Category: Politics

“I hope the Russians love their secrets too…”

Remember back in the 1980s, when Sting and Prokofiev teamed up to extol the blessings for world peace that would flow from recognising that Americans and Russians deep down shared the same basic needs? Now the headlines read

Russia’s Putin tells Snowden to stop US secrets leak.

Okay, the cynics will say that east-west agreement on imprisoning political dissidents isn’t really on a level with “loving their children”, noble-sentiments-wise, but when former enemies can work together to cover up each other’s spying on their allies — well, when you get right down to it, how far is that from lions-lying-down-with-lambs territory? Put this together with the climate catastrophe, and we must truly be living at the end of days…

That this heartwarming rapprochement is happening just as Cold-War so-called allies are betraying the US, on  the pretext of protesting against being themselves the targets of NSA espionage — WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO HIDE?! — is all the more poignant. Sniff. I think I have to go drown my Weltschmerz tears in shots of Freedom Vodka (TM). За нашу дружбу!

Leaker irony

The Guardian comments, with just a trace of snark

A senior Obama administration official who would not provide his or her name told reporters late on Sunday that Snowden’s presumed travel plan undermined the whistleblower’s stated intent to tell the American people about broad government surveillance.

“Mr Snowden’s claim that he is focused on supporting transparency, freedom of the press and protection of individual rights and democracy is belied by the protectors he has potentially chosen: China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador,” said the official, who did not note that the US was simultaneously attempting to secure the cooperation of China and Russia.

In this new brave new world of cooperation among the US, China, and Russia on criminalising dissidents who reveal government secrets, I look forward with schadenfreude to the next time a Chinese intellectual flees to the US embassy, or seeks refuge in the US from supposed persecution. Now that the US state department has pronounced the sanctity of arrest warrants, I expect to see the US respond favourably to those issued by the Chinese Communist Party or the Kremlin.

The Socratic whistleblower

Cybersecurity law expert Joel Brenner says (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan) Eric Snowden is a wimp because he didn’t stay to face the legal consequences of his whistleblowing. In fact, it’s not civil disobedience at all unless you stay and drink the hemlock.

From Socrates through Thoreau, Gandhi, and King, the great theorists and practitioners of this form of resistance to law have told us in words and actions that civil disobedience requires the disobedient citizen to suffer the legal consequences of his or her unlawful act. In Socrates’s case, the consequence was death at the hands of the Athenian authorities. For Thoreau, Ghandi, and King, the consequence was jail. Through their suffering and example, they sought to undermine the moral position of law they found objectionable. Because unless the disobedient citizen takes the legal consequences of his unlawful action – he’s nothing but a criminal or a rebel.

Now, I love Thoreau, and he invented the term “civil disobedience”, but he spent one night in his hometown jail and then let a friend pay his fine. As with his roughing-it-in-the-cabin-but-don’t-miss-Sunday-dinner-with-the-folks stay at Walden, Thoreau knew better than anyone how to leverage a minimum of physical discomfort into a maximum of moral example. It’s hard to compare him to Snowden, who would have to at least take seriously the possibility that falling into the hands of US authorities would result in him being tortured and/or incarcerated permanently without trial.

But this is also completely wrong as regards Socrates, for a different reason: He precisely refused to flee so as not to undermine the moral position of the law. To put it simply, Socrates (as reported in the Crito) imagines the Law addressing him as follows: Continue reading “The Socratic whistleblower”

Intellectual property is theft

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has pointed to this paper by esteemed Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, in which he raises the temperature on the tired old “taxation is theft” thesis. In Bertram’s pithy summary, “Taxing the 1 per cent would be like the state forcibly ripping out their spare internal organs!” This just shows how easy it is to get people to accept almost any moral argument once you frame it to appeal to their squeamishness.

As mathematicians know well, from an inconsistent logical system any proposition may be derived, and human moral calculus is nothing if not inconsistent. Here we see that you can make a perfectly coherent-sounding argument for why taxation is in principle just like forcing people to give up their second kidney to someone who needs it, and that obviously seems wrong, when the alternative might be a situation where people literally need to part with their second kidney in order to eat, or to obtain needed medical treatment for their children.

But I’m interested in another feature of this essay. Mankiw sets the stage as follows:

Imagine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. […] The society enjoys not only perfect equality but also perfect efficiency.

Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies. When the entrepreneur’s product is introduced, everyone in society wants to buy it. They each part with, say, $100. The transaction is a voluntary exchange, so it must make both the buyer and the seller better off. But because there are many buyers and only one seller, the distribution of economic well-being is now vastly unequal. The new product makes the entrepreneur much richer than everyone else.

The society now faces a new set of questions: How should the entrepreneurial disturbance in this formerly egalitarian outcome alter public policy?

The sharp-eyed reader may be wondering, why are these people paying $100 to J.K. Rowling for a pile of paper with printing on it? Why didn’t someone take the first copy, reprint it, and sell copies for $5? Oh yes, because there’s copyright, and the strong arm of the state willing to use force to prevent you from printing certain words on the page. Without that implicit threat of violence, Ms. Rowling’s creation would be worth very little. So what does she owe us in return? A thank-you card? The cost of enforcing her copyright? Or maybe just some constraint on how much of the potential profit she should be allowed to retain, from the monopoly position that wouldn’t exist without the effort and investment of many other people, both living and of prior generations.

The fact that this guy is considered one of the top minds in economics today is sobering…

PRISM and leaks

Plenty of people commenting on the revelations of secret US government acquisition of vast quantities of personal data on telephone calls and other communications (my comments here and here) suggest that this is all overblown, even paranoid. William Saletan wrote about the telephone surveillance

Chill. You can quarrel with this program, but it isn’t Orwellian. It’s limited, and it’s controlled by checks and balances.

David Simon compares it to wiretapping payphones and calls The Guardian’s reporting “the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole”.

So here’s just one example of how far-reaching the negative impact of this sort of surveillance could be — even if it is never misused. There has been much discussion of the Obama administration’s stepped up attacks on leakers, and on the journalists who publish leaks. Imagine you are a government employee in possession of significant evidence of official crimes or corruption. You would like to turn it over to a journalist, but you also know that once you do, the government will be able to trawl through all of the journalist’s email and telephone calls — not just prospectively, but going back years into the past, and find all contacts and contacts of his contacts. They will have plenty of private and embarrassing information that they can use to pressure you or the journalist, or his boss.

Now that the leaker has revealed himself, Farhad Manjoo put the case against the NSA’s power-grab succinctly: The very fact that such an unexceptional 29-year-old was able to gain access to so much information by itself disproves their claim that “you can trust us to do the right thing with your data”. The question you need to ask yourself is not, do I trust the president with this surveillance capacity? The question is, do I trust the most frustrated (or bored) FBI agent or NSA contractor with a top security clearance with this capacity.

Julian Assange’s password

One of the weirdest facts in the fascinating book on underground cryptography and the anti-secrecy movement represented by Wikileaks — beyond the general fundamental link, which I’d never quite put together before, between cryptography (keeping secrets) and whistleblowing (revealing secrets) — was the comment that Guardian journalist David Leigh had published Julian Assange’s password — ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay# — to the unredacted US State Department cables. Master of Secrets Assange gives out his own password to a journalist — rather than giving the Guardian a version encoded with a throwaway password — and then expresses shock and dismay when it ends up in print. Did he also give Leigh the PIN code for his bank card, but ask him only to use it to check the balance?

Secret laws

I think it was from Solzhenitsyn, somewhere in The Gulag Archipelago (though I can’t find the quote right now, so maybe it was some other source) that Stalin was supposed to have ordered that the Soviet criminal code of the 1930s not be published, with a declaration something like “The only people who want to know what the law says are those intending to break it.”

This seemed to me like merely a good example of the Looking-Glass logic of totalitarianism until I read in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side about the secret legal opinions that undergirded the Bush torture regime. It’s true that you can’t have secret laws in the US — at least, I think it is — but reinterpreting the law, and making the reinterpretation itself and the underlying reasoning secret, comes pretty close. It’s hard to say you’re still living under the rule of law — in a Rechtsstaat, as the German word says pithily — when the government is constrained only by its own secret interpretation of the law.

And now we have, in the blossoming scandal of US government surveillance of private citizens, the main documents demonstrating government malfeasance are secret court orders justified by secret executive-branch legal opinions.

I am reminded of when my 10th grade history teacher told us that the US Constitution was so inspiring that even the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states had mimicked some of its language in framing their own constitutions, even if their practice was very far from the true meaning of those words. This was supposed to give us a lesson about the perfidy of the Soviets, I suppose, but I asked then — snotty kid that I was — whether that didn’t just mean that a constitution is useless for protecting individual rights.

Metadata

Is there anyone who feels reassured by Diane Feinstein’s comments that we shouldn’t be worrying our pretty little heads over NSA storing records of ALL telephone calls (only by Verizon Business, but presumably that just happens to be the one that’s come out) over a three month period (and one might surmise that this is just three months of a rolling renewed program), both within the US and between the US and foreign addresses. She said

It is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress. This is just meta data. There is no content involved. In other words, no content of a communication. … The records can only be accessed under heightened standards.

Through her Newspeak interpreter she added, “It’s called protecting America.”

In this case, I’m hopeful that the average person’s inability to understand technical language will lead to positive conclusions. Feinstein (who, I am proud to say, I have voted against every time she’s been on the ballot since I’ve been a California voter). Anyone who understands what “meta data” are, and how data-mining works, will be chilled by this: The FBI has a complete map of who was talking to whom when and for how long, and presumably where they were when they made the call. This is now going to be run through an algorithm sniffing out patterns similar to an already suspicious person’s phone calls or travel. And then they’ll use this as a basis for putting people on no-fly lists and other non-judicial punishments. Won’t they? Certainly the Obama administration has shown no compunction about misusing the machinery of the War on Terror (TM) — in particular the No-Fly List — including  for political ends.

But here, ignorance may help. Will the average American feel reassured at being told these are “only meda data”? What the fuck are meta data? It sure sounds like they’re tapping our phones…

I thought the IRS scandal was ridiculous — I still do — but getting the right-wing riled up about civil liberties may be the last chance to save some remaining shreds of constitutional rights in the US.

Exile, ctd.

I wrote before about US citizens being sent into exile. In looking for information about how the No Fly List works, I found this story reported by Glenn Greenwald:

In April of this year, Saadiq Long, a 43-year-old African-American Muslim who now lives in Qatar, purchased a ticket on KLM Airlines to travel to Oklahoma, the state where he grew up. Long, a 10-year veteran of the US Air Force, had learned that the congestive heart failure from which his mother suffers had worsened, and she was eager to see her son…

The day before he was to travel, a KLM representative called Long and informed him that the airlines could not allow him to board the flight. That, she explained, was because the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had placed Long on its “no-fly list”, which bars him from flying into his own country.

Long has now spent the last six months trying to find out why he was placed on this list and what he can do to get off of it. He has had no success, unable to obtain even the most basic information about what caused his own government to deprive him of this right to travel.

Given that there is really no other way to get from Qatar to the US than by flying, this is equivalent to exile. Without even a trial, or even any official notification. And no procedure for redress. (Supposedly there is a procedure, but it seems to consist only of his being assigned a “redress control number”. No other response was forthcoming from the government in 6 months, and the US embassy has offered no assistance.) Greenwald cites several other comparable cases, and says there are 21,000 names on the list, including 500 Americans. And things aren’t getting better:

The Obama administration “lowered the bar for being added to the list”. As a result, reported AP, “now a person doesn’t have to be considered only a threat to aviation to be placed on the no-fly list” but can be included if they “are considered a broader threat to domestic or international security”, a vague status determined in the sole and unchecked discretion of unseen DHS bureaucrats.

“Legal reasons”

The British press is legally somewhat more hemmed in than the US press, both by law (for instance, the and various arbitrary gag orders) and the threat of libel suits. (Fun fact: The truth defence against libel charges was eliminated in 1606 — at least as regards the sovereign, unpleasant claims are likely to be more damaging if they are true than if they are lies. An exception was made for “good motives” in 1792, but for the public interest in 1843. A more general substantial truth defence was reinstated last month.)

This leads us to this weekend’s blockbuster news. The Guardian has reported that the Mail on Sunday has reported

David Cameron has held crisis talks at Downing Street after being told of allegations of a sensational love affair which has potentially significant political implications for him.

For legal reasons, the Mail on Sunday cannot disclose the identities of the people involved or any details of the relationship – even its duration – other than that they are middle-aged figures. The affair has now concluded.

Hilarious! Like a Mad-Lib sketch for a political sex scandal. Details presumably to follow soon on Twitter.

Continue reading ““Legal reasons””