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.”

Turing, the NSA and the decision problem

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Interesting post by George Dyson on The Edge site. Excerpt:

This is much bigger than the relative merits of national security vs. the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or any of the other debates by which the Snowden revelations have been framed. We are facing a fundamental decision (as Turing anticipated) between whether human intelligence or machine intelligence is given the upper hand. The NSA has defended wholesale data capture and analysis with the argument that the data (and metadata) are not being viewed by people, but by machines, and are therefore, legally, not being read. This alone should be cause for alarm.

And what of the current obsession with cyberterrorism and cyberwar? We should deliberately (and unilaterally if need be) abandon the weaponization of codes and the development of autonomous weapons—two different approaches to the same result. They both lead us into battles that can never be won. A good example to follow is the use of chemical and biological weapons—yes, they remain freely available, but we have achieved an almost universal consensus not to return to the horrors of poison gas in World War I. Do we have to repeat the mistake? We are currently taking precisely the wrong approach: fast-tracking the development of secret (and expensive) offensive weapons instead of an open system of inexpensive civilian-based defense.

Fourteen years ago, I spent an afternoon in La Jolla, California with Herbert York, the American physicist of Mohawk ancestry who became Eisenhower’s trusted advisor and one of the wisest and most effective administrators of the Cold War. York was appointed founding scientific director of ARPA and was instrumental both in the development of the hydrogen bomb and its deployment, in a few short years, by a working fleet of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. He was sober enough to be trusted with the thermonuclear arsenal, yet relaxed enough about it that he had to be roused out of bed in the early morning of July 6, 1961, because he had driven someone else’s car home by mistake.

York understood the workings of what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex better than anyone I ever met. “The Eisenhower farewell address is quite famous,” he explained to me over lunch. “Everyone remembers half of it, the half that says beware of the military-industrial complex. But they only remember a quarter of it. What he actually said was that we need a military-industrial complex, but precisely because we need it, beware of it. Now I,ve given you half of it. The other half: we need a scientific-technological elite. But precisely because we need a scientific-technological elite, beware of it. That’s the whole thing, all four parts: military-industrial complex; scientific-technological elite; we need it, but beware; we need it but beware. It’s a matrix of four.”

We are much, much deeper in a far more complicated matrix now. And now, more than ever, we should heed Eisenhower’s parting advice. Yes, we need big data, and big algorithms—but beware.

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.

On this day…

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… in 1947, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

NSA can search your emails but not its own employees’ messages

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Who said satire was dead? The NSA Can’t search its employees’ emails.

The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. 

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

Now the question is: do you believe the NSA’s answer?

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.