.  Shiban’s security toss took just an hour and a half, but it shared some of the same abusive and deranged anti-terrorist assumptions that marred Miranda’s interrogation.

“The suited man quizzed me about my political opinions,” Shiban says. “When I suggested that these should have no bearing on whether I am allowed into the country, the agent threatened to hold me for the maximum extent of his powers. ‘I am authorised to detain you for up to nine hours," he said. "We have only been here for an hour, but we can be here for up to nine. So you understand what this can lead to.’

“He took my Reprieve business card and disappeared. When he returned,  … A telling exchange followed: ‘So,’ he asked, ‘does your organisation have anything to do with terrorism in Yemen?’

“I replied, ‘My organisation addresses counter-terrorism abuses inside the country.’

“‘Exactly!’ He said. ‘Why doesn't your organisation do something about the terrorism that happens in your country, instead of focusing on the counter-terrorism abuses?’

“What could I reply? Of course I oppose terrorism. But I also oppose the secret air war in my country – waged by the US, apparently with covert support from the UK and others. The drone war in my homeland has claimed innocent lives and terrorised civilians. It operates wholly outside the law, and serves only to fuel anti-western sentiment.”

I want to butt in here, to make 3 points:

1)    I agree with Shiban’s negative judgments of the American directed drone attacks against suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

2)    I have been impressed with the evidence he, and any number of reputable local and global news organizations have compiled, suggesting that although our targeting is intended to be selective and precise, it is often misinformed about its selections and indiscriminate in its effects.  The bottom line, any number of reports from Yemen have said, is that any tactical benefit derived from killing some “bad guys,” and I’ll agree with the NSA that the drone-missile-struck Islamist preacher and accused terrorist recruiter Anwar Al-Awlaki was a very bad guy, is negated, nay overwhelmed, by the strategic disrepute America has earned in Yemen by killing more than a few innocent, non-terrorist civilians.  One suspects, just to mention one case, that Al-Awlaki’s 16 year old son Abdurrahim, also drone-popped, in a separate attack, might not have been that bad.

3)    Whether you or the British government agree with Shiban’s conclusions, his subject is worth considering, and his evidence was bravely and professionally collected, and is essential to any rational consideration, affirmation or rejection of an increasingly important component of American and British military practice, missile-armed drones.

4)    Critically considering drone warfare is something every military, intelligence, or political official, indeed every citizen, should do, and is NOT to be confused with aiding or abetting terrorism.

If you think that distinction is obvious and can go without saying, you probably missed a Greenwald article published in The Guardian the same day as Shiban’s story of his arrest.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-uk-drone-opponents-threats

In it, Greenwald makes public an entry identified by Snowden as being from “a top secret internal US government website,” used only by people "with top secret clearance and public key infrastructure certificates," which Greenwald notes equates “the most basic political and legal opposition to drone attacks [with] ‘propaganda campaigns’ from ‘America's ‘adversaries’”

“One specific entry,” Greenwald writes, “discusses ‘threats to unmanned aerial vehicles,’ including

1)    ‘air defense threats’,

2)    ‘jamming of UAV sensor systems’,

3)    ‘terrestrial weather’,  

4)    ‘electronic warfare employed against the command and control system’ [and]

5)    ‘propaganda campaigns that target UAV use.’”

What does this high-powered NSA analyst (I’ll bet my money these are the “thoughts” of a “Beltway Bandit” contractor) consider enemy propaganda?

One example is the idea, being pressed in the Federal courts by The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, that executing American citizens, like the Awlakis, father and son, without formal accusation or trial, deprives them of their Constitutional rights to due process.

You don’t have to be a law professor to see the logic of this argument, agree with it or not, and I don’t.  But, you do have to be totalitarian or a fool to use the label “enemy propaganda” to try to preempt its presentation and discussion.

Not to say, you can’t be a totalitarian and a fool like those who tried to quash any consideration of the wisdom of continuing the war in Vietnam with labels like “Communist,” or “tool of Hanoi.”

Or the "senior American counterterrorism official" who smeared the UK-based non-profit The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose website says it has collaborated with such respected news organizations as the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera English, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mirror, the Observer and the Daily Mirror.   Said this fellow, who undoubtedly has an access key to the “top secret website” mentioned above, "Let's be under no illusions – there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign [drone warfare] and help Al-Qaeda succeed."

He must believe the crapulous in-house propaganda against “propaganda.”  And he’s not the only one.  Thus summer several folks in the Obama Administration conspired to deny a visa to Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents family members of victims killed by US drones in a suit against the US government.

Akbar had been invited to come to the US to testify before a Congressional committee, not necessarily because members agree with his criticisms of the US drone campaign in northwest Pakistan, or endorse his arguments in behalf of his clients and their relatives allegedly killed or maimed in drone attacks, but because he has information about when and where drone attacks have occurred, and whom they killed or injured, and what the popular reaction to these attacks has been, in the affected “tribal areas,” and across the country, where every poll shows deep Pakistani hostility to the US drone campaign.

If you want to understand the leaders of Pakistan, from President Nawaz Sharif on down, something any responsible Congressperson would want to do, it is useful to hear Akbar out, perhaps even cross-examine him rigorously. But thanks to the Obama Administration, Congress, the news media, and the American people have been denied the chance.

Do you suspect that sometimes, the security apparat inflates the threat of terrorism?

Do you worry that drones kill too many civilians?

Do you think the net effect of deadly remote-controlled American attacks inside other countries’ national territory may be to alienate people over there, fuel more terrorism, and create more hatred of the US?

Someone high up in the NSA is being told that all these ideas are just "adversary propaganda themes."

In fact, the document Snowden showed Greenwald labeled  “the phrase ‘drone strike’ …a ‘loaded term,’ [designed to] ‘invoke an emotional reaction’. This, the document asserts, ‘is what propaganda intends to do.’”

Yes, Polonius, propaganda plays with people’s emotions, in large measure by limiting or eradicating their options for rational consideration.        

The Brits gave Baraa Shiban an unwarranted hard time, but they let him give his speech at Chatham House, which was probably not unlike the presentation he had been allowed to make to Congress back in May.

How’s the old song go? “It’s a long, long way from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September.”  Too short for the beleaguered Obama Administration to permit a full discussion of the drones falling in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and soon, I’ll bet, in Somalia.

Wanna bet, at the NSA and the White House, they’ve already got a drones’ “enemies list?”

 

AL-SHABAAB: ENDGAME?

For a very interesting and well-informed perspective on Al Shabaab and the recent terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, I recommend this report from the always-excellent Peter Greste of Al Jazeera English.

http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/africa/al-shabab-dying-or-resurgent#.UkkfOUsSLD8.twitter

Greste suggests that my (when it was published) contrarian analysis of Al Shabaab as a declining rather than ascending threat is becoming more of a commonplace in Nairobi, where he is based.  He then offers a refutation, which, in my typically insistent way, I see largely as a confirmation.

What’s my logic?

The picture he paints of Al Shabaab activity inside Somalia is of a once-aspiring revolutionary movement now descended into simple, if widespread criminality.  The once alluring moral authority of Al Shabaab’s late predecessor the Islamic Courts Movement has devolved from religious fidelity into extremist puritanical tyranny.  Gone, as in much of once Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (and northwest Pakistan), is all but a fragment of popular support.  Discredited is a group that once claimed to be better, both in morality and efficiency, than the Government.  What has replaced subscription or tolerance is just fear.

Al Shabaab’s wannabe prophets of a purer Islam are now seen just as dangerous criminals.  Their success is simply extortion.  They may still be a constant and menacing presence in Mogadishu, as Greste bravely reports from the scene, but almost everyone who lives there wishes only for their absence.

This in all the important terms of Al Shabaab’s one-time ambitions is devastating failure.

It must also be said, and seriously thought upon, that in today’s difficult world, noted in my previous pieces on the Kenya attack, a weak central government means lots of ungoverned spaces.  And in those inchoate zones, there are many desperate and angry people who can still be mobilized into desperate and angry actions.  And, worse, there is endless, easy access for these desperados to powerful, portable weapons, supplied by rich and irresponsible sponsors to fanatic criminals like those acting as Al Shabaab, who commissioned the Westgate Mall raid.

As presently constituted, the armed and police forces of the government of Somalia, and the visiting troops of the African Union, the Kenyan Army and the Ethiopian Army and Air Force, lack both the will or the capability to pursue and extirpate the urban extortionists or hidey-hole terrorist commanders out in the Somali bush.

That may change, as an effective response to the Nairobi attack is organized.  Again, as I said before, attackers come with “jackets,” criminal and security files, so that, once identified, they and their contacts go up on military and intelligence radar screens.  For them, the hunt is on.  It will be long, slow and expensive, and alas, violent and often not-well-focused.  But if Al Shabaab and its diminishing support network are not already on the run, they soon will be.

But for them, the revolution is over, and whatever battles they may win, the war is lost.  Now (as always) the real job is to make government in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, (in Kenya and Ethiopia, Congo and Zimbabwe, and for God’s sake, in the USA) work.

This struggle will be longer and harder than eliminating Al Shabaab.

TERROR IN A KENYAN MALL

It has become axiomatic: the torment of counter-terrorism is, “the counter-terrorists have to win all the time; the terrorists only have to win once.”

To do what?

To convince people that the terrorists are a constant, powerful threat who can make people and states do things they would otherwise not choose to do.

A perfect example of that is this weekend’s bloody mass murder at a Nairobi shopping mall.  Even once the Kenyan authorities can finally correctly claim that the attack is over, that the terrorists are all dead or captured, in their own terms, the bad guys “won.”

They achieved their ultimate goal: global coverage, global recognition of their ability to kill and frighten, of their “mission” to reclaim Somalia for radical absolutist Islam, of their division of the world into Muslims and targets, and of their identification of both “international” and wannabe-cosmopolitan Kenyan consumers as their particular enemies.

But, today, on NPR’s great news broadcast All Things Considered, I heard the implications of their triumph further magnified by the analysis of an accredited “expert,” J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council's Africa Center.

Pham rightly scorned exaggerated claims by Western powers, especially the Obama White House, that the war against Al Shabaab, the Somalia-based Islamist militia and claimed director of the Nairobi mall attack has been a success, that it has crushed Al Shabaab and left them a spent force.

Asked what he concluded from the events in Kenya, Pham said, the attack showed exactly what the terrorists had hoped, that they were still a formidable enemy.  Then, he added, that the US was undermining its own efforts against terrorism and Al Shabaab by trying to keep distance from Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and the government of Ethiopia, both of whom, he said, could be valuable allies in the counter-terror war.

Pham did have the intellectual honesty to note that President Kenyatta is presently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his own widely-reported role in fostering mass-murder of his civilian Kenyan political and/or tribal opponents following national elections in 2007.  But he recommended mending fences with Ethiopia without noting that government’s well-established record of mass-oppression and murder of its civilian political and/or tribal opponents.

One could call this reluctant pragmatism, but I would call it foolishness of the sort that makes countering terrorism so hard.

What the mass murders at the Westgate Mall shows me is how little it takes, beyond great malignity of will, to commit a terrorist atrocity.  The dirty little secret of counter-terrorism is not how mighty are our enemies, but how miniscule.  But, in a world awash in desperate, truly marginalized people, full of powerful, easily portable weapons, and religiously or ideologically-driven benefactors who will buy the guns and bombs that make losers into terrorist “winners,” a lot of bad shit is going to happen.  And no one, not even the collective efforts of the world’s professional counter-terrorists, can consistently stop them.

Mosquitos can cause deadly epidemics, but they are still mosquitos.

Remember John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the “DC Sniper” and his teenaged running-mate?  Back in 2002, they killed 10 people and critically injured 3 more in a series of random attacks in the Washington metropolitan area before they were finally captured by police.  The truth is, they could have killed many more, and escaped arrest a lot longer if Muhammad, like many criminals, wasn’t so stupid and ego-controlled that he called CNN to brag about his vicious prowess and thereby helped police to track him and Malvo down.     

If he had been content to kill randomly and indiscriminately without demanding credit, he might have been unstoppable.  Killing people with no motive but murder is easy.

Yes, bringing together and arming a dozen or more people is harder to do than firing up one plus one; and co-ordinating them to run amok through a shopping center might be marginally more complex than pairing up to pick off people walking in their neighborhoods or pumping gas at service stations in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. 

Muhammad and Malvo were no criminal geniuses, just guys with guns who didn’t care whom they killed.  How much more credit do you really want to give the killers of the Westgate Mall?  How much organizational skill do you want to credit to their Islamist masters back in the Somali bush?

Enough to make us as a nation want to snuggle up to an accused mass-murderer or two?

Our campaign against Al Shabaab has had its successes.  It has, with the help of “invited” invaders from Kenya and Ethiopia, driven the Islamists from their strongholds in virtually every urban agglomeration in Somalia, and weakened their hold on many parts of the countryside, thus buying for the still new government in Mogadishu both space and time to develop.  But in an impoverished country which for 20 years had no credible central government and where rule of law is still barely above non-existent, it doesn’t take much in the way of organization, financial support and armed force to create an opposition.

In Somalia, Al Shabaab may be far from defeated (and claims to the contrary from distant Washington are nothing but obnoxious, if not delusional), but the shocking headlines from Nairobi don’t change the fact that it is losing.  A loser’s occasional win does not make them winners, although panicky overreactions to their terrorist deeds can make them feel like they are.

As far as I can tell, the Kenyan Army’s incursion into southern Somalia has had at least mixed results, and one should note, it and they have been sustained notwithstanding America’s estrangement from President Kenyatta.  On the other hand, American collaboration with air and ground attacks inside Somalia by Ethiopian forces has not been as well-received.  In part because the Ethiopian Air Force, with US “trainers” on board some of the planes, have killed more innocent civilians than targeted terrorists, and in part because Christian-majority Ethiopia is generally considered an “ancient enemy” in mostly-Muslim Somalia, the US’ involvement with the Ethiopians likely strengthened popular tolerance if not support for Al Shabaab more than it weakened it.

Better we invest in the Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud and try to build his government which seems to aspire to rule of law values from the inside, than swallow our principles and ally ourselves with outsiders like the indicted Kenyatta or the latest autocrat in Addis Ababa, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.

The true triumph of terrorism is not in killing innocent victims, but in corrupting the daily lives and political decisions of those who survive.

It is the true terror of our times that it takes so few degraded people to accomplish that.

     

SOME MAXIMS FOR 21ST CENTURY WARFARE

 

First, let me confess, I have never served in the military, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse (except for one terrible accident when I was about 8 years old when, mischievously tipping a big oil barrel to see what I could spill out of it, I was caught in the act, and in dropping my side of the tilted barrel, caught a curious piglet beneath it. It is one of the worst memories of my life.  So in addition lacking any warrior experience, I am squeamish.

Nevertheless, in a 50+ year career in journalism, I have seen warfare and its consequences (on the streets of New York, Newark, and Kent, Ohio, as well as in the Balkans, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Rwanda, and have spent a lot of time talking with troops and their commanders.

Not enough to make me an expert, but more than enough to conceive these ideas.

1)    Power Projection Is Over:  Wikipedia says that power projection and force projection are the same thing, and that “soft power” can also be successfully projected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection

This is, to me, very confused thinking.

Power projection, once upon a time, meant the ability of a distant state to control other states.  The apex of power projection was the era of colonial empires, when the economies and polities of distant, usually African, Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American nations, and the daily lives and ultimate fates of their people could be controlled from places like London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow and, yes, Washington.

Force projection is a lesser capability.  It can intimidate, punish, oppress its targets, but it, as we have learned to our sorrow, cannot control them.  One way of looking at force projection is that it is power projection without empire, since force projection does not imply the durability or the continuity of power projection.  For its targets the difference between force projection and power projection is the difference between a sock in the jaw and life in prison.  For its projectors, the limited power of force projection was nicely summed up by American fighters in Vietnam (or Afghanistan): “We control the day; they control the night.”  

Soft power, which eschews brute force, conveys influence, which can have both durability and continuity, but neither controls nor intimidates or oppresses.  The soft power of “rock and roll, blue jeans, Coca Cola,” is impressive, whether you see it as liberating or annoying, but it, even in its state-directed iterations of diplomatic alliance or exclusion or economic sanctions allows it targets to choose their outcomes.   

What power projection controlled was not just territory, but equally important, communication.  The armies of empire had superior firepower, but, more important, they knew, both strategically and tactically, what they were doing.  By and large, their victims did not.  Imperial fleets could move with speed and stealth, outpacing both warnings and preparations.  Once landed, imperial troops could overpower territories and kill or corral their inhabitants and move on, before their next targets knew they were in danger.

And control of communications was a 2-way street.  Not only were power projections‘ victims ignorant of their future, the projectors’ folks back home could be kept completely in the dark about the crimes and brutalities being committed in their names.

Which brings us to maxim #2:

 

2)    There Are No More Secret Wars:  Back when power projection worked, wars were a secret to their victims until it was too late, and they could be kept secret from disapproving citizens of colonial powers until the state decided otherwise, or until the disapproval was of faits accomplish, which are harder to argue against, and much harder to undo.

Now, like God’s sparrows, not a bomb or missile falls unobserved, and news of the damage done can be communicated both locally and globally, instantaneously.  For the would-be projectors of power or force, even their most incurious or controlled news media must now contend with other media voices, with other, likely often opposing, points of view, and with an anarchic world of video-capable mobile phones, cameras, computers and satellite links to tell the world of every death, every burning building.

As the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden cases make obvious, secret attempts to project power or force can be revealed to the world, not just after the fact, but in the planning or even pre-planning stages.

As I have said before, as long as institutions involve human beings in conceiving or executing their plans, the betrayal of secrecy is not just possible, but predictable.

The cruel depredations of perhaps the world’s last empire, the Soviet bloc, its oppression, corruption and bureaucratic paralysis, were so well known that it was rejected by its own people, and shunned by the rest of the world. 

Now, with all the world witness to our projections of force in Iraq and Afghanistan (and our airborne killings in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and our connections to coupsters in Honduras and Egypt) and the threats of force against Iran regularly made by belligerent blowhards in Congress, there is a widespread sense of, “There, but for the grace, or lack of interest, of the Pentagon and the White House, go I.”

In addition to the projection of power, force or influence, there is their opposite, the projection of repulsive arrogance.  This kind of arrogance and ignorance can only be remedied by my Third Maxim.

 

3)    WHERE YOU CANNOT TELL FRIEND FROM FOE, DO NOT GO:  I was going to propose as my Third Maxim, There Are No More Short Wars, but the exception proves the rule promulgated above.  The US military did conduct short, successful wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.  What made these “incursions” short and successful was not just that they occurred before the globe was digitally interconnected but because in both cases, our troops, and almost all the citizens in both places knew who the “bad guys” were.  In Panama, there were few remaining supporters of the corrupt and criminal regime of Manuel Noriega, while in Grenada, the Stalinist Bernard Coard was almost universally seen as an oppressive, vicious usurper who had overthrown -- and unforgivably, killed -- the perhaps unsteady, but still widely-liked, Socialist Maurice Bishop.  In neither place did American forces face popular or dogged opposition, and we were in and out too fast for particular factions to use us to target their political or personal rivals or enemies.

Would that had been the case in either Iraq or Afghanistan!  In both of those places, we invaded in support of allies, most of whom had been out of their countries for years or decades before we projected our forces.

They told us who our enemies were, when in reality, they were theirs.  Think of Ahmed Chalabi conning ignorant fools like Paul Bremer and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld into disbanding the Iraqi Army, which they defined as “Baathist,” while most Iraqis defined as “ours.”

Then there were the “night raids” launched in Iraq and Afghanistan against people who were fingered by “our friends” for what frequently turned out to be very private beefs. Every household we overturned, every prisoner we took and held, often for years at a time, did indeed become our enemy, for reasons we gave them.

Now, the latest Inspector General’s report from Afghanistan chronicles a waste of billions given to people we knew or later learned were already against us.  And still the dollars spill across the country where they cannot be traced, much less monitored, because it is completely unsafe for Americans to go beyond Kabul.  Because we don’t know who is on which side, and a misjudgment can mean death.  Which leads us to the Fourth Maxim, which is actually the first and foremost rule of warfare in our time.

 

4)     IN TODAY’S WARS, THE VISITING TEAM NEVER WINS:  The former advantages that made Power Projection work, an outsider’s preponderance of firepower and control of communications no longer work.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns, budget cuts may force him to reduce the US Navy’s aircraft carrier battle groups and the size of Army and Marine forces.  So what?  Those carrier groups are primarily useful for force projection, which is, as I’ve argued, something we should be reducing anyway, and the days of massed troops overrunning opposing hordes on big battlefields is as dead as the harquebus and halberd.  In fact, these days, with remote-controlled, satellite guided munitions, any mass of forces is simply an inviting target.  Enemies will no longer mass against us.  It’s much easier and more effective to pick us off with small groups, carrying portable, often “improvised” (meaning home-made, not put together spur of the moment) weapons.

Massive numbers of soldiers are now chiefly useful for military occupations (as Rumsfeld tragically refused to recognize when he invaded Iraq).  Even the small, mobile forces Rumsfeld championed there served principally to drag us deeper into the briar patch.  Once there, we discovered that occupation is a thankless, often hopeless task, which, one devoutly hopes, we will avoid in the future.

And the thing about occupations, and about power or force projection, is that they are temporary.  Everyone knows that: especially the home team, whether they be our enemy, our friends, or just innocent civilians.  In Afghanistan from the day the war began, the Taliban have been telling the people they live among, or within arms’ reach of, “The foreign forces will leave one day.  We will not.”

It’s not hard to draw the conclusion inherent in that formulation, and Afghans, whether horrified or pleased by that prospective outcome, live every day in its shadow.  That’s why so many of “our friends” prove perfidious.  They want their children to survive.

Everywhere we have projected power since the 1990s, our control of events has disappeared as soon as our troops have left.  In Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, in Iraq, Somalia, and soon in Afghanistan, the projection of force leaves only one certainty behind: the rule of force, usually the force we fought to defeat.

The cost in blood and treasure and in America’s international reputation has been catastrophic.  The benefits to ordinary people are very hard to find.    

PRIVACY AND SECRECY

The “debate” over PRISM and other American and international snooping programs grows more pathetic by the day, still dominated by laments over these “evil” new technologies of data gathering and collation.

The latest “highlight” was conservative columnist Robert Samuelson’s regretting the invention of the Internet.  This is the return of the mad Irish King Cuchulainn cursing the ocean’s waves.

The Internet, with all its dangers and opportunities is here, Bob; get over it.  Or better, learn to manage it.

The same must be said for today’s new surveillance technology: it exists, and any national security agency that fails to use it should be disbanded.  The question is how are these new opportunities to monitor people and their communications used by the NSA, its colleagues and competitors.  It is a given that they can and do register and file just about every form and piece of human communication.  But, what triggers more particular and invasive attention to people or institutions?  And once closer looks are begun, who gets access to selected materials?  Who monitors the snoopers from both inside and outside the system, and what powers do they have to rein in irresponsible or unnecessary prying?  And who tells what about all of this to the people who, in a democracy, should have the ultimate power and responsibility?

These are hard questions, but familiar ones, since they recur often, whenever the balance of power between citizens and their states is transformed by technological or cultural change.

In this case, the ongoing development of surveillance technology and data gathering and mining, like the ongoing development of global use of the Internet creates both dangers and opportunities for both sides of the citizen/state balance of power.

On the one hand, for the 21^st Century and beyond, the uncomfortable fact is that personal privacy is dead, and not just because of government supercomputers. The global distribution of mobile phones with audio or video recording capabilities has created an environment in which anything that happens “in public” is almost as likely to be recorded as your “private” phone calls, texts messages, snail- and e-mails, and probably more likely to be distributed with or without your permission.

But, there is a countervailing truth here: government secrecy is as almost as dead as privacy; people have never-before-equaled powers to rip the government’s blindfolds off their eyes.  The fatal flaw of secret systems, that they require human participation, and inevitably, every secret decision can produce active dissent, is nothing new.  But what is new and growing is the ability of whistleblowers to record events, and to distribute the recordings and their dissident criticisms to the world at large. Thus, what really be created is a new and different balance of powers between citizens and states, uneasy, instable, but still a balance of powers.

And the evidence suggests, people have already begun adapting to this new balance.  Even old folks like me have noticed that younger people have different attitudes toward and expectations for privacy.  They are prone to exhibit more of and about themselves than their parents did. Largely this is because they can; but it also because others can create these displays, with little to stop them, and that such exposures create far less embarrassment or social cost.  Note the political returns of Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and Mark Sanford, just to name 3.  Every college newspaper, it seems, has either a sex or a porn column, which trade in what even fairly recent graduates might consider TMI, too much information.

This is not to say, there are no norms, but just to note that, for most people under 30 the limits on personal disclosure are looser than for older people.  When it comes to the NSA snoopers, the key task will be to determine the norms, not on what you can do, but on what you can do without inviting real surveillance.  If you can fly beneath that radar, and would-be terrorists have long known this and did not need Edward Snowden to tell them to be careful, you can do almost anything you want, until it is too late for even the most aware parents, potential employers or professional counter-terrorists to prevent it.

So, Norms for Our Time:  when you are on the phone or the Internet, assume your every move is being turned into government data, and when you are on the street or anywhere “in public,” assume there is a good possibility everything you say or do is being recorded. 

That’s relatively easy.  Personal and cultural change is constant and people are used to dealing with it.  Much harder is to define and apply rules and limits to powerful institutions like governments and their often-loosely- supervised security agencies.  They are much slower to understand, and much, much slower to adapt to new conditions than people.

After all, it has been 50 years since the US sent troops into Vietnam, and still there has been little recognition of how changes in communications and weapon technologies have made military invasion an exercise in futility.  The universality of digital communication is one key reason why old war-fighting tactics no longer work, and why local organizations cohere so successfully and durably.  The rapid escalation in portable or “improvised” (i.e. locally sourced) firepower is another.  Taken together, these changes explain why, as I like to put it, “In today’s warfare, the visiting team never wins.” 

Gone are the days of “secret wars.”  If a sparrow, much less a bomb falls, the destruction it causes will be publicly known via Twitter, Facebook and supremely, YouTube, not just by the home folks suffering the damage, who will inevitably be alienated from the outside forces responsible for it, but by the “visitors’ own citizens, who will know what death and destruction are being committed in their names. 

Increasingly, Americans are coming to understand that for every terrorist (in, or without quotation marks) killed by American drones in northwest Pakistan, hundreds of friends, relatives and neighbors, and hundreds of thousands of Pakistani fellow-citizens are turned into irrevocable enemies.  They can see the damage on their TV screens, computers and mobile phones. 

Similar secret US attacks inside Somalia, may have eliminated a few terrorists, but they have also strengthened the Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab’s legitimacy as an anti-imperialist force there.  Somalis, like Pakistanis, count the collaterally dead as their friends, those who killed them as enemies, and today’s communications technologies assure they, and anyone they can communicate with, can count corpses as easily or efficiently as domestic spooks can track your correspondence.  American diplomats on the ground recognize this blowback, but in Washington, other imperatives still rule.

Between whistleblowers and video cameras, government secrecy is dead as a doornail, or the concept of personal privacy.  The Video Era, like those of such earlier modes of communication as the human voice, the printing press, radio and TV, has created great opportunities for the consolidation of power in those who can control or best utilize those media.  But, equally, for ordinary people the new media, each time they change the world, also greatly empower individual communications to spread farther faster to an ever-growing audience. 

There is a new balance of power in communication and, as Darwin noted, adaptation is the only answer. 

David Marash