They have compeley misused the power we granted them in sacred trust. We should remove it from them at once. If this has become impossible, we need to know that as soon as we can.
Again, I'll chime in as the resident apologist. The people working at Fort Meade are not evil. They truly believe they're doing a great service to the nation. They may be wrong, and they've certainly thrown privacy out the window. But they are following an ideal: national security.
Post 9/11, the nation went on a war footing. We reacted the way we did to the Nazis and the Soviets. And in their search for an existential threat, the intelligence community seized on nuclear terrorism. These analysts live in constant fear of the day they miss a piece of information and New York, Washington, or London is enveloped in a mushroom cloud.
The best explanations for this type of reasoning that I have heard came from an unlikely source, my grandfather. He's a former FBI agent and WWII Navy veteran. In war time, we threw all sorts of civil, economic, and political liberties out the window to defend ourselves. When I asked him how this was allowed to happen, he said simply, "When you're facing an enemy that wants to cross over the hill into the valley where you, your family, and everyone you've ever known or loved lives, you'll do anything to protect them."
Our grandparents grew up with the threat of the Nazis. Our parents faced the prospect of annihilation by the Soviets. We have had the luxury of coming of age in a time where there is no credible threat to our very national and physical existence.
As a result, it's difficult for us to understand the mindset of someone that spends all day, every day, thinking of the most horrible ways we could be attacked, and then trying to devise countermeasures. It's almost inevitable their perspective on the balance between security and privacy is altered.
I'm not saying this reasoning is morally correct or justifiable, especially when applied to the current surveillance programs, but simply that it is understandable.
The key danger is that these efforts are qualitatively distinct from those in previous generations. The difference between extraordinary measures now and then is twofold.
First, our capacity to surveil the citizenry has exploded over the past two decades, and our legal framework is still grappling with that change. The courts are having trouble understanding that a change in scale can be a change in kind.
For example, it's one thing to have the occasional surveillance flight to search for drug operations. It's quite another to have aerostats and quadrotors watching every inch of a city all the time. But the legal rational that there is no right to privacy in public spaces allows both.
Similarly, it's one thing to say the records generated by my water company are business records not subject to the Fourth Amendment, but it's quite another to use that rationale to justify monitoring the location of my cell phone simply because my cellular provider maintains the records.
Second, wars have a point where they end, and the extraordinary measures are supposed to be reversed. That's why the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" are so dangerous to civil liberties. They essentially extend the extraordinary measures during wartime to police problems that have no logical end.
I agree that we've gone too far as a nation. The fact that these queries don't require FISA orders flat out shocked me, even as a careful observer of these issues. But let's not demonize the individuals. After all, they're only doing what the people demanded after we were attacked. This is a democracy, and immediately after 9/11 such measures were resoundingly approved by the public and our representatives, beginning with the PATRIOT Act.
None of that changes the current reality however. We must slowly learn the lesson the British did when dealing with terrorism. If you treat it as an ordinary police matter, something that will always be present, you deprive it of its power to shock, from which it derives its effectiveness.
The fact is that the war on terror must now end. It's time for a return to normalcy.
Same with the politicians; were they really for it, or simply incredibly afraid of the political suicide that would be the results of standing up against it? Because this was a time when people did not question Bush. From today's perspective on his administration's actions, that seems odd, but it was the reality at the time.
> incredibly afraid of the political suicide
Afraid is not the right word. Aware. When all (public) evidence concerning a law says "fight the terror!" and buildings are still blowing up, you'd have to represent a very interesting district to be "soft on terror".
It was obvious from the length of the act alone that even Congressional staffers couldn't have read it carefully between the time of submission and the time it passed. Quite a few people that I knew were weakly opposed, but the sunset provisions may have made it more palatable.
It takes character to stand up and defend doing nothing when something "must be done".
This is a little off topic, but I always see this trotted out when people talk about big laws (like Obamacare, PATRIOT Act, etc) and it's not really true. Lawmakers usually work with and read a "normal language" version of laws that then gets transformed into a stricter legal version by staffers and experts. They will look at the actual legal version of the law if they care about a specific rule or section, but they usually don't need to.
Of course, I expect my lawmakers to actually read the legal language.
It's important too to note that this isn't a "big law" or even an American thing. Virtually all bills of any substance work this way and it's pretty much standard practice in most countries.
That being said, I'm not defending the PATRIOT Act. I just think the argument that not enough people read it is weak, especially considering all the real arguments you can make that actually attack the substance of the act.
The point is that for all lawmakers, there is both a need and sworn obligation, in addition to national expectation, that they read all the nitty gritty legal language they are voting on, by which all Americans are bound to abide.
That's what lawmakers are there for--to know what in the hell they are passing as laws. If they can't be bothered to do their job--which, at the national level, goes far beyond just securing corn subsidies, because they're voting on legislation that touches on all Americans--then fuck 'em. Throw the bastards out on their asses, and send them back to the cornfields.
To be clear, the "hawk" politicians (and let's be honest, -many on the left) believed in the legislation but also exploited the tragedy to ram it through and neutered the ability of the other side to have a reasoned debate.
Our population was attacked, angry, and for the most part followed the lead of politicians who said we needed these laws to fight the people that attacked us.
In the aftermath, the scrutiny on the part of the American people never materialized. You're basically witnessing the moment where the most scrutiny on these types of programs/laws has ever occurred since 9/11. Worth keeping in mind that many components of these surveillance programs also predate 9/11.
Only 66 Representatives voted against it--62 Democrats, 3 Republicans, 1 Independent. Only 1 Democratic Senator voted against it, while another Democrat abstained from the vote.
At the time the Act passed, Americans were in the midst of a fear frenzy. It was a pervasive culture of fear and panic, the likes of which I can only compare to anti-Soviet fears of the Cold War. People all over the country actually went to stores to buy all kinds of emergency and survival supplies to build up their own anti-terror kits (I forget the name for this that was popular at the time).
Many of us questioned Bush from the moment he was declared the winner of the 2000 election by the Supreme Court. We took part in protests all over the country after 9/11 to oppose the buildup to war in Iraq. I took part in protests in D.C. It was all ineffectual. Fear gripped the country and few paused to consider the long-term ramifications of the actions taken in September's wake.
Demonizing people and falsely assigning ill-intent doesn't help us address and correct the problem, even if it feels good to do so. I personally have to fight the urge constantly myself because I feel so strongly in the immorality of the net output of the programs themselves.
GHW Bush
GW Bush
D Cheney
D Rumsfeld
C Rice
G Clapper
G Alexander
P Wolfowitz
These are the guys that created the orders that the soldiers are following, and the war they are dying in for these criminal's profits.
The people I listed have a decades long history which brought them to the US Coup of 9/11: Cheney in particular.
The above are at the core of PNAC, the CIAs takeover of the executive branch (both Clinton and Obama are their puppets here)
GHW Bush has been running shit since the 70s.
Cheney setup the framework for the current MIC exploitation of the world when he was in Sec. Defense position in the early 90s - then setup Halliburton to be in the position to receive all the mandated private-sector contracts so the military could focus on its "core" -- the same with the Carlyle group.
(Carlyle owned CRG West (MAE WEST) and other fiber infra and DCs)
These guys worked diligently to put all this into place. Obama is just a puppet who was meant to quell the outrage that the Bush regime was bringing.
I posted a list of the key players in this, I did not post any party affiliation....
I can provide a hell of a lot more detail than this too - going back to 1920 with these guys...
You're wading far too deeply into conspiracy territory to suggest that this puppet 'was meant to quell' anything. He is a leader whose administration stands and falls on its own merits.
There is no party but the MIC party - and clearly, the NSA owns that party.
America has died, completely, 100%. There is no such thing as "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave"
The IC isn't running the government. They've got their hands full just running themselves.
The idea that we are not free is absurd. If I want to hold a rally for the Ku Klux Klan, that activity will be protected by the full force and power of the United States government. I can worship as I wish, read the books I choose, and write whatever I want (excepting direct threats of violence) with little fear, knowing that laws and courts stand ready to vindicate my rights.
I would take our extensive package of rights over single party political control, strongman leadership, civil law jurisdictions, and common law libel standards any day.
We are certainly no longer the most free nation on the planet, which saddens me deeply. But we are certainly amongst the best on that metric.
You're clearly being partisan.
The American people overwhelmingly approved the Patriot Act, and the idea of surveillance, and the war on terror, and the actual wars on place.
The Obama administration resumed surveillance programs which had been previously shut down.
The military industrial complex has been growing steadily larger since the 1950s.
Congress people from both parties repeatedly approve the growth of the defense budget, and especially parts which gain them money and jobs for their own states and districts.
There are certainly people to demonize, but sorting them out from the well intentioned would be incredibly complicated.
That isn't really a strong argument. Firstly, their actions is supposed to reflect the ideology of the US citizens in general. If it doesn't, either they are not being administered as well as they should be or they are purposefully ignoring the will of the citizens. Secondly, the idea that because they truly believe that they are doing great service doesn't actually justify any of the actions. If we are forgoing the label of evil because they think that they are doing great work (and I am OK will that, I hate the label 'evil'. It is unconditionally partisan) then it does question whether Nazis/Soviet union deserved the label as well. Because I fear that they too believed in their actions.
> our legal framework is still grappling with that change
US legal framework does not seem to be struggling (I am not a native speaker, so I am assuming that is what you meant). It has expanded the power to monitor and interfere knowingly and willfully. Let's not blame this on misunderstanding or incompetence. While it is the first thing that this should attribute to, the people who have built this system seem highly skillful and knowledgeable. If you claim that decision makers do not understand the new world that has suddenly bubbled up, well it's your responsibility and that of the NSA employees who seem to be following orders without questioning, to either make them understand or replace them. And in all fairness, US voters did. The man even won a Nobel Peace Prize for some reason I cannot understand. But his actions behind the doors seem totally contrary to what his words have been in past. Not really the fault of the voters but it definitely raises questions if he truly understood the costs and still took the leap.
[Edit: grammar]
I think this is a very difficult question to answer. If you're a lowly NSA tech tasked with something seemingly mundane (say, writing some automated tool to be used by an internal billing dept), at what point do you refuse to contribute to an organization that may be operating against the will of the people? Who is responsible?
Evil doesn't require intent. Some of the most evil acts in history were carried out by people who believed they were doing a good and moral thing. Most evil people don't go around thinking "I'm going to be so evil today!"
I suspect you are correct and that the vast majority of NSA employees think they are doing the right thing for America. That doesn't make their actions any less evil.
I don't want to Godwin the discussion here, but it's not at all rare for people to act in an evil (or whatever you want to call it -- bad, harmful) way while not recognizing their own actions as evil.
That people don't think their actions are evil doesn't prove that their actions aren't evil.
Add to that, evil acts are almost always done in service of an ideal. For example the USA has economically and socially gutted many nations by force in service of the democratic/free-market ideal. Yet it's rare to find an American who sees it this way. US-USSR proxy wars in the Middle East and Latin America from the 60s-90s weren't destructive, we were just trying to help those countries out. We wanted to modernize them, to improve their lives, not to destroy them. They were just too uncivilized, too barbaric to get it. Why would they hate us for that?
Hence 'ideology'. Easy to serve, hard to view objectively when you've spent a lifetime on the inside.
>We have had the luxury of coming of age in a time where there is no credible threat to our very national and physical existence.
The Berlin wall didn't fall until 1989. The Soviet Union didn't dissolve until 1991. The period of 1991-2001 was spent fighting proxy wars in former USSR terrories or allies [1]. Iraq. The Yugoslav Wars in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo. Haiti. All of this was an extension of the cold war. The Red threat didn't officially end until 09/11/01, Communism continued to be a spectre held over the head of the American public. It's just the discourse shifted from "the USSR has bombs that can kill us right now" to "Communism is bad therefore we're preventing it from spreading". The constancy of threat and surety of the potential for complete annihilation was always there.
And of course, from 2001 on everyone spent all day, every day thinking of the most horrible ways they could be attacked by terrorists. With great encouragement by media and government apparatuses.
>But let's not demonize the individuals. After all, they're only doing what the people demanded after we were attacked.
Again avoiding Godwinning, but to a certain extent you must demonize the individuals. Else there is no incentive for people to be vigilant of runaway ideology, like the US is operating under currently. Else there is no incentive for individuals to formulate a moral compass external to the state, because why bother when "they told me to do it" is a legitimate excuse? The state idology becomes your morality. After all, you're just tryin' to put food on your family.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...
Certainly not. The issue is not their beliefs, but rather the reasoning behind them. Different experiences of the world give rise to different world views. The world view of those that operate, condone, and approve the surveillance arises from a set of historical understandings and modern experiences that neither you nor I share.
To suggest that the scare tactics of CNN and the like is comparable to the psychological effect upon an ordinary analyst of regular intelligence reports of weapons-grade uranium being smuggled out of Russia via Kazakhstan is naive at best.
The threat of true national annihilation, not a specter concocted by a manipulative elite, has been the norm rather than the exception throughout history.
Modern totalitarianism has its roots in a not too distant past in which totalitarianism was the surest defense against large armed groups of humans that would burn your fields, kill your family, and subjugate your people.
That threat didn't disappear until very recent times. The cultural history of the American people is replete with threats to our existence: the CCCP and Warsaw Pact, the Axis, the German Empire, Spanish colonial North American empires, the British Empire, the Quadruple Alliance, the Normans. The intelligence community takes it's cues from a long history of existential threats.
What seems so obvious to us is that the current world is stable, and thus extraordinary measures to protect our safety aren't justified. Those charged with national security take a longer view. They see our nation as balanced on a knife's edge between internal strife and external threats. And thus, threats to either must be vigilant observed, documented, and understood, so that if the time should come when a conflict does occur, we stand prepared.
That line of reasoning is often alien to privacy advocates. I neither endorse it nor deny it. I simply acknowledge that those who study, train, and practice for our defense are not naive when it comes to the risk of violating civilian privacy. They simply set a different value to each of the variables in the risk-reward equation. You may disagree with those values, but it is important to understand them. Blindly denouncing such views as morally bankrupt simply factually incorrect.
> The Berlin wall didn't fall until 1989. The Soviet Union didn't dissolve until 1991. The period of 1991-2001 was spent fighting proxy wars in former USSR terrories or allies [1]. Iraq. The Yugoslav Wars in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo. Haiti. All of this was an extension of the cold war.
The wars you cited were in no way related to the Cold War. Yugoslavia was a strategically unimportant area, relevant to no one in the geopolitical sphere.
The intervention occurred as a direct result of ethnic cleansing that was taking place in obvious, organized, and deliberate fashion. To suggest otherwise is simply incorrect. I've spoken with the head of UNPROFOR from the Srebrenica Massacre. It was a war crime on par with the worst parts of World War II. Clinton himself stated that his reluctance to intervene was based upon the "ancient ethnic hatreds" argument of Balkan Ghosts. The Yugoslavian intervention was about genocide. As a simple fact, it had nothing to do with the Cold War.
> Communism continued to be a spectre held over the head of the American public. It's just the discourse shifted from "the USSR has bombs that can kill us right now" to "Communism is bad therefore we're preventing it from spreading".
Containment of communism was simply not a factor during the nineties. Moscow was crushed, the former Soviet block in shambles, and Russian interests retreating from throughout the world. Hence the remarkable cooperation on nuclear arms, energy policy, and democratization between the Yeltsin administration and the Clinton administration.
>I don't want to Godwin the discussion here... Again avoiding Godwinning...
I believe the Romans had a term for emphasis by pretended omission.
> to a certain extent you must demonize the individuals. Else there is no incentive for people to be vigilant of runaway ideology, like the US is operating under currently. Else there is no incentive for individuals to formulate a moral compass external to the state, because why bother when "they told me to do it" is a legitimate excuse? The state idology becomes your morality. After all, you're just tryin' to put food on your family.
In a totalitarian state, this argument would indeed hold water. However, you gloss over the most significant part of the counterargument. We didn't simply allow extraordinary efforts against terrorism, the people of the United States overwhelming endorsed it.
A democracy is beholden to its people. Its morality is, by definition, derived from the consent of the governed as expressed through the democratic process. Vox populi, vox dei, as it were. To point fingers at talented and intelligent programmers, people with whom we would be excellent allies and friends in other circumstances, excuses the true culprits: us.
We are to blame for this leviathan. Not the NSA, not Obama, not Bush, not the DNI, DIA, CIA, FBI, or any other amorphous acronym.
We need to understand the reasoning of the those that built these programs, not simply dismiss them as callous power hungry sociopaths. We need to grasp the history that informed their reasoning, both recent and that which began far before that day in September.
Most importantly, we need to remember that blaming individuals does nothing to prevent the true failure, a systematic disregard for the right to privacy and the guarantees thereof provided by the Constitution.
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
Orwell in 1984: "Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda.")
It's a surprisingly interesting novel.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for those in the security services, who have been given a rather difficult job to do, and who seem (from the vanishingly small amount that I know) to be approaching it in a professional and objective manner.
I have no desire to be nasty, and if I have personally offended anybody by what I have written, I most profoundly apologize for the hurt.
However.
This is an important issue, and it deserves public attention and a detailed debate. I hope that some of my provocative wailing and doom-mongering has done what was intended: provoked some thought and consideration.
This is, after all, politics, and, as I have mentioned before, we sometimes need to make a caricature out of our own positions in order to make a point. Omlettes and eggs and all that.
You are nuts if you think that that was acceptable given the circumstances.
Just doing my job is not sufficient in jobs such as these.
I understand Nazi concentration camps. It was a manipulation of nationalist sentiment against an imagined internal enemy, conveniently one that could be dispossessed of a great deal of property, coupled with a never before seen combination of the pure survivalist id meeting modern state capitalism.
I understand United States concentration camps. While we certainly didn't starve, gas, or force Japanese, German, and Italian Americans, we did relocate large numbers of them to temporary camp facilities for the duration of the war. It was believed that recent immigrants and their children might harbor loyalty to extremely dangerous enemies and could serve as a fifth column in the event of an invasion. For what it's worth, despite the indignity and suspect constitutionality, that's a far cry better than most nations have acted in similar circumstances.
Both of those events are understandable, in that I can understand the thinking of the people involved. It does not mean I morally condone it. What I'm attempting to combat is the notion that all acts with which one disagrees must be the result of moral bankruptcy or internal failing.
Usually there is a logic, however skewed, behind even the most heinous events in human history. The first step to preventing those events is to understand that logic. Only then can we address the root causes of the problems we wish to solve.
In this case, I'm suggesting that the root cause was a panicked citizenry seeking shelter from a very real threat, not a government seeking to blindly expand its power. That's an unpopular opinion, but alternative interpretations lead to different actions.
Most Americans still believe they have more to lose than to gain by asserting themselves...