The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Manipulation
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
it might not even be Obamas team leaking. Lets sat a partisan person who works for the NSA wants to destroy a candidate. They could in fact do all the research themselves rather than anyone even close to Obama.
I look at one direct example of Herman Cain. How did the press ever get ahold of the fact that he was paying women out? Literally, you could say the women spoke up, but with the NSA, you could say someone who works at the NSA leaked the information just because they didn't like Herman Cain to begin with.
Now that's scary. Someone's reputation could be destroyed just by a rogue NSA agent.
So if he did leak the video tape to the press, he would appear to be a quack.
Then again, in reality NSA wouldn't have been able to wiretap him or track him down independently, since they can't conduct direct surveillance domestically by policy.
Except when they do it by mistake during a presidential election:
In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff. [1]
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-br...
There should be a zero tolerance policy for this sort of thing. The government itself and authorities need to be held at a higher standard than everyone else.
All jokes aside, that is a great Tony Scotty movie and it has been acknowledged as such even by the "cocky" French cinema critics from Cahiers du Cinema.
"After voicing his concerns, Schoolcraft was reportedly harassed and reassigned to a desk job. After he left work early one day, a swat unit illegally entered his apartment, physically abducted him and forcibly admitted him to a psychiatric facility, where he was held against his will for six days."
LOL.
I honestly don't give a fuck about politicians' after-careers. You failed to lynch them. Fine. We don't do seppuku in this country. Fine.
No, I care, for instance, that Obama had to burn down his entire capacity to move and shake politically just to get a half-assed piece of healthcare reform into effect, and that it very well may have failed if Snowden had happened three years earlier.
From the point of view of political blackmail, there is every bit as much reason to be worried about rogue Facebook engineers as there is to be worried about rogue NSA agents. There seems to be some myopia among technologists as to this point, an idea that "NSA agent = bad" and "Facebook engineer = good" and a projection of negative intentions onto the former and positive intentions onto the latter. But at the end of the day, there is money in political blackmail, and it's not like there is no history of giant corporations engaging in political blackmail, or at least opportunistic employees at giant corporations engaging in such activity.
The internet as it exists today is a system where "private" information is shared between you and thousands of your closest friends at Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Comcast, etc. The entire system, where information flows unencrypted through trusted service providers, is naive and broken. It was been broken since the earliest days of the internet, with clear-text protocols like SMTP, and that brokenness has simply piled on over the years.
[1] While I don't support Lavabit's position of refusing to comply with lawful warrants, I do admire their architecture where the government has had to go to the highest levels of the company to get the information. It couldn't simply lean on some relatively low-level system administrator who had access to the unencrypted data.
Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York, former AG of New York, famous gadfly of Wall Street, and a top contender before the 2008 election to be Obama's pick for Attorney General, when it was discovered that he was paying prostitutes.
The explanation as to how this information was discovered is as follows: he paid for these "services" using a wire transfer to the madam, who had created an "anonymous" corporation to collect payments, as a convenience to her wealthy and famous clients. According to Wikipedia, "The investigation of Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering." [1]
Every bank is required by the Patriot Act to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" regarding certain activity to FinCEN, which reports must be kept secret from the person being reported upon. SARs are typically filed electronically, and then centralized in FinCEN review centers, where patterns are analyzed and information is distributed to law enforcement personnel. Spritzer was being monitored because one of the chief criteria used in determining whether a SAR should be filed is whether an individual being monitored is a "Politically Exposed Person" or PEP (that acronym is actually used actively). [2]
In other words, by explicit provision of the Patriot Act and US DoT regulations, all financial activities of politicians must be monitored and reported on in secret by financial institutions.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who frequents call girls. It was Spitzer's own self-destructiveness that created the opportunity for this take down. But you have to ask, if it weren't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? Perhaps he wouldn't have been. There are certainly similar transgressions committed by less "problematic" politicians that never leak. For instance, even after the whole Spitzer hullabaloo, we don't know who any of this madam's other clients were, even though it was reported that some were famous politicos.
What's most significant here, though, is that we don't need to speculate about how this power can work to the advantage of certain interest groups.
In this case, broad-spectrum surveillance may have resulted in Eric Holder becoming AG at the height of the financial crisis, instead of the one man perhaps most qualified by experience and temperament to prosecute financial crimes, Eliot Spitzer.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan...
[2] http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Cons...
That's silly. Plenty of people have been busted for prostitution without being politicians. For example, NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer busted a whole bunch of people who weren't politicians:
http://www.artharris.com/2008/03/11/bald-truth-exclusive-ag-...
http://nypost.com/2008/03/11/bane-of-the-brothels-is-hoist-b...
As for special surveillance of PEPs, sounds like a good thing to me. Can you think of a reason that our politicians should not be subject to extra scrutiny?
Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full knowledge of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if they take a meaningful stand against their agenda.
The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew every bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose the ones that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible people they were.
Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or unsavory at some point in their life.
Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete and total political power.
Now, an interesting question is, what happens if everyone knew almost everything? This is the alternative scenario. If the end of privacy is more ubiquitous and democratic, the power of the secret services would shrink. It might lead to a change of our laws and social norms to something that more realistically represents our reality.
I'm not optimistic that this would be a good or even better world, but this is the best argument I've heard from the people who are not afraid of the end of privacy. I would count Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt into that group, but also many of my friends.
Which norms and laws would change? I can imagine that e.g. the use of certain drugs like cocaine and sexual behaviors like sado maso and yes prostitution would be the first to be tolerated by the majority. In some societies, that is already the case. A more difficult to swallow reality might be pedophily. I'm quite sure that child abuse would always be unacceptable but simply being pedophilic might be accepted as normal for a certain percentage of the population.
I find the logic of Schmidt and Zuckerberg to be extremely self serving, where can we know all the details of their online and offline life, like they seek to know about ours?
Death of privacy indeed, but for who?
True. Good point. But is information asymmetry becoming larger or smaller? I would argue that it becomes smaller, but I have nothing to prove it.
An anecdotal example out of my memory, is Kofi Annan saying in an interview, that he started to use Google, more and more instead of having to ask his assistants. Another example are journalists, able to uncover secret CIA locations with Google. Or a single whistleblower, Edward Snowden, able to leak a good part of the NSA's secret operations with just a USB stick. Sure, the NSA has more knowledge than ever. But the average Internet user, too, has unprecedented access to personal information of strangers. Just knowing your real name will likely allow me to find your location, employment, a picture of you and much more. So has the information asymmetry between us and the NSA grown or shrunk?
I think the asymmetry is becoming larger. Certainly in absolute terms we all have more information about one another than we did before, but the problem now is not having the information, it's searching through it to find the relevant information. Or being able to act on the information.
What can you as an ordinary individual do with a publicly available list of corrupt government officials? What can a corrupt president or FBI director do with a publicly available list of political opponents?
If for instance gays and atheists are exposed as "deviants" in the media, but corruption and hiring prostitutes are downplayed as something "every politician is doing", then it doesn't really matter who shares what: The openly gay, atheist politician will have a hard time (and perhaps be put in prison) while the corrupt ones walk free.
Sure. But they are also formed by our personal observation. If you would find out that lots of your colleagues, friends, family members and celebrities behave in 'strange' activities, those activities might not be perceived as strange after a while anymore.
Of course, you're right to point to the negative examples of Russia, Iran and Germany. Laws and norms can change both ways. This has been the case with antisemitism. It used to be quite accepted to be Jewish during the Second Reich in Germany but wasn't anymore in the Third. As another example, as far as I know, the Dutch had census data about the religion of every citizen, which only became a problem when they became occupied by Germany with its laws against Jewish.
But what now? Its all to easy to imagine a future with hardly any privacy. How will it look like? How should it look like if we take the end of privacy as a given, at least as a gedankenspiel.
Popular opinion might change, but as we've seen laws can change much more quickly, and even things that most people would consider normal could become a punishable offense.
At that point, for the people who already have the data on their lives out there, it will be too late to do anything about it, while the people who have been smart enough to live "perfectly normal" lives with the correct political and religious views, or those who can hire people to cover their tracks, will be better off.
If there is one thing Zuck has said that was true was calling his users "dumb fucks" for uploading all their private information.
Regarding "PEP" surveillance, I would say that transparency is good, but there is nothing transparent about a process whereby people's activities are reported to data collection centers in secret, and then through some unknown and mysterious process culled and sorted.
Public scrutiny is good. But selective secret scrutiny, scrutiny only of politicians who threaten powerful constituencies, is a disaster for democracy.
What's the problem with that?
> Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who [frequently breaks the law].
Getting laid is a basic need, like breathing, eating and parking a chocolate hostage.
All three of these are things that have always, do, and will always happen. Accepting that, legalising it, and overseeing it results in fewer deaths, less violence, heath care for prostitutes, extra tax income, and a transparent democracy.
Amongst other benefits.
The misery they cause the people who get caught up in their personal psychodrama is unacceptable. But I think this type of problem is orthogonal to politicians who engage in illegal activities (e.g. being gay hasn't been illegal for a long time), it is more of a loss of perspective.
It doesn't seem particularly bad though, it's not like he had embezzled millions or committed crimes. Or actually... that is what most politicians do or have done, and even once it's known they usually can still keep their career.
The case began because a woman, a foreign national employed by the U.S. government, told another employee she suspected the man with whom she was in a sexual relationship was listening to her calls. The employee who misused the NSA's systems also incidentally collected the communications of a U.S. resident on two occasions, a move that requires a court warrant. [1]
This was only discovered because she suspected something and talked about it to a colleague, we don't even know if the perpetrator has been disciplined. How many NSA analysts have been disciplined or had their clearance revoked for misusing these tools?
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-someti...
Obama flip-flopped on FISA [1]. He was blatantly aware of the risks it imposed.
The question is why? Did someone pay him a little visit? Did some man in a black suit and dark glasses show him a little manila envelope with unknown contents, that caused him to change his mind?
One year ago I would have said this was an insane proposition. Now after Snowden, I'm not that sure. That is what is really scary about the surveillance state.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/
[2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/...
King Louis XIII's chief minister
Hopefully that saves someone ten precious seconds; I'll never get them back!
If a candidate for major office pays for sex, does the public have the right to know?
There is an argument[1] that this may have been what took out General Patreaus. It was no coincedence he was removed from the Army and put into the CIA post just prior to catching Bin Laden [2,3]. Patreus would have received all of the credit, not Obama. But we know that the prep work for Bin Laden involved building a replicate of the abbatobad compound in the US, etc. so was well underway under the leadership of Patreus, not Panetta. Obama was very wary of Patreus entereing the 2012 elections, and would have been a much more credible candidate than any republican. In the end, Patreus was of course done in by someone snooping through his gmail. Wether or not he was also the victim of a parallel construction, in how that came about, we'll never know.
[1] ie, Informal line of resoning or logic. In this case, circumstantial.
[2] edit: The move was orchestrated and announced earlier in the spring. viz: On April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had nominated Petraeus to become the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
[3] Bin Laden: Died May 2, 2011 (aged 54) Abbottabad, Pakistan 34°10′9″N 73°14′33″E
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_kil...
The fact that we can't be sure that he wasn't being blackmailed with something even more scandalous demonstrates the problem perfectly. There is no reason to believe that he was, but you can't say it is impossible now that we have documentation proving their capabilities. That is why this sort of dragnet mass surveillance is so dangerous to a democracy. It undermines the legitimacy of the political process.
It's interesting, in hindsight, that probably the seminal event in Mitt Romney's loss was via an unidentified person making an unapproved recording:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81346.html
There was no real need for top down NSA surveillance here. All you needed was someone sympathetic to your cause ("an operative") who could infiltrate the oppositions meetings, with a cell phone.
See http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/scott-prouty-47-...
Sanchez cites examples of Truman using an FBI wiretap on a potential supreme court nominee and Johnson wiretapping Martin Luther King and indirectly wiretapping presidential candidate Richard Nixon (ironic given how crazy Nixon went with wiretapping once he got into office).
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-sanchez16
That's the thing. It can not be "fixed", it will not (although our representatives will offer all kinds of PR actions/"legislations" to try to calm us down and "accept it"). This kind of power is already strong enough to defend itself. Rather, it's going to become stronger (also because it is being attacked). It will take some sort of serious revolution for this sort of cancer to be undone. And for that to happen, we're going to have to feel some serious pain, first. That's our nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Tea_Party_investigation
So this isn't hypothetical.
"To be clear, I don't think it's happened yet." "Obama was probably as surprised as we were." "But what about a future, less scrupulous president?"
(Paraphrasing.)
You might want to review a timeline of events for Watergate. Nixon won re-election after the initial reporting and stayed in office until Aug of 74.
Although, I think the fact that the cover up was so grand is pretty good evidence that the general populace is against that type of behavior once they become aware of it's magnitude.
Not just out of state but out of country sources can pour millions into any campaign, no matter how big or small, and there will be zero paper trail.
Yet no-one seems to care. It's mind-boggling.
(This being my and many others' determination based upon detailed accounting of the story, despite subsequent PR spin to the contrary.)
It's widely suspected that Governor Walker has ambitions for a 2016 run for the Presidency. Or maybe 2020.
One has to wonder what such an Administration might get up to with respect to surveillance results feeding bias.
"Conservative" or "Liberal". I don't want that power in either hands.
I suspect that the preponderance of the evidence leans a rational decision maker towards an answer to that question with affirmative qualities.
What does he think he is, some sort of time-traveler?
What a fucking stupid article.
I think this "theory" of election manipulation is tenuous at best. Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government does not have.
I'm not saying it's impossible to pull off, but the risk (potential political blowback) would certainly outweigh the reward.
There is strong evidence this has been done in the recent past on a massive scale, in the US, by the intelligence agencies and president - see Nixon's plumbers, and J Edgar Hoover, and that was before these capabilities were available. Your assumption about a conspiracy being required is completely unfounded [1]. That is not a theory, that is fact, and it is in no way tenuous, so it lends serious credibility to the idea that in the present new tools are being used in similar ways.
The other point which lends this credibility is the evidence we have seen of use of these powers for all sorts of industrial and political espionage abroad - they are doing exactly this sort of activity abroad (e.g. bugging Merkel before she was leader, Petrobras, Belgacom) - I find it highly likely they are also using these powers at home, at the very least to stymie investigations into their power. Note how obedient to the wishes of the spying agencies almost every politician is.
it wants to make sure that people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated
You seem to trust the current admin, even though they have been shown to lie repeatedly (Clapper, Obama [2]). Why do you trust that if given power they would use it in your best interests and to clean up politics, doesn't that strike you as somewhat naive given the huge compromises every politician has to make just to get elected president?
[1] http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Church_Committee [2] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114276/obama-surveillance...
You know... kinda like J Edgar Hoover's FBI.
What is the government if not "the people in power", and if it is, how can it make sure they're not corrupt?
You're talking about The Watchers watching themselves, which just doesn't work all that well. Besides, as grey-area points out, that ship has sailed long ago. Governments (and the shadowy figures pulling the strings behind them) are all corrupt, evil sacks of shit.