Daily Archives: April 30, 2014

The NSA’s overseas franchise

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Just spotted this from Glenn Greenwald.

Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year – essentially begging to feast at the NSA’s table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb.

The document, dated April 2013, reveals that GCHQ requested broad new authority to tap into data collected under a law that authorizes a variety of controversial NSA surveillance initiatives, including the PRISM program.

PRISM is a system used by the NSA and the FBI to obtain the content of personal emails, chats, photos, videos, and other data processed by nine of the world’s largest internet companies, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Skype. The arrangement GCHQ proposed would also have provided the British agency with greater access to millions of international phone calls and emails that the NSA siphons directly from phone networks and the internet.

The Snowden files do not indicate whether NSA granted GCHQ’s request, but they do show that the NSA was “supportive” of the idea, and that GCHQ was permitted extensive access to PRISM during the London Olympics in 2012. The request for the broad access was communicated at “leadership” level, according to the documents. Neither agency would comment on the proposed arrangement or whether it was approved.

This is hard to square with the report by the UK’s communications interception commissioner which found that GCHQ’s arrangements with the NSA to have been within the law and said that the agency was not engaged in “indiscriminate random mass intrusion.”

Greenwald thinks that the newly revealed documents raise questions about the full extent of the clandestine cooperation and about whether information about it has been withheld from lawmakers.

He interviewed Julian Huppert, the Lib-Dem MP for Cambridge who served on a committee that reviewed – and recommended against – the Communications Data Bill that the spooks have been pushing.

At no point during that process, Huppert says, did GCHQ disclose the extent of its access to PRISM and other then-secret NSA programs. Nor did it indicate that it was seeking wider access to NSA data – even during closed sessions held to allow security officials to discuss sensitive information. Huppert says these facts were relevant to the review and could have had a bearing on its outcome.

“It is now obvious that they were trying to deliberately mislead the committee,” Huppert told The Intercept. “They very clearly did not give us all the information that we needed.”

Surprise, surprise.

Cold War 2.0?

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Interesting essay by Robert Skidelsky bringing an element of historical knowledge to bear on the current crisis in Ukraine.

Before we drift into Cold War II, we would do well to recall why we had the first one. The end of Communism removed one important reason: the Soviet Union’s expansionist thrust and the Western democracies’ determination to resist it. But other reasons remain.

American diplomat George F. Kennan identified them as neurotic insecurity and Oriental secretiveness on the Russian side, and legalism and moralism on the Western side. The middle ground of cool calculation of interests, possibilities, and risks remains elusive to this day.

Kennan is reckoned to have laid the Cold War’s intellectual foundation – at least in the West – with his “long telegram” from Moscow in February 1946, which he followed with his famous Foreign Affairs article, signed “X,” in July 1947. Kennan argued that long-term peace between the capitalist West and communist Russia was impossible, owing to the mixture of traditional Russian insecurity, Stalin’s need for an external enemy, and communist messianism.

Russia, Kennan argued, would seek to bring about the collapse of capitalism not by an armed attack, but by a mixture of bullying and subversion. The correct response, said Kennan, should be “containment” of Soviet aggression through the “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce.”

During President Harry Truman’s administration, United States officials interpreted Kennan’s view as requiring a military build-up against a potential Communist invasion of Western Europe. This gave rise to the Truman Doctrine, from which sprang the logic of military confrontation, NATO, and the arms race.

These developments dismayed Kennan, who claimed that containment was meant to be economic and political, not military. He was one of the main architects of the post-WWII Marshall Plan. He opposed the formation of NATO.

Skidelsky thinks that the West is playing this wrongly and ineptly. We’re doing what Kennan warned against — foreign policy that is “utopian in its expectation, legalistic in its concept…moralistic…and self-righteous,” The goal of Western policy today, he thinks, “should be to find the means to work with Russia to stop Ukraine from being torn apart”. This means

talking and listening to the Russians. The Russians have presented their ideas for resolving the crisis. Broadly, they propose a “neutral” Ukraine on the model of Finland and a federal state on the model of Switzerland. The first would exclude NATO membership, but not admission to the European Union. The second would aim to secure semi-autonomous regions.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphSuch proposals may be cynical; they may also be unworkable. But the West should be urgently testing, exploring, and seeking to refine them instead of recoiling in moralistic horror at Russia’s actions.

Makes sense to me.

The next Fukuyama?

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Thomas Piketty’s remarkable book continues to create a storm of controversy and publicity. It has been Amazon.com’s #1 Bestseller (though, given Amazon’s pathological secrecy, who knows that what means?) and it’s at the top of the New York Times bestseller non-fiction list. It’s already sold over 100,000 copies in the US. And it’s got the American Right rattled and/or annoyed.

So there is definitely a Piketty Phenomenon. In conversation the other day, a sceptical colleague jokingly observed that Capital in the Twenty-First Century “looks like being the next Harry Potter”. But then we had a more sober conversation in which both of us racked our brains to identify the last time a serious book had garnered such astonishing attention. And the answer we came up with was Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992 and appeared to catch the Zeitgeist. Certainly it transformed its author into one of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals. My expectation is that Piketty’s book will do the same for him.

Interestingly, Fukuyama recently published an interesting article in Foreign Affairs lamenting the dearth of good left-wing ideas. Perhaps he didn’t know that Piketty’s tome was coming down the tracks?