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.

 

SURVEILLANCE: AN EXCHANGE

My good friend and fellow worshipper of the horsehide spheroid, Doug Hellinger, raised a serious challenge to my first blog on privacy and secrecy.  I quote from his email:

I would have a very hard time giving in to what you seem to be considering the inevitability of a loss of privacy that greatly increases the vulnerability of movements of resistance (to a corrupt, criminal, repressive or unjust state, or to corporate dominance) to being undermined or of individuals to persecution for, say, their lifestyle choices. To quote a wise man who understands the need for social inclusion, what are we going to say to African Americans and women who are being spied on (as in the good-old Hoover days) as they resist the loss of their economic, social and legal rights? Fuck ‘em?

To which I replied…

"Acceptance."

Yes, we must accept that today's technologies which intercept and record virtually everything we do exist and that maximizing their use to defend the security of the nation is a foregone conclusion.

What we cannot accept is deferring to government all the decisions about what "maximum use" means. Whose recorded data is selected for analysis, by whose authority, to what end?

What triggers data selection beyond collection? What limits it?

When is a data selection operation ended? What happens to the selected materials and the judgments made of them?

Who gets to ask these questions? What are their powers to restrain abuse of the data collection system? How much of the process described above is made available to the public? And what options does the public have to impose modifications on surveillance theory and practice?

Not to mention, what are the threats to national security and how appropriate and how productive are the policies and actions taken to defend it?

Good answers to these questions are what we should be fighting for.

Fortunately, even as governments accrue more and better machinery to log all our communications, and through drone-supported cameras, our every movement, people are gaining new powers of their own.

Even as the Internet is targeted by a frighteningly narrow and self-interested oligarchy of brand name product manufacturers and global media producers, most bent on "winning" by killing off their competitors, it is itself producing a generation of independent recorders of events, and providers of interpretations and opinions.

This now multibillion computer, tablet, cellphone camera-carrying populace cannot only, like the government, record almost everything; it can communicate it instantly and globally. More people understood Edward Snowden in seconds than understood Daniel Ellsberg in decades.

The question, of course, is credibility, whose recordings will most people accept as true? The government's, the mainstream media's or "amateur video?"

With so many video recording devices in so many hands, the products of multiple "amateur" sources should allow the best mainstream media to deduce a best, most comprehensive approximation of reality ever available, simply by wisely selecting from them. Many of them are better and more believable than the best manipulations of propagandists for commercial as well as government interests. Some of them are fakes, cruel manipulations, which is why journalism -- more than ever -- must provide independent, professional witnesses on the ground as well as informed editors and commentators at the home office. If the institutional "mainstream" media continue to fail to do so, if they continue to save money on reporting and continue to scant facts, context and serious analysis, if they continue to simply pass on what government and conventional thinking call reality, the amateurs on YouTube will eat their lunch, and win credit and credibility from the people and force change and restraint on them and government as the price of giving to either of them even a small share of admiration and belief.

Communication, like almost everything else these days, has become battleground for the respective, all too often opposed, interests of the 1% and the 99%.

But to return to the word, yes, accept technology, but learn how to limit it, use it, control it, in support of rule of law, freedom, and lives of decency, dignity and opportunity for all.

I thank “the Duke” for accepting my appropriation of his private communication for my, and hopefully the reader’s benefit.