What Ed Snowden has achieved so far

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Roger Cohen has a terrific column in today’s International Herald Tribune listing the things we wouldn’t have known if Edward Snowden hadn’t revealed them.

Here’s a summary of Cohen’s list:

We would not know:

  • how the N.S.A. has been able to access the e-mails or Facebook accounts or videos of citizens across the world
  • how it has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans
  • how through requests to the compliant and secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (F.I.S.A.) it has been able to bend nine U.S. Internet companies to its demands for access to clients’ digital information

    • We would not be:

  • debating whether the United States really should have turned surveillance into big business, offering data-mining contracts to the likes of Booz Allen and, in the process, high-level security clearance to myriad folk who probably should not have it
  • having a serious debate at last between Europeans, with their more stringent views on privacy, and Americans about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies

    • We would not have:

  • legislation to bolster privacy safeguards and require more oversight introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee
  • a letter from two Democrats to the N.S.A. director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, saying that a government fact sheet about surveillance abroad “contains an inaccurate statement” (and where does that assertion leave Alexander’s claims of the effectiveness and necessity of Prism?)

    • In short, without Snowden’s revelations we would not be having

    a long-overdue debate about what the U.S. government does and does not do in the name of post-9/11 security — the standards applied in the F.I.S.A. court, the safeguards and oversight surrounding it and the Prism program, the protection of civil liberties against the devouring appetites of intelligence agencies armed with new data-crunching technology — would not have occurred, at least not now.

    That just about nails it.

    Regrets in life’s departure lounge

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    Extraordinary piece in the Guardian, based on what an Australian palliative care nurse learned from listening to terminal patients. According to her, their five “greatest regrets” are:

    1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

    2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

    3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

    4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

    5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

    The open society and its (internal) enemies

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    Very judicious New Yorker comment piece about the Snowden revelations by Henrik Hertzberg. I was particularly struck by this passage:

    The critics have been hard put to point to any tangible harm that has been done to any particular citizen. But that does not mean that no harm has been done. The harm is civic. The harm is collective. The harm is to the architecture of trust and accountability that supports an open society and a democratic polity. The harm is to the reputation and, perhaps, the reality of the United States as such a society, such a polity.

    On May 23rd, President Obama made clear in a passionate speech his readiness to reconceive the so-called war on terror. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” he said. One aspect of that struggle, “expanded surveillance,” he said, raises “difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.” Given the month’s disclosures, Mr. President, you can say that again.

    He’s right. The harm is civic in the first instance.

    The coming Chinese credit bust

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    One of the most interesting things I’ve read in the last few days is this fascinating blog post by Robert Peston in which he suggests that the recent turmoil in China’s money markets, the sharp reduction in the flow of credit between banks and the rising cost of loans between banks might presage the kind of financial collapse that countries like Ireland experienced in 2008. As I was pondering the implications of this I read in today’s Observer that Bentley (whose 19.2 mpg Flying Spur retails at £140,000) plans to open 45 dealerships across China in the next two years, and doubt hardened into certainty: the Chinese are locked into a credit bubble, and we all know how those end.

    GCHQ: this is a pivotal moment

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    My Comment piece about GCHQ’s cable-tapping.

    What it comes down to, in the end, is: “Trust us.” And the trouble with that is that in recent decades our political elites have done precious little to deserve our trust. Now we’re being asked to suspend our disbelief as they eavesdrop on all of our online activities – to trust them, in a way, with the most intimate details of our social and private lives. And all on the basis of laws that they – or their security apparatuses – wrote in order to rationalise and legitimate their snooping.

    What we’re witnessing is the metamorphosis of our democracies into national security states in which the prerogatives of security authorities trump every other consideration and in which critical or sceptical appraisal of them is ruled out of court.

    In the UK, for example, we’ve watched GCHQ – the organisation that emerged from the huts of Bletchley Park, trailing clouds of Enigma glory – swell into a gigantic bureaucracy whose remit includes cyber-crime and cyber-espionage and, now, eavesdropping on its own citizens. In the world of organisational politics, there is a term for this: mission creep. And with it comes the kind of swaggering hubris implicit in the name chosen for the cable-tapping project: Mastering the Internet. Says it all, really.

    It’s the metadata, stoopid

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    “To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has been collecting details of every telephone call placed in the United States without a warrant was, he intoned, no reason for Americans to be alarmed. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he cooed. The torch was then passed to Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who was likewise on bromide-dispensing duty. “This is just metadata,” she burbled, “there is no content involved.”

    At which point the thought uppermost in one’s mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there’s no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people “doing intelligence on counter-terrorism”, even that Stasi-scale mob isn’t a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks…

    While we’re on the George W. Obama theme, John Perry Barlow claimed this morning that the Obama administration has now prosecuted seven officials under the Espionage Act and goes on to point out that the total for all his predecessors since 1917 is 3.

    Quote of the Day

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    From the 2011 Report of the Intelligence Services Commissioner:

    The purpose of section 7 [of the Intelligence Services Act] is to ensure that certain SIS or GCHQ activity overseas, which might otherwise expose its officers or agents to liability for prosecution in the UK, is, where authorised by the Secretary of State, exempted from such liability. I would however emphasise that the Secretary of State, before granting each authorisation, must be satisfied of the necessity and reasonableness of the act authorised.

    This is the Section that MPs used to call “the James Bond section” when it was going through Parliament in 1994.

    Google fires its old hiring system

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    Well, well. Google is famous for its demanding and wacky job interviews, in which candidates used to be asked questions like “How many golf balls can you fit in an airliner?” But apparently all that has been junked because, basically, it doesn’t tell you anything useful about how people will do when they work for the company.

    How do we know this? Because Laszlo Bock, Google’s VP for HR (‘human resources’ as ‘personnel’ used to be called) says so. Here’s how The Register summarises his interview with the New York Times:

    “After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” Bock told the NYT. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.”

    In fact, Bock said, Google is increasingly hiring candidates who have no formal education, to the extent that you now see teams at the Chocolate Factory where 14 per cent of the team members have no college background.

    The bottom line, he said, is that Google’s earlier hiring practices simply weren’t effective. When Google studied its employees’ performance and compared it to how the same employees scored in interviews, there was no correlation.

    “We found zero relationship,” Bock said. “It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.”

    So how does Google plan to handle hiring from now on? According to Bock, the online giant is leaning toward behavioral interviews that emphasize the candidate’s own experience, with questions such as, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.”

    Example of “an analytically difficult problem”: how to square protecting your user’s privacy with co-operating with the NSA.