Author Archives: Paul Woodward

The seeds of American fascism — taking freedom away in order to keep it safe

Washington Post columnist, Matt Miller, is offended by Edward Snowden’s “grandiose” conscience:

An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.

The conversation would be entirely different today if we’d had a series of attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page (with which I don’t usually nod in agreement) wrote, if the nation suffered another 9/11 or an attack with weapons of mass destruction, “the political responses could include biometric national ID cards, curfews, surveillance drones over the homeland, and even mass roundups of ethnic or religious groups.” Practices like data mining, the Journal added, “protect us against far greater intrusions on individual freedom.”

What Miller and the Wall Street Journal are appealing to is exactly the same line of reasoning employed by Bashir al-Assad and every other authoritarian leader: if I don’t limit your freedom, then you will lose it altogether.

Dissenters duly rebuked are then expected to shut their mouths in recognition of the greater good. (H/t Philip Weiss.)

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Time to publish the remaining NSA PowerPoint slides

The Los Angeles Times reports: Google is asking the Obama administration for permission to disclose more information about requests it gets from national intelligence agencies for its users’ emails and other online communications.

The technology giant made the request in a letter to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III on Tuesday.

Google is trying to counteract damaging media reports that the company allows the National Security Agency access to users’ online communications.

“Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue,” Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a blog post. “However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.”

Google and other technology companies came under scrutiny last week after a government contractor leaked confidential documents revealing that the NSA has been receiving information from Google and other services, including data from U.S. phone call records and online communications to and from foreign targets.

Google and other companies insist that they only give up user communications when required by law, and they dispute certain details in reports in the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers that detailed their roles in an NSA data collection program called PRISM.

Presentations, by their very nature, just as often portray goals as they do actualities and PowerPoint is perhaps the tool par excellence in conjuring up the simplistic outlines of a make-believe world.

It’s possible that Google is now engaged in some PR theatrics — making a request that it knows will be turned down — but my hunch is that they would in fact be vindicated by full disclosure of the facts.

And if that’s the case, then the publication of all 41 slides from the NSA PRISM PowerPoint presentation might not result in the revelation of secrets that would be particularly damaging to national security per se. The damage might derive as much from American citizens becoming aware of what the NSA would like to do as it does from awareness of what it is actually doing. In other words, a need for the continued secrecy of the contents of these slides, might be more important for protecting the reputation of the NSA rather than protecting the operations of the agency.

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The question isn’t why Snowden blew the whistle, but why so many others didn’t

A Bloomberg headline says it all: “NSA Leaker Recalled as Shy Computer-Bound Maryland Teenager”

“He was always very quiet, and he was always on his computer,” Joyce Kinsey, a neighbor, told reporters Julie Bykowicz and Greg Giroux. Obviously, if Edward Snowden had devoted more time to football or baseball he wouldn’t now be on the run.

And then we come to the question that for two journalists whose beat is money in politics, seems like their deepest concern:

As U.S. investigators begin a probe into how Snowden copied highly classified materials and disseminated them to two news outlets, another looming question for members of Congress and the White House is why he decided to become disloyal to the government that sustained his family.

Snowden bit the hand that feeds his family — the unintended implication being that loyalty to the U.S. government is generally reliably sustained by cash. You get paid, you keep your mouth shut.

As for political insight into Snowden’s motives for becoming a whistleblower, supposedly the only clue comes from his two $250 donations to the Ron Paul presidential campaign in 2012 — no doubt federal employees who happen to be Paul supporters will now be more paranoid than ever, with good reason.

The narrative thrust in this profile is one which we will see again and again: Edward Snowden did what he did because of who he is — not because of what he saw.

But the questions that should concern Americans and journalists who have an interest about the way their government operates and the nature of the society they live in, should not be about the personal details of Snowden’s life.

What he has revealed, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of other Americans already knew about and were willing to keep concealed from their fellow citizens. No doubt some had unshakable conviction that such surveillance is essential and for these true believers, maintaining secrecy amounted to doing the right thing. But Snowden could not have been alone in being troubled by the extent to which surveillance had become expanded without any public awareness or consent.

Ask not why Snowden blew the whistle but why so many others didn’t. And beyond that, ask why it is that during a decade which has seen illegal war, illegal killing, torture, kidnapping, and mass surveillance, not a single senior government official has tendered their resignation and said that as a matter of conscience they had to speak out.

We live in a society where it appears that for anyone to advance into a position of great responsibility, the individual’s conscience must become tethered in the process.

By the time Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 he was 40 years old, had served as a U.S. marine in Vietnam, held senior positions at the Pentagon and Rand Corporation, acquired significant influence and yet his integrity remained intact.

For those who ask why today’s whistleblowers are so young, the answer seems to be that the halls of power now stifle dissent so effectively that responsibility is only invested in the hands of those who long forgot how to do the right thing.

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The missing NSA PowerPoint slides — best kept secret?

Kevin Poulsen writes: What’s in Edward Snowden’s 41-slide PowerPoint deck that’s so hot that nobody dare publish it?

Now that Snowden has revealed himself to the world as the NSA whistleblower, details about his interaction with the press are surfacing. And at the center of the drama is a still mostly unpublished 41-slide presentation, classified top secret, that Snowden gave to the Washington Post and the Guardian to expose the NSA’s internet spying operation “PRISM.”

Only five slides from the presentation have been published. The other 36 remain a mystery. Both the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and the Post’s Barton Gellman have made it clear that the rest of the PowerPoint is dynamite stuff … which we’re not going to be seeing any time soon. “If you saw all the slides you wouldn’t publish them,” wrote Gellman on Twitter, adding in a second tweet: “I know a few absolutists, but most people would want to defer judgment if they didn’t know the full contents.”

But as Gellman himself has reported, Edward Snowden urgently wanted all the slides to be published while also saying: “I don’t desire to enable the Bradley Manning argument that these were released recklessly and unreviewed.”

So, we’re in the curious position where the two journalists the whistleblower is relying on to deliver his message seem to have taken it upon themselves to serve as both messengers and gatekeepers.

If you could see these secret slides you’d know why they must remain secret — that’s exactly the argument the government makes. The Guardian and the Washington Post seem to be casting their source as both responsible and irresponsible.

And let’s not forget: we’re talking about PowerPoint slides and information whose continued secrecy is vital to national security could surely be redacted.

On the other hand, as Edward Tufte duly notes, the NSA itself in its list of useful information sources didn’t bother including PowerPoint presentations.

So, maybe that’s the reason we haven’t seen the remaining 36 slides. When Gellman said, “If you saw all the slides you wouldn’t publish them,” perhaps what he actually meant was that the other 36 slides contain nothing of interest whatsoever.

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The species of oppression by which we are menaced

Why should law-abiding Americans care if their communications and movements are being monitored by the NSA?

Many Americans don’t even care enough to pose the question (it would be interesting to see polling numbers right now showing how many Americans know what the letters N-S-A stand for or what the agency does), and among those who do pose the question, for most it is most likely a rhetorical question — a way of saying, this is an issue I have little reason to be concerned about. If the surveillance diminishes the risk of terrorist attacks, all well and good.

Even if there is a superficial rationality to this indifference about loss of privacy, there is also in this passive consent an attitude that represents the condition of democracy — a condition that Alexis de Tocqueville described over 150 years ago:

…the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

— “What sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear,” Chapter VI, Section IV, Volume III, Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville.

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In 2000, NSA made it clear it wouldn’t be shackled by the U.S. Constitution

NSA 'Transition 2001', December 2000

An NSA memo written in December 2000 expressed ambivalence about the impact of the Fourth Amendment on the agency’s ability to gather electronic signals intelligence. While paying lip service to the protection of the Constitution, the agency underlined that it would need a “powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the ‘protected’ communications of Americans” — the implication being that the NSA’s “presence” (read: surveillance) on the network would inevitably expose U.S. citizens’ communications to government scrutiny. In other words, the global nature of the network would mean that the NSA would no longer be able to draw any sharp differentiation between domestic and foreign communications.

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How the NSA prevented the Boston bombing

The New York Times reports: The [National Security] agency’s ability to efficiently mine metadata, data about who is calling or e-mailing, has made wiretapping and eavesdropping on communications far less vital, according to data experts. That access to data from companies that Americans depend on daily raises troubling questions about privacy and civil liberties that officials in Washington, insistent on near-total secrecy, have yet to address.

“American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.”

In the 1960s, when the N.S.A. successfully intercepted the primitive car phones used by Soviet leaders driving around Moscow in their Zil limousines, there was no chance the agency would accidentally pick up Americans. Today, if it is scanning for a foreign politician’s Gmail account or hunting for the cellphone number of someone suspected of being a terrorist, the possibilities for what N.S.A. calls “incidental” collection of Americans are far greater.

United States laws restrict wiretapping and eavesdropping on the actual content of the communications of American citizens but offer very little protection to the digital data thrown off by the telephone when a call is made. And they offer virtually no protection to other forms of non-telephone-related data like credit card transactions.

Because of smartphones, tablets, social media sites, e-mail and other forms of digital communications, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily, according to I.B.M.

The company estimates that 90 percent of the data that now exists in the world has been created in just the last two years. From now until 2020, the digital universe is expected to double every two years, according to a study by the International Data Corporation.

Accompanying that explosive growth has been rapid progress in the ability to sift through the information.

When separate streams of data are integrated into large databases — matching, for example, time and location data from cellphones with credit card purchases or E-ZPass use — intelligence analysts are given a mosaic of a person’s life that would never be available from simply listening to their conversations. Just four data points about the location and time of a mobile phone call, a study published in Nature found, make it possible to identify the caller 95 percent of the time.

“We can find all sorts of correlations and patterns,” said one government computer scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “There have been tremendous advances.”

Here’s a fantasy portrayal of how harvesting metadata can save lives. The storyteller is Palantir Technologies whose database integration system is reported to have become “an indispensable tool employed by the U.S. intelligence community in the war on terrorism.”

In October, a foreign national named Mike Fikri purchased a one-way plane ticket from Cairo to Miami, where he rented a condo. Over the previous few weeks, he’d made a number of large withdrawals from a Russian bank account and placed repeated calls to a few people in Syria. More recently, he rented a truck, drove to Orlando, and visited Walt Disney World by himself. As numerous security videos indicate, he did not frolic at the happiest place on earth. He spent his day taking pictures of crowded plazas and gate areas.

None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. Lots of people rent trucks or have relations in Syria, and no doubt there are harmless eccentrics out there fascinated by amusement park infrastructure. Taken together, though, they suggested that Fikri was up to something. And yet, until about four years ago, his pre-attack prep work would have gone unnoticed. A CIA analyst might have flagged the plane ticket purchase; an FBI agent might have seen the bank transfers. But there was nothing to connect the two. Lucky for counterterror agents, not to mention tourists in Orlando, the government now has software made by Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that’s become the darling of the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an alert in the CIA’s Palantir system. An analyst types Fikri’s name into a search box and up pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the government’s disposal. There’s fingerprint and DNA evidence for Fikri gathered by a CIA operative in Cairo; video of him going to an ATM in Miami; shots of his rental truck’s license plate at a tollbooth; phone records; and a map pinpointing his movements across the globe. All this information is then displayed on a clearly designed graphical interface that looks like something Tom Cruise would use in a Mission: Impossible movie.

As the CIA analyst starts poking around on Fikri’s file inside of Palantir, a story emerges. A mouse click shows that Fikri has wired money to the people he had been calling in Syria. Another click brings up CIA field reports on the Syrians and reveals they have been under investigation for suspicious behavior and meeting together every day over the past two weeks. Click: The Syrians bought plane tickets to Miami one day after receiving the money from Fikri. To aid even the dullest analyst, the software brings up a map that has a pulsing red light tracing the flow of money from Cairo and Syria to Fikri’s Miami condo. That provides local cops with the last piece of information they need to move in on their prey before he strikes.

Now let’s make a tiny tweak to this story: Fikri, mindful that it’s probably not wise to draw the attention of law enforcement, carefully observes all traffic regulations. He doesn’t get a speeding ticket and the CIA’s Palantir system is not triggered into action.

Shane Harris writes: To date, there have been practically no examples of a terrorist plot being pre-emptively thwarted by data mining these huge electronic caches. (Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said that the metadatabase has helped thwart a terrorist attack “in the last few years,” but the details have not been disclosed.)

When I was writing my book, The Watchers, about the rise of these big surveillance systems, I met analyst after analyst who said that data mining tends to produce big, unwieldy masses of potential bad actors and threats, but rarely does it produce a solid lead on a terrorist plot.

Those leads tend to come from more pedestrian investigative techniques, such as interviews and interrogations of detainees, or follow-ups on lists of phone numbers or e-mail addresses found in terrorists’ laptops. That shoe-leather detective work is how the United States has tracked down so many terrorists. In fact, it’s exactly how we found Osama bin Laden.

What the proponents of mass surveillance need to explain is how, given the existing scope of data gathering, the NSA did not intercept Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before they planted their bombs in Boston. Neither was Faisal Shahzad prevented from attempting to bomb Times Square.

What mass data collection is extremely effective in doing, is identifying trends — such as the emergence of a political movement. As a tool for suppressing political dissent, nothing could be more effective.

The Obama administration might not be in the business of large-scale political oppression, but what it is doing is putting in place and expanding the infrastructure of oppression.

Americans may never face a dramatic moment in which freedoms are suddenly stripped away, if instead we willingly abandon liberty, bit by bit, in favor of an illusory security.

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How not to circumscribe the mind

Ethan Watters writes: Imagine for a moment that the American Psychiatric Association was about to compile a new edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But instead of 2013, imagine, just for fun, that the year is 1880.

Transported to the world of the late 19th century, the psychiatric body would have virtually no choice but to include hysteria in the pages of its new volume. Women by the tens of thousands, after all, displayed the distinctive signs: convulsive fits, facial tics, spinal irritation, sensitivity to touch, and leg paralysis. Not a doctor in the Western world at the time would have failed to recognize the presentation. “The illness of our age is hysteria,” a French journalist wrote. “Everywhere one rubs elbows with it.”

Hysteria would have had to be included in our hypothetical 1880 DSM for the exact same reasons that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is included in the just-released DSM-5. The disorder clearly existed in a population and could be reliably distinguished, by experts and clinicians, from other constellations of symptoms. There were no reliable medical tests to distinguish hysteria from other illnesses then; the same is true of the disorders listed in the DSM-5 today. Practically speaking, the criteria by which something is declared a mental illness are virtually the same now as they were over a hundred years ago.

The DSM determines which mental disorders are worthy of insurance reimbursement, legal standing, and serious discussion in American life. That its diagnoses are not more scientific is, according to several prominent critics, a scandal. In a major blow to the APA’s dominance over mental-health diagnoses, Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, recently declared that his organization would no longer rely on the DSM as a guide to funding research. “The weakness is its lack of validity,” he wrote. “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever.” As an alternative, Insel called for the creation of a new, rival classification system based on genetics, brain imaging, and cognitive science.

This idea — that we might be able to strip away all subjectivity from the diagnosis of mental illness and render psychiatry truly scientific — is intuitively appealing. But there are a couple of problems with it. The first is that the science simply isn’t there yet. A functional neuroscientific understanding of mental suffering is years, perhaps generations, away from our grasp. What are clinicians and patients to do until then? But the second, more telling problem with Insel’s approach lies in its assumption that it is even possible to strip culture from the study of mental illness. Indeed, from where I sit, the trouble with the DSM — both this one and previous editions — is not so much that it is insufficiently grounded in biology, but that it ignores the inescapable relationship between social cues and the shifting manifestations of mental illness. [Continue reading…]

An even more profound problem with the reductionism of neuroscience is that it fails to question the physicalism that has become the bedrock of the scientific outlook. In other words, the belief that if something is real then it must be observable through standardized instruments which enable different observers to agree on the characteristics of the same thing.

In reality, human experience and the human world is primarily constructed from non-physical entities: ideas.

Take for instance the idea of a road — something that at first glance might seem indisputably physical. Imagine a six-lane freeway, filled with fast moving traffic. What could be more physical than that mass of steel and concrete carved emphatically through the landscape?

In fact, a road is a highly abstract concept that only exists inside a human mind and what allows us to drive on roads is the fact that generally speaking we share the same idea about what a road is — that it is a place which allows for the passage of wheel vehicles and is not suitable for picnics or sunbathing; that in the absence of symbolic warnings its boundaries will remain parallel and its continuation will not terminate without warning; that the road’s users will conform to a code of behavior that makes individual actions generally predictable by, for instance, avoiding contact with adjacent vehicles, driving on the same side, and at similar speeds. To drive at night, when sensory input is reduced to a minimum — from road markings whose location we mentally compute; from the narrow field of vision provided by headlights; from the lights of other vehicles whose standardized positions and locations allow us to unconsciously compute their proximity — is to place full faith in the idea of the road.

Neuroscience has advanced to the point where it’s now possible to map in some detail the neural foundations of thought, but a thought can no more be reduced to the firing of neurons than can a word be reduced to the illumination of a configuration of pixels. Ideas do not have an atomic structure and are not bound by time or space. The cartography of the mind cannot be charted by any kind of imaging technology. Not only is such technology ineffective; it is also redundant, since mind is by its very nature (along with a certain amount of discipline and practice) open to self scrutiny.

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Guardian publishes fifth NSA PPT slide — 36 slides remain hidden from public view

“In the interests of aiding the debate over how Prism works, the Guardian is publishing an additional slide from the 41-slide presentation which details Prism and its operation. We have redacted some program names.”

And in the interests of boosting its U.S. operations, does The Guardian plan on dragging this story out for another 36 days, one slide a day perhaps being the maximum amount the paper has determined its readers can digest without being overwhelmed? Give me a break.

As “ImpartiallyApathetic” comments: “Perhaps some brave soul at the Guardian will leak the leak?” Or does The Guardian guard its secrets even more carefully than the NSA?

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Palantir has nothing to do with the NSA’s PRISM program

If a technology company creates a platform that allows data integration from disparate databases and a component in its software is called Prism, is that sufficient reason to speculate that it might have some connection with the much-reported NSA PRISM surveillance program?

It seems like it was good enough reason for Talking Points Memo and Gawker.

Gawker‘s Sam Biddle says: “No one knows what Palantir — named after a magical rock in Lord of The Rings that granted remote vision — exactly does.” But it turns out the “secretive data-mining company” provides a lot of information about what it does both through its website and its YouTube channel with 261 videos.

Josh Marshall’s post at TPM was initially based on an email from an anonymous reader who, for what it’s worth (not much), knows a guy who works for Palo Alto-based Palantir (which has over 800 employees). “I want to stress this is a reader email, not TPM reporting,” Marshall wrote before later adding multiple updates but neglecting to include a statement from the company, relayed on Twitter by the Financial Times tech correspondent, Tim Bradshaw: “Palantir’s Prism platform is completely unrelated to any US government program of the same name.”

Why should the company’s denial be taken at face value?

Here’s a good reason.

In the widely seen PowerPoint slide which depicts dates when PRISM collection began for providers beginning with Microsoft, the first date is September 11, 2007. Yahoo came on board in March 2008.

In a 2012 interview with TechCrunch, Palantir founder and CEO Alex Karp describing their platform said: “We didn’t know it would actually work, until 2008, and we didn’t know anyone would buy it until mid-2008, so third quarter 2008.”

Whatever the NSA was using for data collection from Microsoft and Yahoo in late 2007 and early 2008, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t Palantir software.

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Hands off my metadata

We know where you live.

We know who you talk to.

We know where you travel.

We know where you are now.

We have your social security number;

your credit card numbers;

your purchases;

your emails;

your text messages;

your photographs;

your videos;

We know the websites you visit;

the searches you perform;

the music/books/articles you “like.”

We know who your Facebook friends are and who they know.

We know what you’re typing right now; we pretty much know what you’re thinking.

But we don’t know what you just said on the phone with your mom — why should we care?

We know everything else.

“The public doesn’t understand,” [former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau told Jane Mayer] … speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening — you don’t need the content.”

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information, showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved, where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones at night. [Continue reading…]

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DNI Clapper lying to Congress in 2013 about the NSA’s domestic intelligence gathering capabilities

On March 12, at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper answered: “No, sir.” And Wyden reiterated the question, “It does not?” Clapper responded: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly.”

As can be seen in the video clip above, Clapper’s body language seems to say much more than his words. He literally squirms and bows his head as he issues his denial. His discomfort in being pressed to answer this question is transparent.

In an interview with National Journal on Wednesday, Clapper squirmed and equivocated even more: “What I said [before the Senate committee] was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails. I stand by that.”

What is implied in both of Clapper’s qualifications — that data is not collected ‘wittingly’ nor are e-mails viewed ‘voyeuristically’ — is that data gathered on millions of Americans is not systematically subject to human analysis.

But that’s irrelevant and almost certainly a willful deception since in the absence of any human analysis, vast databases can be created and massive amounts of machine analysis performed through which electronic data gathered on the bulk of the population can be used to construct and operate a social surveillance system of unparalleled scope and detail.

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FBI places most Americans under surveillance


Part of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order granted to the FBI on April 25, 2013.

The National Security Agency at the request of the FBI is keeping a record of everywhere you go and everyone you talk to at all times.

Since, as The Guardian reports, the government is collecting this information from all Verizon customers, it’s reasonable to assume that it is also doing so with every other telecommunications carrier. In other words, there’s little doubt that every single individual in this country who uses any form of electronic communication is under 24-hour-a-day surveillance.

The White House is hiding behind the word “metadata” as it attempts to defend its actions — on the assumption that most people will overlook the loss of privacy if they believe that the content of their conversations is not being recorded.

In reality, metadata is the information that is of greatest interest to a security state. How so? Imagine the converse. Suppose the NSA was recording the content of all communications but not the metadata. Suppose it could only gain access to the metadata under a specific search warrant. The government would always know everything that was being said but have no idea who was talking to who. It couldn’t engage in data mining, constructing social networks and most of the other features of a mass surveillance enterprise. It couldn’t utterly abandon the principle that criminal investigation needs to be constrained by reasonable suspicion and probably cause.

People who think that screening procedures by TSA agents are unreasonably intrusive should be even more concerned about the handling of their metadata.

It’s not just metadata; it’s my data. And it’s turning into the equivalent of a citizens’ bar code used not only by governments but also corporations who understand that information is power and thus resist whatever constraints are imposed on their ability to gather personal information as extensively and in as great detail as they can.

The Guardian reports: The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered. [Continue reading…]

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Will the Israel lobby block Samantha Power’s appointment to the UN?

Even if Samantha Power’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the UN is not blocked by the Senate, I don’t expect we’ll hear her reassert her view that a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict will require an imposed solution, including the use of a “mammoth protection force,” or that the U.S. should stop spending billions supporting Israel’s military forces but should instead be investing the same amounts in a Palestinian state. But, what seems certain is that the following clip from a 2002 interview will be reappearing on lots of Zionist websites and that the Israel lobby will kick into high gear to oppose her nomination. Unless, that is, their failure to block Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Defense Secretary has led organizations such as the Emergency Committee for Israel to adopt some tactical changes.

Maybe the White House figures that its opponents will reserve all their venom for Susan Rice, and thus allow Powers to take up office without strong opposition.

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Just a few months ago, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next national security adviser, saw her main chance to become secretary of state dissipate before her eyes, as Senate Republicans (with John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the lead) excoriated her for, as they saw it, misleading the public about the attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year. (My thoughts about the attacks on Rice can be found here.)

Rice was forced to withdraw her name, and Senator John Kerry was awarded the job. Now Rice will be, in effect, Kerry’s supervisor. McCain and Graham, by turning Rice into the scapegoat of the Benghazi debacle, have inadvertently allowed the president to bring her into the innermost ring of power, in a role that requires no Senate confirmation.

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A cosmic perspective

I’m all in favor of a cosmic perspective.

On the occasions I’ve been lucky enough to sleep under the stars, far from civilization, I’ve found that a small but radical realignment in perception can enhance that perspective.

Instead of looking up, look out — out into the Milky Way and deep space.

In other words, instead of assuming the position that one is lying on top of the globe — space above, earth below — imagine ones back stuck to the side of the globe, looking outwards.

This shift from up to out, breaks the geocentric perspective and puts the Earth in space, rather than making space outside the Earth.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, to consider the vastness of the universe is indeed inspiring — but it’s also terrifying, and not simply because it threatens an inflated ego.

However abundant life might be in the universe, the places that support life are miniscule in relationship to everything else.

To see the universe as intrinsically hostile to life is terrifying, realistic, and above all, should enhance our appreciation for this tiny planet. Inside the wafer-thin bubble of the Earth’s atmosphere percolates a complex, fragile, and vital energy — a force by which we are possessed and yet have the conceit to challenge.

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Obama’s brutal pragmatism

There are many Americans — and I expect they include Barack Obama — who drew a lesson from the Bush-Cheney era that there is no greater danger than comes from being wedded inflexibly to a rigid ideology. The fall of the neoconservatives coincided with the revival of “the reality-based community.”

When Obama entered office, he appeared to be taking a principled stand when he signed an executive order calling for Guantánamo to be shut down and banning the use of torture, but beneath the principle was a much stronger allegiance to a brutal pragmatism.

Since the detention of terrorist suspects had resulted in the creation of a legal and political quagmire, the solution — transparent in its application, even while never honestly articulated as such — has been to kill rather than capture suspects. The administration professes its desire to capture suspects “whenever possible” but it turns out that it’s virtually never possible.

As for how the detainees that Obama inherited get treated, in spite of his pledge to end torture, many are now in fact being tortured. Whereas Bush authorized torture to extract intelligence, Obama authorizes forced feeding of hunger-striking prisoners — which is widely viewed as brutal enough to be described as torture — because this president is less concerned about the prisoners’ treatment than the consequences of their deaths under his watch.

In a nutshell, this then is Obama’s pragmatic approach: better to kill rather than capture; but if already captured, better to torture than allow to die.

Joe Nocera writes: Nearly four months into a hunger strike that has now spread to some two-thirds of the detainees at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the question in this headline can no longer be avoided.

Fundamentally, hunger strikes are a form of speech for prisoners who have no other way to communicate their concerns. Hunger strikes give them the means to protest their confinement and to send a message about that confinement. During the “troubles” in Ireland, for instance, Irish Republican Army prisoners went on hunger strikes to protest their detention by the British — and some ended up being force-fed.

For decades, the international community, including the International Red Cross, the World Medical Association and the United Nations, have recognized the right of prisoners of sound mind to go on a hunger strike. Force-feeding has been labeled a violation on the ban of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The World Medical Association holds that it is unethical for a doctor to participate in force-feeding. Put simply, force-feeding violates international law.

Whatever triggered the hunger strike at Guantánamo — the detainees say that the military had begun searching their Korans and instituted a series of harsh new measures, which the military denies — the underlying issue is that the detainees are in despair of ever getting out. Many of them, including 56 men from Yemen, have been cleared to leave the prison by a committee of top national security officials. But thanks to a combination of Congressional actions taken during the past few years, and the timidity of President Obama, they remain in Guantánamo with no end in sight. The hunger strike has been their way of reminding the world of their continued imprisonment, and it has worked brilliantly. One wonders whether President Obama would have even mentioned Guantánamo in his big national security speech last week if not for the hunger strikers.

The military claims that it is force-feeding the detainees in order to keep them safe and alive. According to The Miami Herald, about one-third of the detainees on strike — at least 35 men, though possibly more — are being force-fed. A handful are in the hospital.

But not long ago, Al Jazeera got ahold of a 30-page document that detailed the standard operating procedures used by the military to force-feed a detainee. The document makes for gruesome reading: the detainee shackled to a special chair (which looks like the electric chair); the head restraints if he resists; the tube pushed painfully down his nose; the half-hour or so of ingestion of nutritional supplements; the transfer of the detainee to a “dry cell,” where, if he vomits, he is strapped back into the chair until the food is digested. [Continue reading…]

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David Petraeus moves to Wall Street

Gawker: David Petraeus’ road to redemption has reached its gilded destination. As we first reported in April, the disgraced former CIA director will join Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the private equity giant best known for “large debt-fueled corporate takeovers.”

How exactly does experience designing failed counter-insurgencies translate to an expertise in high finance? “As the world changes and we expand how and where we invest, we are always looking to sharpen the ‘KKR edge,’” cofounder and co-CEO Henry Kravis said of his new hire.

Petraeus will sharpen edges as chairman of the newly-formed KKR Global Institute, where his team will include Ken Mehlman, the former Bush campaign manager and onetime chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has been with KKR since 2008.

George Anders writes: Petraeus’s new job calls for him to get into the “thought leadership” business. As my colleague Halah Touryalai reports, his global institute is expected to address “macro-economic issues like the role of central banks in the world since the crisis, changes in public policy, and other areas where KKR has interests.”

In essence, KKR wants Petraeus, a former four-star general with a uniquely intellectual bent, to help establish the private-equity firm as a citadel of big-picture insights. That would be a welcome change for Kravis and Roberts, who doubtless have grown tired of endless allusions to “Barbarians at the Gate,” an archly titled account of KKR’s 1988 takeover battle for RJR Nabisco.

Blackstone has always had a bit of geopolitical cachet, thanks to founding partner Pete Peterson’s days as Commerce Secretary and his ongoing interest in fiscal policy and Social Security. Carlyle at one time had former President George H.W. Bush as an adviser, helping to buttress that firm’s image as deeply connected to the political realm. Now it’s KKR’s turn to try.

Such has become the nature of power in government: that “service to the nation” turns out to merely be a stepping stone to the advancement of self interest. Whatever Petraeus’ precise value to KKR turns out to be, he will be establishing himself within what has become a transnational system of governance in which representation is limited to the interests of shareholders and power can freely be exercised without democratic irritations like the need for accountability and transparency.

Right-wing nuts who arm themselves in fear of the creation of World Government don’t seem to have noticed that it’s already here — even if it’s more amorphous and less centrally organized than conspiracy theorists might imagine.

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Daniel Klaidman’s loyal service to the Obama administration

Alex Pareene writes: Eric Holder feels bad. The attorney general of the United States has been criticized quite a bit since basically the day he was announced as Obama’s pick for the job, but lately that criticism has come from liberals, who are upset with the Justice Department for excessive snooping on journalists. Holder, according to Daniel Klaidman in the Daily Beast, now feels really personally sorry about the whole treating reporters like criminals thing, because he still thinks of himself as a good liberal.

Holder signed off on the search warrant issued for Fox News reporter James Rosen. The warrant justified seizing Rosen’s records by claiming that his handling of his source, a State Department contractor, may have constituted a violation of the Espionage Act. The AG apparently did not feel bad about this until he read in a newspaper that he had done so:

But for Attorney General Eric Holder, the gravity of the situation didn’t fully sink in until Monday morning when he read the Post’s front-page story, sitting at his kitchen table. Quoting from the affidavit, the story detailed how agents had tracked Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, perused his private emails, and traced the timing of his calls to the State Department security adviser suspected of leaking to him. Then the story, quoting the stark, clinical language of the affidavit, described Rosen as “at the very least … an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” in the crime. Holder knew that Justice would be besieged by the twin leak probes; but, according to aides, he was also beginning to feel a creeping sense of personal remorse.

Holder’s supposed “remorse” is risible. He didn’t realize how far he’d gone until he read about what he’d done in the Washington Post? Whoops! I accidentally criminalized news-gathering. (At least someone still reads the paper in print.) It is a bad sign of bubble-inhabiting when an administration doesn’t understand the ramifications of its actions until it reads about itself in the press.

I once compared Daniel Klaidman to a crow feeding off a rotting carcase but suggested that that might be unfair to crows. Even so, sycophantic behavior, as much as it expresses itself through an apparent desire to please others (Klaidman’s description of Holder’s angst must surely have pleased the attorney general), tends to be driven by the shameless pursuit of self interest.

At a time when plenty of journalists in Washington must be feeling like betrayed lovers, there are others whose desire to stay in bed with their sources is so strong they are apparently willing to forgive anything.

However contrite officials like Holder might act, and however outraged the press might present itself, each side can be in little doubt that their incestuous relations will continue.

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