IT’S NOT THE SPYING, IT’S THE LYING

 

Does anyone deny that the inherent vulnerability of all forms of digital communication to archiving and data mining is of significant value to governments seeking to secure themselves against their enemies?

Given that, why shouldn’t governments exploit this vulnerability to identify, track down and defeat those enemies?

Of course, in a democracy, “those enemies” should never include the people.

To the contrary, in American democracy government is meant always to be, as President Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address:  “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The horror of the Obama Administration’ communications penetrations is that everything about them, how they are used, against whom, upon what predicates, under whose authority, under whose supervision, even -- but for Edward Snowden’s leaks to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, -- their very existence, has been hidden from the American people.

Snowden’s whistle-blowing (any anyone who disputes that label should ask himself, “Why did he tell The Guardian and not the Russians or the Chinese?”) has ignited a great political war, the most important of our generation.  It is a war about power, power which, under strict rule of law, should reside, not in the White House or the Congress, but with the people.

As usual, the essence of power is knowledge, in democratic terms, the knowledge the people need to grant informed consent to their representatives in the legislature and their administrators in the executive branch.

The Obama Administration is just the latest, although perhaps the greatest White House offender against our Constitutional concept of democratic governance.  It has lied by omission and commission.  It has consistently denied the American people knowledge of the realities of government surveillance.  It has thus pre-empted the consent of the governed, the thing which gives them legal and moral legitimacy.  It has abused the people directly and individually, and it has abused their elected representatives.

In the name of national security, the Obama Administration has treated the American people as its enemy.

It certainly treated the documentary-making journalist Laura Poitras like an enemy, assaulting her with not just digital technology, but in-her-face gumshoe intimidation.  And this went on for months, long before Snowden reached out to her with his explosive information about “our KGB.”

The details of the security apparat’s harassment of Poitras are spelled out in Peter Maass’ terrific NY Times story of the Snowden to Poitras to Greenwald to us revelations of snoops gone wild.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

It’s not just the White House that hides the facts, and not just ordinary people who are misled.

As The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman pointed out:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/12/intelligence-committee-nsa-vote-justin-amash

The leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, with the acquiescence of its members, hid from all the other members of the House, the facts of the NSA’s phone data collection in the days before the crucial 2011 vote to approve radically expanded domestic as well as international spying under the so-called Patriot Act.

This is how establishment Democrats and Republicans worked together specifically to disenfranchise the millions of voters who installed the Tea Party caucus in the House.  As Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) told Ackerman, ‘We're trying to get information so we can do our jobs as congressmen. If we're not able to get that information, it's inappropriate."  

Or worse than inappropriate, “this is tantamount to subversion of the democratic process," Bea Edwards, the executive director of the Government Accountability Project told Ackerman.

Now, thanks to Ackerman and Maass, Poitras and Greenwald, and of course thanks to Edward Snowden, the American people know better, and are now knowledge-armed to fight this vital war against anti-democratic abuse of governmental power.

It’s going to be a long war, and hard for the people to win.  For every story in the Guardian or the Times, there are the sorry performances at President Obama’s last news conference, at which he revealed his “trust me, even if I can’t trust the facts to you” formula for surveillance “reform.”  Gregory Ferenstein of TechCrunch told the story of how the White House press corps whiffed almost entirely, and theirby left their customers in the dark.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/09/press-corps-fails-to-ask-any-nsa-questions-at-obamas-nsa-press-conference/

Thanks to Tom Murphy for pointing out Ferenstein’s piece to me.

The spying continues, as it partly should, but so does the journalistic process of revealing lies and discovering secrets, of passing along information, of refining info into knowledge, and hopefully, at some point, knowledge into effective power.  People power, what democracy is supposed to be all about.

As I said at the top, spying is not the problem, it’s the lack of control over the spying, the lack of honesty with the people so they might exercise, or democratically delegate control over the ever-more-effective, ever-more-intrusive revolution in digital surveillance.

It’s the lying, stupid.  

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.