IT'S NOT WHAT THEY'RE SEEKING, IT'S WHAT THEY'RE HIDING

As I said before in another context, what’s wrong with what’s been going on at the National Security Agency (NSA) “is not the spying, it’s the lying.”

Spy agencies are supposed to spy, but within the rules laid out for them by Congress.  They are not allowed to lie to Congress or to Congress’ mandated overseers like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  Nor, it should be said, are the NSA, The White House or leaders of the Congress allowed to lie to the American people about what they’ve learned about law-breaking activities in the name of national security.

When lies like this become routine, the bond of trust between citizen and government breaks down and democracy dies with it.

This week, Wikileaks published an August summary of negotiations over the Intellectual Property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement which is meant to strengthen economic relations among twelve signatory nations: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, and Brunei.

Several commentators have noted, the Wikileaks document may not be current; there have been a couple of secret negotiating sessions since August.  But the release is timely, as the next round of talks among the 12 nations’ Chief Negotiators is scheduled for next week in Salt Lake City.

If the document is still relevant it indicates that what the US Trade Representative is seeking is bad enough, but worse by far is that the Obama Administration is hiding all the potentially consequential details.

Make no mistake, what’s being proposed could directly affect you if you suffer from cancer, if you’re going to have surgery using a new medical device, if you read a book or use the internet. 

Think you might fit into one of those categories?  Think you ought to be included in at least the theoretical discussion of new global rules for who can claim patent protection, for what, for how long?  Or are you happy to leave that to the fine folks at the Trade Rep’s office or the Oval Office or lawyers for a few hundred directly interested corporations?

Even if you’re appalled to be excluded from the whole discussion, don’t take it personally.  You and I are not the only ones being cut out until the dips have their fait accompli. According to the International Business Times,

http://www.ibtimes.com/leaked-tpp-chapter-5-scary-provisions-wikileaks-trans-pacific-partnership-release-1468856

“Only 700 representatives of various corporations have access to the text. The governments of the countries involved in the negotiations are not able to view the text while it is being discussed by the corporations, meaning that the public will have little to no input on what will be included in the final version.”

And The Guardian notes,

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/nov/13/wikileaks-trans-pacific-partnership-chapter-secret

“Even members of the US Congress were only allowed to view selected portions of the documents under supervision.

“‘We're really worried about a process which is so difficult for those who take an interest in these agreements to deal with,’ says Peter Bradwell, policy director of the London-based Open Rights Group.

"’Lots of people in civil society have stressed that being more transparent, and talking about the text on the table, is crucial to give treaties like this any legitimacy. We shouldn't have to rely on leaks to start a debate about what's in then.’"

What’s not to like about the Intellectual Property rules the USTR has put on the table?  International Business Times cites 5 major issues.

The first is the strengthening of Big Pharma property rights to their proprietary medicines.  What this generality could mean specifically is spelled out by Politico.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/wikileaks-ip-pacific-rim-99793.html

“Pharmaceutical patents and copyright issues addressed through the intellectual property rights chapter have proven especially controversial, as the United States seeks strong protections for its drug-makers, and Asian countries fight for cheaper medicines.”

What protections to the pharmaceutical giants want?

Politico says they want to eliminate, or sharply reduce countries’ rights to breach patent rights “in the interest of public health," by restricting those exceptions to epidemics and disallowing diseases such as cancer.

“The United States is also pushing to ease drug-makers’ ability to obtain patents overseas and in developing countries and to extend the duration of those patents beyond 20 years.”

As Public Citizen put it in their response to the Wikileaks document, "These proposals would strengthen, lengthen and broaden pharmaceutical monopolies on cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS drugs, among others, in the Asia-Pacific region."

Second, the manufacturers of medical devices want the right to patent-protect their use by surgeons and technicians in the operating room.  IBT sums up the real-world meaning of this: “In layman's terms, the United States' TPP proposal would make it so that the patent protections exception would apply only to “surgical methods you can perform with your bare hands,’" quoting Burcu Kilic, legal counsel to Public Citizen's Global Access to Medicines Program.

Third, what’s sauce for Big Pharma is also to be served up for Big Ink,the publishers or words and music.  IBT reports, “The preliminary version of the TPP would also rewrite the guidelines on international copyright law by lengthening the terms that copyright protections.  [Today] copyright term protections are capped at the life of the author of a work plus 50 years.  But under the TPP, longer copyright protections could extend copyright term protections to Life + 70 years for works by individuals, and either 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation for corporate owned works (such as Mickey Mouse)."

The net-net here, says IBT will “bolster the profits of corporations and harm consumers by keeping works out of the public domain for far longer than under current law.”

Points 4 and 5 would, several critics claim, gut many of the freedoms enjoyed by today’s citizens of the internet.  International Business Times quotes from “the relevant section of the TPP's intellectual property chapter leaked Wednesday: ‘Each Party shall provide that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms have the right to authorize or prohibit all reproductions of their works, performances, and phonograms, in any manner or form, permanent or temporary (including temporary storage in electronic form).’  Then IBT cites The EFF response: “'the provision ‘reveals a profound disconnect with the reality of the modern computer,’ which relies on temporary copies to perform routine operations.

"”Does that mean—under the US proposed language—that anyone who ever views content on their device could potentially be found liable of infringement?’ the EFF wrote. ‘For other countries signing on to the TPP, the answer would be most likely yes.’"

Finally, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership rules would dump the job of enforcing these radical new limitations on Internet freedom on whom?  Again, IBT quotes the Electronic Freedom Foundation: “The TPP wants service providers to undertake the financial and administrative burdens of becoming copyright cops, serving a copyright maximalist agenda while disregarding the consequences for Internet freedom and innovation."

With such big changes with such big consequences in play, why is such a small, unelected, unrepresentative group of corporate lawyers and carefully anonymous government bureaucrats allowed to debate and promulgate in such secrecy.

It sounds like the answers are (1) they have so much to hide, and (2) they know many if not most people, in the US, in the other 11 TPP countries, in the world, would not agree to their diktats.

By the way, if you think these arguments are harmless abstractions, check this list from The Guardian’s George Monbiot of how "investor-state rules" in similar international trade agreements have enabled private companies to bully elected governments.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/us-trade-deal-full-frontal-assault-on-democracy

“The Australian government, after massive debates in and out of parliament, decided that cigarettes should be sold in plain packets, marked only with shocking health warnings. The decision was validated by the Australian Supreme Court. But, using a trade agreement Australia struck with Hong Kong, the tobacco company Philip Morris has asked an offshore tribunal to award it a vast sum in compensation for the loss of what it calls its intellectual property.

“During its financial crisis, and in response to public anger over rocketing charges, Argentina imposed a freeze on people's energy and water bills (does this sound familiar?). It was sued by the international utility companies [and] for this and other such crimes, it has been forced to pay out over a billion dollars in compensation.

“In El Salvador, local communities managed to persuade the government to refuse permission for a vast gold mine which threatened to contaminate their water supplies. A victory for democracy? Not for long, perhaps. The Canadian company which sought to dig the mine is now suing El Salvador for $315m – for the loss of its anticipated future profits.

“In Canada, the courts revoked two patents owned by the American drugs firm Eli Lilly, on the grounds that the company had not produced enough evidence that they had the beneficial effects it claimed. Eli Lilly is now suing the Canadian government for $500m, and demanding that Canada's patent laws are changed.”

The next round of TPP negotiations starts next Tuesday.  Let’s see if anyone outside the secret circle can find out what’s being discussed, much less actually join in the discussion.

Wasn’t one of the first things Barack Obama promised, long before he said anything about being able to keep your health insurance coverage, was transparency.

Well, you gotta say that promise has been easy to see through.

 

 

 

  

 

 

MORE PROOF: PRIVACY IS DEAD

I share a communication tonight from me to Politico's fine media writer Dylan Byers, even if it, and this, are shamelessly self-promoting.  Who sez i can't do new media? :)

Hi Dylan,

Your note today on the surveillor surveilled played perfectly into my hands.  Heh heh.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/10/danger-on-the-acela-175888.html

I have been writing a blog:http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/.

The very first post, from July 9, is perfectly apposite (says I) for today's news. 

It posits that our world is defined by twin realities: personal privacy is dead, and so is government secrecy.  

Between the endless powers, and gluttonous appetite of the NSA, registering and if they choose, penetrating all our once-private communications, virtually everything we say, write or think can be known to the government, and our ubiquitous cellphone and tablet cameras, not to mention digital audio recorders, mean that anything that happens in public view can be publicized globally almost instantaneously via the internet and social media.

This world of observation and digitally distributed blabber works as efficiently for secrets governments once considered private to them, and will continue to be fed as long as governments employ human beings.

So... 

Here's that first blogpost...

http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/07/privacy-and-secrecy.html

And here's today's, discussing the NY Times' very recent use of interviews just like the one Mattzie spied out. 

http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/10/obama-according-to-times-indecisive.html

Oh yes, did I have a point?  Yes, please check the blogs out, and if you deem it suitable, put my name on your list of recommended bloggers.

All the best,

dmarash

 

 

SENDING A MESSAGE

The world sent two messages to President Barack Obama, but it remains to be seen if he got them.

The two messages were: (1) The world is weary of America using its standoff weapons to vaporize its enemies, and (2)  What the world thinks, as in what the world’s people think, as opposed to what “world leaders” (or even local leaders) think, matters.

In my last blast http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/08/syria-what-is-to-be-done.html  I accused the Obama White House of “old world thinking.”  What I was talking about was President Obama’s apparent conception of “sending a message,” in this case to the Syrian serial mass murderer President Bashar al-Assad.

The incremental escalation of the American government’s response to President Assad’s continuing crimes against his citizens, from (1) scowling at him, to (2) threatening to give some number of small arms (but not actually giving them) to -- which fraction of? -- the Syrian rebels, to (3) raining rockets or missiles or bombs on “military targets” is thought of as “sending messages,” to convince Assad to give up his war in favor of the civility of a “peace negotiation.”   Each nudge up the scale is a further “statement,” leader to leader.

It is significant that so far, the White House whispers of disapproval, and the brandished threat now on the table have not moved Assad to reform. 

So, the conventional political logic, accepted by “leaders” of the Democratic and Republican parties and the country’s media, asserts, Obama’s personal and national  credibility demand that he deliver on his threat, his metaphoric hard punch to Assad’s leadership biceps, enough to hurt, but not cripple or even short-term disable him.  

A manly sort of diplomatic communication: the kind that once could be done discreetly, a “message that was “private,” or “secret,” depending on whether or not you were “in the loop.”

Well, as I said in my very first post http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2013/07/privacy-and-secrecy.html it is the defining quality of our new age of digital communication that your expectation of privacy and government’s expectation of secrecy are obsolete fantasies.  Because of the global network of mobile phone, tablet, computer and television screens it is literally true that almost everybody can know almost anything – personal or political  -- and know it instantly, from cell phone snappies of physical and political boobs or from video “live shots” from the Supreme Court steps or Tahrir Square.

One of the great things about human beings is, if you let them do something, most of them will want to do more; if you let people know something, most of them will want to know more.  Now that people know what their digital screens can show them, they feel entitled to unfettered use of them to see more, in as close to real time as possible.

This certainly has its downsides, as screens are extremely susceptible to manipulation, both through what they show and don’t show, and the “real time” obsession crowds out time to think.  But, too bad, screens rule, like it or not, which means these swift judgments of screen-watchers are both more widespread and deeply-held than any in history, including the comparatively parochial affirmations of faith in Christianity or Islam. 

People today, all over the world, see for themselves, and judge for themselves and then back their judgments with all the conviction their egos can give them. 

In today’s media age, governments, democratic or not, have to sell their ideas to their people, and so, doing nothing but denouncing the use of chemical weapons is sold as “caution,” or “patience,” or “prudence,” while threats of arms supplies or armed attacks or sold as “justified,” or “measured,” or “necessary.”  This is called “spinning” the American people.  When Assad spins his own people he claims Israel is behind any American aggression; when he adds that it will fail like previous American aggressions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, he is trying to spin the American people and the world. 

So far, probably for the better, the noise of the multi-party attempts to spin the Syria crisis is drowning out, maybe flat sweeping downstream, the drums and guns of war.  Today, everybody in the world gets to listen in on the leaders’ conversations, gets to hear the messages, back and forth.  And draw their own conclusions.

That’s why the Arab League, the group of regional states which first tossed Assad’s government out, then gave status to self-declared representatives of the rebels, which has no love nor loyalty for the Syrian tyrant, has opted out of any military assault, no matter how “limited.”  Their people are telling them, loudly, on Facebook and Twitter, in the barber shops and beauty parlors, the Parliaments and on the streets, "Do not sign off on this American message of force."

So, it seems obvious, are the people of Great Britain and of Northern, Western, Eastern and Southern Europe telling their governments, “Hold on! Not so fast, and maybe not at all.”

From every corner of the world there is a call for evidence that the Assad government (and not a “rogue faction” of it, or not a faction of rebels) was responsible for the use of poison gas on civilians, women and children, and that any military response will be both careful of human life and effective in improving Syrian lives.

What is new here, and historically definitive, is that so many people have opinions they consider informed, and are so willing to share and embrace their judgments.  What is new here and defining of our age is that people can see what is happening “on the ground,” see how it is affecting the people who live on the ground, and tell their families, friends, neighbors, governments all about it.

For the past several years, people have seen global coverage of the results of American drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.  Even sincere and professed enemies of the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula take little pleasure in them.  They know the warheads sometimes go astray and when they do, innocent civilians die, and, far too frequently, the American government and military minimize their culpability.

The net result in Pakistan and Yemen, polls show, is diminished affection and respect for the United States, and military intelligence suggests, continued growth in recruits to the terrorist cause.

And global polling shows, disaffection and disrespect for Uncle Sam also seem to be growing.  Our propensity for warfare, and interference in affairs and nations beyond our borders are usually seen as leading reasons why.

Everybody loves a winner, but not a bully, especially when the “loser’s” wounds are on display.

So “secret wars,” even “secret” attacks are no secret anymore.  No drone rocket falls without the eye of some sparrow-sized camera recording it, and sending the picture around the world. 

And as long as “secret policies” are executed by human beings, no policy-planner should feel his or her secrets are immune to the sting of an Ellsberg, a Manning or a Snowden, or the coverage of the Post or the Times or CNN, CCTV, Al Jazeera, RTV or YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.

This is called “living in the real world.”

Hey, White House! Get the message?         

 

 

 

 

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.

 

THE SECRET INGREDIENT: HYPOCRISY

If hypocrisy were oil, Washington would be Saudi Arabia.  But even by the standards of a town where disingenuousness and moral falsity frame also every public discussion, President Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney yesterday blew smoke fouler than the air in a Chinese coal mine.

“We oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools,” said Carney, specifically ignoring the zeal in the Democrat’s house, the Senate, to demand changes, limits, and procedures that would certainly re-mantle the Federal Government’s universal surveillance system.

But here’s the Big Hoot:  “This blunt approach,” Carney went on, “is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process.”

So true!  But whose fault is that?  Why, I believe it is no one other than the Press Secretary’s boss, President Barack Obama.

Until Edward Snowden spilled to Glen Greenwald in The Guardian, and later, the Washington Post, the extent of telephone, snail and email, cellphone, GPS record-keeping underway at the National Security Agency, President Obama was zealously protecting keeping all the secrets of that cuddly “Intelligence Community.”  (Anybody ever hear references to a Health and Welfare Community?  Even though they deal, literally, with community concerns.  Education community? Housing community?  Yes, it is common to invoke the Defense Community, because, it, too, like Intelligence, benefits from painted on warm and fuzzies.)

Before Snowden, all the American people were allowed to know came from some, dare I call them “cryptic” hints from a couple of well-briefed Senators, and important whistleblower coverage of phone-record-napping in the NY Times and elsewhere.  That should have alerted the public that traceable digital systems, not just phones, but computers, and GPS connectors could, and therefore were likely to be scanned for Big Data.

That the snoops are also clocking postal communications seems so “last century,” that it caught me by surprise. It shouldn’t have.  Surveillance covers all, or it’s almost nothing at all.    

That’s why turning off parts of the surveillance machine won’t work.

What will work is rule of law, covering the whole damn surveillance system, what the people’s representatives will legislate as limits, not on data collection – a blind eye sees no dangers, but on data selection: what triggers actually examining a person’s collected data, and who gets to do the examining? Is some form of warrant needed before selection can begin, and what level of cause will be required to obtain one?  Will anyone argue on behalf of privacy? What parts of a person’s data can be examined?  Who monitors the process to see that set limits are respected, that every search doesn’t simply strip-mine personal data? And who has oversight over the monitors, and how much are they allowed to share with the public?

These are all difficult, subtle, and vitally important questions.  A Congress which having taken its feet from their normal resting spot in their mouths, should not now use them to out-run their brains.  Carney and his boss are right about that. 

Information, deliberation and openness will all be required if Americans are to exercise any influence on perhaps the most important legal and political decisions of our time. But it ill behooves the man who has smothered all of them, either because he uncritically trusts the men and systems whose secrets he’s been hiding from voters, or because he mistrusts the wisdom of those citizens and finds it safer compulsively to cover his ass, to say so.

Let’s not forget that the most flagrant known examples of abuse of surveillance data come from the Obama Justice Department’s pursuit of phone records of journalists at Fox News, CBS News and the Associated Press who were working on revelations, not of strategic secrets, but of undisclosed CIA and State Department ineptitude and dishonesty.

You know the kind of thing, like that Attorney General Eric Holder was Bill Clinton’s end-of-term-pardon go-between (and might one guess, in the usually politically correct, indirect way, bagman?) with the convicted fugitive billionaire Marc Rich.  That was supposed to be a secret, too.

This of the embarrassment President Clinton and then Deputy AG Holder might have saved themselves with a little information, deliberation and openness, even at the cost of a crook’s Get Out of Jail Free card, and whatever it might have produced.

 

   

A MOTTO FOR JOURNALISTS IN THE NEW AGE OF OBAMA AND SUCCESSORS

They know a lot about us, but we know more about the world they live in. And we can make the people trust us more.

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