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.

 

 

 

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

 

 

25 QUESTIONS ON SURVEILLANCE, SECURITY, JOURNALISM, PRIVACY AND DEMOCRACY

Recently, 2 serious and stimulating papers have been published looking at the state of journalism, particularly investigative journalism, in the Age of Obama.  Both the collective writers at the TOW Center, who have directly addressed their remarks to the President’s Panel on NSA surveillance issues, and former Washington Post editor Len Downie, in his brilliant essay for The Committee to Protect Journalists (where I was a founding member, a past Chair, and Executive Board member and still serve of the CPJ Advisory Board) consider the impact of Mr. Obama’s unmatched record of aggressive criminal prosecution of suspected whistleblowers, leakers, and the journalists with whom they communicate.

Both are well worth your attention.

http://towcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Letter-Effect-of-mass-surveillance-on-journalism.pdf

http://www.cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php

Reading them has stimulated me to pose a series of questions, whose answers may well define, not just the future of American journalism, but of American democracy.

1)    In a democracy, do citizens have the right to know everything their government is doing (in their name and with their money)?

 

2)    Or do governments have a right to keep secrets from citizens?

 

3)    If the answer to 2) is “Yes,” what should be the limits on what can be kept secret?

 

4)    Must official secrets be limited to those deemed essential to the security (or just the interests) of the nation and its people?

 

5)    Who should be empowered to monitor what is to be kept secret, and to make sure the specified limits on secrecy are strictly observed?

 

6)    Under what rules should these monitors work, and what guarantees of access to secret materials should they have? 

 

7)    How should their work be made accessible to citizens?

 

8)    What (in addition to these institutional monitors) is the role of the free press in  reporting on government secrecy and secrets? 

 

9)    Have press revelations of secrets ever actually damaged national security?

 

10) Is the public better off for the press’ exposure of government “secrets”?

 

11) Would the public be worse off if the government had absolute power to protect its self-declared secrets, backed by the threat of criminal or professional sanctions against those who make them public?

 

12) If the government forecloses secure press access for dissenters or whistleblowers will it leave these “witnesses” no other choice than immediate and total “publication” of dissident information via the internet?

 

13) Is the government’s and nation’s interest better served by securing access for whistleblowers to journalists, who focus their data-gathering, winnow both data and sources, do further reporting for context and reactions, consult with and solicit comment from government, before presenting and distributing their information, or by sending whistleblowers (with often inchoate, unchecked, information) directly to the global digital audience?

 

14) How can protections for whistleblowers and journalists be institutionalized to guarantee maximal public access to important information or judgments, without endangering national security?  

 

15) And what protections should citizens have to protect their privacy, and limit the intrusive powers of government?

 

Let’s assume the government has access to and registers all digital – phone, internet, and US mail communications.

What problems do those capabilities create?  We’ll seek answers through the journalist’s 5 basic questions: who, what, where, when, why?

Targeting:  Potentially? Worst case? The answers to, “Who can be targeted?” are: WHO? Everyone. WHAT? All communications. WHEN? Whenever. WHERE? Everywhere. WHY? Because government can.

Actually?  We need answers to these questions.

 

16) WHO?  Whose communication file be opened, examined, and further processed?

 

17) WHAT? Once a communications file is opened, what kinds of data can be examined?

 

18) WHEN?  Should investigations be time-limited? For keeping files open? For analyzing what’s in them? For taking action based on collected data?

 

19) WHY?  Should investigations and analyses be broadly issue-specific,--  to protect national security, to combat major criminal activity, to serve the public interest?

 

20) Should they be narrowly case-specific, limited to data relating to particular threats or crimes?

 

21) Should they simply be target-specific?  With what threshold for targets, for secondary targets, for wider examinations based on networks of secondary or  tertiary communicants?

 

22) Should there a defined threshold for suspected “security threats” or suspected criminal activities to predicate violations of personal communications data?

 

23) Are simple keywords sufficient predicates for opening, and processing communications data?

 

24) Who (in government and out?) can know your secrets?

 

25) What right and mechanism of appeal would citizens have to contest government surveillance of their communications?

 

I’m sure this list is only the beginning for a discussion of the highest importance.  Please feel invited to join.

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.

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.

 

   

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.

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.

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