John Cassidy is right about one thing. How people react to Ed Snowden depends on their attitude toward authority. The more anti-establishment you are, the more sympathetic you are going to be to Mr. Snowden. Frankly, though, I have little patience for either side of the argument. Mr. Cassidy self-identifies as being in the pro-Snowden part of this dispute, but his argument is completely incoherent.
When he finally gets to offering his own analysis, he gives us this:
The Obama Administration doesn’t want him to come home and contribute to the national-security-versus-liberty debate that the President says is necessary. It wants to lock him up for a long time.
And for what? For telling would-be jihadis that we are monitoring their Gmail and Facebook accounts? For informing the Chinese that we eavesdrop on many of their important institutions, including their prestigious research universities? For confirming that the Brits eavesdrop on virtually anybody they feel like? Come on. Are there many people out there who didn’t already know these things?
Mr. Cassidy is arguing that Mr. Snowden provided us with basically no meaningful information. Everyone knew that the NSA was sweeping up massive amounts of information, including any potential adversaries. There is no harm here. Perhaps recognizing that there must have been some value in Snowden’s disclosures, Mr. Cassidy continues:
Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public.
I’m not sure that the American public is any more enlightened than the jihadis or the Chinese. If our adversaries were not advantaged, I don’t think the public was particularly advantaged, either. There is absolutely no pressure for anyone to resign. No one is going to be charged with perjury. No crime has been revealed. Policies and programs have been exposed that people may dislike and may think go too far. I know that I feel that way. But even Mr. Cassidy acknowledges that Mr. Snowden broke the law. Mr. Cassidy says he wishes that Mr. Snowden had remained on U.S. soil to fight the charges against him even though he would be facing thirty years in prison, yet he argues that the penalty is far too stiff.
There is too much ambiguity in this line of argument. Surely the government has the responsibility to prosecute those who brazenly violate their oath to protect classified information. While there should be whistle-blower protections, they cannot apply to people who don’t reveal criminal wrongdoing.
On the other hand, those who are acting like Mr. Snowden is the second coming of Usama bin-Laden are equally irritating. People who conscientiously object to certain government policies are not usually doing so to aid and abet the enemy. I certainly don’t think that is the case here. Mr. Snowden needs to answer for what he did in court, as a deterrent to other leakers if nothing else, but he doesn’t need to be locked up for decades.
The big thing to me about this is the nexus of gov’t, industry, judicial, and the news media (all 4 estates) are looting the national treasury and setting things up to prevent dissent. Those ingredients are essentially fascism defined.
Snowden is a mixed bag. Courageous and a coward at the same time.
How does what he did compare to Daniel Ellsburg? I think that the other ex NSA guys who have backed him and were themselves smeared by the establishment speaks volumes towards the information itself.
Whatever the 4th and 5th amendments used to mean must now have a new definition. In secret of course.
For telling would-be jihadis that we are monitoring their Gmail and Facebook accounts?
That’s just idiotic. Without taking a stand on the right or wrong of it, IF the NSA is going to be running algorithms against Google’s data to look for signs of jihadist activity, it’s not at all difficult to see why they wouldn’t want to announce this to the public.
Can you imagine? You’re a jihadi, you log into Gmail, and you get an announcement telling you the NSA is looking for you. Better scrub your data!
You do remember how we found OBL, right? How he didn’t have cable(did he have satellite TV?) or internet. I guess you missed the news yesterday that most jihadis go off the grid as much as possible. The smart ones know they’re being watched. And have known for a long time. Snowden’s revelations aren’t new news to them.
Thanks for condescending to enlighten me. No, I don’t imagine you’re going to catch a lot of terrorists by trawling Gmail. I’m sure I could have picked a better example. But my only point was that it’s not hard to imagine cases where you wouldn’t want to announce your data mining operations to the public.
I’m not even saying this in defense of the program, although it’s true that I’m less bothered by it than a lot of people. I just don’t find that particular argument persuasive.
It is being seen as whistle blowing, at least to some, to the extent it goes beyond what is authorized by section 215 of the Patriot Act. Clearly, this ongoing monitoring is not related to a specific investigation, as 215 directs.
The is one issue and one issue only. The NSA is violating the Constitution under the color of law. Scooping up everyone’s communication is a clear violation of the direct language of the Fourth Amendment.
That we have members of Congress too much of cowards and too invested in their partisan games to investigate it is the tragedy that is going to destroy democracy in the United States.
The phrase Snowden used was “turnkey tyranny”. He did not assert that the President or anyone else had turned that key yet, but that the structure of the systems and the sucking up of all internet communications presented that opportunity should a tyrant decide to go down that road.
The focus on Snowden himself and the attempt to shut him up are distractions from that single issue.
John Dean warned Richard Nixon that his obsession with leaks to the point of violating the law and the Constitution was a cancer on his Presidency. President Obama does not face a Congress seeking to undo him on this issue–which is as frightening as it is strange. But the metastasizing of the intelligence community is a cancer on his Presidency that he either excises or allows to destroy popular government. It is that serious. And history (until revised by the future tyrant) will remember it well.
The IRS head resigns for doing his job. Clapper and Alexander lie to Congress and keep theirs. Who’s running this government?
Clapper and Alexander lie to Congress and keep theirs.
Which proves one point of Boo’s wrong. There has indeed been criminal acts committed by people other than Snowden. But given what just happened to Scott Bloch(Turdblossom’s buddy), elites get a free pass to break laws.
Some elites are more equal than others.
…the structure of the systems and the sucking up of all internet communications presented that opportunity should a tyrant decide to go down that road.
The problem is that it’s really the internet itself that provides that opportunity. Consider a case where tyrants are actively using these capabilities: China. It’s safe to assume the Chinese can do anything the NSA can do, so what is our government to do about that?
This is a deflection from the Constitutional argument. The fact that China is doing it does not let the US off the hook from its own Constitutional requirements unless you are going to concede the the United States is no longer a country governed by the Constitution and the rule of law.
Our government has no responsibility to check what China is doing to its own people. There is no law, domestic or international, that gives the US government that authority.
The point is that we are very close to becoming like China under the leadership of a democratically elected President and Congress.
I don’t know about you, but to me that is unacceptable.
This is not an abstract poli sci argument about the US v. China.
And one wonders, if the occasion arose, would the US include China in the Five Eyes agreement it has with Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand in which each country shares data about the other countries’ citizens so that each country can get around laws against wiretapping their own citizens.
The other big issue is that the US taxpayer is paying for tens of billions in investment to mirror and archive the entire internet just to provide a secure and maximal data store for NSA to search. While schools are closing, health clinics are closing, and bridges and roads are decaying.
The issue again is that NSA is not focused on critical data but has swept up everything in a huge dragnet. This increases the number of false positives (innocent people flagged as enemies) that its searches identify and the number of false negatives (missed potential attacks).
In addition, the NSA is conducting offensive cyberwar on other nations (Iran and China are known examples). Without a state of war actually existing between these countries. But the US treats cyberattacks against it as serious as a nuclear attack; that is, the US reserves the right to respond with nuclear weapons if the US experiences a cyberattack. It is not a smart move for the most cybervulnerable (free enterprise baby) nation on earth to be whacking the cyber hornets nest. If the President is indeed in the loop when these attacks are made, it is doubly dangerous because the President likely does not understand fully the potential consequences because the briefings will be slanted to what NSA wants to do.
I’m not just talking about what China is doing to its own people. The internet is global, and China is all over it. The NSA isn’t the only entity out there that’s archiving the internet, nor is ours the only government that’s engaged in cyber warfare.
I’m not even sure what conclusions to draw from all this, but I do think it’s something we should be thinking about more. All the focus on hunting terrorists is kind of a red herring, because al Qaeda is hardly even worth talking about when it comes to cyber espionage and cyber war. But the US isn’t the only player, and even if we abolish the NSA and blow up all their servers, the internet will still be crawling with spies. That’s what I’m asking what our government should do about.
I’m honestly not sure about the constitutional argument either. I have no doubt that online communications qualify as papers or effects, but I’m not sure that running search algorithms against gigantic amounts of metadata is unreasonable. (If that’s what’s really happening, of course. But if it’s true that they aren’t looking at content, I’m not sure how that’s different from inspecting unopened mail.)
Of course, my thinking about all this is conditioned by my assumption that the internet is not security, so I have no expectation of online privacy in the first place. I figure if you’re serious about keeping your data private, you don’t hook up your computer to every other computer on the planet.
Here is one thing you need to know. The security of software is compromised because the FBI insists on having a backdoor for wiretapping it. Read Schneier on Security, a blog that focuses on cybersecurity issues to catch up with some of these issues.
The key words in the Fourth Amendment have to do with specificity of suspicion. The framers of that amendment did not like dragnets based on guilt by association. Linking metadata into networks is first-order guilt by association unless there are ways of minimizing the links that you are searching by an attribute that reflects honest-to-goodness probable cause.
You have no expectation of online privacy because the internet industry is too lazy and cheap to provide online privacy and because of legal requirements for backdoors.
The problem is that so much of our current transactions are compelled to be online. Every major employer requires online applications to HR, with resume attached. Applications for government services frequently are only online. And purchases are online as well as the discounts when you sign up for online affinity cards of retailers.
The other issue is the differential use of information by agencies like NSA. Agencies with that degree of information have used them politically in the past (J Edgar Hoover). Agencies have been politically biased in the way that they have used that information and who is considered a threat (FBI’s COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s).
Inspecting unopened mail is different from phone metadata and the USPS does not do wholesale inspection of unopened mail without probable cause.
The USPS does not open mail without a Federal Court Order. The sole exemption is that the Postal Inspectors (Postal Police) opening mail (usually packages) under the exigent circumstances of clear evidence of chemical, biological, or explosive material requiring immediate action, analogous to :hot pursuit”. When we think there is a letter or package with such material (like anthrax or ricin or a ticking bomb), the package is segregated, the area cleared and the Postal Inspectors are called. Do the Inspectors call a Federal Judge? I doubt it, it’s more like a police call of a crime in progress. However, opening mail to read it stringently requires a court order. If mail is already opened and the address missing, i.e. letter mangled in the machinery, the letter (already open remember) is scanned strictly looking for indications of who it’s addressed to.
This issue is unopened mail. Recording the addressee, return address, and PO timestamp and PO location for transmission to law enforcement.
Can’t say that this isn’t done, but I’ve never heard of it. The images lifted by the cameras contain this information but it isn’t stored, just used in lookup tables to find the zipcode to send it too. It is possible that there is a back door in the software that I’m not aware of, wherein an address is watched for and data recorded and secretly sent back, but I really doubt it. If they could do that in the milliseconds available, why don’t they fix the crappy visible features in the software?
Definitely the address and return address of every letter are not stored anywhere. The storage capacity and data transmission rates are not there on standard Mail Processing Equipment.
The most likely scenario is the old fashioned way. The NSA would advise the local postmaster and letter carrier to make notes on target’s mail. If he slips them into a collection box in another town rather than leaving them in his own mail box for the carrier it’s impossible to track them. Remember that the government could record every phone call in Northern California for six months because the equipment was actually designed to do that. Your phone calls, even those made on an old dial phone, are digitally sampled at some point and electronically transmitted (sometimes by optical equipment) and stored in computer buffers. Just like e-mail. Snail mail is much harder to intercept, except on the front and back ends by humans just like in 1920.
A “target’s mail” implies probable cause somewhere along the line.
I think that you’ve helped me rid the “it’s just like reading the address on a mail envelope” deflection.
Scooping up everyone’s communication is a clear violation of the direct language of the Fourth Amendment.
If they were actually doing that, it would be.
Scooping up the transaction information, on the other hand, is not.
So let’s have an investigation and find out which it is.
And it is only case law that has allowed scooping up metadata of suspicionless individuals under the Fourth Amendment.
Oh, yes, the FISA Court asserted without evidence that its order complied with the Fourth Amendment. That was cute.
“Only” case law?
“Only?”
Tarheel, case law makes up as much of the western, and Anglo-American, legal tradition as enacted legislation.
Case law isn’t some dirty trick; it’s a foundational part of our system of law and government.
I’m with you – neither the saint or satan routine is convincing.
Fundamentally, any govt institution which deals in classified information is going to want an exposer of that information brought to justice. That’s the law, and that’s what they’ll do. Snowden knew this. I’m not sure what we expect some of these agencies to do – if they don’t prosecute him, they’re basically giving license for anyone who disagrees with policy to expose anything they want.
But, given the torture of Bradley Manning, Snowden’s decision to run is more than understandable. I don’t see how he’d get a fair trial, even if I think he’s basically guilty. I have no problem with him residing in Ecuador for a number of years instead of being inappropriately treated in a US prison. Being exiled from one’s homeland is more of a punishment than many realize anyway, regardless of where you come from.
Calling bullshit on Snowden’s shtick is neither “demonization” nor a fair litmus test for attitudes towards authority in general. Snowden panders to fear of the U.S. government in particular, not generic authority.
Only if administration officials that leak classified information (much of it propaganda) are held to the same standard.
Jeremy Scahill explains the full picture for those that can’t figure it out and get hung up on the character of messengers instead of the message.
Snowden’s fans were quite happy to focus on his personality and character five days ago.
Gee, Marie, what happened?
Cassidy’s piece wasn’t intended to describe the content and impact of Snowden’s revelations. (For that, start with the Guardian.) His piece was about the ambivalence and internal conflict that are influencing how journalists write about Snowden himself.
It’s been over two weeks since the story broke, when you downplayed the importance of it. You’ve hardly touched the substance of the issues at all. I find nothing wrong with what Cassidy wrote.
As for the question of whether Snowden told our enemies anything they don’t know, it’s not much of a contradiction. A jihadi knows enough to use code when writing emails or speaking on the phone. (Zero Dark Thirty gave away more actionable information than Snowden). So does someone in the US who wants to buy pot. (ditto for The Wire). But I, who can presume to not be suspected by my government of any criminal activity, didn’t know that my communications data is being recorded. Nor did I know that specific warrants aren’t required to tap my phones and collect my data. Nor did I know that if the UK surveillance industry collects US data and the US’s collects UK data, they can just swap and call it even. And the numbers of people who have top secret security clearances — are they actually saying 3 million??? — is also something I didn’t know.
Laws secretly interpreted, secretly ruled on, overseen by a Congress that’s lied to, charging whistleblowers in secret (“30 years” is a meaningless number) with the whole shebang looked at in a meeting between the President and the Privacy Board that’s held in secret… and you’re annoyed with Cassidy?
Try reading this and get back to me.
In the abstract, yes, Snowden committed a crime and should be answerable for it. But in practice, it’s the “answerable” that’s the problem.
In practice, we have an administration that tortured Bradley Manning for years and has pursued genuine whistleblowers (in the legal sense of the term – revealing lawbreaking, not just what they believe to be morally wrong, as Snowden did) with a vengeance. It is charging anyone who enables classified information to be publicly known with espionage – on the novel theory that “enemies” (undefined, of course) can then learn it, whether or not the defendant ever had contact with, was motivated by, or benefited in any way from them – a ridiculously over-the-top legal reading that means Snowden is in far more legal jeopardy than he would be for the crime of leaking classified documents. And he also has good reason to fear being tortured.
Sure, it’d be a lot better if Snowden were willing to stand his ground and face the legal consequences. Except that the legal consequences in this case far graver than what is or should be legal, just as the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment shouldn’t be legal.
And Boo: shame on you for suggesting, in essence, that because heads are not rolling over Snowden’s revelations and because no laws were broken (at least in the administration’s telling of it), Snowden wasn’t justified. That is the logic of Village Media: if both major parties have signed off on something, there’s no controversy and it’s OK. I know you don’t buy that.
I’m not particularly enamored of the canonization of Snowden by some on the left, and I suppose his motivation, which we don’t truly know, does matter. But as Tarheel Dem alluded to, Snowden himself is a side issue. What he revealed – confirmed – was and is what’s important here. But then, I happen to think authority, in all its many forms, has a well-proven tendency to act in the perceived interests of… authority. Which isn’t necessarily the same as either my interests or the public’s interests.
This gets to your stance versus authority.
My political mission is to keep the Republicans out of power, particularly out of the White House. I care so much about this one issue that nothing compares to it. But what that means is that I am affirmatively pro--Establishment when the Democrats are in control. While I am pretty much an across-the-board progressive who is to the left of 99% of congressional Democrats, and I therefore oppose much of what the Democrats do, I am actually quite pleased with the performance of the administration in the context of the known alternative. I am for them exercising their power. I’d like to see them exercise more of it in most instances, although surveillance isn’t one of them.
Government leaks cannot be tolerated. Whistle-blowers need to reveal illegal acts, not just covert activities. You can argue that Snowden was justified, but you can’t reasonably argue that what he did is legal or should go unpunished.
You also exaggerate the mistreatment (in duration) of Bradley Manning and the extent to which the administration has pursued genuine whistle-blowers. Here are the [six https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-13889-obama-administration-has-aggressively-prosecuted-leaks
-and-whistleblowers-who-are-they] they have prosecuted.
Of the six, only Drake was a genuine whistle-blower. Manning tried to be a whistle-blower but things got out of control.
The other four were just leakers, and Kiriakou was actually an apologist for torture who just talked out of school.
Well those descriptions certainly sanitized the information that Manning, Drake, and Kirakou presented. And ignored the fact that in an unprecedented move, the DOJ went after Risen and Rosen.
Just keeping the lid on Bush scandals for eight years won’t necessarily prevent Republicans from gaining power; indeed, to a certain extent it helps them avoid their demise.
If you don’t remember, Kiriakou was the guy the CIA trotted out to argue that water boarding worked like a charm. Somehow, he exceeded his brief. His job was to lie, not to reveal the identity of covert officers.
Remind me again exactly how the DOJ “went after” Risen and Rosen. Were either indicted?
As for Drake, he did everything the correct way and just came up against a corrupt system. In the end, the punishment was appropriate, but they should have started out with a wrist slap rather than tormenting him for years with the prospect of a long prison sentence.
Every once in a while, someone manages to disrupt through nonviolent action the amassing of power and wealth among the very few. Given the personal risk to everyone who’s tried, and the odds against success, the least I can do is to support the efforts that speak to my principles of the kind of society we should make for ourselves.
That my support for actions like the Occupy Movement and Snowden’s revelations puts me at odds with the Obama administration isn’t an inevitable consequence. There’s no inherent contradiction between supporting democratic government and a mission to keep Democrats in power, unless the Democrats in power decide to construe it that way.
I have to acknowledge that as far as our perspectives are concerned, I share your goal but not your methods. Thanks for the great discussions.
we have an administration that tortured Bradley Manning for years
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.
My initial reaction to Snowden was very sympathetic, but I’ve turned against him as more information – about hims, his actions, the holes in history – have come out.
I’m not entirely sure what this says about my stance towards authority. My heart is at war with my head, maybe?
Yep, the more he talks the more he sounds like one of those Geeks from The Big Bang Theory. But, it’s not funny. Whatever his plan was…sitting in a Russian airport waiting for someone to grant him asylum is just stupid. The whole thing has become about him instead of what NSA is doing.
It’s amazing how many internet commenters are experts on electronic intelligence tradecraft, as well as the subjective understanding of the al Qaeda leadership.
Even more amazing is how consistently this expertise lines up with a particular ideological stance.
Anyway, I’m reminded of the US Congressman (Peter King maybe?) who blabbed on Fox that the NSA was listening in on Taiban and al Qaeda’s satellite phones, which was immediately followed by their abandoning the phones.
On 9/11, Orrin Hatch blabbed about it on television.
Thanks.
My brain took “Republican,” “terrorism,” “fuck-up,” and “media blabber,” and somehow spit out Peter King.
There are a lot of IT folks online who don’t need to understand intelligence tradecraft to know when something is excessive.
And the preponderance of IT folks tend to be somewhat libertarian.
Data mining is a known technology. Folks who read about Ray Klein and the diversion of all telecommunications traffic to the NSA have not forgotten that. Folks who advocated that telecommunication companies not be immunized from breaking the law in the Bush administration have not forgotten how that resulted in painting and unconstitutional collection with the color of law.
It doesn’t take much technical ability to read the FISA court order as requiring all information from a vendor, including from suspicionless American citizens.
It doesn’t take much technical ability to read the NSA targeting rules linked by the Guardian to understand that they are designed to evade any restrictions imposed by law.
It doesn’t take much technical ability to realize that the Five Eyes agreement seeks to avoid domestic laws against warrantless surveillance of one’s own citizens.
So when is Pete King going to be hit with esionage charges? Or did he insta-declassify that? Some leaks are more equal than others.
On the other hand, it does take quite a bit more specialized knowledge than is possessed by your typical IT person to say that leaking this information was meaningless to terrorists seeking to avoid detection.
Anyway, I’m reminded of the US Congressman (Peter King maybe?) who blabbed on Fox that the NSA was listening in on Taiban and al Qaeda’s satellite phones, which was immediately followed by their abandoning the phones.
How about Leon Panetta outing the doctor who was helping the CIA with the “vaccine” program in Pakistani town where OBL was hiding? Was that leak okay?
Ten polio vaccine health workers have been killed and vaccine programs continue to be halted, leaving hundreds of thousands unvaccinated and at risk. Real people dead or crippled because Panetta blabbed classified information. (That was an unwise method to target OBL, but once done, it served no purpose and endangered people to disclose it.)
Has the DOD and State been able to identify a single person that was killed or injured because of what Manning released? Or Snowden?
No, Panetta shouldn’t have blabbed, either.
You see how that works, Calvin? The application of a principle, without regard to teams and agendas?
You should try that some time.
He went and deliberately set out to get a job so that he could take the intelligence and give it to other countries.
He was not working on some `conscience’ that he got AFTER he got the job and ` learned’ of the intelligence.
If deliberately setting out to get a job so that you could spill classified materials about the United States isn’t TREASON…
WHEN W-T-F IS?
No matter which way you lean on this, Each and everyone of us has to own up to the fact that even I have that proverbial snake in the grass and/or i’m not that righteous after all aha Zen moment….