NSA REVELATIONS: MORE OF THE SAME, MUCH MORE

The latest revelations about NSA/GCHQ spying seem, literally, more of the same.  The numbers go up, “thousands of targets,” and so do the levels of folly and indiscrimination.  The NY Times says,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/world/nsa-dragnet-included-allies-aid-groups-and-business-elite.html?hp

 

“Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.”

The list of targets published by the Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/20/gchq-targeted-aid-agencies-german-government-eu-commissioner

includes: “senior European Union officials, foreign leaders including African heads of state and sometimes their family members, directors of United Nations and other relief programs, and officials overseeing oil and finance ministries, according to the documents. In addition to Israel, some targets involved close allies like France and Germany.”

At this point the Times reporters James Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren pause for a moment and gather a joint “straight face,” and use it to deliver this: the NSA/GCHQ to-surveil lists “also include people suspected of being terrorists or militants.”

Let me do better than just italics to highlight this.  Let me repeat:  in addition to officials of Doctors without Borders, the EU anti-trust agency, and the African economic organization ECOWAS, our security services also tracked actual potential threats to someone’s security: “people suspected of being terrorists or militants.”

How reassuring.

Less reassuring was the revelation that one of the email accounts tapped by GCHQ (likely on assignment from the NSA) was “the email address was used for correspondence with [then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s] office, which he said staff members often handled. He added that it was unlikely that any secrets could have been compromised.

“This was an unimpressive target,” Mr. Olmert said.

Unless the Times/Guardian/Spiegel missed something, the snoopers were plugged into the wrong circuit, the G rated email account.  I suspect bureaucratic buffoonery: some intel  jobsworth was tasked to set up a tap on Olmert. And he did. Incompetently and ineffectively.  But if anyone up chain asked him about the Olmert account, he could answer truthfully, “We’re on it. It’s working like a charm.”  Turning up nothing.

If the White House, or some other NSA “client” within government wanted to know what Olmert was up to, a search of Israel’s hard-charging news media, print, radio, TV and internet, almost certainly would have provided better information, at a much lower cost, measured in dollars or national dignity.

Probably the first question any spy should ask him or herself about a possible penetration for information is, “Can I get away with it?”

Probably the most frightening thing about all the secret surveillances Edward J. Snowden has publicized is, the NSA brass actually believed they could “get away with them, all of them.”

Somehow, as they burrowed deeper down intercept alley, the intelligence executive was blind to a world of change (as their analogs were so amazingly deaf to the rumble of impending collapse of the Soviet Union.)  DNI James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander acted as if the universality of smartphones, digital recorders, and computers were no significant threat to data-security, and existence of a 24/7 digital livestream of global communication meant that stolen info could be instantaneously re-distributed to a worldwide public

Remember, these latest revelations cover the period 2008-2011, by which time institutional dreams of secure secrecy should have been thoroughly discredited.   In 2005 and 2006 James Risen had published in his book State of War, and in the NY Times, well-sourced stories on a secret CIA cyberwar against Iran, and the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of American telephone communications.  Barton Gellman, in 2007 and 2008, had outed the super-secret White House Group on Iraq, and in the Washington Post and his political biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Angler, the NSA’s massive data-mining of digital communications. 

I guess the professional judgment of Clapper and Alexander was, “That can’t happen again.”

How would Angela Merkel ever find out, we’re tapping her cellphone?

It’s called risk-assessment, and it’s probably the most basic job in national security.  If you can’t manage the first, you shouldn’t be allowed to attempt the second.  So, beyond the imperative to fire the 2 retired Generals because they both lied to Congress and systematically misled their legal monitors on the FISA Court, (yeah, I know, too late to fire Alexander.  He’s already resigned.) how about firing them for their obvious and avoidable misjudgments of risk and reality that, for very little return in important intelligence, has subjected the United States to international hostility, mistrust, contempt and humiliation?

Whatever the risk, what was the expected reward from collecting and transcribing the conversations of ECOWAS’ Mohamed Ibn Chambas, which included, the Times reports, “’Am glad yr day was satisfying,’ Mr. Chambas texted one acquaintance” The Times reported.

“’I spent my whole day travelling ... Had to go from Abidjan to Accra to catch a flt to Monrovia ... The usual saga of intra afr.’ Later he recommended a book, “A Colonial History of Northern Ghana,” to the same person. ‘Interesting and informative,’ Mr. Chambas texted.”  This is an intellgience mission that seems stupid from top to bottom, beginning to end.  Chambas is even mis-identified by his snooper as “Dr. Chambers.”

The same Congress that has cut food stamps and unemployment insurance, that won’t build highways or repair bridges writes a blank check to the national security services to exemplify the idea of “a bureaucracy run amok.”

Challenged about the apparent surveillance on the EU’s anti-trust ball-buster of Intel and Microsoft, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines actually gave a coherent and intelligent answer: “The intelligence community’s efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.”

Me, I buy that, we probably do want to know what the top economic movers and shakers around the world are thinking and saying.  But I’m no better than agnostic on whether that’s what the tap on Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the European Commission was really about, helping government make  better economic policies.  I suspect it could have been about helping US companies cut a better deal with the Euro-folk, a more diffuse national benefit.

At least the cost of this revelation will be borne by the security bumblers and their White House enablers.  Sr. Almunia may now, righteously, be doubly suspicious of the American Government and American IT firms, and doubly harsh in his treatment of them.  But the news that UN relief agencies, even NGOs like Medecins du Monde, have also been penetrated, their notes and observations swept into the NSA’s data files, will hurt the organizations, hamper their ability to do good around the world, perhaps even put their refugee rescuers and volunteer doctors and nurses in mortal danger.

In the case of Almunia, and of the human rights and social service workers, what they see and say may well be worth knowing.  But not at any price; and all these cases, the consequences that were risked should have forestalled any secret sweeping.

In addition to being an historically grave offense against privacy, the decade-long NSA etc surveillance campaign has been an offense against competence, judgment, discipline and common sense.

This clown show started under President George W. Bush, but it hasn’t dropped a stitch (or a seltzer bottle) since Barack Obama took over the White House.  With his characteristic mysterious mixture of diffidence (or is it laziness) and passivity (or is it cowardice?) he has permitted, nay encouraged, the most dysfunctional departments of his government to keep on doin’ their thing.

Now, 6 months after the Snowden revelations hit the fan, Obama is admitting there’s a problem.  Appallingly, it is clear from his remarks at his December 20 News Conference, the problem he sees is not an ongoing privacy problem, or competence problem, but a theoretical issue far in the future: “I have confidence in the fact that the NSA is not engaging in domestic surveillance or snooping around, but I also recognize that as technologies change and people can start running algorithms and programs that map out all the information that we're downloading on a daily basis into our telephones and our computers that we may have to refine this further to give people more confidence.”

That for Barack Obama is the real problem here, a public relations problem.

The President says, “What [is clear] from the public debate, people are concerned about the prospect, the possibility of abuse. And I think that's what the judge in the district court suggested. And although his opinion obviously differs from rulings on the FISA Court, we're taking those into account.”

Uhhh, can we hold it right there?  (1) Judge Richard Leon didn’t just worry about some as yet undocumented potential for abuse, he declared unconstitutional the present, on-going, broadscale, warrantless imposition of government surveillance on the private lives of American citizens who are suspected of crimes, and have had no direct contact with suspected terrorists.  And (2) those previous “rulings on the FISA Court,” were all predicated on now-corrected misinformation, lying claims that the DNI and NSA and the other agencies under FISA supervision were obeying the law in their actions and in their filings to the court. 

Thus, those FISA Court “rulings” are completely invalid.

I hope Mr. Obama also takes that “into account.”  But more likely his scheme is to calm down the rubes and keep doing what he and his security team have been doing since the day he took office (and to be fair, many years before).  As he himself said at the news conference, “it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular program may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse. And if that's the case, there may be another way of skinning the cat.”

That’s not cat skin, sir, that’s my privacy.

 

 

 

THE GUARDIAN CORRECTS: HERSH DID NOT CALL OBAMA KILLING A "LIE"

The helpful folks at the Poynter Institute point out

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/225234/guardian-corrects-its-seymour-hersh-story/

A correction by The Guardian retracts the most startling assertion attributed to Seymour Hersh in the speech featured in my earlier post HEAR, HEAR, HERSH.  “Not what he meant at all,” says The Guardian, leaving it unclear as to whether the error was a misstatement by Hersh, or a misunderstanding on the part of their reporter, who interviewed Hersh, it turns out, back in July.  The key point is:

Hersh has pointed out that he was in no way suggesting that Osama bin Laden was not killed in Pakistan, as reported, upon the president’s authority: he was saying that it was in the aftermath that the lying began. 

Now, exactly what does that mean?  So far at least, neither Sy nor The Guardian cares to clarify, which is worse than too bad.  Who does Hersh allege lied about what in the aftermath of the Bin Laden killing?  Must we wait for the book?  Is The Guardian content to leave the question hanging?

All of this is, of course, just a fascinating side issue to Hersh’s, to my mind quite correct, flaying of the American news media.

For that, please see http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/09/hear-hear-hersh.html

MIRANDA: ONE LEG TO STAND ON

On the night of Sunday August 18, officers of the London Metropolitan Police pulled David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen who happens to be the partner of Guardian journalist Glen Greenwald, out of a transit area of Heathrow International Airport, held him incommunicado for 9 hours, showering him with tough questions and barely veiled threats, and denying him access to a lawyer, or Brazilian diplomats, before seizing his computer, his cellphone and digital files containing copies of many of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s stolen documents.

Miranda was held under a British anti-terrorism law, not because he was a suspected terrorist, or had ever committed any terroristic crimes, but because the cops suspected, correctly, he might be transporting files pertaining to official American (and British) security secrets.

That they had struck paydirt, was obvious within the minutes it took for Miranda to surrender everything in his possession.  The extra 8-plus hours of detention was about payback, again, not so much against the unfortunate file-mule Miranda, but against Greenwald, his investigative partner Laura Poitras (who had given the data to Miranda) and The Guardian, the British newspaper which has, with the Washington Post, been publishing a careful selection of Snowden’s damaging, revelatory documents.

Implicit in the extraordinary detention was also a clear message of intimidation aimed at all journalists: “Learn and report information we want hidden from citizens of the UK, the US and the world, and see what happens.”

The message was reinforced when British security agents visited The Guardian, and in a little bit of theater that was simultaneously tragic, farcical and futile, forced Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to witness the destruction of computers and accessories which also contained copies of Bowden-collected documents. Other copies, Rusbridger has said, remain in journalistic hands in the US, Germany and Brazil, if not other locations.

For a day or 3, this (and the White House’s role of passively greenlighting the detention before the Bobbies moved in on Miranda) was big news.

And then, quickly and quietly, the story died, except for continuing coverage by (unsurprisingly) The Guardian and, to a considerably lesser degree, the BBC.

The Miranda detention, which, in those heady first few days, several British experts on the Terrorism Act, the security issues at stake, human rights, press freedoms and journalism denounced as a gross overreach and dangerous abuse, all but disappeared from the US and UK media.

The story’s lack of what we newspeople call “legs” is easily documented.

Since their reporter’s partner’s detention, The Guardian, which, by the way, had paid for Miranda’s air tickets, has run 85 stories related to the security shakedown, more than twice as many as the BBC, and exactly 5 times as many as any other British news organization.  But even their vigorous coverage has run out of gas.  Of the 85 stories in The Guardian since August 19, 74 appeared that month, missing only 2 of 13 remaining days, and averaging 6 ½ stories a day for August.  Since September 1, The Guardian has, by its own count, published 11 stories in 50 days.

Worse news is that almost half of those stories appeared on one day, September 18, and 5 of those 11 stories were devoted essentially to one issue: the angry debate at the annual Directors’ conference of the Liberal-Democratic Party, in which all the Lib-Dem Directors but one voted for a resolution demanding changes in the letter and the application of the 13 year old Terrorism Act.

Coverage of the conference

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/18/david-miranda-lib-dems-anti-terrorism-powers

included some high Party officials making some pertinent observations: “Home Office minister Jeremy Browne (remember the Lib-Dems are part of the Conservative-led ruling government coalition) condemned schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000 as "too broad and overbearing," [while] Sarah Ludford, the Lib Dem MEP who secured the debate, said she suspected the use of schedule 7 to detain Miranda "was no less than an attempt to intimidate and shut up the Guardian."

And so on, yada, yada, yada.

More recently, The Guardian worked the Miranda story back into the paper through a lengthy analysis of the material relating the British version of the NSA, GCHQ, and by covering an instance of “Miranda-lite” treatment accorded a well-respected Yemeni human rights professional.

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

“Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen.” He says he was specifically threatened with “the full Miranda,” 9 hours in detention.  

Note that Shiban was neither suspected nor accused of terrorism.  He got the “locked room, hard questions” treatment because he has annoyed US and UK security bureaucrats by publishing reports documenting the so-called collateral civilian deaths caused by, and angry civilian response to, US-directed drone-borne missile attacks on suspected operatives of Yemen’s Al Qaeda subsidiary.

Aside from this story, and an accompanying comment on it from Guardian reporter Greenwald, the most enterprise The Guardian has shown, in terms of keeping the Miranda Case alive was a recent article by the paper’s ombudsman, Readers Editor Chris Elliot.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/22/guardian-coverage-of-government-surveillance

Elliot seemed surprised at how little reader response he’d seen to The Guardian’s coverage, not just of Miranda, but the whole Snowden NSA revelations story.

“More than 300 articles have been published since the first, on 6 June 2013, which revealed that a top-secret court had ordered a US telephone company, Verizon, to hand over data on millions of calls. However, since then, the readers' editor's office has received only 108 emails in relation to the series, of which just 13 were critical. Of the 13, only two specifically criticised the Guardian for publishing the disclosures, which is unusual for such a high-profile story.

“Of the rest, 48 were supportive of the Guardian's reporting, 27 offered further information or further case studies, and seven wanted to know how they could help Snowden, with some of them offering money, advice on visas, or even places to stay. A further 13 wanted to know more about what this kind of surveillance means for them personally.”

So, what about the rest of the UK media coverage?

The BBC, with 37 stories since August 19^th, has been by far the most active.  But even the Beeb has published only 4 stories since the end of August; and the rest of the Fleet Street and TV mob have been even more AWOL on the Miranda story.

UK Channel 4, probably the best television source for daily news coverage in English has done only 9 stories overall, one since the end of August.

SkyNews, Rupert Murdoch’s all-things-English satellite news channel has offered its viewers a total of 6 stories, none since August.

On the print side, Murdoch’s Times of London (once upon a time a “paper or record,”) has also totaled 6 Miranda-related stories, 2 this month (both on the arrest of the Yemeni drone-tracker).

The Daily Mail and The Telegraph have had 17 Miranda-related stories each, but only a single story (Yemeni arrested) in the Mail, this month, while The Independent has had 13 Miranda stories since August 19, none after August 30.

There is, of course, an American angle to this story.  The detention was done largely in America’s interest, and, as we noted above, with passive approval from President Obama’s White House.  But this has been of scant interest to American news outlets. 

A search of the NY Times database shows 11 Miranda Case-related stories in all, none since August; while the Washington Post archive coughs up just 6 references.  Again, no mention of the the case since the end of August.  As for America’s so-called “news channels,”  CNN has had 15 stories, MSNBC 5 and Fox News 3, but with the exception of one Fox story, none has said a thing since August 22, and only 1 story on CNN even mentioned the US’ enabling role.

As for that one September Fox story, it was merely a pass-along of an AFP report on the European Commission’s unease at the treatment British authorities had given Miranda. There has been no American newschannel coverage of the White House green light.

It’s not like the Miranda matter has gone completely unnoticed.  In addition to the European Commission, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, and Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, have written to David Cameron's government requesting further information on the legality of Miranda's detention, and The Guardian reported, 

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/sep/04/un-press-intimidation-state-secrets

they have warned the British government that the protection of state secrets must not be used as an excuse to "intimidate the press into silence."

These comments got zero coverage from the US news media, print or TV.

And there is this comment made to BBC’s radio 4 soon after Miranda’s Heathrow detention, by David Anderson QC, the British government’s independent reviewer of terrorist legislation: “The police, I'm sure, do their best,” he said, “But at the end of the day, there is the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which can look into the exercise of this power, there is the courts, and there is my function.”

If anyone in the British news media is curious about what the terrorism law reviewer or the Police Complaints Commission, the courts or Parliament is thinking about the Miranda case or the Terrorism Act, they’re keeping it to themselves.  Not a word has been published, not a question has been asked in print, or on radio or TV. 7 weeks now, and no sign anyone in the British media is waiting for results.

Until darkness fell, most of the coverage of the Miranda detention in the British print press (except in The Guardian) was harshly unsympathetic. Typical was this from The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100231711/why-does-being-a-relative-of-glenn-greenwald-place-you-above-the-law/

“Should being a relative of Glenn Greenwald place you above the law? I ask the question because this morning many people are arguing Greenwald’s partner David Miranda should, in effect, enjoy immunity from investigation solely because his spouse writes very lengthy articles for The Guardian.”

And, on August 30^th, when Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser at the Cabinet Office, went on the record to warn that ‘lives’ had been ‘put at risk’ by Miranda, ‘if the documents’ he was carrying had fallen ‘into the wrong hands,’ The Times, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail all rushed into stenography mode with uncritical repetitions of the charge, often adding Robbins’ comment that  Miranda had ‘showed very bad judgment’ by, as David Barrett wrote in the Telegraph:  ‘http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10276460/David-Miranda-was-carrying-password-for-secret-files-on-piece-of-paper.html

“carrying thousands of British intelligence documents through Heathrow airport [while]  also holding the password to an encrypted file written on a piece of paper.”

If Barrett or any of the other British journalists who wrote about Robbins’ charges had bothered to check with Greenwald, or any expert on digital security, they would have learned that for encrypted files like those Miranda was ferrying, one code word is not enough.  Usually 2 or more keys are required to open the secured materials.  Suffice it to say, that weeks after seizing Miranda’s copies, the UK security services had managed to read, according to the notes taken by The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100233498/david-miranda-accused-of-carrying-secrets-that-threatened-spies-lives-this-look-bad-for-glenn/

“just a small portion of an astonishing 58,000 pages of intelligence documents.”

In all of American journalism, the only substantive look at the Miranda case this month came from CJR.org’s Ryan Chittum:

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/british_spooks_dont_quite_unde.php

Chittum seemed spurred by, and led with, the fact that the British Spook-in-Chief Robbins had misquoted him (admittedly with egregious carelessness or dishonesty).  But, Chittum did take the opportunity to add that “only a dozen” or so of the encrypted documents had by then been accessed by UK Security because Miranda’s “bad judgment” had been trumped by Poitras’ encryption tradecraft, and to note the fundamental stupidity of Oliver Robbins’ on-the-record rant:

“’Indeed it is impossible for a journalist alone to form a proper judgment about what disclosure of protectively marked intelligence does or does not damage national security,’ [Robbins said.]

“This is misleading, [says Chittum]. It’s not as if Greenwald is doing a Wikileaks-style document dump and crowd-sourcing the reporting (that’s one major difference between Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, by the way). The Guardian is vetting the information, and you can be sure the paper is going back and forth with the government, perhaps even with Robbins himself, before it reports anything.”

So, as CJR has always put it, “laurels” to Chittum (with an ink-stained cluster for pointing out why Manning was a “leaker,” and Bowden a “whistleblower,”) and “dart” after dart after dart to just about everyone else in journalism for cutting the “legs” out from under one of the year’s most important stories.

Silence means consent.

LIES, DAMNED LIES AND "NATIONAL SECURITY"

For virtually as long as it has been in business, the NSA's super-surveillance program has abused the US Constitution, and defied the instructions of the FISA Court which is supposed to supervise it, and lied about it, -- to the court, the Congress and the American people.

The revelation, just this week, of the NSA's persistent and dangerous misbehavior, found in the text of official rulings by FISA Court Judge John Bates in 2009 and 2011, does, in the words of the Director of National Intelligence, Gen. James Clapper, "harm to national security."

No, Director Clapper, making your lies and abuses public knowledge harms only you, and those within your organization who served you and neither the nation nor the Constitution.  Your attempt to frighten your critics by claiming your personal humilation is a national security disaster only confirms your unfitness to serve.  Resign.

The application of the "national security" label to the disclosure of Cabinet-level failure, like the gratuitous use of the Espionage Act to condemn leaker Bradley Manning, and the foolish misuse of the Terrorism Act in the UK, to trigger the detention and interrogation of David Miranda and the meaningless destruction of computers and hard drives at the office of The Guardian newspaper all illustrate a corrupt use of language by the leading American and British War-on-Terror-ists, which slimes them like an exploding bag of funny money colors more common criminals like bank robbers.

But perhaps the most meaningful revelation on the counter-the-counter-terrorists front was the one made to the Washington Post by the latest Chief Judge of the FISA Court, the widely respected Reggie Walton: (as reported by Spencer Ackerman in The Guardian) "that the Fisa court remains reliant on government assurances, rather than its own independent oversight capabilities, to determine that the NSA and the government is in compliance with surveillance law and agreed-upon procedures."

That is to say, the FISA court is dependent on a band of unrestrained, unashamed liars, and has no weapons beyond its own wits to counter them.

Every day, it seems, we learn how much must be done to bring the National Security sub-state under control and to assure that national security and the public interest are truly synonymous, and not as DNI Clapper seems to think, concepts in conflict.

MIRANDA WRONGS

THE MIRANDA WRONG

Some smart American general, I can't recall if it was Stanley McChrystal or David Petraeus said, every drone that kills 10 "militants" creates 100 replacements.

I think that's accurate, as far as it goes, but it is basically "old world" thinking. In the new world of instant and global digital communication, the world in which secrecy and assumptions of secrecy are both equally anachronistic, each attack creates not just 10 new fighters for every one killed or injured, it creates thousands, maybe millions of new enemies.

Perhaps this obvious lesson will now be drawn by the foolish security officials who detained David Miranda because he was Guardian columnist, and Edward Snowden revelation reporter, Glenn Greenwald's partner, and gave him 9 hours of "rubber room" treatment.

These apparatchiks of the formerly secret services, the ones who identify themselves to their victims, or in this case, their victim's partner, with numbers rather than names, and their very nonymous enablers like Prime Minister David Cameron, President Barack Obama, and DNI James Clapper should note, what you do is no longer secret. You can and will be held responsible by a global jury.  Think about, please.  It is well past time.

So, you may have given Miranda a hard time, and sent chills down the spine of Greenwald and his reporting partner Laura Poitras, but you have also enraged millions of once-undecideds in the ongoing war in which privacy as well as secrecy are casualties.

For Obama, the President of Faux-Transparency, this Battle of Bull Run in his war against journalism and freedom of speech further shrinks public tolerance for his performance and persona, and geometrically grows both sympathy and the audience for Greenwald and Poitras' print and video reporting.

As for OBama's crusade for East German STASI-style snitching inside America's security state, he should remember another truism of counter-terrorism: the counter-terrorists are never allowed to lose, while the terrorists need only to win once, or once in a while. Ordering everyone who works at the DOD or CIA or NSA to rat out "suspicious characters," only squeezes more secrets loose from an angry and demoralized workforce.

Few journalists will be deterred by what the Brit securi-thugs did to David Miranda, but thousands of potential visitors may divert to other places to visit and spend their money rather than support a British government which behaves so atrociously. And dozens of people who know, or investigate what Obama and Clapper call secrets will now be more motivated to make them public knowledge.