Politics – Page 61 – Common Infirmities

Starving children for progress

Apparently the US Fox News network has recently advocated withholding free lunches from poor schoolchildren, as an effective means of teaching their parents the lesson that being poor is a bad life-choice, and they should have chosen to be rich instead. (It should be noted that this represents an upgrading of American right-wing attitudes toward nutritional support for the poor, who were previously compared by leading politicians to dangerous ravening beasts.)

I’m surprised they didn’t cite the wealth of studies from the UK, showing that children receiving free school meals went on to have significantly worse GCSE (age 16 qualification) marks — suggesting that free school meals impede learning of lessons by the children as well as their parents — and had higher rates of obesity (suggesting that Fox News correctly judged that lunch is superfluous for these children). English as a Second Language and Special Education teaching, as well as foster care, appear to have similarly detrimental effects, suggesting that eliminating these supports will yield major improvements to children’s health and educational success.

(For details of the statistical methodology, see here.)

Information, which terrorists could use

If there are any terrorists reading this blog, I have to make a formal demand that you not read this post. Really. Terrorists must stop reading here. (You know who you are.)

According to an article in The Guardian

Following a ruling by Lord Justice Laws and Mr Justice Kenneth Parker, the police will now investigate whether possession of the seized material constitutes a crime under the Terrorism Act 2000, which prohibits possessing information that might be useful to terrorists and specifically “eliciting, publishing or communicating” information about members of the armed forces, intelligence agencies and police which terrorists could use.

That’s quite a broad mandate, and I think many people should be worried.

For instance, I happen to be in possession of information suggesting that the UK intelligence agencies and police and armed forces are led by incompetent politicians who have lost control of their own parties and are losing the support of the public, and who could themselves wind up in prison if the laws were fairly applied. It is easy to see how this information could be of use to terrorists if they knew. And now I have gone and published the information on this blog. (They may already know, but that is no defence under the law, so far as I can tell.)

If it comes to trial, I plan to argue that I couldn’t possibly have anticipated that terrorists would violate the terms of service of this blog by reading past the first line.

This is how democracy works

If you know anything about the difference between the US and the UK constitutions, you probably know that a parliamentary system, as in the UK, is more dynamic and effective: No separation of powers to hamstring the government. The Prime Minister stands on a parliamentary majority, and parliament answers to no one, so he (or sometimes she — that’s another difference), so the PM gets to make decisions and have them carried out.

That’s how it works for legislation, more or less, but not, apparently, in matters of war and peace. Parliament is now actually debating the decision to attack Syria. Labour has submitted an amendment to the government motion, requiring that military action proceed through an orderly process, including a vote by the UN security council. And it appears that there are enough disaffected coalition MPs to make it likely that it would succeed. This forced the government to back down yesterday on holding an immediate vote on a measure authorising the use of force. Now, they are debating a non-binding resolution of support.

I don’t know where I stand on the merits of this, but I’m fascinated by the process, and grateful for Ed Miliband — not someone I had previously thought of as a courageous leader — for being willing to ask some difficult questions. Presidents and prime ministers have a natural bias toward moralising with bombs. It makes them look strong and decisive, and like they’re accomplishing something important. Democracies need other forces that can ask difficult questions, and restrain the march to war.

I wonder if the the US Constitution could be amended to give the Congress a role in declarations of war? Nah, it’d never pass. Too utopian.

But this does spare the Obama administration from the frustration that leads to this sort of invective:

[A government] source was claimed to have said: “No 10 and the Foreign Office think Miliband is a f****** c*** and a copper-bottomed s***. The French hate him now and he’s got no chance of building an alliance with the US Democratic Party.”

I’m not sure what the “copper-bottomed” part means, but it sure sounds colourful.

The cost of anti-terror

By way of Brendan James at The Dish comes this report by Ben Richmond on the disruption of vaccination efforts in rural Pakistan caused by the CIA smuggling a spy into Osama bin Laden’s refuge disguised as a health worker distributing hepatitis B vaccines. I won’t question the justice of killing bin Laden, nor will I call it useless because bin Laden may have been, by that point, barely even a figurehead of al Qaeda. I appreciate the value of propaganda by force in the important struggle against violent Islamists.

But when we reckon the costs against the benefits of killing terrorists, let us consider the 22 vaccination workers killed and 14 injured in retaliation attacks, or the many thousands who will be killed or maimed by polio, now that the realistic hope of soon eradicating that horrible disease has been set back, perhaps for a very long time. One wonders iƒ the cost to public health had any place in President Obama’s decision-making in approving this particular CIA operation. Is there anyone who speaks up for non-American interests? Is there any number of lives of the poor bystanders for whose sake a US president would judge it worth giving up a symbolic victory in the struggle to save American (and wealthy western more generally) lives? Other than because of threats of diplomatic or military retaliation against Americans.

I’d be genuinely interested if any political theorist has thought through how this calculus works.

LOVEINT

John Quiggin points us to this Washington Post report: By analogy with the classic military terms SIGINT (signals intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence), there is now the NSA-internal abbreviation LOVEINT:

The LOVEINT violations involved overseas communications, officials said, such as spying on a partner or spouse. In each instance, the employee was punished either with an administrative action or termination.

NSA released a statement saying that “NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities” and responds “as appropriate.” I contend that if you respond “as appropriate”, you don’t understand the concept of “zero tolerance”. “Administrative action or termination” doesn’t sound like Edward Snowden’s experience of NSA’s zero tolerance — depending on what they mean by “termination”.

But it gets better.

NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong emphasized in a conference call with reporters last week that those errors were unintentional. He did say that there have been “a couple” of willful violations in the past decade. He said he didn’t have the exact figures at the moment.

So, he’s the Chief Compliance Officer of our super math spies, but he can’t keep track of numbers bigger than two.

But it gets better. “Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported.” Is this supposed to reassure us about the fundamental honesty of NSA employees? Here we have a secret government agency, accused of abusing its power. We are told that there have been only “a couple” of abuses, all of which were revealed by the perpetrators themselves. Might a more robust investigation — you know, maybe not third-party investigation, but at least second-party?

At least we know Snowden wasn’t the only one being granted too much trust.

Police break the law: The law must be stopped!

Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair — now titled Lord Blair as reward for his 2010 resignation and his tireless efforts to expand the scope of police anti-terror activity — has given an interview in which he advocates criminalising any release of information that the state wishes to keep secret. He bemoans the fact that

Most of the legislation about state secrets is in the Official Secrets Act and it only concerns an official.

Now, before you wonder how far he might go in criminalising the discussion of public policy, rest assured, Blair is only interested in promoting discussion:

I think there is going to have to be a look at what happens when somebody possesses material which is secret without having authority.

That doesn’t sound so bad. They’re just going to “have a look”, and see “what happens”.

You might think, as soon as someone without “authority” possesses the material, that it is no longer a secret, but that would be only if you don’t have Lord Blair’s experience of making words mean what you intend them to mean.

If only we’d had these laws back in 2005, poor Charles de Menezes might still be a terrorist today!

Spying on the UN: The majestic equality of the law

One of the superficial arguments made against Edward Snowden is, He signed a contract, for crying out loud! He agreed not to reveal this information. And he broke the law. So, of course, he belongs in prison.

Let’s talk about some of the other people who violated the contracts they signed and broke the law. People like Barack Obama. Just to pick an example at random, we have today in Der Spiegel (odd that it hasn’t appeared yet in the English-language press, so far as I have seen):

The US clandestine service NSA has been spying not just on the European Union, but also on the United Nations Headquarters. That has been revealed by secret NSA documents that Spiegel has examined.

According to these, the NSA succeeded in the summer of 2012 in penetrating the videoconference system of the community of nations, and to break the encryption. This “dramatically improved the data received from video-teleconferences and the capacity to decrypt these data,” according to one secret NSA document. “These data transmissions deliver to us the internal video-teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!)”. Within three weeks the number of decrypted communications rose from 12 to 458.

The US is committed by treaty not to conduct clandestine operations against the UN or the national representations there. “yay!” indeed. It’s good to see that violations of international treaties are considered with an appropriate level of seriousness within the agency.

So Barack Obama — and his security agents — have violated solemn treaties, ratified by Congress, hence part of the “supreme law of the land”. So do those who break the law definitely belong in prison? What about those who have revealed information that they have pledged to keep secret? Or is there some wiggle room to consider justifications and rationales for breaking the law?

Why should David Miranda keep David Cameron’s secrets?

One more thought on l’affaire Miranda that hasn’t, I think, been sufficiently represented in the public discussion: What is stolen information? If David Miranda had picked up the British crown jewels in Berlin, and was flying them to Brazil, and was foolish enough to change planes in Heathrow, of course the police would have every right to stop him there and confiscate the jewels.

In fact, though, Miranda was carrying information. If his memory was good enough — if he had a photographic memory — he could have carried it in his head. He is a Brazilian citizen who has, so far as I know, no connection to the UK. What possible justification could there be for expecting him to keep British secrets? If we consider the implications of countries stopping travellers in transit, to examine and confiscate the information they are carrying, it is chilling. And again, what if the traveller is carrying the forbidden information in his head rather than on a hard drive? I’m sure I know many things which whose distribution could benefit enemies of, say, the Iranian state, or the Chinese.

“Could be of benefit to terrorists”: Theresa May channels Al Franken

One of the more ingenious bits of political satire that I have seen in recent years was a Saturday Night Live sketch (apparently conceived by Al Franken) that parodied the use of out-of-context quotes or intentional misunderstanding of words in political advertisements. This was during the 2008 US presidential election, and was directed at John McCain, but there was no shortage of alternative targets; and Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential election campaign exceeded even the satire.

The sketch showed McCain in a sound studio, recording the “I approved this message” message, purely as a frame for showing a succession of increasingly ridiculous ads. In one, an ominous voice says,

Barack Obama says he wants universal health care. Really? Health Care for the whole universe? [pictures of spiral galaxies] Even for Osama bin Laden? [pictures of Obama and bin Laden next to each other]

It proceeds to my favourite, the same ominous voice intoning that “Barack Obama says he wants to provide tax breaks to child molesters”. At that the McCain character asks, is that true? The advertising executive explains that Obama has proposed giving tax breaks to all Americans, and that would certainly include child molesters.

I thought of this when I heard about this recent BBC interview with Home Secretary Theresa May, explaining why the police were justified in using anti-terrorism laws to interrogate David Miranda, who was suspected of nothing other than ferrying documents that the UK wanted to keep secret between two journalists. Despite the fact that the law seems to allow detention only for the purpose of ascertaining whether the person detained is a terrorist, May argues that the information he was carrying “could be of benefit to terrorists”. Of course, as William Saletan has pointed out, this is a climb-down from the Home Office’s earlier language that Miranda carried “information that would help terrorism”, and that many people believe — and certainly the journalists and their publishers seem to believe — that publishing this information would help everyone. If it helps terrorists, then only incidentally.

Or, as Theresa May would have rewritten the SNL sketch,

Glenn Greenwald and Eric Snowden say they want to provide secret information about US and UK espionage activities to al Qaeda.

Checks and balances and the British constitution

There is a theory that says that Britain has a unified state, with Parliament supreme, more decisive and hence less considerate of individual rights than the American state, intentionally hamstrung as it is with checks and balances. Well, that’s the theory, but I’ve long had the non-expert impression that British governance has more practical checks on government power than the US federal government has. (Federalism itself is an important check on the US government, but whether it serves or vitiates the liberty of individual citizens depends very much on the nature of the state government. Germany, with both federalism and a deep understanding of the need for limited government seems substantially better at protecting individual rights than either of the U’s.)

A case in point is the government response to the David Miranda affair. The government has gone through its whole playbook, from dismissing the incident as a routine police matter to accusing its critics of condoning terrorism. The critics, both inside and outside of government, have not been silenced. And now, it turns out there is an official “independent reviewer of terrorism legislation”, with real power to interrogate police and government officials, and report to the public.

The Guardian reports

David Anderson QC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, who held talks with the Met police this week, will focus on schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act of 2000, which lets police detain people at ports and airports without grounds for suspicion.

This is giving cover to the Liberal Democrats, the codependent spouse of the surveillance-addicted Tories, to withhold support for the government action. And unlike American judges, who roll over as soon as the government whispers “national security”, British judges have been willing to demand fealty to the rule of law with respect to the materials seized from Miranda:

Two judges ordered the Met and Home Office to desist from using, copying or sharing the materials until next Friday unless it were for the purpose of ensuring the protection of national security or for investigating whether Miranda was himself involved in the commission, instigation or preparation of an act of terrorism.

To the extent that the security services in the US and the UK are on a rampage to demonstrate that no one can mess with them and count on them reacting in any way reasonably or proportionately (as I argued here, and more recently Bruce Schneier argued here), this is exactly the sort of moderate, calm, institutional response that is best calculated to reestablish the authority of democratic institutions. But possibly drive the security services to lash out even more ferociously.