Why the previous post matters

The New York Times reported on Monday that the FBI is giving itself additional powers to poke, prod, pry, and probe into our privacy.

The agency is re-writing portions of its field operations manual in what it falsely claims is a mere "fine-tuning of existing rules" but actually is a clear expansion of power.

Here's the background: In 2008, the FBI gave itself a new power to "proactively" investigate people and organizations even in the absence of any suspicion of wrongdoing. That is, even if there was no reason to think the person or group had done anything wrong or was planning to do anything wrong, the FBI could investigate them. In effect, the FBI could investigate you for the purpose of seeing if it should investigate you. This was called something along the lines of "improving national security in a time of international terrorism." Previously, it would have been called "a fishing expedition." Or perhaps "official paranoia."

(Sidebar: The changes were made in secret and emerged only a year later as the result of an FOIA suit.)

Anyway, the way the federales got that "proactive" power was by creating a wholly new category of investigation called an "assessment." An assessment, again, required no evidence, no suspicion, that there was anything illegal going on.

As an example how this worked,

[a]fter a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil.

Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities, including in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio.

That is, simply being a Somali-American required that you be "assessed" just to see if you might be some sort of threat, even if there was no hint that you had any connection with that teenager. Or anything else illegal, for that matter.

You'd think that sort of thing, of being able to investigate without any evidence of wrongdoing, was bad enough, but of course it wasn't enough for the feds. So now comes the "fine-tuning." For one thing,

[u]nder current rules, agents must open an assessment before they may search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without opening an assessment.

That is, they can do such searches without there ever being a record of it having been done. It's entirely secret.

That's not the only "fine-tuning" going on. For example, under current rules individuals or groups under "assessment" can be physically surveilled only once for a certain period of time. Under the new rules, that period of time can be renewed repeatedly by a supervisor. Bear in mind here that an "assessment" can be kept open - and thus the surveillance can continue - indefinitely.

The use of lie-detector tests, now blocked until a "preliminary investigation," which requires a factual basis for suspected wrongdoing, is begun, will under the new rules be used in assessments and not just on someone being assessed, but on potential informants. More seriously to my mind, the trash of such potential informants would be subject to search by agents - because the feds want to be able to use information found that way to pressure the person to assist the government's investigation. That is, they want to be able to use surreptitiously-gathered information to force someone to spy on their behalf. This is called "protecting our freedom." In another context, one with only the slightest of differences, it would be called blackmail.

There are now rules governing agents' or informants' attendance at meetings of, and secret participation in, organizations on which the feds are gathering information. Those rules are not public. Under the new rules, those agents or informants can attend five meetings even before the secret rules apply.

Finally, some investigations, including those into public officials, members of the media, and scholars, are considered "sensitive" and call for additional oversight. Under the new rules, much of that oversight is being relaxed; for one example, the rules on academic protections will apply only to scholars who work for institutions based in the US. All you furriners, you is outta luck.

This is what FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni called mere "fine-tuning" but which Mike German, National Security Policy Counsel for the ACLU, called "an expansion of power that is completely unaccountable."

The bizarre thing here is that Caproni may indeed think of the changes the way she described them: Remember that one of the conclusions to be drawn from the work of psychologists Joris Lammers and Adam Galinsky is that "people with power ... feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want" - in this case, taking more power, a freer hand to find out whatever they want to find out, to know about you whatever they want to know about you, and to do it behind a thicker wall of secrecy: remember the new power to conduct databases searches without any record of it.

That, too, that pattern of "we can know about you but you can't know about us," is regarded as "natural" by power. Several years ago, commenting on the use of tracking technologies by private companies and individuals, I wrote this:

Are the children going to be able to track the parents? Are the employees going to be able to track the boss? Will the public be tracking government agents or Starbucks executives?

Of course not. It seems silly even to ask. ... This is not about protection or accountability, it's about power. Establishing, using, extending, demonstrating power. Whether it's the direct intimidating power of "they know I'm watching" or the more subtle power of "I can catch them at something," both of which assume those being watched are untrustworthy (which is what the watchers always assume about the watched), it is something those with power put on those without it ... [including] ... the power of voyeurism, the power of "I can know your secrets."

Oh, but don't worry your pretty little heads about things like that, Ms. Caproni says. Agents, she assures us with the straightest of faces, could only retain the results of those secret database searches if there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose for doing so.

In other words, "Trust us."

Well, I first encountered the name Valerie Caproni in late 2005 in a post about the alarming increase in the use of so-called National Security Letters, legal documents by which the FBI can demand secret access to a variety of someone's personal and financial records from places such as banks, credit card companies, phone companies, ISPs, and so on without the need for any sort of warrant. At the time, she dismissed concerns about possible overreach and violations of privacy, arguing there really wasn't a point to the agency engaging in either. That is, "Trust us."

This came just 15 months before the DOJ's own Inspector General revealed that there were "many instances" of the FBI having "improperly, and sometimes illegally, used" NSLs to obtain information.

Moreover, record keeping was so slipshod, the report found, that the actual number of national security letters exercised was often understated when the bureau reported on them to Congress, as required.

I next came across her name last fall in considering PHC*'s intention to push for legislation that would force communications services including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook, and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype to provide convenient means for the feds to engage in electronic surveillance of their users - including decrypting data - that the telcoms are currently required to provide.

Of that move, Caproni said "We're talking about lawfully authorized intercepts ... We're not talking expanding authority." I responded at the time:

You're talking about being able to force companies to do what they didn't before, to have cop-friendly capabilities they didn't before, in order to enable you to wiretap where you couldn't before, spy where you couldn't before, to get data (including messages in decrypted form) that you couldn't before. Yes, you are talking about expanding authority, Ms. Caproni, and you are a liar.

And now, here again, comes Valerie Caproni, mouthpiece to power, to declare there is no reason for concern, to assure us that information gathered in secret database searches will not be kept unless there is a damn good reason. That is, yet again, "Trust us."

And just why should we do that, Valerie "Two-time loser" Caproni? Why, in light of your record, should we simply take your word for it that the agency for who you make excuses will not secretly retain secretly-obtained information? How can we even know if you did dispose of that information when there is no record that you ever obtained it in the first place?

In fact, we should not. We dare not. Not only because you are a two-time loser, but on the general, vitally-important, but too-often overlooked civic principle that in any free society, in any society that hopes to be free or to remain free, in any free society it is bad public policy, it is incredibly bad public policy, it is insanely bad public policy, to give anyone, particularly government, particularly police forces, additional powers under the totally lame-brained assumption that they will never abuse them.

All of history, all of human experience, screams as us that that is just an absolutely nutty, crazy, wacko, stupid, dangerous thing to do.

Why? For the same reason that back in the '60s we said "Question Authority."

Because power corrupts.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

27.7 - Thoughts prompted by the Fourth

Thoughts prompted by the Fourth

The is the week after July 4th and as usual I didn’t think about a holiday until after it had happened so I didn't talk about it last when when I should have. Nonetheless, let me say now that I hope you enjoyed your Fourth and I hope you got to see some fireworks and  to spend time with friends or family or better yet both and what with the Fourth being on Tuesday and all that, I hope you got the extra day off for beach or barbecue or baseball or whatever.

So still being in the afterglow of the Fourth, I wanted to end this week's show on this. Quote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light or transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

These words should form the backdrop against which the Fourth is seen. Our national birthday should not be a time for celebrating the status quo or for patting ourselves on the back in an orgy of national self-congratulation, but rather a time to reexamine and rediscover the truly revolutionary heritage which America has.

Even more than that, it should be a time to rededicate ourselves to the ideas and ideals of the Declaration, to recognize that it is, as the Declaration says, our right and our duty to resist invasion of our unalienable rights.

It is our duty to resist the CIA and FBI and NSA when they try to poke, prod, pry, and probe into every secret of our private lives;

it is our duty to resist attempts to muzzle, restrict, intimidate, and otherwise restrain freedom of speech, of assembly, and of the press;

it is our duty to resist a militarist US foreign policy that is at war in multiple nations and a militarist US federal budget that proposes to spend an overall total of $825 billion on the military and our various wars this next year while human needs go unmet and racial and other injustices go unaddressed;

it is our duty to resist governmental policies that favor big business at the expense of the general public, that favor the rich over the poor, the haves over the have-nots.

We here at What’s Left do not believe in violence, but we do believe in revolution - nonviolent revolution. And we believe that we are fully within the revolutionary heritage of America when we say we believe it is our duty to demand our rights and our duty to make the changes necessary to secure those rights, for ourselves and for all others.

Our heritage as Americans includes a great many idealistic values - but the conservative appeal to the worst in our heritage: to selfishness, to suspicion, to fear, and to “what's-in-it-for-me.”

Which raises something I have been meaning to talk about, something that I think clearly divides the left from the right, indeed impacts whether you are a person of the left or the right. It’s called reification and it is the ability to perceive an abstraction as a reality.

It’s often described in negative terms, using as typical examples people who convince themselves that Sherlock Holmes was a real person or that Hogwarts is a real place.

But it also means having the ability to see the reality that lies behind the abstractions of statistics.

Consider health insurance and the fact that 22 million people will lose their coverage under the latest proposed version of TheRump care. To the right, that’s a number, a statistic, a politically unfortunate statistic to be explained away, yes, but still a statistic. To the left, it’s 22 million actual people, 22 million living, breathing, struggling, human beings who will have less access to health care - and therefore be at real risk of dying years before they should. That ability, that ability to perceive the very real people who make up that number, is reification and that is an ability at which the left far exceeds the right, even that, again, helps determine which side of that divide you are on.

Put bluntly, the right’s vision of reality is constrained by the selfish devotion to “me and mine” above all else, as that inability to reify limits a sense of connection to a wider world, it limits the range of what seems real to them.

That’s why they speak of the personal but never of the public; of self but never others; of us and them but never we; of family but never of community.

In fact, they are largely incapable of talking of community, because that means to talk of social obligations, of moral commitments to others, including to people you will never know, never meet, commitments which their circumscribed view can’t comprehend, indeed rejects.

But we not only affirm community, we celebrate it. So instead of rejecting community, what we ultimately reject is the right of so few to have so much when so many have so little. What we ultimately resist is the power of so few to control so much when so many control so little. What we ultimately affirm is the right of every human being to a decent life free of hunger, fear, and oppression. What we ultimately demand from our society is the effort to guarantee that right.

We’ve no desire to place a ceiling over anyone's aspirations, but we do want to put a floor under everyone's needs.

Because compassion is not a cliche; it’s a requirement of our humanity. Decency isn’t for case-by-case convenience but must be a basic social tenet. And justice is not a prerogative of the powerful but a basic human right and it must be protected as such.

We don’t dream of perfection, of idealized utopias, but of simple human justice. Justice in its truest sense: economic, social, and political. A justice that rejects the ascendancy of bombs over bread, of private greed over public good, of profits over people, a justice that rejects the ascendancy of the powerful few over the disadvantaged many and of the powerful many over the disadvantaged few. A justice that centers on the preciousness of life and will fight to maintain and even expand that preciousness.

That sort of justice won’t come easily. It won’t come cheaply. And it won’t come conveniently. But it is possible - and, after all is said and done, it simply is the only right thing to do.

That is our banner, the banner the radical nonviolent American left carries for the Fourth: Justice. Compassion. Community.

A banner for the next American revolution.

Left Side of the Aisle #44 - Part 5

Hypocrisy of Obama supporters

Finally, another sort of hypocrisy, this one of valuing political expediency and party loyalty over human rights and basic decency. And while that sounds like an all-but-routine denunciation of the right wing, in this case it's not.

During the Bush years, liberal democrats and supposedly progressive activists screamed (and legitimately so) about how George Bush - Shrub - was undermining American values and shredding the Constitution. Barack Obama - President Hopey-Changey - campaigned on how just awful all that was and how he was going to change all that. That was not just a single plank in his platform, it was central to his campaign.

But once in office he went back on almost everything he said. His administration not only endorsed the Bush regime's arguments on how national security trumps all, it went beyond it, refusing to prosecute Bush administration crimes up to and including open admissions of approving torture from Bush and "The Big" Dick Cheney themselves, expanding executive power, broadening claims justifying official secrecy, pushing for renewal of expiring Traitor Act provisions, intensifying the technically secret drone war in Pakistan, expanding the ability of government to spy on our communications, allowing the FBI additional powers to poke, prod, pry, and probe into our privacy, waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seeking to destroy WikiLeaks, and allowing the torture of Bradley Manning.

Sometimes the extensions of individual, even monarchical, powers are even more shocking:

In the case of Libya, Obama not only ignored the War Powers Act, he deliberately thumbed his nose at the very idea of Congress having any say at all on if, when, where, or even why American military forces would be employed. He essentially said "It's my Air Force and I'll do whatever I want with it."

He has endorsed the power of presidents to imprison anyone, even American citizens taken on American soil, indefinitely without charge, trial, or any legal rights whatsoever based solely on that president's own unchallengeable claim that the person - the disappeared person - was in some way connected to "terrorism." But don't worry, Howard Dean is safe.

And he declared for himself the power to order the extra-judicial murder of anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world, on the basis of that same sort of unchallengeable claim - while refusing to reveal whatever legal argument has been invented by his administration to claim that power. But again, Rudy Guiliani need have no fears.

And how has all that been treated by far too much of what passes for the left in this country? Beyond a few quiet grumbles about how there might be some legitimate criticism on the matter, it has mostly been silence. A silence most recently demonstrated and punctuated by a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

According to that poll, fully 77% of self-identified liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere - that is, they endorse the secret and illegal CIA war. What's more, 55% still approve of them even when the targets are identified as American citizens.

And what about that symbol of Bush-era undermining of human and constitutional rights, Guantanamo Bay prison? Iin February, 2009, shortly after Obama was inaugurated and a time when he was still talking about closing the prison, a Pew Research poll showed that 64% of Democrats supported closing it down; I think we can safely assume the portion of liberal dems who felt that way was even higher. But in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53% of liberal Democrats now approve of his decision to keep it open.

This is more evidence, if it was even needed, of hypocrisy on a grand scale, a scale that envelops an entire political party and even more importantly, envelops far too many of the very people who denounced the immorality and illegality of the Shrub years but now find that the chant of "elect more Democrats" silences the whisper of conscience.

The evidence says that for a large segment of self-proclaimed liberals and progressives, the old right-wing charge that their opposition to George Bush was based on political expediency rather than actual commitment rings true and I say that these people, these hypocrites, these trimmers whose morality depends on whether the president has a D or an R after the name do not deserve to be listened to, do not deserve even to be believed when, quoting Glenn Greenwald,

they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President.

Greenwald also notes that 35% of liberal democrats say they oppose Obama's destructive and dangerous policies of the sort I've run through here. But while that is, as he says, "a non-trivial amount," it still marks us - those of us for who opposition to illegal wars and extra-judicial murder is a matter of conviction, not convenience - it marks us as a minority of all liberals who are a minority of the country as a whole. We are a minority of a minority.

And yet we must struggle on. We have to keep on trying. There is a reason my blog is subtitled "Surviving a Dark Time." Far too many believed - and have convinced themselves - that the darkness lifted in January 2009. They were wrong.

Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/08/libya-here.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/05/little-more-bad-news-so-is-this.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/third-footnote-to-preceding.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-previous-post-matters.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/aclu-sues-to-force-release-of-drone-attack-records/2012/02/01/gIQArL6xhQ_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-finds-broad-support-for-obamas-counterterrorism-policies/2012/02/07/gIQAFrSEyQ_story.html
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1893/poll-patriot-act-renewal
http://equalityanddemocracy.org/?p=89
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1125/terrorism-guantanamo-torture-polling

They are not on your side

As everyone knows, the renewal of some provisions of the Traitor ('scuse me, "Patriot") Act was unexpectedly defeated in the House on Tuesday. Brought to a vote under a "suspension of the rules" procedure, it required a two-thirds vote to pass - a margin it failed to reach.

Most of the media coverage - and a good deal of the online commentary - was about how "embarrassing" this was for Rep. Boner and his cronies, since it was the fact that 26 GOPpers defied the leadership and voted "nay" that brought the bill down. In a sense, I suppose that was a reasonable focus, since the vote was 277-148 for passage and when it is brought up again under normal procedures - and there is a rush on to do just that, under a rule allowing for just one hour of debate with no amendments or points of order allowed* - it should pass handily.

That outcome should be of great relief to much of elite opinion, i.e., the Serious People, such as the editorial writers at the Washington Post, who ran a panicky, trembling-lip piece on how "the clock is ticking" on the Traitor Act and how

[i]f lawmakers fail to act, they risk stripping the government of important anti-terrorism tools,

thus, we are apparently supposed to gather, leaving us all at the mercy of The terrorists! The terrorists! who hate our freedom and want to murder us in our beds. I expect the editorial was dictated; I can't help but think their hands would have been shaking too much in fear to type it in themselves.

But getting back to the overall coverage of the vote, there were a couple of points that were either wrong or omitted.

One thing that was wrong was all the talk about the vote reflecting some kind of "tea party insurgency" or "tea party defiance." But only eight of those 26 GOPpers were first-termers. Even if every one of the 5 non-voting GOPpers was a first-termer, that would still mean that 50 of the 63 new GOPper House members voted with the leadership. Not much "defiance" there.

On the other hand, something that was omitted almost entirely from the coverage that I saw was that support for renewing provisions of the Traitor Act declined rather significantly. Last year, only 10 GOPpers voted against renewal as compared to this year's 26. And that renewal got 315 votes, which is 38 more than this year. So 16 GOPpers and 22 Dims went from "yea" to "nay" since last year. Not nearly enough to make the difference for more than the immediate moment, but when support for this sort of crap drops nearly 14% in a year, well, it's at least worthy of mention.

Something else worthy of mention but got very little is that the defeat of the bill is proof again, if proof were still needed, that the areas of privacy and civil liberties are the ones where the right and the left can overlap and diverge in perhaps unexpected ways. In a lot of ways, Ron Paul may be (meaning is) suitable for popping out of a cuckoo clock - but when he says that police powers should be strictly limited to those proven actually necessary and protection of personal privacy against government intrusion is a high ideal, there are many on the left who could (and will) echo not only the sentiments, but the words.

But here's the crux of it, the vital, central point that has to be made and made clearly and to which the title of the post refers: The GOPper leadership and the White House were and are united in support of the bill. They are united in their support for continuing the expanded government powers to poke, prod, and pry into every aspect of our private lives. The are united in their devotion to the maintenance and yes expansion of executive power. In fact, the White House's only objection was that the extension was only to December of 2012 instead of 2013.

This is nothing new, of course. When these same three provisions were up for renewal in 2009, the White House was all over it, calling them "important authorities" even as they admittted that one of them hadn't ever been used, which does raise the question of just how "important" it is. No matter, we need it! Why? Well, because we have it! Which has always, always, been the cry of the national security state from the very beginning: It must have more power and it must continue to have whatever powers it already has. It's vital! Important! Necessary! It's for your own good! Power, we need to keep reminding ourselves, never concedes anything (least of all its own powers) without a fight.

And in this the Obama administration - with the full support of the Serious People - is every bit as bad as the Bush administration was, adopting its policies and embracing its positions, even going beyond them in some cases, sometimes shockingly so. On the power of the powerful, the extent of the Executive, on the ability of the government to know more about you while you know less about the government, PHC** and Shrub are two of a kind, peas in a pod, birds of a feather, soulmates, whatever cliché you care to employ.

Which is why the whole business about "sunset" provisions, about how "Oh, this is just a temporary extension, just so we can take a better look at it" is such thoroughgoing bull and has been since the Traitor Act was first passed in a panic after 9/11. At that time, we were assured that we needn't worry about the impact on civil liberties because most of the provisions - 16 of them, in fact - we going to sunset after five years.

Well, four years later, in 2005, the House voted to make 14 of those 16 permanent and the other two were extended for 10 years. The Senate made a number of changes in the Traitor Act, but most of those were undone in conference and ultimately the House version passed pretty much intact. Other provisions have gotten the same treatment: They haven't been made permanent, but "sunset" keeps getting later and later, pushed back again and again. And now some Dims in the Senate are saying they want the three provisions involved here made permanent.

All of which means that when it comes to your privacy, when it comes to your civil liberties, when it comes to insulating the individual against the power of the state, they are not on your side. Never have been. Never will be.

*Because of the way Thomas files information, that link may not be valid for long. If it doesn't work, go to the Thomas home page, look up H.R.514, select "All Congressional Actions," and look for February 9.

**PHC = President Hopey-Changey

127.2 - Revelations of NSA spying: July

Revelations of NSA spying: July

Come July, we started to learn more about how the FISA court, the secret court whose very secrecy somehow creates transparency in government, has turned itself into what the New York Times called

almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come.

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage, and cyberattacks.

The court has embraced multiple ways of expanding the powers of the spooks to poke, prod, and pry into our lives, multiple ways to justify giving such all but unlimited spying authority to the NSA and other spy agencies in spite of both domestic and international law as well as the Constitution. It turns out one "reason," one justification, is that just like Barack Obama apparently has his own definition of "transparent" and Clapper claimed he didn't lie to Congress because he has his own definition of "collection," so too does the FISA court have its own definition of "relevant" - as in when evidence is "relevant" to an on-going investigation. The Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that "relevant" means there is a "reasonable possibility" it could produce important information. The FISC, however, apparently charmed by the government's argument that, as one official put it, "you can't find a needle in a haystack unless you have a haystack," decided that essentially all information that can be gathered, everything, is by definition "relevant."

For another example, it has expanded the use of the so-called “special needs” doctrine to effectively exempt the collection and examination of our communications data from the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The "special needs" doctrine was invented in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that this supposedly minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger, in that case railroad crashes. The FISA court decided that this doesn't just apply to specific individual cases - it applies everywhere to everyone.

The court got nearly 1800 requests from the spies for surveillance orders last year. It approved every single one of them. Which could be yet another definition of "transparency."

We learned, too, that there are multiple, independent surveillance programs with names like EvilOlive, ShellTrumpet, MoonLightPath, and Spinneret. And one called X-Keyscore that, with just an email address and a few keystrokes, can give a data analyst access to nearly everything a user does on the Internet – from chat sessions to email to browsing.

Edward Snowden, whose release of documents made much of this knowledge possible, said “I, sitting at my desk could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”

The program allows analysts, with no prior authorization, to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.

Sources:
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/secret-fisa-court-widens-power-nsa-sp
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?_r=1&
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/07/easy-way-government-get-around-secrecy-rules-change-them/66913/
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/31/nsa-project-x-keyscore-collects-nearly-everything-you-do-on-the-internet/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-sb-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D351747
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data

203.6 - TRAITOR Act provisions up for renewal

TRAITOR Act provisions up for renewal

Three provisions of the grossly misnamed "PATRIOT" Act - which would better have been called the "TRAITOR" Act, and which is what I will call it here for its attack on privacy and civil liberties - are set to expire on June 1.

When the Traitor Act was passed, it was in an atmosphere of unreasoning panic in the immediate wake of 9/11, passed with unseemly haste and essentially no debate with most members of Congress not even having had the chance to scan the hundreds of pages of the bill, less having read it and analyzed it, even then, even in that atmosphere, enough members kept enough of a grip on their sanity to put "sunset" provisions on some parts of the monstrosity, willing to look forward to a time when the so called "great war on terror" might not inspire the same feelings of overwhelming dread and we might decide the expended powers to poke, prod, and pry into every part of our private lives, well, maybe we overdid it a little. A little.

As a result, those provisions had to be renewed. And they were, in 2006 under the Bush gang and in 2011 under or own President Hopey-Changey.

Now, they are coming up again and this time there is at least the appearance of a debate, all because of one event that occurred since the last renewal: an event named Edward Snowden.

Edward Snowden

Because of Edward Snowden, we know about the mass collection of so-called "metadata" about our personal telephone calls, we know about tracking of our emails and other online activities, while phrases like "bulk collection of data" and "mass surveillance" come easily to our lips. We know - we have it in their own words in their own memos - that "collect it all" is the mantra of the National Security Agency, the NSA.

And we know - again because of the spooks' own words, their own repeated failures in their attempts to make a case for it - we know that this massive, daily, on-going, organized, conscious, deliberate violation of our privacy and our rights has not done a damn thing to make us "safe."

And now three provisions of the Traitor Act will expire, will no longer be law, as of June 1 unless Congress acts - in fact, because of a planned recess, Congress actually has until May 22.

Two of those three provisions are known as the "lone wolf" provision and the "roving surveillance" provision. The first changed the definition of "foreign terrorist" to include any non-US-citizen suspected to be somehow a terrorist or a terrorist-in-waiting even if they have no connection whatsoever to any other group or country or whatever. Even if they are all by themselves, they are still considered part of "international terrorism."

The "roving surveillance" provision in essence authorizes telephone wiretaps on an individual. Normally such wiretaps are on a particular phone line. This provision says that no, you are not doing surveillance on the phone line but on the person - so you can, under a single warrant, tap, you can surveil, any phone line that this person may use.

But the provision that's caused the biggest stink is Section 215.

Section 215 allows investigators to obtain "any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents and other items)," as long as the records are sought "in connection with" a terror investigation. The phrase "in connection with" is important. I means that the person or organization or institution whose records are sought need not be suspected of any wrongdoing. They need not even be connected to anyone suspected of any wrongdoing. The only requirement is that investigators be prepared to claim that the information is in some way, is somehow, "relevant" to an investigation. Which is why it's sometimes referred to as the "library records" provision - because some federal spook somewhere might think that the books you read are "relevant" to - something.

It was Section 215 that enabled NSA's on-going, daily, bulk collection of metadata on millions and millions of phone calls. Defenders of the Traitor Act have claimed that such metadata is just a list of what number called what number, so what's the big deal, but that is flatly false. It does include what number called what number, yes - which of course, if it's a landline it reveals from where the call was made (with the same applying to where the call was to) -  but it also includes what time the call was made, how long the call was, your calling card number if you used one, the trunk identifier (which narrows down the physical location of the caller), the IMEI number (a cell phone's unique identifier) and the IMSI number (the unique identifier of the SIM card in your mobile phone).

In 2013, at the time this was coming out, The British newspaper The Guardian noted that

when cross-checked against other public records, the metadata can reveal someone's name, address, driver's licence, credit history, social security number and more. Government analysts would be able to work out whether the relationship between two people was ongoing, occasional or a one-off.

In one small-scale study at Stanford University a year ago, researchers found that phone metadata is

unambiguously sensitive, even in a small population and over a short time window.

Using only metadata willingly provided by a group of people via a certain app, that is, metadata from a limited number of people and only over a period of a couple of months, the researchers were able to infer one case of multiple sclerosis, one heart condition, an unplanned pregnancy, what some of gun someone owned, and they had a high degree of success in cases where they tried to predict someone's religion.

That was, again, a small number of people over a limited time. The NSA is sucking up such data on millions of phone calls every day and has been doing it for several years.

And that doesn't begin to express the reach of Section 215. It's been used to justify NSLs, or National Security Letters, these extra-judicial search warrants, unreviewed by any court, not even the notoriously compliant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which virtually never rejects an application for a warrant, an extra-judicial search warrant issued by any FBI field supervisor on their own authority demanding sensitive information and accompanied by a gag order which not only prohibits the recipient from revealing what records were sought but even from mentioning ever having gotten the demand in the first place.

So it is not surprising that there is a push being put on by civil liberties groups and the civil libertarians in Congress - which includes some folks on the right as well as the left - to let Section 215 die its well-deserved death. Even the White House is on board with that idea, having admitted some time ago that it just doesn't need it. (It could hardly have done otherwise, in light of the fact that Obama's own presidential task force concluded that the program is "not essential to preventing attacks.")

So what's happened?

In April, Senate Majority Leader Fishface McConnell and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr introduced a bill that would extend all three expiring provisions through 2020, without any changes, using a maneuver intended to have the bill skip any committee hearings and go straight to the Senate floor for a vote.

Sen. Fishface McConnell

However, the House Judiciary Committee reached a bipartisan agreement on a different bill, one that supposedly - I strongly emphasize the word - offers significant reforms. Originally, the bill, called the USA Freedom Act, let Section 215 expire, but even that reasonable provision - remember, even the White House says it can do without it - was watered down in the pursuit of the mythologized bipartisan support. Now, the USA Freedom Act narrows the type of records collected, adds some oversight protections, and toughens the standards for a warrant to examine phone company records, but it doesn't end bulk data collection. Instead, it requires the phone companies to maintain those records so that the feds can look at them if they can convince a court they have a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that a specific search term - such as a certain telephone number - was associated with international terrorism.

That bill is expected to pass the House but its chances in the Senate - where the right-wing leadership wants our privacy to be invaded unimpeded - are uncertain. And while the USA Freedom Act is, again, expected to pass the House, civil liberties groups seriously question what protections it actually offers. For one unhappy example, the court they have to convince to get a warrant to search phone records is the - I say it again - notoriously compliant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

So, as one observer put it,

here's where we stand with Patriot Act Section 215: two bills, no real changes, a blindfolded fight over the Patriot Act and a bad feeling about everything.

And now that I've depressed you, let me make you feel really down: Remember, all this talk only applies to the three sections of the Traitor Act that are due to expire on June 1. The rest of it rolls merrily along. And while much of the bill is reasonably noncontroversial, often enough just dealing with administrative changes, there is one section that is not part of the debate because it is not going to expire. And its implication are, if anything, worse than those connected to Section 215.

It is Section 702 of the Traitor Act.

Unlike the bulk metadata collection under Section 215, information which the phone companies are required to provide to the spooks on a daily basis, Section 702 is the one under which the NSA sucks up data directly from the physical infrastructure of communications providers. It's the one through which the NSA scoops up mountains of data traveling over the internet, data including emails, instant messages, Facebook messages, web browsing history, and more.

Just to make sure that's clear, unlike the telephone metadata program, the information gathered up under Section 702 includes content. It's not just who sent an email to who, it's the content of that email. It's not just who sent who an instant message, it's what was in that message. You posted a YouTube video under privacy protections so that only specified friends could see it? The NSA can see it, too.

The NSA is not supposed to "intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States." But the words "intentionally" and "target" both have been given wide and let's just call them "flexible" meanings such that millions of internet records of millions of Americans are "unintentionally" swept up. But don't worry, the NSA insists it doesn't "collect" any records on Americans - until it turns out that in the NSA's version of English, a record isn't "collected" until an agent actually directly examines it. It can be gathered, indexed, and permanently stored, but it hasn't - yet - been "collected."

I hope you're reassured that your Fourth Amendment rights and your constitutional right to privacy are under such trustworthy and strong protection.

There is only one real answer to this and it is just not going to happen, at least not this year: We have to throw out all of the Traitor Act and start over.

Again, a lot of the Act is noncontroversial and even common sense administrative changes. It would be easy enough to pull those out and reintroduce them over again and get them passed in pretty much no time.

But those provisions are not the issue. And after 14 years of the Traitor Act with no evidence that it has done anything to protect life or property or anything else worth protecting, after years of mass intrusions into our privacy, after thousands of Traitor-Act-approved secret searches of homes, offices, and other premises - 6,500 of them in 2013 alone, the vast majority of them having nothing to do with terrorism - it's time to say enough. Before it's too late.

There are those - as there always are in any such case - who say they are not worried because they didn't anything wrong and so the NSA doesn't care about them because they only go after "the bad guys."

To those people I would only say that you are staking a hell of a lot on the assumption that power does not corrupt.

Sources cited in links:
http://apps.americanbar.org/natsecurity/patriotdebates/lone-wolf
https://w2.eff.org/patriot/sunset/206.php
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/06/the-fight-to-control-the-patriot-act/
http://www.gsm-security.net/faq/imei-international-mobile-equipment-identity-gsm.shtml
http://www.techopedia.com/definition/5067/international-mobile-subscriber-identity-imsi
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/obama-administration-nsa-verizon-records
http://webpolicy.org/2014/03/12/metaphone-the-sensitivity-of-telephone-metadata/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/11/footnote-to-footnote.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/diverse-groups-stand-united-against-plan-reauthorize-section-215-patriot-act
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/liberal-conservatives-nsa-spying-patriot-act-117586.html?google_editors_picks=true
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/06/the-fight-to-control-the-patriot-act/
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-usa-freedom-act-telephone-records-privacy-20150506-story.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/way-nsa-uses-section-702-deeply-troubling-heres-why
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/what-it-means-be-target-or-why-we-once-again-stopped-believing-government-and-once

Aaaaaaahhhh!!!

Updated Tell me again, go on, try to tell me again why it was so fucking important to elect Democrats. Just try.

The Senate, in a high-stakes showdown over national security, voted late Friday to temporarily give President Bush expanded authority to eavesdrop on suspected foreign terrorists without court warrants[, Associated Press reports].

The House, meanwhile, rejected a Democratic version of the bill.

Democratic leaders there were working on a plan to bring up the Senate-passed measure and vote on it Saturday in response to Bush's demand that Congress give him expanded powers before leaving for vacation this weekend. ...

Senate Democrats reluctantly voted for a plan largely crafted by the White House after Bush promised to veto a stricter proposal that would have required a court review to begin within 10 days.

And why is it a "temporary" measure, supposedly just for six months? Because taking the time to work on a final, permanent bill would have screwed up their fucking summer vacation, that's why. And oh, yeah, I'm damn sure the version they'll come up with later will take back the "temporary" expanded powers to snoop poke prod and pry, just like those provisions of the Traitor Act with "sunset" clauses - and we all remember how well that worked out.

This whole pile of crap started when an FISA court ruled against part of the Bushites warrantless eavesdropping and by the way, the AP article linked here gets that part wrong. It says the ruling

barred the government from eavesdropping on foreign suspects whose messages were being routed through U.S. communications carriers, including Internet sites.

Bzzzt! It did no such thing. It said such surveillance could not be done without a warrant from the FISA court because it was in effect domestic surveillance and the busybodies couldn't promise that domestic conversations would not also be intercepted.

The fact is, as a means of oversight, the FISA court is a joke: According to data compiled from the court's annual reports by the Federation of American Scientists and presented by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in the period 1979-2005 the FISA court was presented with nearly 21,000 requests for electronic surveillance warrants and rejected precisely four. Even so, that was too much of a restriction for the Shrub gang, who, as they usually do when they're caught screwing around with the law, demanded the law be changed to let them do what they damn well pleased.

Now, truth be told there was an aspect of this that was (relatively) uncontroversial: Most if not all nations of the world, even if they're not quite so direct about it, reserve the right to spy, including the right to listen in on foreign communications - that is, cases where both sides of the conversation are in foreign countries. (In fact, a lot of countries feel no compunction about doing the same to domestic communications as well. Be grateful for small favors.) The thing is, due to changes in communication technologies, the routes information travels can go rather far afield. It would not be surprising for someone in Peru talking on their cell phone to someone in Japan to have their call routed through Seattle. Email packets can be scattered far and wide on their way from sender to recipient.

Since intercepting of foreign communications was accepted practice, the question became how to do surveillance of communications passing through the US without in effect engaging in warrantless domestic wiretapping. And who was going to decide if the measures to keep the two separate were adequate to the task.

Democrats initially wanted the FISA court to decide; that's pretty feeble protection but it's better than none at all, albeit it not by much. For its part, the White House wanted that power to be in the hands of - get this - the attorney general. That's right, the very man who has twisted himself into so many rhetorical knots to evade his patent mendacity that his name should be Earblot Slagzone.

And yes! the dynamic, the powerful, the Voice of the People Democrats stood their ground and forced the White House to retreat - all the way back to requiring both Slagzone and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell to approve! What a victory! High-fives and tickertape parades all around! Tickertape being a good approximation of the strength of the Democrats' collective backbone.

The bill also, the Washington Post points out,

would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas. ...

Privacy advocates accused the Democrats of selling out and charged that this bill gives the government more authority than it had under a controversial warrantless wiretapping program begun in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Under that program, the government could conduct surveillance without judicial oversight only if it had a reason to believe that one party to the call was a member of or affiliated with al-Qaeda or a related terrorist organization. This bill drops that condition, they noted.

Democrats "have a Pavlovian reaction: Whenever the president says the word 'terrorism,' they roll over and play dead," said Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Fredrickson said the group is "hugely disappointed" and that the Democrats "let themselves be manipulated into accepting the White House proposal ... it's mind-boggling." No it isn't, Ms. Fredrickson, it's Democrats.

But oh, it's true that the fear merchants out in force, each one trying to outdo the other, for example:

- "I hope that there are no attacks before we are able to effectively update this important act." - Rep. Lamar Smith
- "We are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short." - The Shrubbery-in-Chief
- "Al-Qaeda is not going on vacation this month." - Sen. Mitch McConnell
- "We're at war. The enemy wants to attack us." - Sen. Joe "The Zipperman" Lieberman

But for sheer paranoid wackoness, this is a prize-winner:

"Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said. "All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

Omigod omigod OMIGOD! We might miss that message! Hurry hurry hurry! Oh please protect us Mister Bush, please oh please protect us from the very bad men using email!

This is the kind of mindless, cliché-ridden crap which stampeded Senate Democrats into endorsing virtually everything Bush wanted and House Democrats into rejecting better oversight and perhaps later today assuming the position like they do every time Bush puts on his petulant "my way or the highway" routine. While I have absolutely no expectation they will, what the Democrats - what any decent human being - should do is reply that they feel the call of the open road and Bush can take his power-hungry, lying, fear-mongering bullshit and cram it.

Footnote: But I really am being unfair, aren't I? After all, we know - don't we? - from experience that they'll act fairly and properly, just like our intelligence agencies always have.

As for Democrats, well, I mean, let's be fair and all, at least they'll stand fast and protect our future from any more wacko rightwing fruitcake judges Bush wants on the federal bench. Won't they?

Updated to note that Marty Lederman at Balkinization has a preliminary analysis of the atrocity passed by the Senate.

We are so screwed, Part whatever it is now

The Washington Post for Sunday has an article on how

the accolades for [Attorney General Alberto "Call Me Al"] Gonzales are flowing in.

Lawmakers, including some Democrats who voted against his appointment, are praising his openness and mild-mannered demeanor. U.S. attorneys and career Justice Department employees say they welcome his open-door management style. And outside critics say they are merely grateful that Gonzales has agreed to hear them out.

Well, isn't that just precious. Of course, his actual positions "are not much different" from those of his predecessor, John Burntfarm, but hey, so what? He's "mild-mannered." He's rejected any changes to the Traitor Act beyond minor technical ones, but darn it all, he's got an "open management style." And gosh gee whillikers, he'll actually have a meeting with us before he ignores what we say and continues to use the mystique of terrorism to press for increased government powers to poke, prod, and pry into private lives without even the patina of judicial oversight. What more could anyone possibly ask?

Well, you could ask about the propriety of "the chief law enforcement officer of the country" surrounding himself with "an influential clique of conservative lawyers" and injecting himself on the side of the GOP in the filibuster argument. And you could inquire into the impartiality of an Attorney General who says he's going to focus more on "gang violence and human trafficking" but whose new task force is aimed instead at prosecuting the favorite target of the religious right: obscenity.

But I dunno, that would be, well, kinda rude, sorta, wouldn't it? And he's so, you know, mild-mannered 'n' stuff. We couldn't do that!

I mean, after all, what do actual policies matter?

We are, I say again we are, so screwed.

January 5, 2002

[Intended as an op-ed column in a local paper, it was not published. (Links not in original.]

It seems I'm a traitor.

I have this on no less an authority than Attorney General John Ashcroft, who in the course of cowing a timid and reluctant Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6, said those who "scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty only aid terrorists" and "give ammunition to America's enemies." Or, put more directly, "Anyone who questions anything we're doing is an anti-American terrorist-lover."

Well, that must be me, because I do question; in fact, I denounce. I denounce the idea espoused by Bush, Ashcroft, and the rest that crew that human rights and due process are frills to be dumped when they become inconvenient.

I denounce the idea that those accused of crime, even terrorism - bearing in mind the word is "accused" (unless "innocent until proven guilty" is just another frill to be given the boot) - deserve less due process than Nazi war criminals got at Nuremberg.

I denounce military tribunals, secret trials with secret evidence, no right of appeal, and death sentences within easy reach.

I denounce the blatant bias of questioning thousands of Arab men, supposedly seeking ties to terrorists, on the grounds - and only on the grounds - that they are Arab men. And anyone who denies that is racial profiling needs a remedial course in basic logic.

I denounce the practice of detaining hundreds of people, holding them virtually incommunicado to where even their families couldn't find them, often on the flimsiest and most technical of charges, detention which under our new "anti-terrorist" legislation could become all but indefinite, even without the pretext of actual charges.

Speaking of that legislation, I denounce the sweeping new powers to poke, prod, and pry into our private lives, to threaten dissent; powers long desired by the Ashcrofts of this nation but which not even they have claimed would have prevented the catastrophe of September 11 had they been in force.

I denounce, that is, the attack on our human rights, the erosion of our privacy, the guilt by association, the proof by suspicion, and the sweeping up of the innocent in the idle hope that the guilty will by some chance be among them.

And, apparently doubling my treason, as I denounce the sweeping up of the innocent here I denounce the mowing down of the innocent elsewhere.

I denounce, that is, our war in Afghanistan, soon to become the war in Somalia? Iraq? Yemen? Sudan? The list is extensive, but consists entirely of poor countries in the Middle East and the horn of Africa. (There is one nation in that region, which despite espousing an extremist form of Islam, having coddled terrorists, and having clear links to Osama bin Laden, is surely safe from attack: Saudi Arabia.)

Note well: The issue is not whether or not to fight terrorism. It's how you do that without becoming a terrorist yourself. In that light, it must be said that our "war on terrorism" as presently pursued is wrong, immoral, and wholly ineffective.

Consider that in the course of our war in Afghanistan, we killed perhaps as many as 4,000 innocent civilians. (By the way, when was the last time you heard any discussion of civilian casualties? Perhaps that's because the White House "advised" the networks to avoid the subject. CNN management followed up with a memo to reporters and anchors that it would be "perverse" to focus on civilian deaths.) The interruption of aid supplies caused by the war has already condemned at least thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, perhaps more, to death by starvation this winter - which would be true even if we hadn't blown up two storehouses full of Red Cross aid supplies outside Kabul. That is, we have already killed or condemned to death more than twice as many innocents as were killed in the World Trade Center atrocity.

And for what? To what end? Supposedly, the bombing was to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial; when it started, George Bush even said "We are not looking to replace one government with another." But it soon became obvious that was exactly our intent, as sorties moved to front-line support for Northern Alliance forces (which wound up directing US air strikes) and the argument smoothly segued from the Taliban harboring al-Qaeda to the Taliban being the same as al-Qaeda. Indeed, when there were reports that a deal was being struck for the Taliban to surrender Kandahar in return for safe passage of Mullah Muhammed Omar out of the city, Donald Rumsfeld said the US would "accept no deal" which allowed him to go free. (Just how did it get to be our decision as to what sort of peace deal the Afghanis would make among themselves?)

What makes this doubly - triply - outrageous is that according to the UK newspaper the "Daily Mirror," in early October Pakistani Muslim clerics had scored an agreement with bin Laden under which he would be extradited to Pakistan and held under house arrest, while an international tribunal decided whether to try him itself or turn him over to the US. The deal was killed when Pakistani President Musharraf said he "could not guarantee bin Laden's safety," a truly odd claim considering that at the time much concern was expressed about how popular bin Laden was in Pakistan. Significantly, in the same article a US official is quoted as worrying about "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance bin Laden was captured." In other words, "Yes, we want him taken - but not yet." [A slight error: It was the Daily Telegraph, not the Daily Mirror, that broke the story. The "premature collapse" quote was from a column in the Mirror by John Pilger, which referred to the Telegraph piece.]

But perhaps the worst thing is that, in the final analysis, we lacked even the limp justification of effectiveness - it just won't work, and neither will extending our attacks beyond other borders. If the recent history of the Middle East proves nothing else, it proves that neither terrorism nor counterterrorism, neither retaliation nor counter-retaliation, work in the long run. They may gain you a lull, but not an end. To cite the obvious example: For decades, Palestinians have been committing terrorism against Israelis - they still do not have a home. For decades, Israelis have been committing terrorism against Palestinians - they still do not have security.

And while September 11 is clearly the worst attack on Americans, it was hardly the first. (Remember the USS Cole? The 1993 World Trade Center bombing? The embassy attacks? The disco bombing?) And neither, contrary to what seems to be the current notion, was this our first military response. (Remember the shelling of Beirut? The bombings of Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan?) It was, rather, another turn in the cycle of mayhem, a cycle that grows deadlier over time.

The fact is, terrorism can't be stopped unless it is understood - any more than you can cure a disease without knowing the cause. Terrorism is born of desperation-driven fanaticism, a desperation that can't be separated from the social and economic conditions in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow, conditions - it must be said bluntly - which we as a nation are complicit in maintaining for our own selfish benefit.

Together, all this means three things:

One, unless we are prepared to wipe out entire peoples, our "war against terrorism" will not succeed. It will only produce more anger, more hatred, more suicide bombers; the more so as it spreads to more poor nations.

Two, patient police work of effective investigation and intelligence has done and will do more to oppose terrorism than all our bombing sorties combined. (September 11, it's become clear, didn't arise from a lack of police powers but from a failure to use those already there.)

Three and most importantly, our best targets for "attack" in this "extended campaign" are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, of denigrated, degraded, and denied people among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way for us to fight terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don’t see us as grasping bullies - and the best way to no longer be seen as a grasping bully is to stop being one.

260.6 - The legacy of 9/11

The legacy of 9/11

Yeah, so it's been 15 years. We remember 9/11, oh yes we do and there are a good number of pundits and officials to make sure we do just in case we don't.

And amid the pundits and officials symbolically patting the nation on the back for how supposedly brave and resilient we are even as we have been by those same voices conditioned, like one of Pavlov's dogs, to twitch with fear at the word "Islamic" comes the news that over the Labor Day weekend, one of the legacies of 9/11 was on display: Over those three days, the US military bombed six different countries spanning Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

It included 45 bombing raids in Iraq and Syria and 20 targets in the Libyan city of Sirte, plus attacks in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan. All they needed was to hit someplace in Pakistan to have run the entire list of nations we have been bombing in recent years.

What George Bush pronounced an "extended campaign against terrorism" has become what it had to become, what it could not fail to become: an "extended campaign" of unending war, a campaign now spread to multiple nations. It is one of our legacies of 9/11.

Oh, but this spreading war is, officials insist, all necessary due to the endurance and geographic spread of al-Qaeda and its various mutations, including Daesh, that is, ISIS.

Countries we have bombed in recent years

Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger and Pentagon official now at the Center for a New American Security, claims that the Obama administration "really wanted to end these wars," but instead has "combat operations on multiple fronts." He than added, in the most unintentionally telling remark you will hear anywhere this week, "That's just the unfortunate reality of the terrorism threat today."

Just the unfortunate reality. Indeed, that's what we're supposed to accept: That's just the way it is. Our wars are an "unfortunate reality."

It's all passive voice. The wars, or rather their causes, their roots, really have nothing to do with us. Nothing to do with anything we did or didn't do. Nothing to do with the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq. Nothing to do with the drone attacks on Pakistan. We are merely helpless victims, passive observers almost, just doing what is necessary, never initiating anything, just responding always to others with actions that have no repercussions themselves. Because our actions provoke no response. Have no blowback. No unintended consequences. It's all just an "unfortunate reality."

Just a couple of weeks after 9/11, I wrote something about that event that began this way:

If the history of the Middle East over the last 30 years proves nothing else [remembering this is the 30 years preceding 2001], it proves beyond question that neither terrorism nor "counter"-terrorism, neither retaliation nor counter-retaliation nor counter-counter-retaliation will stop the circle of death - particularly not so long as those on each side insist on seeing themselves at the wronged innocents only defending themselves against unreasoning violence or oppression or exploitation (or all three) while viewing their adversaries as evil brutes fully aware of their own brutality. Another cycle of mayhem is simply not an answer.

And yet more cycles of mayhem, more counter-counter-counter-counter-retaliation is exactly what we've seen. And there is no sign of it ending. In fact, Scharre said the US bombing campaigns are an appropriate response because they can be sustained over time in the same way that the US has committed to long-term military presences in places such as Germany and South Korea. That is, he's saying, decades of bombing cities and towns is the same as troop presence by mutually-agreed treaty in places not at war.

That piece I wrote shortly after 9/11 ended this way:

Our best targets for "attack" in this "extended campaign" are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way to minimize terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don't see us as grasping bullies - and the best way not to be seen as a grasping bully is not to be one.

I'll let you decide how well what I wrote 15 years ago has stood up to time and events. But the truth remains that unending war is one of our legacies of 9/11, a legacy that has in point of fact made the world less safe than it was 15 years ago.

Jeh Johnson

One legacy, but not the only. Because we also celebrated the anniversary of 9/11 by seeing Jeh Johnson, secretary of the department for the protection of the fatherland, going around the national media circuit, pushing the latest version of "be afraid, be very afraid," this version being the dark, looming specter of "self-radicalized actors" in the US, a specter requiring what one outlet called "a modern-day version of Cold Ear-era ideological screenings."

(Apparently, the chant of "ISIS is coming! ISIS is coming!" no longer has quite the impact it once did and so some sort of re-boot was required.)

Just how much far Johnson go in spinning his around-the-campfire tales of dark and evil doings? He asserted that "in the current environment, where we have to deal with the prospect of a lone wolf actor or a self-radicalized actor, just saying there's no specific credible threat doesn't tell the whole story." So even though there is no evidence of a threat, we have to act as if there is evidence of a threat.

This is the attitude we have adopted since 9/1l, this is what the official notion of defending our rights - that is, the notion of what officialdom has adopted as to what constitutes defending our rights - has come to: deliberately promoted constant fear, even in the absence of evidence of a threat.

So much so, in fact, that under earlier this year, the FBI told high schools across the country to report to the government students who criticize government policies or "western corruption" or who say they are anarchists on the grounds that they are potential future terrorists. Schools also had it suggested to them that young people who are poor, who are immigrants, or who travel to "suspicious" countries are more likely to become terrorists. In fact, the feds claimed that that young people "possess inherent risk factors" that make them more likely to become terrorists, risk factors so broadly and vaguely defined that almost any high school student could be deemed worthy of government surveillance.

That is another legacy of 9/11.

And then there are the laws that are enabled by that reign of fear and suspicion, the first and best-known being the so-called Patriot Act, or as I call it, the Traitor Act for its impact on civil liberties and privacy, for its dramatic expansion of the ability of the spooks to poke, prod, pry, and probe into every aspect of our lives.

In the wake of its passage, I noted that no one had been able to come up with a single argument as to how if the law's provisions had been in place it would have prevented 9/11. Because there weren't any such arguments and in fact the failure over 9/11 was not in the lack of authority but in not using the authority that already existed. So I wrote that

[a]dding more such powers, more authority to invade our privacy, restrict our freedoms, track our movements, more ability to substitute suspicion for proof - all while reducing judicial oversight - only creates more opportunities for official abuse.

Diagram of data from Prism

And abuse of course followed. It's been out of the news of late, so I do have to ask: Have we forgotten what Edward Snowden revealed? Have we forgotten about the collection of phone metadata of every call within, into, or out of the US? Have we forgotten the PRISM program, under which essentially all internet traffic that passed through the US was passed through the NSA? Have we forgotten about the agency's programs to have the ability to hack into any computer system it wanted to, individual, corporate, or government, friend or foe, anywhere in the world, no matter how well protected or encoded?

Oh, yeah, right, supposedly the so-called USA Freedom Act fixed all that last year, so why worry - except it didn't: About the only thing it did was to end the bulk collection of phone metadata by the NSA under Section 215 of the Traitor Act while requiring that phone companies keep the data so the spooks could get a court order to see it. About the only thing that changed was who held the records.

Meanwhile, it did nothing about Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is what the spooks use to justify sweeping up as much of the Internet as they can get their hands on.

And it wasn't even relevant to Executive Order 12333, or "1-2-triple-3" as I understand it is known. It's a presidential directive dating from 1981 that defines US spy operations. It allows the NSA to capture and retain essentially any data it can find, including the actual content of email, phone calls, whatever, so long as the information is gathered outside the US.

But in a technologically-interconnected world unlike anything that existed when the order was first issued, a world where an e-mail from New York to New Jersey is likely to wind up on a server in, perhaps, Brazil or Japan or Britain, the restriction to "outside the US" is utterly meaningless, utterly without effect, because our personal data can very easily - is even very likely to be - stored somewhere outside the US.

The only requirement left is the open door that the information be gathered in the course of "a lawful foreign intelligence investigation." And even if that information is "incidental," having no connection to the person or group that is the supposed actual target of the investigation, EO 12333 specifically allows for the NSA to keep it. No warrant is required, no court approval is neede, no such collection need be reported to Congress, nor do the people whose personal information is "incidentally" swept up have to be told.

All of which means that the spooks' slogan has effectively become "all your data are belonging to us."

And that, too, is a legacy of 9/11.

James Clapper

And finally, let's not forget that even as the government has claimed authority to strip away all of our privacy, all of our secrets, in pursuit of the chimera of "national security," that despite a few victories, the government's own secrets are held more tightly than ever, to the point where in April, Congress was still trying to find out from James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, just how many US citizens had had their personal info "incidentally" swept into the government's databanks.

The fact is, during the Obama administration, there have been eight prosecutions of whistleblowers under the 1917 Espionage Act - more than double the number under all previous presidents combined. And know - and remember this any time someone says anything about how Edward Snowden should return because of, as Hillary Clinton put it, "all the protections we have for whistleblowers" - know that if you are charged under the Espionage Act, as Snowden surely would be, you are legally barred from arguing in your defense that the classified material you leaked was improperly classified. You can't argue it never should have been classified. You can't argue that the "secrets" were classified solely because they were embarrassing to officials and had no impact on national security. You can't argue that release of the materials was actually of benefit to the public. You can't even testify as to why you did it. So you tell me what "protections" would be available for Edward Snowden.

So what is our legacy of 9/11?

We as a people let one terrible tragedy, one serious attack, one bloody assault, stampede us into a war in Afghanistan which has killed over 100,000 people and nearly 15 years later continues seemingly without end, and a war in Iraq which has killed hundreds of thousands, opened a door to al-Qaeda and its demon spawn ISIS, and has morphed into the war in Iraq and Syria with hundreds of thousands more dead, stampede us into actually, seriously, arguing whether or not torture and other war crimes are legitimate if we do them, stampede us into living with a constant undercurrent of promoted fear sufficient to stampede us in turn into surrendering our privacy, our civil liberties, and our ability to know what is being done supposedly on our behalf by a government that increasingly is the tool of the intelligence community rather than the other way around, stampede us into passively allowing the government to decide what we know, how much of it we know, and when we know it, stampede us into heading down a slippery slope at the bottom of which is the complete loss of what it means to be a free people.

That is our legacy of 9/11. It is a legacy we need to reject - strongly and clearly.

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