Category Archives: Politics

So who are we “at war” with, exactly? Sorry: that’s classified information

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From the “you-couldn’t-make-it-up-but-unfortunately-it’s-true” Department.

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

“Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”

Nothing to hide so nothing to fear? Oh, yeah?

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One of the most infuriating episodes of the NSA/Snowden/Tempora story was Foreign Secretary William Hague’s patronising little speech to the Commons, arguing that “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear”. I had a go at this in a direct way, but felt that the Hague view (which is widespread, nay ubiquitous, among our ruling elites) needs a more considered, philosophically-informed riposte. And, lo and behold, up it comes on OpenDemocracy, in the form of a terrific interview with Quentin Skinner, the historian and political philosopher, in which he discusses various conceptions of liberty.

When asked about surveillance, he said this:

The idea that there is no problem with surveillance as long as you have nothing to hide simply points to the complacency of the liberal view of freedom by contrast with the republican one. The liberal thinks that you are free so long as you are not coerced. The republican agrees, of course, that if you are coerced then you are not free. But freedom for the republican consists not in being free from coercion in respect of some action, but rather in being free from the possibility of coercion in respect of it.

When William Hague told the House of Commons that no one has anything to fear so long as they have done nothing wrong he was missing an absolutely crucial point about freedom. To be free we not only need to have no fear of interference but no fear that there could be interference. But that latter assurance is precisely what cannot be given if our actions are under surveillance. So long as surveillance is going on, we always could have our freedom of action limited if someone chose to limit it. The fact that they may not make that choice does not make us any less free, because we are not free from surveillance and the possible uses that can be made of it. Only when we are free from such possible invasions of our rights are we free; and this freedom can be guaranteed only where there is no surveillance.

I think it very important that the mere fact of there being surveillance takes away liberty. The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it’s true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It’s no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won’t necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.

The situation is made much worse once you come to know — as all of us now know — that we are in fact subject to surveillance. For now there is a danger that we may start to self-censor in the face of the known fact that we may be being scrutinised by powerful and potentially hostile forces. The problem is not that we know that something will happen to us if we say certain things. It’s that we don’t know what may happen to us. Perhaps nothing will happen. But we don’t know, and are therefore all too likely to keep quiet, or to self-censor. But these are infringements of liberty even according to the liberal account. Surely the liberal and the republican can agree that, if the structures of power are such that I feel obliged to limit my own freedom of expression, then my liberty has to that degree been undermined.

Decline, like stuff, happens. And our governments lie through their teeth.

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Paul Krugman has a terrific column in the New York Times about the way conservatives are trying to turn the story of Detroit’s decline into a moralistic tale about public debt. Excerpt:

So now the deficit scolds have a new case to misinterpret. Never mind the repeated failure of the predicted U.S. fiscal crisis to materialize, the sharp fall in predicted U.S. debt levels and the way much of the research the scolds used to justify their scolding has been discredited; let’s obsess about municipal budgets and public pension obligations!

Or, actually, let’s not.

Are Detroit’s woes the leading edge of a national public pensions crisis? No. State and local pensions are indeed underfunded, with experts at Boston College putting the total shortfall at $1 trillion. But many governments are taking steps to address the shortfall. These steps aren’t yet sufficient; the Boston College estimates suggest that overall pension contributions this year will be about $25 billion less than they should be. But in a $16 trillion economy, that’s just not a big deal — and even if you make more pessimistic assumptions, as some but not all accountants say you should, it still isn’t a big deal.

So was Detroit just uniquely irresponsible? Again, no. Detroit does seem to have had especially bad governance, but for the most part the city was just an innocent victim of market forces.

What? Market forces have victims? Of course they do. After all, free-market enthusiasts love to quote Joseph Schumpeter about the inevitability of “creative destruction” — but they and their audiences invariably picture themselves as being the creative destroyers, not the creatively destroyed. Well, guess what: Someone always ends up being the modern equivalent of a buggy-whip producer, and it might be you.

Sometimes the losers from economic change are individuals whose skills have become redundant; sometimes they’re companies, serving a market niche that no longer exists; and sometimes they’re whole cities that lose their place in the economic ecosystem. Decline happens.

One of the most infuriating things that have happened to our politics in recent times is the way utter nonsense — whether about Western policy in Afghanistan, or economic policy at home — is not only peddled by governments, but believed by their credulous citizens. In the case of Afghanistan, for example, even a half-wit can see that the US-NATO campaign has been a disastrous failure; and yet ministers (and generals) continually claim the opposite (while no doubt confiding the truth to their diaries in preparation for later memoirs).

In economic policy, the public has apparently swallowed the falsehood that the current dire state of our economies is a punishment for welfare states living way beyond their means. In fact, the reason we’re having to endure “austerity” is because commercial banks — i.e. private, not public institutions — went berserk and had to be bailed out by governments with public money.

As Robert Kuttner puts it in “The debt we shouldn’t pay”,

Public debt was not implicated in the collapse of 2008, nor is it retarding the recovery today. Enlarged government deficits were the consequence of the financial crash, not the cause. Indeed, there’s a strong case that government deficits are keeping a weak economy out of deeper recession. When Congress raised taxes in January at an annual rate of over $180 billion to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, and then accepted a “sequester” of $85 billion in spending cuts in March, the combined fiscal contraction cut economic growth for 2013 about in half, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Moreover, some of the causes of public deficits, such as Medicare, reflect to a large extent inefficiency and inflation in health care rather than profligacy in public budgeting.

It was private speculative debts—exotic mortgage bonds financed by short-term borrowing at very high costs—that produced the crisis of 2008. The burden of private debts continues to hobble the economy’s potential. In the decade prior to the collapse of 2008, private debts grew at more than triple the rate of increase of the public debt. In 22 percent of America’s homes with mortgages, the debt exceeds the value of the house. Young adults begin economic life saddled with student debt that recently reached a trillion dollars, limiting their purchasing power. Middle-class families use debt as a substitute for wages and salaries that have lagged behind the cost of living. This private debt overhang, far more than the obsessively debated question of public debt, retards the recovery.

The debt debate reminds Kuttner of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. “In a grand inversion, minor characters have usurped center stage, while the more important ones are out of sight.”

Yep.

Some unintended consequences of NSA snooping

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One of the least-discussed aspects of the Snowden revelations is the catastrophic damage they are doing to US foreign policy in one important area, namely Internet governance.

This is one of the big unsolved problems in the international arena because of the disproportionate power that the US wields in the governance of the Net. The reasons for this are largely historical: the Net was an American creation, and it emerged from a Pentagon project, the Arpanet. In the beginning it was largely an American — and, to some extent, European — project, and so it made sense for the informal governance arrangements (under which, for example, domain names were managed) set up in the early days to continue.

But as the Internet became a truly global system, the old arrangements began to look increasingly odd. They also began to irritate some of the bigger powers like China and Russia, who couldn’t see why a global system should continue to be run by a single, ageing superpower. Why shouldn’t the Internet be governed by an international body — like the United Nations, through one of its agencies, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)? These stirrings reached a peak at the World Conference on International Telecommunications held last December in Dubai, where there were attempts to loosen the grip of the US on Internet governance. These attempts were robustly rebuffed by the US and its allies, but it was clear that this is an issue that won’t go away.

The problem is that while the current governance system is absurd in a global context, nobody has yet come up with a convincing alternative. Or, to put it another way, it ain’t broke but it still needs fixing. The ‘obvious’ solution — to hand the responsibility over to the UN — would be nuts, because it would mean handing over the Net to a sclerotic, incoherent institution in which Robert Mugabe’s government and a host of other unsavoury regimes have a vote that counts as much as a vote from a democracy. It would be like giving a delicate clock to a monkey.

But, in the end, we will have to have new governance arrangements that meet two criteria: reflecting the truly global nature of the system; and protecting its essential features from the tampering of unsavoury regimes.

Which is where the NSA revelations come in. They demonstrate to the world that the US is an unsavoury regime too. And that it isn’t a power that can be trusted not to abuse its privileged position. They also undermine heady US rhetoric about the importance of a free and open Internet. Nobody will ever again take seriously US Presidential or State Department posturing on Internet freedom. So, in the end, the NSA has made it more difficult to resist the clamour for different – and possibly even more sinister – arrangements for governing the Net.

[HT to Robin Stenham for his comment.]

Time to dump the “Great Firewall” metaphor

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This morning’s Observer column — about a new way of looking at the way the Chinese government deals with the Net.

We need different imagery to communicate the essence of this more sophisticated approach. Rebecca MacKinnon, one of the world’s leading experts on “networked authoritarianism”, suggests that a Chinese scholar, Li Yonggang of the University of Hong Kong, has come up with a better metaphor: the internet as waterworks. He thinks that the regime’s efforts to deal with the internet can be best described as a hydraulic project. Water, in this view, is both vital and dangerous: it has to be managed.

In a blogpost about this approach, MacKinnon wrote: “If you approach internet management in this way, the system has two main roles: managing water flows and distribution so that everybody who needs some gets some, and managing droughts and floods – which if not managed well will endanger the government’s power. It’s a huge complex system with many moving parts … there’s no way a government can have total control over water levels. Depending on the season, you allow water levels in your reservoir to be higher or lower … but you try to prevent levels from getting above a certain point or below a certain point, and if they do you have to take drastic measures to prevent complete chaos.”

Given that almost all of the ruling Chinese elite are engineers, you can see why this approach would make sense to them. It’s both rational and feasible. And it provides such an instructive comparison with GCHQ, whose pet project for hoovering the network is codenamed – wait for it! – “Mastering the internet”. Interesting metaphor that, eh?

Technology vs. Democracy

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I participated in an interesting discussion last night at the Frontline Club on the topic of “privacy vs. security: have we got the balance right?” It was chaired by the BBC’s urbane Mark Urban. The other panellists were Professor Helen Margetts of the Oxford Research Institute, John Kampfner, former Editor of the New Statesman and now a consultant to Google, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary and now Chairman of the Commons Intelligence Committee which is currently looking into the Snowden revelations and their implications (if any) for the UK.

It was an enjoyable discussion with a packed and attentive audience. Malcolm Rifkind did a predictably good job of defending the proposition that the UK is doing a reasonable job of ensuring that its spooks obey the laws that apply to them (specifically the Intelligence Services Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Human Rights Act — though he said relatively little about the HRA). What he didn’t address — because it’s not in his Committee’s remit, was my question about whether GCHQ is a competent outfit which gives value for the oceans of public money that it consumes. And nobody really addressed my biggest concern, which is whether the level of comprehensive surveillance that we now have is, in the end, compatible with a democratic, open society.

Just before embarking on this post, a link popped up in my Twitterstream. It led to an astonishing post on the Economist blog. It’s entitled “America versus Democracy” and starts from the observation that FISC, the secret court that supposedly authorises NSA surveillance, has effectively become a parallel Supreme Court, because it is making law relating to the Fourth Amendment (which is the one that supposedly regulates the state’s ability to intrude on citizens’ privacy). And it’s doing this lawmaking entirely in secret.

But then the post begins to explore the implications of this.

That all the people of the Earth, by dint of common humanity, are entitled to the protections of democracy is an inspiring principle. However, its foreign-policy implications are not really so clear. To those of us who are sceptical that America has the authority to intervene whenever and wherever there are thwarted democratic rights, the advocates of democracy-promotion offer a more businesslike proposition. It is said that authoritarianism, especially theocratic Islamic authoritarianism, breeds anti-American terrorism, and that swamp-draining democracy-promotion abroad is therefore a priority of American national security. If you don’t wish to asphyxiate on poison gas in a subway, or lose your legs to detonating pressure-cookers at a road-race, it is in your interest to support American interventions on behalf of democracy across the globe. So the story goes.

However, the unstated story goes, it is equally important that American democracy not get out of hand. If you don’t want your flight to La Guardia to end in a ball of fire, or your local federal building to be razed by a cataclysm of exploding fertiliser, you will need to countenance secret courts applying in secret its own secret interpretation of hastily drawn, barely debated emergency security measures, and to persecute with the full force of the world’s dominant violent power any who dare afford a glimpse behind the veil.

You see, democracy here at home must be balanced against the requirements of security, and it is simply too dangerous to leave the question of this balance to the democratic public. Open deliberation over the appropriate balance would require saying something concrete about threats to public safety, and also about the means by which those threats might be checked. But revealing such information would only empower America’s enemies and endanger American lives. Therefore, this is a discussion Americans can’t afford to have. Therefore, the power to determine that this is a discussion the public cannot afford to have cannot reside in the democratic public. That power must reside elsewhere, with the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America’s behalf, about how much democracy—about how much discussion about the limits of democracy, even—it is safe for Americans to have.

That’s the argument I was trying to make last night, but much more eloquently stated. It’s why this stuff really matters.

On the way home on the train, I was reading the New Yorker, still one of the great treasures of journalism, when I came on a cartoon. It shows two NSA operatives sitting before a wall of computer monitors. “After we read every e-mail that’s ever been written”, one is saying to the other, “I’m gonna start on that new Dan Brown novel”.

Why FISA has become a (secret) rival to the Supreme Court

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Amazing report in the WSJ.

The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: “relevant.”

The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on the secret redefinition of the word “relevant.”

This change—which specifically enabled the surveillance recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—was made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of judges responsible for making decisions about government surveillance in national-security cases. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that “relevant” could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling.

The ‘relevant’ language was added to the Patriot Act when it came up for reauthorization; it was signed by President Bush in 2006.

In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, current and former administration and congressional officials are shedding new light on the history of the NSA program and the secret legal theory underpinning it. The court’s interpretation of the word enabled the government, under the Patriot Act, to collect the phone records of the majority of Americans, including phone numbers people dialed and where they were calling from, as part of a continuing investigation into international terrorism.

“Relevant” has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, “everything,” is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department’s primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law.

It’s the metadata, stoopid – part 2

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This morning’s Observer column.

Over the past two weeks, I have lost count of the number of officials and government ministers who, when challenged about internet surveillance by GCHQ and the NSA, try to reassure their citizens by saying that the spooks are “only” collecting metadata, not “content”. Only two conclusions are possible from this: either the relevant spokespersons are unbelievably dumb or they are displaying a breathtaking contempt for their citizenry.

In a way, it doesn’t matter which conclusion one draws. The fact is that, as I argued two weeks ago, the metadata is what the spooks want for the simple reason that it’s machine-readable and therefore searchable. It’s what makes comprehensive internet-scale surveillance possible.

Why hasn’t there been greater public outrage about the cynicism of the “just metadata” mantra?

Plugging away

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This is just wonderful. Beyond parody — especially the “network hygiene” bit.

File this under “F” for futile: The Army is restricting access to the Guardian website to try to crack down on leaks, the Monterey County Herald reports. The Guardian was the first to write about the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program earlier this month, and it reported details about a separate spying program yesterday. The Guardian’s reports are based on classified documents leaked by former government tech contractor Edward Snowden, who is now wanted by U.S. authorities.

The access restriction is part of the Department of Defense’s routine preventative “network hygiene,” Gordon Van Vleet, spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), told the Herald. The censorship/network hygiene is meant to prevent the downloading of classified documents — like the kind the Guardian has linked to on its website and which presumably has already been seen by many people. “Until declassified by appropriate officials, classified information — including material released through an unauthorized disclosure — must be treated accordingly by DoD personnel,” Van Vleet wrote.