Tag: United States

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Quotations

2013.8.19

In 2012, the Migration Policy Institute reported that immigration and border enforcement spending totaled almost $18 billion. That is 24 percent more than the $14.4 billion combined budgets in the last fiscal year of the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Add the billions anticipated in the Senate bill, and you have what the trade publication Homeland Security Today calls a “treasure trove” for contractors in the border security industry.

Projected as an approximately $19 billion industry in 2013, defense contractors seem, in the words of one representative from a small surveillance technology company hoping to jump into the border security market, to be “bringing the battlefield to the border.“

Todd Miller, “War on the Border”
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Quotations

2013.8.16

I suppose everything Alexander said was technically true, since the “congressional review” was different from the “NSA audit”, but it’s still gross deception. He acts with the ethics of the head of a police state. We should either upgrade him to the title he deserves, “Chief of the Secret Police”, or ask for his resignation.

Robert Graham, Errata Security
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Aside Quotations

2013.8.10

All four of Obama’s proposed reforms are useful. The second is adding an adversary to proceedings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which has the power to approve secret warrants. Another is to assemble a committee that would issue a report about the balance between liberty and security. And then there’s a call to increase transparency. Some of this area’s elements are cosmetic—a new Web site for the N.S.A., for example, for which one hopes there is a better graphic designer than whoever puts together the agency’s classified PowerPoint presentations—and others are important but fragmentary. Obama said he’d make public the “legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215.” That is good, but legal rationales, for this and all other collection activities, are not things that should ever be fully classified in the first place. How an agency proceeds in a given case is one thing, but what it and we understand our rights to be should never be secret.

Source: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/nsa-dirty-dishes-obama-press-conference.html

You’ll forgive me if thinking that releasing details of how laws are secretly interpreted constitutes ‘transparency’ to any reasonable degree. Though I’m well aware that a vast portion of American jurisprudence is effectively withheld from the public (you have to pay for access to PACER to see how legislation has actually been interpreted by courts, thus excluding individuals from understanding their laws and court processes) it is inexcusable that POTUS thinks that making their rationales public is sufficient. What is legal is not necessarily right nor constitutional, and dragnet surveillance of the world’s communications is an inexcusable affront to basic human freedoms and liberties in today’s digital era.

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Links Quotations

There are two types of laws in the U.S., each designed to constrain a different type of power: constitutional law, which places limitations on government, and regulatory law, which constrains corporations. Historically, these two areas have largely remained separate, but today each group has learned how to use the other’s laws to bypass their own restrictions. The government uses corporations to get around its limits, and corporations use the government to get around their limits.

This partnership manifests itself in various ways. The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.

Here’s an example: It would be reasonable for our government to debate the circumstances under which corporations can collect and use our data, and to provide for protections against misuse. But if the government is using that very data for its own surveillance purposes, it has an incentive to oppose any laws to limit data collection. And because corporations see no need to give consumers any choice in this matter – because it would only reduce their profits – the market isn’t going to protect consumers, either.

Schneier’s article, “The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership,” does a terrific job in striking to the heart of the ‘arrangements’ between our corporate partners and America’s governing bodies.
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Quotations

2013.7.30

Obama’s first director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, wanted the CIA to use its [drone strike] capability more strategically. His reading of the intelligence suggested that the collateral harm of the operation–the anger that the strikes caused among Pakistanis, even though the targeting was precise–was damaging to U.S. security interests. The CIA, in a deft bureaucratic move, simply stopped providing Blair’s office with advance notice of strikes. The dispute went all the way to the Office of the Vice President, which sided with the CIA, although Blair “won” the ability to have a director of national intelligence representative at CIA covert action briefings at the White House.

Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
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Writing

New Zealand Reveals the ‘Five Eyes’ Spying on Each Other

In an interesting bit of news, it seems we can certifiably state that the NSA spied on a New Zealand journalist at the behest of the New Zealand government. The government has apparently classified journalists alongside foreign intelligence services and ‘organizations with extreme ideologies’ (read: terrorists). The government’s defence security staff “viewed investigative journalists as ”hostile“ threats requiring ”counteraction“. The classified security manual lists security threats, including ”certain investigative journalists“ who may attempt to obtain ”politically sensitive information“.”[1]

So, while the information about the surveillance is shocking in its own right, there is also an important tidbit of information that can derived from the US intelligence services’ actions: despite the supposedly sacrosanct prohibition the Five Eyes partners not spy on one another, this prohibition was broken in this instance. Though Canadian experts have previously stated that such surveillance on Five Eyes partners would be an extreme exception, it’s striking that surveillance mechanisms designed to counter the FSB are being brought to bear on investigative journalists. That the NSA and other American intelligence services turned their ‘ears’ towards a journalist at the New Zealand government’s behest suggests that, despite protestations to the contrary, ‘friendly’ intelligence services do ‘help’ one another spy on people and groups that domestic intelligence services are prohibited from monitoring for either legal or technical reasons.

Reasonable people can disagree on how and why intelligence services operate. However, the routine (mis)information that has been put forward by Western agencies concerning governmeing spying has significantly undermined any foundation for a genuine democratic debate to arise around such spying. When the United States’ Director of National Intelligence asserts that he was providing the “least untruthful” answers to elected officials questioning dragnet surveillance, and supposed ‘red lines’ are being crossed in secret to target journalists tasked with providing truthful reporting to citizens, then the ability to support or even reform intelligence practices is undermined: why shouldn’t we, the people, radically and unilaterally curtail surveillance practices if the same services and their administrative officers won’t truthfully disclose even their most basic operational guidelines?

  1. I should note that, following the revelations that the NZ government is monitoring journalists and classed them alongside foreign intelligence sources and extremist organizations, the government has publicly come out against these allegations.  ↩
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Links Writing

The Significance of a ‘Three Hop’ Analysis

Washington’s Blog has an excellent, if somewhat long, post that outlines the significance of the NSA’s ‘three hop’ analysis. It collects and provides some numbers behind basic communications network analyses, and comes to the conclusion that upwards to 2.5 million Americans could be “caught up in dragnet for each suspected terrorist, means that a mere 140 potential terrorists could lead to spying on all Americans. There are tens of thousands of Americans listed as suspected terrorists … including just about anyone who protests anything that the government or big banks do.”

Go read the full post. Some of the numbers are a bit speculative, but on the whole it does a good job showing why ‘three hop’ analyses are so problematic: such analyses disproportionately collect data on American citizens the basis of the most limited forms of suspicion. Such surveillance should be set aside because it constitutes an inappropriate infringement on individuals’ and communities’ reasonable expectations of privacy; it runs counter to how a well ordered and properly functioning democracy should operate in theory and in practice.

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Humour Links Writing

Definitions for the American Surveillance State

David Sirota of Salon has developed an excellent set of terms to speed along discussions about the contemporary American surveillance state. My own favorites include:

Least untruthful: A new legal doctrine that allows an executive branch official to issue a deliberate, calculated lie to Congress yet avoid prosecution for perjury, as long as the official is protecting the executive branch’s political interests. Usage example: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper avoided prosecution for perjury because he insisted that the blatant lie he told to Congress was merely the “least untruthful” statement he could have made.

And:

Modest encroachment: A massive, indiscriminate intrusion. Usage example: President Obama has deemed the NSA’s “collect it all” surveillance operation, which has captured 20 trillion information transactions and touches virtually all aspects of American life, a “modest encroachment” on citizens’ right to privacy.

The full listing of terms is depressingly cynical. However, the persistent – if often humorous – turn to cynicism may ultimately limit how politicians address and respond to Snowden’s surveillance revelations. What Snowden confirmed raises existential challenges to the potential to imagine, let alone actualize, a deliberative democratic state. The accompanying risk is that instead of addressing such challenges head on, citizens may retreat to cynicism rather than engaging in the hard work of recuperating their increasingly-authoritarian democratic institutions. We’re at a point where we need a more active, not more withdrawn and bemused, citizen response to government excesses.

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Links

On the Zimmerman verdict …

politicalprof:

So let me see if I have this straight:

In Florida, I can follow an otherwise law-abiding person around on a dark and rainy night, and if they decide I am a threat and respond, I get to shoot and kill them if I start losing the fight.

I am sure the people of Florida are sleeping much more secure in their beds knowing that this could never happen to their child or in their neighborhood.

Quality work all around.

Legalizing lethal stalking: a really great decision…

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Aside

Firearms vs Tampons

chartier:

Jessie Jessup

context

They were off the deep end a while back: I think that the Republicans are now drilling for oil at the bottom of the pool…