Tag: Edward Snowden

Trust

Trust is a critically important feature of successful relationships and of flourishing societies. Enduring trust builds on honestly and truth.  I have just finished reading Jonathan Rauch’s exposition of these truths in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth and his enlightening exploration of how to find and defend truth in today’s challenging environment. 

How can we determine what is true and what is not? Rauch’s book explores this question. In sorting out fact from fiction we must recognize the personal and social biases through which we evaluate claims and the factors that motivate them. The task is made even more difficult by the fact that there are some who deliberately propagate falsehoods for their own purposes. Whatever else might motivate them, political and other leaders act to gain or retain their power. They often have an incentive to misrepresent facts, i.e., to lie. Former President Trump and his Big Lie (and his many, many other lies) is by no means the only President to have lied to the American public. Many other Presidents have also lied.

Ken Burn’s documentary, The Vietnam War, is a brilliant expose of such lies and yesterday I watched for the first time the 2010 Goldsmith and Ehrlich directed documentary The Most Dangerous Man in American: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon almost give Trump a run for his money as liars, though I think that they thought they were lying for the benefit of our country along with their reelection (which by no means excuses it).

Our constitution provides limited, enumerated powers to our government and checks and balances of the powers between its branches and its citizens. But the power of free speech and a free press to expose lies is an indispensable check on the lies of public officials. Our republic has been defended from foreign attacks by many brave solders. But we should also be grateful for the self-sacrifices of a few brave whistleblowers for exposing government lies and thus defending our republic and the individual liberty in which we have flourished.

Wednesday, I watched Daniel Ellsberg receive the Committee for the Republic’s Defender of Liberty award. We are still meeting virtually, but the event was a fascinating discussion of the Vietnam war decision making. The discussion included the Pentagon Papers movie directors, Goldsmith and Ehrlich; the official head of the Pentagon project that wrote the Pentagon Papers history of the war, Morton Halperin; the New York Times reporter who wrote the first article on the Papers given to him by Ellsberg; and Ellsberg himself who went on at great length. It was a riveting two-hour discussion. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/l7L3DOhakNU

I hope that we can present this award to Edward Snowden in the future.  

Holding our government officials accountable for speaking the truth and for abiding by the law are critically important in preserving (or restoring) trust and in determining “the truth.” Each one of us contribute to (or detract from) those goals. But I am in awe at the personal sacrifices of Ellsberg and Snowden in the service of truth, which so badly needs defending. If there is hope of saving our fractured and disbelieving Republic, it will be because of the bravery of such people and the embrace by the rest of us of the wisdom expressed by writers like Rauch. It requires our individual commitment to truth and the institutions and norms that facilitate and incentivize finding it (filtering falsehood from truth). It requires an effective Constitution of Knowledge.

Terrorism: Security vs. Privacy

We all care about our personal and national security and about our individual freedom, of which our privacy is an important element. Measures that serve both are win win and thus uncontroversial, but often measures that enhance one diminish the other. How and when to use such measures (tools) involve agreement on the balance of risks between security and privacy. Striking the best balance requires public review and debate and constant monitoring as I have discussed before. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/fighting-terrorists-part-ii/

Tools that enable our government to collect information on and track individuals can enhance our security by detecting and hopefully interrupting plans to carry out terrorist attacks. The existence of such capabilities, e.g., to monitor phone calls, emails, payments, and physical movements, also create the capability of collecting such information on people for other purposes, e.g. for commercial or political espionage. Governments through out the world have used such tools to monitor and suppress the “undesirable” activities of their foreign enemies and sometimes of their own citizens. Limits and safeguards on the use of such tools can mitigate the risk that they can be misused to get private information on individuals for other unwarranted purposes.

Finding the best balance between security and privacy is difficult but important for our freedom. We know or assume that we know how Russia, for example, uses surveillance tools on its own citizens. We generally believe that our own government only uses such tools to enhance our security. But the risks of and the growing actual misuse of government powers for political ends (e.g., targeted IRS audits on political enemies, illegal surveillance of a government employee’s girl friend or wife, etc.) are challenging our, perhaps, naïve faith in the honestly of our government. Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified email and Russian theft of U.S. government personnel records are nothing compared to the temptation to steal historical data on the activities of Donald Trump and Mrs. Clinton.

The credible rule of law is one of the critical foundations of our personal freedom. It both protects and limits the extent and domain of our privacy. The principle of “Innocent until proven guilty” is an essential element of the rule of law. It evaluates whether an act has violated the law. In a free society people are not punished for acts contemplated but not committed. Acting against people the state believes might be likely to or inclined to violate the law, for example, that it thinks are likely to commit a terrorist act, would violate this fundamental principle of a free society. An exception to this general rule would be the arrest of a person having the instruments and ingredients for making a bomb and supported by evidence that he plans to make and use the bomb.

Following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC on 9/11, public sentiment shifted its balance between security and freedom in favor of security. The so-called PATRIOT act signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001, reflected that shift by infringing on our privacy and traditional rights in ways that would not have been accepted earlier. Moreover, measures that were initially considered temporary and emergency in nature have become increasingly accepted as normal. Even after a slight curtailment of the provisions of the PATRIOT act when it was renewed in 2015 most of these measures were left in place. No one seems shocked today that the government maintains a “No Fly” list based on suspicions that certain people who have committed no crimes might be potential terrorists. Such profiling unsurprisingly results in Middle Eastern Muslims dominating the list, a racial and religious discrimination that violates existing anti discrimination laws and would not have been tolerated before 9/11.

It is not unusual today to hear people who claim to appreciate the importance of the First Amendment to the US Constitution (freedom of speech) suggest that radical Islamist websites that attempt to recruit ISIS Jihadists should be blocked. Most of my friends are too young to remember the anti-communist witch hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s from which we coined the term McCarthyism. It was a time when a frightened public saw communists under every bed. Soviet spies, a legitimate target for arrest and punishment, were often confused with Marxists (communists), who espoused an economic system now rightly discredited. Those of us who still support freedom of speech believe that bad and pernicious ideas are best defeated with reasoned counter arguments. We believe that it is potentially dangerous to our freedom to allow our government to determine what we can read, hear, or see.

Edward Snowden did our country a great service by forcing a public discussion of what safeguards are needed to strike the balance desired by the public between their security and their privacy. I have written about Snowden before:  https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/the-year-of-edward-snowden/    I recently viewed the movie “Snowden” and the documentary about the same events called “Citizenfour” and highly recommend both. The Heritage Foundation has contributed to this discussion in the following half-day seminar. http://www.heritage.org/events/2016/10/cybersecurity I particularly recommend the opening session with Michael Hayden, who makes a number of interesting and thoughtful observations.

The level of discussion, which is to say the lack of serious discussion of these issues, in the American Presidential campaign is distressing. I am reassured that some very bright and thoughtful people are discussing them. In addition to the Heritage seminar cited above, the New American Foundation recently held an all day seminar on these issues that started off with an excellent presentation by Andrew J. Bacevich (starting at about 24 minutes into the video)

https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/events/next-presidents-fight-against-terror/

We can not remind ourselves often enough that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” And, we should add, courage.

Dennis Hastert and the law

Former congressman Dennis Hastert has been charged with failing to tell his bank why he was withdrawing his money (up to $3.5 million withdrawn in smaller amounts over a few years). It appears that he was being blackmailed by someone threatening to expose a sexual relationship long ago that Mr. Hastert does not want disclosed. Blackmail is a crime that I understand, but I have yet to read that the blackmailer has been charged with any crime. I assume that that is coming.

Mr. Hastert is being charged with violating our Anti Money Laundering (AML) laws.
These laws allow arresting and convicting people for moving money (as Mr. Hastert was doing) that the government thinks was the proceeds of crime (not the case with Mr. Hastert, his crime was failing to report what he planned to with his money), when they are not able to prove that there was a crime in the first place. As far as I know, paying a blackmailer (which is what Mr. Hastert apparently did) is not a crime, though demanding and receiving such money is. The United States has pushed such legislation and the new bureaucracies needed to enforce it all over the world at the cost of billions and billions of dollars (that could have been used for poverty reduction or other more pressing things) with very little if any benefit to show for it. Charging Dennis Hastert with AML violations is a rare exception. Wow, what a benefit for such intrusions into our private lives. I consider AML laws more than a costly waste of money. They are another expansion of the arbitrary power of governments that can be used for good or ill with limited oversight. They lower the standards required for convictions of the real crime, what ever it was, and to that extend diminish the rule of law as we have always understood it.

It is hard to grasp how far our government has evolved from the freedoms we were guaranteed in our constitution. Most of these incremental intrusions have been in the name of protecting us from ourselves and our neighbors. The unlawful (according to a recent court ruling) spying on its own citizens by the NSA exposed by Edward Snowden is now well known and tomorrow we will see what congress does about it. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/?s=snowden. In another example, The Washington Post and others have exposed the shocking abuse of civil forfeiture laws (modern highway robbery by the police). https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/the-abuse-of-civil-forfeiture/.

These are the tips of an alarming iceberg of regulations contained in tens of thousands of pages of laws and regulations from banking to buying cereal. Charles Murray, a very thoughtful and out of the box thinker and observer of our times, makes an intriguing proposal for fighting back. Like me, he is a student of the 60s when civil disobedience seemed the only weapon left to us against an abusive government: http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulation-run-amokand-how-to-fight-back-1431099256

Has our preference for security over freedom swung so far? What are some people smoking to think that government bureaucrats at homeland security, the IRS or the Veterans Administration can more efficiently meet our needs than we can arrange ourselves in the private sector? I have commented on these alarming developments many times before:
https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/big-brother-is-getting-bigger/ https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/protecting-our-civil-liberties/
https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/the-rule-of-law-2/

Strengthening National Security

On March 10, Edward Snowden was interviewed via videoconference at the annual conference of SXSW Interactive: “Conversation with Edward Snowden” It is an absolutely brilliant discussion of the issues first raised by Snowden last year with emphasis on protecting our privacy. I had not viewed it yet when I posted my last blog on the slippery slop of government expansion, but it provides another powerful set of examples. I strongly urge anyone to view it who is interested in and concerned about how to strengthen our security against criminals and enemies without eroding the checks and limits on the scope and power of our government that is one of the foundations of our successful democracy built into our constitution.

Snowden is surprisingly articulate. He understands economics almost as well as cryptology. I will repeat here just two of the many brilliant points he made and urge you to watch it all.

No one in the discussion of surveillance and national security raised by Snowden wishes to impede the ability of the NSA or the government to gather information on targeted individuals under court orders with proper oversight. Sounding like an economist (and of course we all love economists) Snowden notes that the billions of dollars that have been wasted on mass (as opposed to targeted) data collection and analysis (it has produced virtually no useful information) has taken valuable resources away from improving the collection and analysis of targeted information. Thus, for example, the underwear bomber and the Boston marathon bombers probably could have been stopped if our government had used its intelligence resources more wisely. In short, mass surveillance programs have reduced our security in many ways.

When asked why the NSA and other government security agencies persist in hanging on to worthless and wasteful (and potentially dangerous) programs, Snowden presents a proper public choice answer that is very similar to the special interest defense of wasteful and harmful tax loop holes I criticized a few days ago. Individuals and companies benefit from the huge amounts spent on these programs. They acquire a self-interest in their preservation. In addition, bureaucrats are naturally self-protective and slow-moving. You really should listen to Snowden’s own words.

As I have said a number of times previously, the disclosures of confidential government documents and internal discussions by Chelsea (AKA Bradley) Manning are harmful to the effective functioning of government. I am glad that she is in jail, though a hospital would probably be more appropriate. Snowden, on the other hand is a full-blown hero and patriot. It took me a while to fully embrace this view, but it is clear now that our personal and national security have already improved and should improve further in the future because of him (and others working in the same direction). I am very grateful for the huge personal sacrifice he has made for me and for our country. I hope that our government will find a way to welcome him back home soon.

The Year of Edward Snowden

I am increasingly in awe of what Edward Snowden, at great personal risk, has done for our country. One of the three original journalists to whom he gave documents, Barton Gellman, has written the following article for the Washington Post. Edward Snowden after months of NSA revelations says his missions accomplished/2013/12/24  Every American who cares about the future of our country should read it. I have blogged a number of times this year about Snowden if you would like to read more.

Some people confuse the technical and legal ability to collect personal information about targeted individuals under well-developed controls, with the data mining searches for needles in haystacks Snowden exposed. Here are just two of his statements from the article:

“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden. As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”

“I believe the cost of frank public debate about the powers of our government is less than the danger posed by allowing these powers to continue growing in secret,”

Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden continues to amaze me and to rise in my admiration (see his interview by the New York Times). “Snowden-says-he-took-no-secret-files-to-Russia” 

He most certainly violated his pledge and the law, but the thoughtfulness and care with which he has revealed very selective documents contrasts very sharply with the damaging data dump of Chelsea Manning (AKA Bradley). Manning, who never convincingly explained what he thought he was doing or why, impeded the flow of candid information and discussion within the U.S. government (e.g. in cables between our embassy’s and the State Department). This will make future diplomacy more difficult.

Snowden, on the other hand, who revealed information gathering programs and their assessments rather than the content of information collected, has thankfully forced more open discussion of what tools the government has and how they should be used. He has risked his own future in the heroic service of the higher interests of his (and my) country.  Richard Cohn expresses these views very well in a recent Washington Post oped: “Snowden is no Traitor/2013/10/21/”

Our government has been caught lying repeatedly in connection with its spying activity. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/abuse-of-power/  In many respects this is an expected part of the game with regard to enemies we wish to protect ourselves from. But the law sets important limits and safeguards on the government when it comes to spying on its own at home or friends abroad (e.g. the President of Mexico, 70 million French phone records per month, etc). Records revealed by Snowden document that these are being violated as well.

Last week I attended a fascinating discussion at the Brookings Institute between Matt Apuzzo, Investigative Reporter for The Associated Press and author with Adam Goldman of Enemies Within: Inside NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Ladin’s Final Plot Against America (Touchstone, 2013), and Bruce Riedel, Director, The Intelligence Project, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. Apuzzo and Goldman’s book is a spy thriller account of the only specific case revealed by the government of the 50 potential attacks they claim their programs helped prevent. The government thwarted the September 2009 al Qaeda terrorist plot – led by Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American – to attack the New York City subway system. Without taking a position on whether NSA and related domestic spying activities helped with this case, Mr. Apuzzo reported that the link to the would be terrorist came as the result of an email he sent to a known British terrorist. This was enough to enabled the government to monitor Mr. Zazi’s communications on the basis of older and established intelligence authorities without resort to the more intrusive programs reveals by Snowden. So the government lied to us again.

The natural tendency of government is to grow and to expand their authority. Whenever our government seemed to go too far, American’s have pushed back. Edward Snowden has alerted us to the need to push back again and I am very grateful to him for that.

Are We Becoming A Nation of Cowards?

“No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

James Madison, April 20, 1795

Osama Bin Laden’s vendetta against the United States grew out of his anger over our stationing American troops in his home country of Saudi Arabia. Imagine for a moment what might be his most cost efficient weapons for hurting the U.S.  What might give him the biggest bang for the buck? Shutting 19 American Embassies and related diplomatic facilities in the Middle East for at least a week on the basis of intercepted communications between al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri in Pakistan and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, who heads the al-Qaeda franchise in the Arabian peninsula, would be high on the list. Such reactions to intel, which could well be a deliberate planted by clever Arabs, must have the ghost of Bin Laden laughing hysterically (if it is possible to imagine Bin Laden laughing at all).

I still carry in my travel bag a nail clipper missing the little nail file that a Miami airport guard broke off as a potentially dangerous carry on weapon not too long after 9/11. It has taken 12 years for our government (the Orwellian named Department of Homeland Security) to figure out a way for me to board planes without taking out my computer and taking off my belt and shoes. At least the perpetual alert status of code Orange has been dropped.

These are minor inconveniences compared to the cost and danger of the billions and billions of dollars spent by NSA and others to invade our privacy (for our own good, of course) in order to better search for needles in hay stacks that might detect plots to harm us (such as the Boston marathon bombings—Upps). We are assured that these data will never be searched by a rogue bureaucrat looking for dirt on political enemies. We are reassured because our political leaders never lie to us.  For example, when National Intelligence director James Clapper informed a Senate Intelligence Committee last March that the government was not “wittingly” collecting information on millions of Americans, he later justified the lie by saying that it was the least dishonest statement he was comfortable making.

Gregory Johnsen, an expert on Yemen at Princeton, recently noted the unrealistic and dangerous expectations of the American public (at least as our government sees or would like to see them):“Unfortunately the way we in the US have talked about the terror threat as a society AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] doesn’t have to be particularly good or even successful to constitute a serious threat.  As a society we in the US seem to have a zero-tolerance approach to terrorism instead of weighing its risks against other potential threats.  In such an environment any threat from AQAP could be considered serious.” (reported by Foreign Policy Magazine)

I am not one to see conspiracies everywhere, but this latest scare is a nice distraction for recent revelations of potentially dangerous and at a minimum wastefully expensive government over reaches in the name of keeping us safe (Snowden’s NSA and other revelations). This mornings Washington Post has two op-ed pieces on this subject that you should read. The first by Eugene Robinson, “The New Al-Qaeda Menace” /2013/08/05/, is correct in my view. The second (just below it) by Juan Zarate and Thomas Sanderson,  “Adapting to Terrorism 2.0”,  is down right scary. George Orwell’s big brother could not have made the case better for bigger and more intrusive government for our own good. Are they deliberately trying to destroy our liberties or are they over zealot fools. Probably the latter.

Over the centuries our young men and ladies have risked and often lost their lives to keep us free. How ironic that in the name of keeping us secure our liberties are being increasingly eroded and threatened. It is worth reading a more extensive excerpt from James Madison’s prescient April 20, 1795 “Political Observations” quoted above:

“Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

“War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

“The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.

“No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

“War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.

“In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.

“In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.

“The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

–James Madison, from “Political Observations,” April 20, 1795 in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Volume IV, page 491.