I have no idea why Glenn Greenwald chose to die on a hill that has nothing to do with the fight that interests him. Why does he erroneously argue that “The establishment leadership of the two parties collaborate on far more than they fight”? The answer is obviously because the only thing Greenwald cares about is “war on terror” policy. He ought to be pleased that the Amash amendment got more support than most people expected it would, but he uses the vote to make a long-winded and totally boring argument about how conservative Republicans support and enable intrusive surveillance. Was anyone unaware of this? Did anyone ever argue any differently?
In fact, those same conservative Republicans’ willingness to politicize national security issues (remember Benghazi) is one of the main reasons that a Democratic administration feels compelled to inoculate themselves from charges of being soft. This has been going on in this country, mostly to our detriment, since the GOP started purging the State Department over the communist revolution in China. The Democrats’ fear of being labeled soft helps explain why we have Korean and Vietnam War veterans. And it helps explain why U.S. weapons shipments will shortly begin arriving in Syria. It explains why the end of the war in Iraq had to be accompanied by an escalation in Afghanistan.
It takes two to tango, but let’s be clear about the source of our warmongering. Only one party stands ready to capitalize on any foreign policy setback by calling for a more belligerent posture. Only one party actively hopes for a terror attack so they can paint the other party as weak and feckless.
Conservative Republicans are the devil on America’s shoulder, whispering constantly about the danger from people who don’t look like they look and don’t believe what they believe. And, yes, they consistently succeed in getting Democrats to do dumb, violent things that they otherwise would not do.
This has been the case my entire life, and for most of my parents’ lives, too. If you interpret this history to mean that there isn’t a difference between the two parties, you’re missing the entire dynamic at play in the formation of U.S. foreign policy.
All one has to do is imagine the last five years under a McCain/Palin administration, and the idea that there is a bipartisan Establishment that determines outcomes will evaporate in your face.
I thought you stopped reading Glennzilla for general health reasons. He can be a bit Over The Top sometimes.
I did until the Snowden thing cropped up. Now that he is making news and somewhat driving events, he can’t be ignored.
S.J.RES.23 Authorization for Use of Military Force. 98-0.
Is that supposed to be an argument?
The World Trade Center was still smoking when they took that vote.
If you are prepared to explain to me why that isn’t exactly the time it mattered most I am prepared to listen.
Because at that particular point in time, the country was at its most united. To use it as an example of how the country is unified on any particular issue is singularly misguided.
Without any question, I would’ve voted Yes on that. However, under a President Gore, do you think we would’ve seen 98-0? I honestly don’t know. Maybe But ‘most united’ so often means precisely what the rightwing pretends it means.
It would have served the country better had more people been willing to be disunited and thinking straight. When it first happened I reluctantly supported Afghanistan because something had to be done, but I was flat wrong.
This, a thousand times. I non-reluctantly supported Afghanistan and sort of frozenly didn’t know what I thought about Iraq, and I was wrong and wronger. I don’t want unity, I want representatives who make better decisions than I do.
Not too many were reluctant in their support of using military force against Afghanistan and likely fewer still that today concede that they were wrong regardless their original level of support. To err is human; to admit an error is adult. Not enough adults like you seem to be running the asylums these days.
I’d say there were very, very few who didn’t support military intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11. How many were to the left of Wellstone on 9/12?
I suppose there’s nothing more fruitless than speculating what might-have-been in military history. But it seems largely beyond argument IMO that the Afghan populace was broadly supportive of our invasion and overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, including Pashtun areas. But the complete, planned and immediate redeployment of almost all US military assets for the (patently illegal) invasion to Liberate Iraq’s Oil from Saddam and the utter refusal to spend the basic funds needed to reconstruct and “nation build” Afghanistan (all thrown down the Iraq rathole) resulted in a spectacular snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory (to sound pretty jingoistic, but there it is.)
Do you think the Afghan invasion was always certain to be an utter failure no matter what tactics/strategy were employed? If you have time to state your view, I’d be interested.
Considering that it was Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Tommy Franks leading the charge, you bet your sweet bippy I opposed it.
Never forget that the attack on Afghanistan began in 2001 and the attack on Iraq began in 2003, almost a year and a half later.
I wouldn’t presume to know what the Afghan people wanted and can only assume that public opinion is no more unified there than any place else. My visceral response to any authoritarian or patriarchal, fundamentalist religious government is informed by my secular feminism. However, that is not to be imposed on other countries and peoples and particularly not militarily. Considering all the seemingly intractable problems we have in this country, how arrogant we are to consider that we can “fix” problems in any other country.
The Iraqis were glad to have us there too. In neither case does that mean we should have been there.
I am a history buff, and while I have not studied the history of Afghanistan in detail (prefer the Middle Ages and early Modern), though Bushian idiocy counts for a lot, I do not think any amount of money or assets would have been enough to nation build Afghanistan. Certainly not in any way the US would have found ideal, anyway.
Yes but aren’t Democrats “weak and feckless” whenever they DO cave in to Republican militarism? How many people have to die to keep Democrats “onside” as far as this dynamic goes? Isn’t it possible that sometimes a Republican administration would be able to take a less aggressive posture than Obama precisely because they don’t have to look over their shoulder at Democrat opposition quite so much?
Republicans tend to do a lot of mouth loud talking to make them look aggressive, but often do relatively little in practice. They’re always talking about standing up for “biblical values” or the little guy but what do they actually do for him beyond largely symbolic gestures of support? Democrats tend to act more decisively to put aggressive foreign policy into action.
Maybe if Democrats did demagoguery as well as the Republicans, they wouldn’t have to act quite so stupidly so often in order to look tough.
Yes, that’s largely true. Most people agree that it was far easier for Nixon to thaw relations with China than it would have been for a Democratic administration, precisely because Nixon had a record as a red-baiter going back more than 20 years.
But, and this is a key point, the Republicans are much more willing to use violence for frivolous reasons (see Grenada, Panama, Iraq).
I’d rather see a frivolous attack on Grenada if it prevents a major war on Iran. So much of politics is pure showmanship – it’s the bodycount that ultimately matters and here the Democrats don’t have a great record – Vietnam, continuation of war in Iraq, escalation of losing war in Afghanistan – all, arguably, to try to stay onside with militaristic Republicans.
I’m not saying that the relative non intervention in Libya and Syria under Obama isn’t an advance, a sign of some learning, but just because Republicans are vociferously baying for more blood while in opposition doesn’t mean they would have committed more boots on the ground if in power. There is a limit to how far you can take the “Republican’s would be even worse” argument to justify Dem warmongering and erosion of civil liberties…
Now the sequester is limiting Military expenditure. Should we be praising Republicans for this? Should we accuse them of national sabotage and lack of patriotism for another debt ceiling fiasco? Why not brand Republicans as unpatriotic fighters for foreign interests through corporate outsourcing, tax avoidance, and corporate military adventurism abroad? Why not arrest and try a few neo-cons for acting as agents of a foreign power (Israel). Arrest and try the Koch brothers etc. on some semi-trumped up charges of conspiracy to subvert democracy. Set up special prosecutors a la Whitewater. He doesn’t have to stick to his terms of reference or find anything. Create some hysteria. It worked for McCarthy, and Republicans against Clinton.
Fight politics as a propaganda war rather than an intellectual policy wonk. That’s the visceral level most people vote at. That’s why Kansas votes the way it does. The Republicans realise they are fighting a war. Democrats are afraid to fight for their core principles. Most don’t even realise there is a war on.
It worked for McCarthy, and Republicans against Clinton.
You know, I can’t think of a surer sign that an argument has gone totally off the rails than saying, “It worked for McCarthy.”
‘It didn’t work when McCarthy tried it’ springs to mind.
At least that acknowedges that it didn’t work when McCarthy tried it, you know? It’s not like the guy had a long, distinguished career in the Senate.
“Only Nixon could go to China”
Let’s be clear – the reason that “only Nixon could go to China” is that if any Democrat had done what Nixon did Nixon and the right wing would have screamed bloodly murder and accused the Democrat of everything from treason to genocide.
After you study history long enough you realize that three things are true about conservatives in any era. First, they lack empathy except for a narrowly defined group with which they identify. Second, they are incredible hypocrites – the actions of their opponents that cause them the most outrage are invariably milder version of stuff that they themselves are doing. This is because double standards are logical if your group is the “chosen people” and the others are the heathen. In that case, anything the heathen do is by definition an outrage – but if you do the same thing then it is ok because it is advancing your righteous cause. Third, they completely lack self-awareness and so have no idea that the first two are true, or that they constantly confirm those two points with their behavior.
Isn’t it possible that sometimes a Republican administration would be able to take a less aggressive posture than Obama precisely because they don’t have to look over their shoulder at Democrat opposition quite so much?
If there were any Republicans who were interested in such a thing, they probably could. Nixon going to China, for instance, but those days are over.
Republicans tend to do a lot of mouth loud talking to make them look aggressive, but often do relatively little in practice.
There are a whole lot of Iraqis who don’t agree with you. Republicans these days do a whole hell of a lot in practice when it comes to military action.
Democrats tend to act more decisively to put aggressive foreign policy into action.
What the hell? Are you completely unfamiliar with the Bush presidency?
It is clear from the distribution of Democratic votes that Nancy Pelosi whipped the vote to come close, preserving Democrats for whom this might be an issue, but ultimately to fail. Whether she colluded with John Boehner and Eric Cantor on this or was just supporting the White House position, the result is the same. A bunch of Democrats going on record as not supporting a reasonable restriction of NSA bulk collection and effectively violating their oath of office.
Jim Clyburn voted Aye with the entire South Carolina delegation to the House of Representatives.
Mel Watt voted Aye with Walter Jones, Patrick McHenry, and a bunch of other Republicans.
The remaining NC Democrats voted No with Renee Elmers, Virginia Foxx, and a few other Republicans.
And for you, the biggest story is Glenn Greenwald and the spin that he puts on his articles? When exactly do you want an honest and forthright debate on the national security state in the media and Congress? When Republicans like Mike Rogers can “Terror, terror, terror” the members of the House into voting for bad policy?
If there is not compromise with the White House on the Amash amendment, the Rush Holt amendment repealing the PATRIOT Act will not get uniform Democratic support either, and it should.
When do we start to roll back the national security state? After the next neo-con President takes office, has an oops and scares the public into even more draconian executive power?
When is the right time to have this debate and expect some openness from the White House instead of stonewalling?
BTW, all indications are that the public won’t see the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture either. Sen. Levin seems to advocate stonewalling it to serve the CIA.
When does the accountability come?
Well put.
There is way to much of this shit for me to ever buy that it’s all because people are scared of looking soft. If you’re afraid of being tarred with that brush, then why aren’t you trying to change the perception about what it means to be soft?
Yes, the two parties are exactly the same—on those things that the two parties are the same on.
Thus, we live in an almost comically militarist country and society, in the sense of elevating our soldiery to the status of do-gooding heroes and saints and pouring inconceivable billions down the ruinous rathole of needless corporate weaponry to outfit them–even if the parties often do not agree on deployment decisions, especially in the age of neo-conservatism.
We live in a country that has unanimously chosen to adopt another country, Israel, as our permanent ward and turn a blind eye to virtually everything the little delinquent does, while working tirelessly to cover up his every scrape with the law. Not exactly tough love, haha.
And we now live in a country where both parties apparently have majorities which support the absolute necessity of the Modern Surveillance State and want to ensure that nothing much is known or said or revealed about it. The days of such things as Church Commission are long gone.
I think you’re missing the whole point of the post, which is that there are other things going on in the world. There are parts of the government that are not the security state, and the Republicans are working furiously to tear down all of those except the Border Patrol. (And of course you could complain that the Democrats caved on border security in order to get the pathway to citizenship, but really however much graft and corruption are involved there, it’s a small price to pay for la ciudadanía para 11 millones. Think about that! 11 million new voters! Who won’t be voting Republican!)
So if you think any part of the federal government that you don’t fear and loathe is worth keeping, the difference between the parties is blindingly obvious.
I think you’re right, and I think the comment to which you’re responding is also right.
If we ever want to win the fights on the ‘other things going on in the world?’ We’ve got to focus on this fight, first. Because when we are indistinguishable from the extreme-right Republicans in some (maybe even in ‘very few’) important ways, it undermines our power, our unity, and our effectiveness.
Every time we play ‘reasonable adult in the room,’ instead of proclaiming our principles, or worse, when we start crowing about how Cornyn and Chambliss and the far-right are voting with our most important principles, but Warren and Sanders are not, we’re losing the fight even if we’re winning the vote.
Every establishmentarian Democrat, who doesn’t give two shits for privacy and cares only for Democratic control of the Congress, should be freaking completely the fuck out about this vote. It is a political–forget about policy–nightmare. Instead, establishmentarian Democrats will say, ‘Well, voters must vote Dem, when the time comes, even though elected Dems can vote with the most extreme right-wingers in Congress.’ Instead of moving our caucus toward us, as the Republicans do with primaries, we move our caucus rightward, by giving them a pass.
And you know what? I buy that we have to vote for small-minded unprincipled sellout Dems. I really do. I’ll vote Dem no matter how they betray the principles I hold dear, because I believe that the lesser of two evils means precisely the same as the greater of two goods. But establishmentarians will spend an incredible amount of energy scolding liberals who start to despise the Democratic party, and they’ll spend an incredible amount of energy hating liberals who refuse to vote for a Democratic party that votes like the extreme right on some issues, but they will only spend a tiny fraction of that energy trying to convince Democratic officeholders not to vote like Sarah Palin.
I’m terrified that we’re well on our way to losing the Senate. And if Democratic turnout is low, we’ll blame apathetic voters or townhalls or unfair attack ads or some shit, instead of looking more closely at our clarion call: “We’re better than the Republicans on many issues, although identical on others, and while we always try to find a pragmatic compromise position, we often don’t have the power, skill, or will to make a positive change in your life! Vote! Vote! Vote!”
From Steny Hoyer’s whip argument:
That is not what Amash/Conyers/Mulvaney/Polic/Massie did. If NSA has evidence that someone is in communication with terrorist groups (one-hop), they would not be barred from collected the metadata associated with those persons.
This is just waving the “Terror, Terror, Terror” flag to defend unconstitutional bulk collection of metadata (Sec 215 is metadata, Sec. 702 is contents) on everyone who is connected to telecommunications systems.
It is a dishonest argument.
I think you need to step back and play devil’s advocate for a bit if you want to be fair.
If we identify a number as belonging to a terrorist then do we have the ability to see all their contacts? That’s really the question here.
We can roll back the data mining, but we don’t want to allow information to be destroyed that we might find very useful.
Those two things can be distinguished.
Yes we do. See all their contacts means “one-hop”, which means that the suspected terrorists telecommunications address (IP or phone number) is on one side and the one-hop contact is on the other. That puts the one-hop contact available for search suspicious activity to validate a terrorist link and not just a random phone call. Getting a warrant for that search would not be that difficult.
The problem is thinking that bulk collection a expended lots of computer resources to build networks of everyone to three hops out is going to make the process more efficient. There is no evidence that it will or has.
I’m not about being fair. The issue in this argument is what is the truth of the matter. That issue is partly obscured by the governments determined secrecy about this program. So a whole lot of investigative journalism has gone in to figuring out the outlines of the way the program operates. In addition the government has tried to confuse the issue by conflating the Section 215 authorities and Section 702 authorities. And not just the public is confused. Most members of Congress outside of the Intelligence committees are likely confused as well.
No evidence has been provided that telecommunications companies destroying transaction data has been a hindrance to investigation of anything, criminal or terrorist. The failures that led to 9/11 and other real terrorist (as opposed to FBI entrapment operations) threats have not been shown to be the result of lack of necessary information but to be the failure of judgement to act on the information that was available.
The government keeps saying how many terrorist threats were prevented by this overreaching authority. I don’t believe it. They have to demonstrate that those threats could not have been prevented by following the constraints of the Constitution.
More and more, NSA is appearing to be a multi-billion-dollar contractor boondoggle that could become a serious threat to civil liberties but is pretty useless in preventing attacks by non-governmental small groups of actors.
BTW, seems (according to the Twit stream) that J. Rubin is freaked out by the bipartisan vote last night.
Well, as long as you have no interest in making a fair argument then I have no reason to engage with you in an argument.
There are a lot of issues at play here, and I definitely support rolling back the degree of surveillance and also adding clarity to the law.
However, I am not going to lazily insist that I know what it is useful and what is not.
As for 9/11, if I told you during the summer of 2001, that there was a cell in the country who was taking flight lessons and intended to hijack a bunch of planes, and that they were receiving funding from the UAE, I think you would be able to use data mining to find them and their paymasters. Also, after the attack, it would be very useful to be able to track all their communications going back beyond six months.
So, let’s not pretend that such information can’t be useful. The question we need to answer is how much privacy we’re willing to sacrifice. What capabilities are we willing to go without in the interest of privacy? And what is the legal foundation we’re operating under? And who gets to decide the answers to these questions?
But using the debate as an excuse to argue that Congress cooperates on most issues is exceedingly dumb.
So truth and the search for truth doesn’t matter in the effort to become the anti-rightwing-echo-chamber? What exactly is the standard of “fair”?
You wouldn’t have to datamine to find their paymasters. Investigative techniques did not start with data mining. If you had that specific information, you had the specificity to trace a chain of cause-and-effect instead of one of loose correlation. There was information that the folks supposed to be keeping us safe wilfully ignored, causing several resignations around the 9/11 period and a deliberate attempt to cook the 9/11 investigative report.
I don’t know to what degree Congress cooperates in covering each other’s asses on votes. But what you see in legislation is far from serving their constituents on either side of the aisle. But it is pretty clear that that cooperation does not extend to actually providing a real jobs program or a real path to citizenship. Mostly it is cooperation of expanding or holding harmless huge military budgets and being stampeded in to wars that turn out to be disastrous. And keeping the money flowing in DC to fund increasingly expensive and dysfunctional campaigns. Or cooperation in keeping the illusion of the deficit fairy alive.
That is a separate issue. And I found Greenwald’s lack of curiosity about how the vote was actually put together made his argument rather superficial. Hoyer, after all is one of two Congressmen directly representing NSA and its whatever thousand employees and contractors.
you are trending off to tangential issues.
Do you remember Able Danger?
I certainly agree that we need transparency, but for my own metadata, I would readily agree to most of the things they claim they’re doing with it. I’m still not convinced that it’s unconstitutional, anyway, because I keep coming back to the fact that no one is actually looking at all this data.
I’m not saying I’m convinced that it is constitutional either, but for myself I honestly don’t mind being three-hopped by some bot. (Goddamn, we really are living in science fiction.)
You also have to separate the technological aspect form the legal aspect, because technologically, in most of these cases we’re really talking about capabilities. I agree that proper warrants should be issued to use those capabilities, but there’s this whole huge massive infrastructure that needs to be in place to make that possible. If you’re saying we shouldn’t have that, I entirely disagree.
I wouldn’t necessarily put these capabilities in the hands of the NSA, of course, and it should all be done openly, but I definitely want the feds on the Internet. The entire world runs on the Internet, and we’re going to leave it all in private hands? And who’s going to police them? Nobody?
We had that infrastructure ready to go to do minimized searches with cause, according to NSA whistle-blower William Binney. He says that post 9/11 his skunk-works at NSA even ran a post-mortem to see if their system could have produced information that might have clarified the possibility of a terrorist attack. According to him, that information could have been available beforehand if his more limited project hadn’t be superseded by the Stellar Wind program that clearly was unconstitutional. Now, there needs to be some way of verifying Binney’s statements, but no one in Congress yet seems interested in this investigation. The technology is not that difficult to manage proper warrrants. In fact, it now seems and much hashing about that the $20 million-a-year PRISM program that connected to Google, Facebook, and so on, managed the automated issuing of the equivalent of national security letters on a search-by-search basis. And that’s all it did. Other systems, yet undisclosed did the actual collection of content from those internet services.
But those warrants could easily with much less cost than the Bluffdale data center be tied into Title III courts that could issue proper and constitutional warrants.
IMO those capabilities should be an interface between local law enforcement, state law enforcement, and the FBI and the Title III courts. But there has to be some other means of accountability to ensure that the FBI doesn’t follow its historical tendency to pursue political witch hunts. Right now, FBI is the cover for the actions that are actually occurring in NSA. FBI requests a FISA Court order for Verizon Business Systems to deliver all international and domestic metadata to NSA.
We have to have this open debate, and it is not occurring because the White House is covering for the NSA.
What we really need is another Church Committee style investigation that gets all of the dirty laundry out in the open and restores democratic processes.
But those warrants could easily with much less cost than the Bluffdale data center be tied into Title III courts that could issue proper and constitutional warrants.
No, they really couldn’t. What you’re talking about, these national security letters, are security tokens. So a Title III court issues a warrant to search Google or Verizon or whoever. And then the NSA or whoever is doing to search has to have all these negotiations with Google about how they’re going to transfer the data, and then they have to build the interfaces. There are going to be a lot of requests and responses going back and forth over the Internet, and Google is going to require a security token for every one of those.
And note that Google now has a bunch of data about what the NSA is up to, so the tokens can also provide some measure of accountability.
Of course, if there are perfectly valid reasons for what they’re doing, there’s no need to be secretive about it. I wouldn’t argue with that.
When all you’ve got is fear mongering — the really, really bad hypothetical GOP administration as compared to the really bad real DEM administration — that’s not a real argument.
The facts are on Greenwald’s side and he actually sees a glimmer of hope on the issue civil liberties that the powers in the Democratic and Republican Parties have no intention of championing. Bargains with the devil to maintain/advance the national security state and the fortunes of corporate America is the anti-progressive. At least FDR’s bargains with the devils got us financial regulation, Social Security, etc.
Sorry, Boo, but yours is the dumber argument here.
For starters, I can’t imagine Greenwald – a man who had to move to another country to exercise a right that most Democrats now recognize and most Republicans still don’t – would argue that the two parties are indistinguishable on all issues. It’s disingenuous to claim that he does. But he writes publicly about one constellation of issues, and in that arena, at a meta level, his claim of current indistinguishability is pretty strong. In the weeds, Republicans are worse on some things (eg use of military force) – and for the last five years, Democrats have arguably been worse than others. I get where he’s coming from.
For several years now polls have shown, for the first time in generations, that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans on national security issues – specifically because of the massive overreaches of the Bush administration and the rhetorical excesses (not just on security) of current Republicans. If the Democrats are being “forced” to not appear “weak,” as you claim, it’s because they’re actively ignoring the majority of voters who are telling them that we don’t want the Republican template.
That’s not political necessity – it’s a choice. At what point do we hold them accountable for that choice? Never, according to your argument, because the alternative would be worse, and besides, they don’t really mean it.
Except that on a whole host of issues, from the zealous prosecution of whistleblowers and the journalists that publish them (see Risen) to the expansive interpretation of the PATRIOT Act to the current dustup over three hops, the evidence is overwhelming that they do mean it. Nobody is clamoring for the Obama administration to do these things; nobody was publicly even suggesting that they do them. Nobody was nostalgically pointing to the good old days, when the Bush administration did these things – in part because nobody in their right mind is nostalgic for any piece of the Bush administration, , but also because Bush never went this far with his own citizens.
But according to you, it’s all OK, because Korea. Or something. What a dumb argument.
Front page this.
I for one will clamor for the Obama administration to know what the fuck is going on on the Internet. I entirely agree with the calls for transparency, but I think a lot of people have some basic misconceptions. There seems to be this idea that the NSA is just gobbling up the whole Internet, but in fact the Internet is much much bigger than the NSA and growing by the second. The idea of trying to monitor it all gets to be kind of like that Borges story about the 1:1 scale map.
And the NSA is not the biggest presence out there. I don’t know, maybe people haven’t read enough cyberpunk, but the scales of things are different on the Internet. In meatspace Google is of course in the United States (although they do their best to avoid paying taxes), but that really isn’t the case in cyberspace. (And Amazon, and Microsoft, and Apple, and Oracle, and so on.)
It’s completely stupid to be so secretive about it, of course, but there are valid reasons for the kinds of activities we’re talking about here, and they have nothing to do with terrorism.
I’m interested in your arguments and responses, but I’m obtuse. If you could identify some of the valid reasons for the domestic surveillance state other than the only one ever stated—preventing global terrorism—I’d appreciate it.
You know, it may be that the Modern Surveillance State (sensibly) wants to keep track of the (actual) terror problem in America, which is homegrown Rightwing hate groups and heavily-armed cornpone militias of “conservative” white male imbeciles. But that is emphatically not a reason ever thrown out by the current admin.
Also, what is the reason Google (for example) would want to permanently store the sort of trillions of bits of internet metadata that NSA wants? To make really great retroactive ads? And Google can sue you in civil court, but for what exactly? The NSA? They happily feed the requested/stored info to the FBI and initiation of criminal proceedings. Somewhat different enforcement mechanisms and uses….
What does yottabytes of storage mean if not mirroring and archiving the entire internet? And getting successive appropriations to expand as the internet expands?
Answer to that here.
It all comes down to counting servers. For instance, to mirror and archive all the internet traffic going through Google, you would need a storage capacity equivalent to Google’s. It’s all very secretive, because these data centers are high-security operations, but you can find various estimates of how many servers the NSA has, compared to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Microsoft announced at one point that they had 1 million servers, and Google shows the locations of 13 data centers at its site, from which the most widely accepted estimate appears to be that they have about 2 million servers.
The most detailed estimate of the size of the NSA’s operation that I’ve found is here. From that, if you factor in the data centers we don’t know about, you can see that they’re probably in about the same range as Google and Microsoft. And of course, even as the NSA is adding servers, everyone else is too.
To my mind, what a defensible program would be about would be maintaining the capacity for the feds to intervene in the internet. For instance, let’s imagine a scenario that is not at all implausible, where Chinese espionage has infiltrated Google to one degree or another. We know that China has at least one program comparable to PRISM, China has God knows how many servers, and there are very large numbers of Chinese computer programmers who are very good at what they do. So does India, by the way. And a lot of them work at Google.
Oh, and as for the whistleblowers, I don’t know. If you want to talk about tyranny, you could say these people are being tyrannized for revealing information about these programs, but I’m more interested in knowing whether anyone has been tyrannized by these programs–you know, actual forms of tyranny like being harassed, detained, tortured, or disappeared. Has anyone that we know of been unjustly fucked with as a result of data gathered by the NSA?
Yeah I know, turnkey tyranny. Honestly, the only reason I can think of why the feds would want to fuck with me is if, say, President Rand Paul decided to use PRISM to round up all the liberals. In that case, they wouldn’t need PRISM to find me. Well, that and they’d have a hard time finding anyone competent to run the system.
(Hell yes Rand Paul would use it. Somehow it’s always the libertarians who turn out to be most tyrannical once they gain power–like Jefferson with the embargo.)
“Has anyone that we know of been unjustly fucked with as a result of data gathered by the NSA?”
I’m more interested in knowing if there is any way that we might come to learn such a thing, barring whistleblowing.
Sunlight Foundation: Obama Promises Disappear from Web
IMO when you start scrubbing history to avoid accountability, you can rightly be accused of Orwellian tendencies. Score another blooper for the the crack White House communications team. And possibly a bunch of nitwit national security advisers who think this is protecting the President.
In fact, those same conservative Republicans’ willingness to politicize national security issues (remember Benghazi) is one of the main reasons that a Democratic administration feels compelled to inoculate themselves from charges of being soft. This has been going on in this country, mostly to our detriment, since the GOP started purging the State Department over the communist revolution in China.
Maybe.
Wilson and FDR were before that Truman and Acheson probably really wanted to get into Korea, anyway.
But I guess you’re right about Vietnam.
Maybe only Vietnam, really, when you think about it.
Obama does not seem to have anyone pushing him into doing anything he doesn’t actually want to do, re national security.
Well, not openly. But don’t think the 2008 campaign rhetoric about “not fit to be commander-in-chief” didn’t require a lot of stroking of the military when he first came into office. Thus Gates and now Hagel. Thus the surge. And the delay in forcing DADT repeal. And there are lots of wondering about his relationship with the intelligence community, given the appointments that he has made in that area.
And I think that has paid benefits in military skepticism about intervention in Syria and Iran and certainly in the end to DADT.
Obama does not seem to have anyone pushing him into doing anything he doesn’t actually want to do, re national security.
Really?
I can’t help but notice a lack of bombing runs in Iran.
I can’t help but notice a lack of American troops on bases in Iraq.
I can’t help but notice a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq.
I can’t help but notice a lack of missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Why does he erroneously argue that “The establishment leadership of the two parties collaborate on far more than they fight”? The answer is obviously because the only thing Greenwald cares about is “war on terror” policy.
I really don’t think that’s it. For one thing, the differences between the two parties on the “war on terror” are, themselves, pretty significant. One party wants to torture people, for instance, while the other does not. (Remember when Greenwald considered that issue significant?) One party wants to invade and occupy other countries, while the other does not. (Not actually something Greenwald has cared about for very long, but still, something significant).
No, the reason libertarians like Greenwald insist on the meaninglessness of party distinctions is because a sense of superiority to those dumb partisans is an important part of his self-image. As a result, he ends up running cover for the worst actors while training his fire on the best, and being completely AWOL when a fight breaks out on an issue he purports to be concerned about, when he isn’t actively stabbing the people who argue his position in the back. Remember in 2009, when the fight over torture was front and center, and Greenwald decided that the most important use of his megaphone was to declare that the people leading the anti-torture fight (Obama, Pelosi) “lacked the moral standing” to do so? It even required him to repeat discredited CIA/Republican talking points about Nancy Pelosi being briefed.
Majority of House Democrats and only 94 Republicans vote for the Amash/Conyers amendment and this cleverly parsed statement from GG. Can we call it “donkey punching”?
While it’s literally true – Pelosi, Hoyer and New Democrats and Blue Dogs (often with key DoD facilities in their districts) did vote No–it was pretty much an establishment vote. Could Leader Peolosi have gotten more No votes if she needed them? That was the way they were whipping the vote.
The fact remains that a majority of House Democrats voted to restrain bulk collection of personal telecommunications information and a majority of House Republicans did not.
Reminiscent of the people who claim that “the Democrats” votes for the Iraq AUMF.
In fact, the Iraq AUMF lost 58-42% among Congressional Democrats, a blowout of LBJ/Goldwater proportions.
But it feeds some people’s egos to pretend both parties voted for the war.
It likely is not their egos, but some political philosophy commitments outside of the frame of two-party politics that, whether aligned with a third party or not, seeks to open up the space for alternatives. Unfortunately, that is structurally difficult, if not impossible in American politics. Eventually, one party or the other co-opts you (see GOP absorption of Wallace’s Independent Party).
So the problem at the moment for civil libertarians, let alone real (as opposed to Paulista) corporate libertarians, is that neither party seeks to co-opt them. Socialists have the same problem. So do environmentalists.
Journalists like GG push those buttons to gain readership in a competitive market.
I have no idea what feeds his ego. No doubt his having made it into being asked to appear on the Wall Street media is not without its effects. But that’s just a guess.
It likely is not their egos, but some political philosophy commitments outside of the frame of two-party politics…
Yeah.
Your typical Democratic or Republican partisan is at least theoretically aware of the possibility of confirmation bias – of the risk of believing something because it confirms their pre-existing narrative about the two parties. They can look out for it, even if they don’t always succeed.
But committed non-partisan partisans don’t have this check. They interpret a story’s conformity to their pre-existing narrative about the parties as proof against bias.
It’s virtually the entirety of his self-image. He has to be able to say that anyone who disagrees with him is obviously a blatant partisan in the thrall of Dear Leader Du Jour, whereas he will never succumb to such a cult of personality as that. Otherwise he’d have to accept that sometimes people disagree with him for sound reasons. Or, worse, that sometimes people who are not him are right. And he can’t accept that. Like Aesop’s scorpion, it’s his nature.
Spencer Ackerman, Guardian:
NSA amendment’s narrow defeat spurs privacy advocates for surveillance fight
You ask above:
He makes the argument because it is demonstrably not “erroneous.”
The following headline perfectly sums up the thrust of Greenwald’s statements:
Well, ah am so suhprised!!!
The rest of the article continues:.
Man…when the going gets rough, the fixers drop their disguises mighty fast, don’t they?
I repeat:
“…the move to require individualized suspicion before any American’s phone records can be collected drew the first presidential veto threat based solely on a House amendment since 2005, according to the measure’s sponsors.”
HOO boy!!! That’s your “Peace President” there, alright.
A surveillance-enforced “peace” by any means necessary. Say something loudly about the fire next time (or even the fire this time, the one that is eating up this government and leaving nothing but smoking embers of individual rights in its path) and what happens?
Ask Bradley Manning.
Ask Julien Assange.
Ask Ed Snowden.
When push comes to shove in terms of the one policy that underlies everything that is going wrong in this country…militarily enforced economic imperialism (including surveillance state spying on the entire population of the U.S.)…the parties are very well “united.” They may disagree on tactics, but the basic strategy remains the same. Keep scoffin’ up them goodies from the feed trough of the world…including most of the citizenry of the U.S….in the name of American/1% exceptionalism. There is not …and has not been since the Dulles brothers set the whole operation in motion after W.W.II…one iota’s difference between the basic strategies of both parties. “Get it while the getting is good” is the name of the game.
Only…in the 60+ year interim since the U.S. became the world power that pretty much militarily runs things, that getting has gotten progressively less and less “good.” Harder to maintain; harder to expand. “Them injuns got repeatin’ rifles, now!!!” as the old western movie
villains…errrr, ahhh…”heroes” used to say.Bet on it.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…well, just read my latest post.
You Say Syria and I Say Philadelphia. Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off!!!
Like I said, meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, Detroit and most of the rest of the previously fairly prosperous cities on the U.S. shit be going down.
Down like a motherfucker!!!
And you snipe at Greenwald because he…and any number of others…are yelling “Fire!!!” in a badly burning building???!!!
Where are your scruples, Booman?
Really.
What the fuck!!!
Please.
WTFU.
AG
Because one fire company will come with water and the other with gasoline, maybe? Is Norquist happy with the drowning yet?
You need to develop your ideas about “military-enforced economic imperialism” more to make them coherent. Because there Russians and Europeans and Arabs and Chinese and Japanese and Koreans and Brazilians and Indians who are all playing this game. They’re all buying up shit like gangbusters. Some have societies I envy and some operate shitholes that make North Philly look like Oahu. Some have free and fair elections, and some have laws so deplorable that their leaders should be hung.
Where are we on that spectrum?
Where are we on that spectrum?
Well…a quick comparison of military expenditures will tell a good part of the tale.
Take a good look at the blue bars.
WAAAAY up there!!!
Despite all inconsistencies and inefficiencies in our system…and believe me, there are plenty…the U.S. is outspending the next nine countries combined in terms of military power, and military power is the name of the economic imperialist theft game.
We da boss, baby!!!
Bet on it.
The best of the worst.
AG