Tag: US politics

Civil wars in US and British memory

I commented a while back on the NSA and GCHQ naming their most secret programs of spying on their fellow citizens after battles of their civil wars (American and English respectively). I didn’t remark at the time, but this clearly shows the dominance of the NSA, since it is striking how little memory there is of the English Civil War, in comparison to the omnipresent shadow cast by the American Civil War over US politics. It’s hard to imagine a British nerd making a playful reference to battles of the English Civil War, except in an attempt to anglicise a prior US nerd reference to the American Civil War.

A minor example of the latter is the comment by a Republican congressman, enthusiastic that his party was steering the country toward a government shutdown, and responding to a skeptical question about the (Democratic controlled) Senate’s response by saying

Ulysses S. Grant said, ‘Quit worrying about what Bobby Lee’s doing and let’s focus on what we are doing,’ ” Culberson added. “We are focusing on what we need to do and not worrying about what the other guy is going to do. . . . That’s how Ulysses S. Grant won the war.

It is a telling statement about the current state of US politics that one party is portraying the other as their opponents in a civil war. (And, in return, they are being compared to terrorists and hostage-takers.)

I see this as an improvement over Republicans invoking the spirit of the Confederacy. Oddly, Representative Culberson is from Texas. Even more oddly, he preceded this invocation of Civil War strategy by saying “We’re 100 percent united!” I guess that’s the effect of civil war, to make the residue seem more unified.

Some questions about US debt default

Some things that genuinely confuse me about the looming (again) threat that the US will default on its debts:

1) Why is it the Democrats’ problem? Why is it President Obama’s problem? Who is taking whom hostage? A debt default doesn’t particularly affect Democratic constituencies. I’d expect that Republican business interests would be more directly concerned. Why can’t President Obama threaten to veto a bill raising the debt ceiling unless the Republicans agree to attach an infrastructure stimulus bill and raise the minimum wage? Is it just that the president has the direct responsibility for coping with the financial shitstorm that would follow breeching the debt ceiling?

2) Why doesn’t the looming government shutdown obviate the default threat? I see political commentators making arguments that a government shutdown will purge some of the Republican bile, and so make a debt default less likely. And Matt Yglesias points out that some people seem to think (erroneously) that not raising the debt ceiling will save the government money. But a government shutdown clearly does save a lot of money. So, as long as that’s going on, presumably government outlays will not exceed its income. Maybe it’s a technical problem, preventing debt from being rolled over at all. [Update below]

3) Why is it such a big deal? I don’t mean, why is it a big deal? I mean, why is it such a big deal. The standard belief, as summarised here, is that the US breaching its debt ceiling will have long-term repercussions for financial markets, only the least important of which would be permanently raising the cost of US government borrowing. I have commented earlier about the peculiar faith the bankers have that past defaults are uniquely significant for predicting future defaults. Surely if I’m thinking of lending money to the US Treasury, the fact that two hundred Republican firebrands blatantly take no responsibility for US debt repayments and think that playing chicken with debt repayments is a great way to score ideological points should make me uneasy. The fact that they have already pushed it over the brink would marginally increase my unease, but the total effect would depend on how that exercise came out. Did they get a good warm feeling out of it, or was the outcome shocking and unpleasant, so that they would be very unlikely to choose this tactic again in the near future. If the latter, then I’d be more inclined to focus on the fundamental solvency of the US government, which is obviously very good.

Obviously, I’m not a banker, but I wonder if they’re being rational, in at least the house-of-mirrors sort of “the value of a bond is what people think people think people think people think … people think it’s worth” way. Of course, once you’ve iterated ad infinitum pretty much any answer can come out.

[Update 30-9-2013: By way of Andrew Sullivan comes a link to this explanation (from Zeke Miller at Time): Continue reading “Some questions about US debt default”

Outsourcing espionage

In the light of recent developments, including the vast trove of NSA documents downloaded by Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden, and the revelation from those documents that the US has been systematically violating its treaty obligations by spying on the SWIFT international financial transactions system, some comments by Janine Wedel in her book Shadow Elite take on new significance:

Through SWIFT the US Treasury Department sought and gained access to large numbers of financial and communications records. Treasury then established the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, run out of the CIA, to analyze the SWIFT data and later shared it with the CIA and FBI. It also hired Booz Allen as an “independent” auditor, which, along with SWIFT, reviewed Treasury’s logs of information searches… As Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project, put it: “It is bad enough that the administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the US government security establishment.”

To sum up that interaction: A private company, given “government” access to sensitive and private data about citizens of the United States and other countries, not only worked alongside government to analyze the data, but then also (supposedly) oversaw the process.

Is there any surprise, then, that the self-watching watcher had no safeguards in place to prevent a newly hired employee from walking off with all these super-secret data?

There have always been those who have claimed that capitalism is inimical to tyranny. Usually some ideological affinity between capitalism and democracy, or in a practical sense that tyranny is bad for business, which depends on the initiative of many well-informed independent actors (rather in the same way that European economic integration in the early 20th century made war self-defeating for the economic elites, hence impossible; or, so it was argued). But maybe there is some truth to this claim in the Leninist sense: When we come to hang the capitalists, they will bid on the contract for the rope. Given opportunity to accumulate vast secret power through spying, or to make vast profits by outsourcing the espionage, at the risk of exposing the secret government, American elites couldn’t resist the lure of the cash. Stalin would never have made that mistake.

I suspect that Stalin would have done very well on the marshmallow test, for what it’s worth.

 

Which enemy are GCHQ and NSA fighting?

Hint: They both named their major programs aimed at undermining all internet decryption after Civil War battles. (Edgehill for the British, Bull Run for the US). So they’re not thinking of an external enemy, are they?

I suspect that the huge effort the US has put into decrypting SSL — which will eventually get out into the wild, of course, and hugely disrupt commerce worldwide, will come to be seen as the information warfare equivalent of the huge investment that the US and Soviets put into perfecting sarin and other nerve agents, and making them cheap and easy to produce.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

Obama to the American people: You’re beautiful when you’re angry!

Back in 2008 I remember being amused by the accusations of arrogance levelled at then-candidate Barack Obama. It seemed to me a mere expression of anti-intellectualism. Of course you don’t become a top politician, even within reach of the presidency, without being pathologically arrogant, but no one really wants a shrinking violet as president.

But the Republican He’s a smart, educated guy, and the Republicans think (I supposed) they can gain an advantage by playing to the common fear that any such person must hold the average citizen in contempt.

I must now admit to having experienced a failure of empathy. Only now, when I (and those like me) am the object of the great BO’s contempt, do I appreciate how peculiarly infuriating this man’s ego is. This idiosyncratic blend of openness and narrow-mindedness, his willingness to discuss anything with anyone, undertaken with the absolute self-assurance that his intellect already encompasses any argument we might make.

Basically, Obama tells the American people, “You’re beautiful when you’re angry”.

In his recent remarks on l’affaire Snowden, Barry said

And if you look at the reports — even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden has put forward — all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails. What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they’re not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC.

Having said that, though, if you are outside of the intelligence community, if you are the ordinary person and you start seeing a bunch of headlines saying, U.S.-Big Brother looking down on you, collecting telephone records, et cetera, well, understandably, people would be concerned. I would be, too, if I wasn’t inside the government…

But people may have better ideas and people may want to jigger slightly sort of the balance between the information that we can get versus the incremental encroachments on privacy that if haven’t already taken place might take place in a future administration, or as technologies develop further….

And so those are the kinds of things that I’m looking forward to having a conversation about.

Speaking as one of those “ordinary persons”, I am disgusted by the president offering to start a “conversation” about what I and many others who have thought deeply about these matters consider to be already huge violations of our civil liberties, an injury to the rule of law, and laying the groundwork for the complete evacuation of democracy, with the caveat right up front that the only possible result could be “to jigger slightly sort of the balance”. Because Obama the Omniscient couldn’t possibly have gotten the whole policy wrong. He’s an (adjunct) constitutional scholar, ferchrissake!

He ridicules our concerns, because we’re not well informed like the people in the “intelligence community”, but he has been withholding the information, and taking extreme measures against anyone who tries to inform us.

But he loves having these heated conversations with us. We ordinary folks are so beautiful when we’re angry!