Trust no one. Or, trust everyone, because we’re all going to find out anyway.
Spencer Ackerman, of the Guardian, is a big wheel on the Twitter. These are all from today.
Spencer Ackerman @attackerman
NSA’s Raj De says any company/service provider for whom collection under 702 occurred knew about it, even if didn’t know “PRISM” name. Big.
Spencer Ackerman @attackerman
Another clarification from NSA’s De: the companies also know about upstream collection under 702, from Internet backbone, not just PRISM.
Spencer Ackerman @attackerman
@JameelJaffer of ACLU: Vacuuming a country’s entire phone calls is “the logical endpoint of the arguments the government is making today.”
As suggested by this comment from somervilletom, this thread is to catch — vacuum, if you will — your thoughts on the surveillance state.
Update: PRISM background from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
PRISM is a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program launched in 2007 by the National Security Agency (NSA), with participation from an unknown date by the British equivalent agency, GCHQ.PRISM is a government code name for a data-collection effort known officially by the SIGAD US-984XN.The Prism program collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to Internet companies such as Google Inc. and Apple Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. The NSA can use these Prism requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the Internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle, among other things
Footnote numbers removed for readability. Virtually every major firm in “the Internet sector” was shocked — shocked! — when PRISM’s existence was revealed. Or they weren’t.
On the Ukraine thread I stated unequivocally that, in my view, Manning damaged national security and foreign policy not to mention the lives of troops, foreign service officers, and intelligence agents in the field. It was an immature and nihilistic act that just sent a boatload of classified info into the cloud to see what would happen. It was not a specific leak of a specific program that endangered American lives or liberties.
Snowden’s clearly was. The NSA program is illegal, unconstitutional, making us less free and certainly less safe (by diverting countless resources and man hours to domestic intelligence instead of focusing abroad, spying on allies like Merkel instead of enemies like Putin, etc. it was a massive clusterfuck and I am glad it’s been exposed). That said, I think Snowden had a much better case than Manning and should’ve stood trial. We would’ve gained from further revelations and his defense would’ve galvanized the opposition to these policies. Instead, he blew all of his credibility away by engaging in a self-serving quest for attention and personal praise of unsavory regimes like China or Russia. Say what you will about the post-9/11 US, and there is a lot to criticize, it is nowhere near as autocratic or barbaric than those regimes which he has consistently praised.
The Senate needs to stand up and pushback against this, we need to repeal the Patriot Act in it’s entirety and suspend the drone war overseas. Drones of course should still be used to get intelligence, and I don’t see how any of our post-9/11 sins have any bearing over the legitimate need to contain Russia and restore order in Eastern Europe. But some here think it does.
I think Manning is actually a sympathetic figure. A victim of the cruel DADT policy, a victim of society’s indifference to transgendered individuals, and a victim of a political-military system that conditioned her to think she was fighting the terrorists that killed us on 9/11 while engaging in a foolish war in Iraq and all sorts of unrelated operations overseas. Instead of trying to reform that system from the inside or bring to light it’s abuses so it could be reformed from the outside, she tried, with the help of noted anarchist, nihilist, and accused rapist Assange to bring the system down entirely. Not the right move and it cost her and our foreign policy dearly.
As for Snowden, he comes across as a big dick to me, he’s clearly a narcissist, not actually that bright, and a big Paultard who had he gone into the military might’ve ended up like a McVeigh. But, what he did actually was legal in my view and helped bring a stop to a terrible program and policy endangering us all. It’s his cavorting with Russia and China instead of giving himself up for his cause that gives me cause for concern. Very difficult for him to get a fair trial now and very difficult to see if he isn’t selling things that should be secret to our rivals. Had he just turned himself in and sought whistleblower protection he would’ve done a much better service for his country.
… but Snowden is a dick and a narcissist. OK JC. đŸ™‚
I think one could make a case for separating Snowden and Manning. Manning is a soldier, and he took a soldier’s oath, and he leaked information about war.
Snowden is problematic — though I also read the New Republic piece, and found it interesting but wanting (as in, wanting to prove a point while pretending to be objective) — but so is the system. There will never be a perfect actor in this drama.
And the irony of Snowden, to me, is that we just didn’t need the information, we needed HIM. As much as the hero / villain / dick and narcissist debate is annoying, it puts a human face on all this. We screamed for years, and no one listened, but Snowden focused everything. The reaction to him tells us a lot. Obama, as I argued on the other thread, is pretty rational when it comes to Snowden personally, it seems — but he’s clearly not rational on the NSA.
And I don’t care. Did you read the rest of my argument? He is a whistleblower deserving of protection and due process and he should face his accusers since that trial would do far more to help America than his continuing to be a pawn of our autocratic rivals. That’s all I was trying to say.
I am saying too many on the left think he and Manning are these saints or victims (the same way some fetishize a thug like Chavez or Castro or Guevara before him) of American tyranny, when in reality, he is a bit of a far right ‘activist’ who spouts the same kind of radical anti-statist nonsense that the Pauls and McVeigh shouted. But the TNR piece argues this is why he is not deserving of protection, and I totally disagree there, but we shouldn’t be cheering him on S x SW either.
But my point is, don’t worry about Snowden. Almost nothing he says or does now matters. He could outright defect to North Korea, and that would reflect on him, not this country.
What matters is what he revealed, and what we do now.
Sorry, but I think you’re way, way offbase on your prescription for what Mr. Snowden should have done.
I put much more credence in the view of Daniel Ellsberg on this matter, in pieces like this (emphasis mine):
This is the government that tortured Ms. Manning. Your notion that Mr. Snowden should have handed himself over to this government is naive and mistaken.
I don’t know why Manning was treated the way he and then she was, but why is the press not asking Hagel that question everytime he speaks to them? If the Pentagon were trying to keep that a secret they have already failed miserably.
Snowden is a civilian and last time I checked habeas corpus had not been suspended. I don’t see why he can’t avail himself of the same due process and rights everyone else gets. He should hire a lawyer and go through the motions. The lawyer should raise a stink at every turn and I don’t know why a judge wouldn’t uphold the Constitution if there is a blatant violation. You seem to have given up on our system; I haven’t. I assume it will work and that there are plenty of ways to make it work.
Other than solitary confinement which, while we may think it’s torture, is not considered torture as of yet?
Since you seem to have missed it in the other thread:
Is the UN specialist on torture unqualified?
as torture. It is one of those things so obvious that we hardly needed to be told.
That is all I was stating. He was not tortured according to American law, which is the law he is subjected to, or the military code of justice.
In either case, I certainly agree that solitary confinement should be eliminated along with the death penalty and deplore it’s use against Chelsea Manning. Particularly since it occurred pre-trial, and is used post-sentencing in the civilian system.
Anyway, as I stated below, we are all in agreement the NSA needs to be reigned in pretty hard.
By the same reasoning, no torture occurred during the prior administration. After all, waterboarding is not “torture”, according to the White House officials who ordered it.
At the risk of skirting Godwin’s law, I remind you that the Nuremberg defendants (some of whom were executed for their crimes) committed no violations of contemporaneous German or Japanese military or civil law.
I think America was on more solid moral ground during the era of the Nuremberg trials than we are today.
I thought this post was going to be about Paul, since I, at least, very much agree with what he has to say on this topic, even though I have to question the “personality.”
But why start off the discussion by deriding the messenger? (who wasn’t even mentioned in the original post)
This label of “attention-seeker” is often used to assassinate the character of someone who has done something that the assassin cannot attack directly. It’s an ad-hominem attack. In this case, Snowden did deliberately try to publicize his leaks in a way that could not be stifled or marginalized, and he did it for a good reason. He didn’t want to wind up in solitary confinement next to Manning. Going to Russia was not his first choice. it’s where he could get to.
Please give us quotes of him “consistently praising” autocratic and barbarous regimes.
By “autocratic and barbarous regimes,” I presume jconway is referring again to Russia and China..Here is a transcript of Snowden’s recent presentation to the SXSW conference. You can Ctrl-F to find the words Russia and China to see what’s said using them. If you expect that Snowden said those countries are great, you’ll be disappointed. The closest he came to anything like that is saying that they won’t bother to build the capability that the NSA has, to spy on everyone, because they can steal the data from the NSA.
In my view, the debate about Mr. Snowden, Ms. Manning (I guess, I haven’t followed the case closely enough to know), and Mr. Assange misses the point.
The surveillance being conducted by the NSA transcends the most distopian fantasies of Orwell. At the same time, the mechanisms that enable it are the bedrock of the web and internet as we know them. We cannot have the web that we are accustomed to without also having ability to build PRISM and its private industry counterparts.
I am, frankly, disappointed to be reading exchanges about whether or Mr. Snowden is a “dick” or armchair psychoanalysis of his motivations (“attention-seeking”, “narcissist”, etc). I remember all to well when a criminal conspiracy orchestrated from the White House and involving the nation’s highest officials burgled the offices of a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg. The fact that Mr. Ellsberg was receiving psychiatric care was itself broadcast all over society by that same administration in hopes of discrediting him.
I’m reminded of climate deniers attacking the activism of Dr. Hansen.
Stop making these guys into heroes. They are not. That Snowden is a legitimate whistleblower deserving of protection, doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t deserve praise or a peace prize, or that he is a hypocrite for staying in Russia instead of facing the music in American courts. Manning is an unfortunate and troubled soul who endangered American lives, but deserved full due process that was denied her. She was sentenced too harshly, but did deserve to go to jail. This is a nuanced series of arguments, aren’t you the one always decrying the black and white characterization of issues?
Yet you are blanket against any kind of intervention overseas, any kind of remotely assertive American foreign policy, any kind of drone, even for purely intel purposes, and any kind of intelligence or spy agency. We aren’t Canada, we are always going to be a world power that requires great capabilities. And I would argue there wouldn’t be an EU or Canada that could afford the luxury of being passive social democracies without America willing to put it’s blood and treasure on the line.
Whose lives were endangered?
You may have noticed that Manning was acquitted of all charges of aiding the enemy.
Head of that review says he did
I’m most emphatically NOT attempting to make anybody a hero, that’s why I wrote “Trees and the forest”, and your first paragraph exemplifies what I mean by missing the point. The massive surveillance operation being conducted by the NSA is just as anti-American, just as dangerous, and just as tyrannical whether Mr. Snowden is a hero or a villain.
Your second paragraph mis-states what I’ve written on BMG recently. I am opposed to US military intervention, and I think we’re in violent agreement about that. I think any intervention that happens should be nuanced and probably must be led by somebody else to be effective. We may disagree about who runs point, but that in no way means I’m opposed to “any kind of intervention overseas”.
Regarding drones, in my comment on the other thread I said just the opposite from your characterization:
The concern I raised about drones is about the domestic use of drones. Are you suggesting that using fleets of nano-drones to conduct domestic surveillance is ok with you?
I also wrote on that same thread:
Do you disagree with me? You even uprated that comment!
I certainly hope that America has ways to have a muscular and assertive foreign policy without resorting to the heavy-handed and ultimately counter-productive disasters that have accompanied virtually every overseas “intervention” I can think of in the past, say, decade (since 9/11).
It seems to me that the very first step towards accomplishing that is to rule out the ready-fire-aim approach that has been so tempting lately. I assume, because I respect your commentary, that you are not proposing that.
In any case, THIS thread is about surveillance, and I certainly hope that we agree more than we disagree about that topic.
I misinterpreted what you were saying on the other thread and conflating your more nuanced position with the others. In much the same way, nobody here is actually defending Snowden or Manning like friends on Facebook are, as victims or martyrs.
I think we are all in agreement that what Putin did was wrong, we differ to the degree in which the US can effectively stop him.
As to this thread, I am quite clear that I don’t even want border patrol drones let alone domestic ones, nor the vast majority of the post-9/11 security state. What troubles me is the peace dividend of ending the wars is not being accompanied by a rollback of these laws. Let us not praise Rand Paul too quickly, in the unlikely event he is actually elected as President he will continue all these policies that Obama said he’d undo as well. They will be permanent unless we get the same coalition that stopped the Syrian strike to roll these powers back. What the NSA is doing is entirely illegal and unAmerican I think we are all in agreement about that.
There’s a lot to chew over here.
The harm caused to both Iraq and the US by the actual actions Manning blew the whistle on, is both provable and enormous. Manning, according to Manning, tried to go through “proper channels”, and was rebuffed; it was then that she approached Assange. Assange’s personal views, like Snowden’s, tend towards the cyber-libertarian; but in early 2010 he had not yet been accused of sexual assault, and was running the most effective news organization in the world. It was only after Manning’s leaks that Assange became Public Enemy Number One for the deep state. In my opinion – and I know not everyone will share this – Manning was justified in violating her oath as a soldier, because the illegality she was exposing was vastly more severe. Like anybody, she has flaws, but if our military were filled with people with her moral sense, it would be a better military and America would be better off for it. She was indeed tortured in custody, because the US has ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and is fully bound by its provisions; treaties supersede federal law.
Edward Snowden is only in Russia for one reason. The US government revoked his passport while he was flying into Moscow and was due to fly out again on another flight. The US government was in fact so anxious to have him not able to travel further, that it forced the private plane of the president of Ecuador to land in Spain during its flight from Moscow to Quito, just because there was a rumor Snowden would be on it. So the US government was well aware from the beginning that neither China nor Russia was Snowden’s eventual destination. They can, even now, easily get him out of the hands of the Russian government by re-granting him a valid passport to travel on, or by allowing a friendlier government to grant him asylum. We cannot, of course, guarantee that now, as a Russian resident, Snowden is not vulnerable to exploitation by Russian intelligence, though it does appear at least that he has never, while in Russia, had on him the archive of the documents he leaked, which he handed over to the journalists who have since been making the Snowden disclosures. If Russian intelligence still pumps him for information on NSA methods, and there’s no evidence so far that they have gained any information at all from him, the US government would bear a great deal of the blame for trapping him in Russia in the first place.
Legally speaking, as a contractor, rather than a government employee, Snowden is not, and was not ever, eligible under US law for whistleblower protections. There would have been no point in him seeking protection he would never have gotten. He also asserts (though this could only be corroborated by the NSA, which isn’t going to do so) that he tried many times to bring up his concerns via “proper channels”.
Without having to declare him a “hero”, then, it is clearly not rational to criticize him for “hypocrisy” for staying in Russia – it’s not like he has any choice about that right now – or for failing to employ legal defenses he is barred from using.
Fleeing the country was also a rational response to his situation. Have you seen how many times serving US elected officials have called for his death from the floor of Congress? It is plain that he is not safe in this country, and Daniel Ellsberg is right about what would have happened to him. You may believe that he should have taken his chances, but the law is (however unfairly), for the reasons stated above, not on his side here. Even if it were, our system is such that it is trivial for a prosecutor to ensnare people in factitious criminal charges if the prosecutor is sufficiently motivated; with respect to Snowden and Assange both, there are no words strong enough to express how motivated they would be, once they were on US soil. Look, for comparison, at the case of John Kiriakou – he is the only person ever jailed as a result of the CIA’s torture program, and that’s because he blew the whistle on it. Like it or not, that is the America we live in today.
Last, speaking as a student of history and as a dual US-British citizen, I’d be wary of assertions like “America is always going to be a world power.” All empires fall. It was the turn of Britain a century ago, and it is – to my sorrow – likely America’s turn in the decades to come; the parallels, for those conscious of history, are too powerful to ignore. All I would offer in consolation is that it is not necessary or desirable, in order for you and I and all those we know to lead the kinds of life we want, for America to be Top Nation. Britain is a better, richer and happier place today than it was when it was trying to control 40% of the world’s landmass; it’s more than possible that America would be a better, richer and happier place today if we chose not to be sinking over half a trillion dollars a year in spying on everybody and maintaining armed outposts in 170 countries. Tacitus spoke of the Roman imperial agenda as “Creating a wasteland and calling it, peace” – how much, indeed, have our rulers learned since then?
I love your point about Britain.
Are you sure about this, though?
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33918.pdf is an official government document stating who is a “covered employee” under the Whistleblower Protection Act. President Obama actually expanded this Act in 2012 (Presidential Policy Directive 19) to cover NSA and CIA employees, who were not previously covered; but he did not expand it to cover NSA contractors such as Snowden. NPR reports (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/01/23/265360447/snowden-coming-home-is-not-possible-under-current-whistleblower-laws) that Snowden himself believes, correctly, that the Whistleblower Protection Act does not cover him.
I see that he wasn’t eligible.
But to the larger point, the whistleblower argument has always rung hollow to me. It’s like Jeff Toobin saying Snowden broke laws by violating his contract. Well, yes, but when the target is a rogue agency, and it might not be that rogue (that is, maybe everyone in the White House knew) … the greater good has to be considered.
I didn’t realize he was being prevented by the US from traveling, including back here if the government wants to arrest him. I’d have more respect for him if he were willing to face arrest and have his day in court, even if he doesn’t have whistleblower protections. The constitutional principles at stake (freedom of speech comes to mind) are important enough that we need this case to enshrine said principles.
…that he should accept, like John Kiriakou, going to jail for a trumped-up violation of the Espionage Act?
Why? He is not, despite the desperate attempts of the government to paint him as such, an agent of or in the pay of any foreign power. All he has done is to inform the public about matters of high importance that it’s good we all should know. If the Kiriakou case had come out differently, I might say, yeah, he should take his chances – but it didn’t.
…but MLK spent some time in jail too, and for the right reasons. Besides, the jury could always find him not guilty regardless of what the government would like.
What harms did Manning reveal in Iraq? What information from those leaks benefited the American public? How was shoring up the Iranian nuclear program by outing the diplomats working with our State Department to apply internal pressure to the Ayatollah? How was stopping the North Korean nuclear program shored up by releasing cables showing that the Chinese think that regime is as irrational as we do? How does revealing Stuxnet protect American citizens rather than the Iranian nuclear program? How does revealing what diplomats say in closed sessions improve diplomacy? How does putting more and more of our foreign policy in the hands of the far more secretive and evasive DOD, DIA, NSA, or CIA make any of us safer or freer? Those are all the direct ramifications of Manning’s actions, whether you choose to admit them or not.
Iraq intel was cooked, the war was unwinnable, like we didn’t already know that? I don’t see what she proved or what information benefited the public.
When have I ever defended the pre-trial actions of the US involving Chelsea Manning? She surely didn’t deserve any of that treatment, and should’ve been properly tried under the military code of justice. But what she did do was illegal, rightly so in my opinion, and the sentence could’ve been a little more leniant but she should’ve gone to jail for some period of time. No Ellsburg there in my view, though I know he is entitled to his own opinion on that.
Thanks for the consolation! I love it when Europeans who benefit most from American military power lecture us! How many thousands of Americans died defending Britain and France in two world wars? How many billions of real dollars did we spend on Free Europe with the Marshall Plan? Britain is only able to enjoy all those benefits since she passed the torch of world leadership to the US. You don’t have a choice, great powers will always decide world events, the US has its hands dirty and is an imperfect nation, I am not arguing it is exceptional or morally superior by any means, but to paraphrase Churchill-we are the lest evil power the free world has.
Canada or Sweden would never have beaten the Axis, contained and eventually peacefully defeated the Soviet Union, or contain the rising powers who seek regional hegemon today. If we bothered taxing the wealthy and corporate America we could afford our guns and butter, but if Europe tires so much of ‘American imperialism’ I’d be more than happy to stop paying for it’s guns.
We are the only nation capable of defending other countries from getting absorbed by aggressive powers. I am proud that we defended South Korea and Kuwait. Fly over the Yellow Sea at night, as I recently did coming out of Incheon, and compare all the lights and activity on the southern side of the DMZ to the sheer darkness on the other. Would you shut those bases down? I see 36,000 American troops defending that country from the worst regime on the planet. You want to make sure trigger happy nationalist Japan doesn’t revoke Article 9? Can’t do it without our bases there and the nuclear shield. You want to keep China out of Taiwan? Can’t do it without American commitment. Even the Vietnamese are begging us to rebuild our old bases.
We should certainly retreat from brush fire wars of choice, you won’t find anyone who worked harder to protest the Iraq War than I did, it’s the reason I became politically active at such a young age. I would be the last person to support a war in Iran, I could even see how a nuclear Iran might be preferable to the hellfire any kind of strike would unleash. As much as I want to see Assad dead and out of power, I also opposed those strikes since his opposition is even worse, and we had no idea how Russia would respond. But to say the choice is between the cyber libertarians as you called them who have no allegiance to any flag and want us to retreat entirely from global involvement and the neocons I say it’s a false choice. We need an activist foreign policy, one that is committed to institutions and alliances, and yes we undermine them every time we do something stupid: by unilaterally invading Iraq, by spying on our allies, and by spying on our own people, by illegally imprisoning and torturing people at Gitmo and abroad, by backing Pakistan. I have never argued otherwise. But the choice is not between giving up and going home or blundering around foolishly. It saddens me to see the foreign policy of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy compared to that of George W. Bush.
Sweden, as a neutral nation, certainly wasn’t going to defeat the Axis. But that was 70 years ago. It would be like basing military needs in 1931 on the Civil War.
Frankly, the arguments you’re making are generally the realm of Europe-hating neocon hawks. The 2013 military spending by the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Australia – which you so derisively mock – was about 30% larger than that of Russia and China combined. Surely they don’t need the United States to outspend all of those nations (including Russia and China) combined, which it does, clocking in at 39% of the world’s military spending, in order to have some semblance of safety. It strikes me that we could cut our military by more than half and still be as safe as we are now.
The foreign policy of Roosevelt was to do absolutely nothing until after Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, Benelux, and France, and then to build up the U.S. military and engage in Lend-Lease. We didn’t get in the war until attacked at Pearl Harbor, a year and a half after the fall of France. He was more aggressive than the Republican isolationists, but not all that aggressive.
The foreign policy of Truman came at a very particular point in history, when the U.S.S.R. was refusing to leave Eastern European nations it had occupied when fighting the Germans, and may well have been an overreach.
The foreign policy of Kennedy was to abandon the Bay of Pigs uprising, negotiate an end to the Missile Crisis, and negotiate a Test Ban Treaty. His main incursion into hawkish foreign policy – Vietnam – has gone down as perhaps the biggest mistake in this country’s international history.
Snowden explicitly cites the Kiriakou case as the main reason he did not persist in going through channels, but used news outlets instead, while staying out of US clutches.
What harms did Manning reveal in Iraq?
Don’t take my word for what was revealed. The New York Times puts it pretty well.
In Iraq, the leaked logs – aside from the terrible “Collateral Murder” video – describe “many episodes never made public in such detail, show[ing] the multitude of shortcomings with this new system [of using contractors in place of the regular military]: how a failure to coordinate among contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy. Contractors often shot with little discrimination — and few if any consequences — at unarmed Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security forces, American troops and even other contractors, stirring public outrage and undermining much of what the coalition forces were sent to accomplish. The mayhem cropped up around Iraq, notably in one episode reported in March 2005 in which a small battle erupted involving three separate security companies. […] For all the contractors’ bravado — Iraq was packed with beefy men with beards and flak jackets — and for all the debates about their necessity, it is clear from the documents that the contractors appeared notably ineffective at keeping themselves and the people they were paid to protect from being killed. In fact, the documents seem to confirm a common observation on the ground during those years in Iraq: far from providing insurance against sudden death, the easily identifiable, surprisingly vulnerable pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s driven by the security companies were magnets for insurgents, militias, disgruntled Iraqis and anyone else in search of a target.”
In Afghanistan, the leaked logs “sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.”
You can find out more at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html.
It would seem clear to me that these leaks benefited the American public, and speeded our exit from Iraq.
When it came to the diplomatic cables, I would contend that it is on the whole better for the public to know when, say, the US launches an undeclared cyberwar against a sovereign nation without congressional discussion or approval (Stuxnet), when Chinese protestations as to the legitimacy and stability of North Korea’s leaders are shown to be insincere, and when our whole professed commitment to spreading “democracy” is shown for the hollow sham it too often is. You argue that by revealing misdeeds and hypocrisy, Manning simply drove the misdeeds and hypocrisy further underground; that’s not any sort of argument for not revealing them. When you try to suppress such things, the strategy that works is to drive them farther and farther underground until they become impractical strategies to pursue.
Manning’s information was and is invaluable to historians of our involvement in Iraq, and serve as an incontrovertible object lesson in why we should never have gotten involved. That’s why the war-hawks shouted as much as possible about how much MANNING VIOLATED THE OATH. They were trying to distract from disclosures that, by showing the granular horror and incompetence of the World’s Finest Military (TM), made it harder to convince the public and the commentariat that war in, say, Syria was a good idea.
What she did do was illegal, rightly so in my opinion.
I don’t entirely disagree. I get that she knowingly violated the UCMJ and therefore the law requires some jail time. Her sentence and treatment were wildly excessive, and speak much more to the government’s embarrassment at her disclosures and the desire to deter others, than to any actual harm the disclosures caused.
Thanks for the consolation! I love it when Europeans who benefit most from American military power lecture us! How many thousands of Americans died defending Britain and France in two world wars? How many billions of real dollars did we spend on Free Europe with the Marshall Plan? Britain is only able to enjoy all those benefits since she passed the torch of world leadership to the US.
I’m a US citizen too (did you notice that?), and my taxes and yours both go to supporting the US military. But it’s obvious that the bulk of military spending over the last fifteen years has not been on general policing actions like, say, preventing Somali piracy. It has been on US wars of choice, that never needed fighting in the first place. I’m not going to express gratitude for that spending, or to consider it a substitute for UK military spending, because guess what? Without W and his cabal of whackadoodle warmongers, neither the UK nor any other country would have started those wars themselves. Dare to disagree?
As for the stuff further in the past; how would you feel if I asserted that the United States owed all it was today as a country to British colonization, and that therefore, you should be grateful? That would be ignorant, offensive, and wrong, and I think the same about your comments regarding the US in the Second World War. We might as well be grateful to Russia itself, given that they expended many more lives in that war than either the US or Britain did. I would welcome us spending much less to defend Europe, and having Europe spend more if it were necessary; but I think you’d be surprised how much we do spend is in fact a grossly overblown, unaccounted-for gourmanderie of graft.
We are the lest evil power the free world has.
If that is really so, then the US should welcome, rather than discourage, more sunlight on its activities.
In all your litany of past praiseworthy activities of the US military, you’re forgetting that with each marginal intervention, the payoff gets less. Empire is a drug, and since the end of the Cold War, we have been overdosing. You can pick a country here and there where there’s a case for (some international force, not necessarily the US) to be there; but you can’t make the case for 170 countries, so understandably you don’t try.
I believe in building peace abroad, not waging wars of choice. I believe in investing in education and remedying global poverty, not in military bases. Each base we build is in itself a risk to the peace of the world, irrespective of how great the rationale seemed at the time.
Which is NOT how I am presenting it.
First a reply to Fenway:
–I am not a neocon, realists like Bob Gates and Chuck Hagel, appointed by President Obama and vigorously opposed by the neocons have been saying the same things about Europe failing to do it’s part, you can also see how grossly unprepared they were to take on Qadaffi’s ramshackle military here. If you think the EU could single handedly defend itself against Russia without American assistance you must’ve just returned from a lovely visit to Colorado
–
-The Republican isolationists called for zero support for our allies which is exactly what marthews is calling for, for us to roll up every overseas base, and to abandon our allies to the wolves. That is not what Democratic presidents did historically. It’s not what Roosevelt did, not with major allies. I cried no tears over Georgia which is like the Czechs in this case, especially because their President goaded Putin as much as the other way around. But Ukraine is a way bigger deal, we let Germany take Czech but Britain and France were right not to let them take Poland, we pursued economic sanctions against Japan until they fired the first shot. That is far more proactive than what marthews or Manning would want.
To Marthews:
Manning didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know about Afghanistan or Iraq, we withdrew Iraq right on schedule and Manning didn’t change that one iota, most of us were highly aware that Afghanistan was corrupt. You are being way more selective in which leaks were good than Manning was. That’s my whole point. Manning either didn’t care or didn’t know about what she leaked. Some of it was good, but she just let entire wires and cables detailing the entire secret history of recent US diplomacy out in the open jeopardizing ongoing negotiations. You may feel we have a right to know, but it wasn’t up to Manning to determine what we did and didn’t have a right to know. The stuxnet thing hurt, particularly since Russia is waging cyberwar with impunity, and particularly since it set back the Iranian nuclear program without endangering any lives. I would rather stuxnet than a first strike, and that is the real choice the President faced. You bet it worked in tandem with the stricter sanctions in bringing Iran to the table. can’t do it again now thanks to Manning. Public diplomacy and private diplomacy are very different, and both levels are required to be effective. Make no mistake, Manning crippled the State Department’s ability to do foreign policy, Hillary Clinton was rightly upset since she lost a decades long battle between the DoS and DoD. Now thanks to Manning more generals will be doing foreign policy, more intelligence agencies will be planning it and far less diplomats. I want John Kerry to be successful, I want our diplomats to be the first line for our foreign policy and now they won’t be. That’s directly Manning’s fault.
I believe in building peace abroad, not waging wars of choice
Where have I proposed a war of choice anywhere here? I am not defending Iraq, and I was against Syria, am against a war in Iran (which is precisely why stuxnet is a good thing since it made that war far less likely). I even back the Hagel defense cuts! I too believe in building peace abroad, which is why I support containment and deterrence.
I believe in investing in education and remedying global poverty, not in military bases.
It’s not an either or choice. We had both under FDR-Carter. Reagan than threw it out of balance by gutting social safety nets, cutting taxes way too low, and building up the military in a grossly disproportionate way to meet non-existent Soviet buildups and challenges that never materialized. I support the Hagel cuts-you are proposing eliminating our global footprint entirely and voluntarily surrendering global leadership to China and Russia-which are increasing their defense budgets-and that is something I am unwilling to do.
Each base we build is in itself a risk to the peace of the world
That’s a rather extreme statement. I would argue our bases in West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan to name a few have significantly prevented war and deterred aggression. Our continued troop presence in the Balkans is preserving a tenuous peace, our bases in the Middle East prior to the Iraq War deterred and successfully contained Iraqi aggression, and one could argue we can cut them back significantly now. I agree with Joe Biden that we should shore up our bases in the Baltic states and Poland to defend our NATO allies. NATO helped preserve peace, as has the UN, which we have jointly operated bases with in a variety of peacekeeping settings.
I am not arguing for a bellicose foreign policy, but a balanced one, and one I would argue this President and his Democratic predecessors maintained. You want to follow the Pauls down the road to Old Right isolationism so be it. I am more than happy to see the Republicans go in that direction since it means a diminished neoconservative influence on that party and means ours is the only adult foreign policy left standing.
I have read nothing at all to indicate marthews is calling for anything of the sort.
Where to begin? Perhaps at the end. I can do without the snark. I never said the EU could defend itself singlehandedly from Russia, though if seriously threatened I think it could. I said the combined budget of the EU and the US could probably get by being four times larger than Russia’s rather than nine times larger, as at present. And I’m hardly going to take one opinion piece, on a peripheral incursion in Libya, as evidence of what would happen if Europe itself were threatened.
I also never said you were a neocon. I said the, “Rah, rah, USA. We saved your pussy European asses from speaking German in WWII and now we’re the only thing keeping you from speaking Russian” line of argument is unbecoming. And I do not agree with Gates or Hagel that Europe should spend more on defense when it’s slashing everything else. I believe Europe made a big mistake in going the austerity route, but in the midst of that I would not support more spending on the military. Smarter spending, maybe. More spending, no.
I thought Marthews was getting a little snarky so I snarked back and it was unbecoming of me and I’ll apologize to you both.
I agree with spend smarter-Marthews is suggesting spend nothing or next to nothing. He said he would close every base since every base is a threat to world peace. He reminds me of my friends who asked me to protest the Army’s birthday on Cambridge Common. I didn’t go because I believe we do need an Army, and the best way we support our troops is not wasting it in foolhardy wars. But a standing army is a good thing to have when used properly.
I think that’s a problem with this conversation and thread, and to the extent that I’ve contributed to the problem (I’ll admit my the two posts in this thread I wrote had entirely the wrong effect I intended), I apologize. But we all want a foreign policy more aligned with our stated ideals and values, with human rights and the rule of law, but there has to be a balanced approach. We can’t roll back the national security state entirely or retreat entirely from our military commitments abroad.
There is a whole lot more nuance and fluidity to these issues beyond the Fox News talking point of “Obama being a pussy and Snowden being a traitor” versus extreme calls to bring every troop home from foreign soil and eliminate our intelligence gathering capabilities entirely. The NSA needs to be reigned in precisely because in going too far it’s actually far less effective. Snowden makes a good point-by spying on all of us they let the Boston bombers through. By spying on Merkel they dropped the ball on Putin.
But it’s going to be hard enough for our side (and I do believe we are all on the same side here) to create that balanced policy if we move too far in the other extreme. The status quo is unacceptable, I never defended it and I don’t think anyone here is, but drones, the NSA, CIA, the military, the Presidency itself, and the military are tools. They are not intrinsically good or bad. They are tools and necessary ones. The question is how do we best use them? I think quoting the Paul’s, demonizing the foreign policy establishment, and defending the leakers doesn’t really answer that question.
The answer lies in backing strong Congressional oversight, backing members of Congress who support that oversight, actually prosecuting the officials who broke the law to the exact same extent we have prosecuted Manning since they both endangered the public trust and national security alike, limiting executive power, enforcing the ban on overseas assassinations again and following the War Powers Act even for small scale deployments and unmanned combat units. And lastly it means keeping our allies in the loop and treating them as friends, listening to their counsel and working cooperatively with them. And maybe, as Carter did, we can start linking military aid we send to the human rights records of the regimes we send it to. Strengthening soft power and empowering the State Department. Hiring more foreign service officers since we face a real shortage and hiring country and culture experts for specific intel on specific places rather than more IT guys like Snowden to do the bulk data. On the ground intel from specific sources is far more valuable.
I don’t think anyone’s views are as extreme as what you reference (I know mine are not) and there should be broad agreement.
One thing:
Although it is true that the NSA surveillance appears to be too broad to be effective, that is not my primary complaint about it. I’m far more concerned that it’s blatantly incompatible with our constitutional presumption of liberty.
People’s communications simply should not be searched, viewed, or recorded for all time with no individualized suspicion whatsoever. I can’t think of anything more conducive to a totalitarian state in the wrong hands. I believe we must hold the line on this, and for that reason I would oppose the blanket surveillance even if, someday, they figured out how to use the data “effectively.”
I am saying that there is no rational basis for it. It actually doesn’t do what it’s advocates purport to do. But certainly, we don’t want the Stasi.
The Stasi collected files on only one third of their people. We were horrified at the time, but they look like amateurs now compared to the bulk surveillance that technology has made possible.
I do also believe that the huge scale of its collection makes it harder for it to process and understand what it collects. When you’re talking about seizing the entire phone communications of whole countries, no system in the world can parse that meaningfully. But that doesn’t mean they’re not trying to outdo the Stasi any way they can.
The surveillance by the NSA pales in comparison to the combined information aggregated by private companies servicing advertisers on the web, not to mention the private credit bureaus. Have you ever looked at what PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is collected by the Medical Insurance Bureau (MIB) and who has access to it?
I think we have to have much more fundamental discussion than we’re having. I think we have ask ourselves what is “privacy”, and from whom are we reasonably permitted to isolate ourselves.
In the era when our constitutional protections were created, government was the most powerful and therefore most feared agent. I think we have to have another fundamental question about THAT presumption.
I am horrified by the NSA and PRISM. The rub here is that they are by no means the most powerful or the scariest guys in the neighborhood.
This is what “libertarians” (or at least the sincere ones who aren’t clothing pro-plutocracy views in hip clothing) don’t see. The NSA revelations and the experience of peoples around the globe over the past century make clear that individual privacy and liberty still face tremendous threats from governments.
But in that time a threat from private corporate actors has arisen that rivals the threat posed by government. That threat can only be curtailed under the rule of law enforced by a democratic government. We should insist that our government refrain from these unjustified violations of personal privacy and liberty, AND that it protect against against similar violations by private actors. Modern Europe has far superior privacy protections for its citizens.
If Facebook uses my PII to target an ad at me, it might conceivably be annoying, but it won’t materially harm me. Commercial companies have commercial interests, and I always have the choice not to buy their product. At its worst, individual actors at commerical companies may be able to misuse the data available to them to commit crimes, such as stalking or harassment. That’s a meaningful problem, but can be addressed under current law.
The situation with government is far different. Government can lock you up, or even kill you, on the basis of the data it has on you. It is also breaking into commercial databases and stealing, for law enforcement and surveillance purposes, the data commercial companies have which was never collected for law enforcement purposes. So, I am against strong privacy protections for commercial data PROVIDED that government is only requesting commercial data on an individualized, constitutional, probable cause warrant basis.
I would also observe that a great deal of the Internet – including an awful lot of free sites – get their only revenue from advertising, which in turn only generates meaningful revenue because of their ability to target ads. If you prevent targeting through EU-style data protection regulation, one effect is that you would drop the revenue of free websites by around two-thirds. I like having a robust Internet with many free sites available.
Alex Marthews, National Chair, Restore The Fourth; President, Digital Fourth Massachusetts (yes, I work on these issues full-time!)
I agree with much of your comment. I think your last paragraph is perhaps the most important aspect of this issue. I addressed this in the thread that spawned this one:
In my view, this is the real issue. It is compounded by the reality that I see no credible way to rely on the executive branch of the government to protect us from illegal searches when it is that same executive branch that is so eager to conduct these searches in the first place.
There are some differences between us. Private companies can, and do, use PRISM-style data mining for FAR MORE than targeting ads. There are entire industries doing, for example, forensic discovery — using PII mined from the web to gather information about you for use in civil actions like employer and divorce proceedings. Services now exist to assemble “background” checks available to prospective employers, landlords, and mortgage companies. The boundary between use and misuse of PII in the private domain is FAR less well-defined than in the public domain. Relying on current law to protect oneself from “harassment” is, I suspect, a dangerous delusion — the threshold of harm that must be passed before authorities are remotely interested is well above what I suspect you or I would consider offensive.
Mr. Bork was harmed by the disclosure of the list of video titles he had rented. It is easier than you think to assemble a list of youtube videos (or more explicit material for those who do that) for just about anyone. So long as the entity that assembles that list is willing to pay the providers for access to the data (because money talks) and is only a little creative about the use it intends for that data, no laws will be broken and the providers will appreciate the business.
Finally, I quibble a bit with your use of the phrase “free sites”. Yes, those sites are free to the user. But it still takes significant amounts of money to deliver those “free” bits to your browser, and SOMEBODY pays that money. Too few people ask themselves “who is paying for me to watch this material, and why?”
In my view, the bottom line is that government intrusion is just the visible part of the real iceberg. It’s the part that’s NOT visible that sinks ships.
You’re focusing on privacy issues, perfectly understandable given the topic of the thread. I’m not sure I agree 100% with the idea that there’s no harm if private companies know all about our patterns and sell that information, but I agree they’re not going to haul us off to prison.
When I write about private actors posing as big a threat to our “freedoms” as public actors, I’m talking not only about privacy issues, but also about things like labor rights and regulations. Libertarians push a fantasy world in which everything will be great if the government “governs least.” In an advanced industrial and post-industrial economy, that leads to the vast majority of individuals having no leverage and it leads to untold human and environmental destruction. I wish we could ask coal miners or steel workers from the 1870s how “free” they felt in the absence of regulation.
The point about internet ad revenue is an interesting one, though. We always have to balance competing interests.
Just in case it wasn’t clear – as it appears it wasn’t – my point is that there is a diminishing marginal return to opening new bases in new countries, once you get beyond the most important, say, ten or so? At what point do we say, hey, do we really need this $2 billion base in Burkina Faso or Paraguay or Micronesia? Who made us the boss of everybody, and why do we have to trade off all the positive things we could get for that money, and pour it into engines of destruction instead?
As Eisenhower famously put it, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
I don’t want a defense budget of zero; I want us to stop the mindboggling level of waste and reallocate a very significant portion of defense spending to purposes that are not in the service of violence and destruction.
Nor do we need to abandon all foreign intelligence-gathering capability. I would be perfectly satisfied if the people we were keeping tabs on were actual agents of actual foreign powers who pose a realistic threat to the United States. Surveillance supported by individualized probable cause is perfectly valid and supported by the Constitution. However, if you restrict yourself to that kind of surveillance, you may not actually have an NSA – and we need to at least be capable of imagining the truthfully not too terrible world in which that is so.
Congressional oversight can’t be the only answer here, though it is important. If you have a deep state that has already surveilled and gathered the secrets of every presidential nominee for the last few cycles, and every person with the ability to monitor its budget and operations, who is really in control? Not the elected officials, that’s for sure.
I agree with much more of what you say than you think. Much of what you say, about soft power and about foreign policies that align with our values, is right and important to say. But you should be aware of the damage that an over-mighty security state is doing to this country, and it is only enabled further by accepting as a first premise that we HAVE TO be doing at least half of what we’re doing now.
Then I do think we are in agreement. Frankly, I am glad we are moving away from Germany (though we do need some forward bases in Europe, but clearly no more tank divisions on the Danube to face off against), I think the Okinawa base has outlived it’s usefulness and clearly if a base antagonizes the local population more than it protects it or our interests-then it is time to go home. I don’t think backing the Sultan brutalizing his people was justified by our naval base in Bahrain-particularly since Diego Garcia is so close by and most of our air/naval wings are located on mobile carriers.
There is no longer a strategic basis for the F-35. I might even scale back the Ford class, and since we are not fighting James Bond I don’t see why we need this thing.
Good response, but I think this is a bit too optimistic:
A tool is something you have power over. The military industrial complex is too big to be a tool. In a totalitarian state the intelligence apparatus has the power — it’s not a tool. We have arguably reached that stage, even before the 70’s (Church, Pike), where the elected government does not have control of the intelligence agencies, so we should be discussing how to put these “tools” back in their place, not how best to use them.
Here is a good breakdown of the four schools of American foreign policy.
Bush was a Jacksonian, Clinton and Obama have mixed Hamiltonian with Wilsonian impulses, and Ron Paul and Gore Vidal were both Jeffersonian isolationists. I would argue that Hamiltonian is the best way to go forward, relying on institutions in a Wilsonian way but giving up it’s commitment to democracy promotion by force, and utilizing Jeffersonian impulses only when it comes to the use of force, rather than the deployment of assets. I think Marthews and others are conflating the two.
I find your categories not very useful. There are people whose opinions do not fit into any of them, and I think part of your difficulty in this discussion stems from trying to cram those people into them.
A link would have been nice, but it seems they are not jconway’s categories. FWIW, I tend to be very Wilsonian.
re: Kirth-the idea is that a good foreign policy takes the best elements of four (even Jacksonianism is useful, but should only be employed when fighting a total war for national defense). And a balanced foreign policy shouldn’t veer too far into one bucket. I would argue Rand Paul is a pure Jeffersonian and his foreign policy would be bad for America in a lot of ways (anti-UN, anti-NATO, anti-humanitarian intervention and foreign aid) and good in other areas (limiting survelliance state, cutting back defense budget, relying less on military force). Obama and Clinton are hybrids of Wilsonian and Hamiltonian instincts. LBJ and Bush were Wilsonian in rhetoric but Jacksonian in implementation which was a bad combination.
The concept is from Walter Russell Mead, and the book review I should’ve attributed is here .
It was a quick search, I think Mead explains the concept better here.
I couldn’t find his Lincoln quote, but basically Lincoln was Jeffersonian regarding foreign entaglements (opposed invading Mexico in the 1840’s and again in the 1860s to enforce the Monroe doctrine), Jacksonian regarding the conduct of the war (he favored total war and total victory), Wilsonian regarding why we were at war (fighting for freedom and human rights and against slavery) and Hamiltonian domestically (encouraged land great colleges,western expansion, infrastructure, and American industry while keeping trade routes open during the war).