Some Questions About Eavesdropping
Julian Sanchez | December 17, 2005, 7:03pm
The New York Times story about the warrantless eavesdropping that's been going on for several years now prompted a couple questions. (Beyond the obvious, and strictly rhetorical, "Don't they even pretend to care about civil liberties anymore?")
First, why on earth did the Times, apparently at the Bush administration's request, sit on this story for a full year? The supposed reason for the request is that the revelation would threaten national security by tipping off terrorists. But... about what? About the fact that the government is seeking to wiretap suspected terrorist? To whom does this come as news? We all know law enforcement can get secret wiretap warrants through a FISA court; the only reason to expect terrorists to change their behavior now that they know wiretaps are happening without warrants is if we think they've somehow broached the secrecy of the FISA courts. That seems unlikely—at any rate, unlikely to have been known about and still persisted for several years. So what kind of plausible difference to our national security could it make if terror suspects who know they might be targeted for eavesdropping with a warrant learn they might be targeted without one? Whatever the issue was, what changed? What did the Times uncover in its year of further investigation that led editors to believe the time was now ripe for publication? Or to put it the other way: I understand why a paper might want to hold off on a story when the government says it worries it might be a security threat, but if, as it seems, they ultimately decided they could publish with a clear conscience, why did it take so long to make that determination? (Tangentially related: I note with some amusement Mark Levin's complaint at The Corner that he "cannot remember the last time, or first time, this newspaper reported a leak that was helpful to our war effort." That's because, as a rule, puff stories about how very swimmingly that effort is going don't need to be "leaked": As we've recently learned, the government is so happy to have them printed it'll pay for the privilege.)
A second, slightly more abstract question is what, exactly, counts as an "international" communication these days. Previously, we're told, the NSA had only spied on wholly foreign conversations. They still (say they) don't do any wholly domestic surveillance. What's new is the intereception of phone calls and e-mails where one party is based in the U.S. and the other overseas. Except... how do we know? I check the same account whether I'm sitting in D.C. or Madrid—and I can't say I'm wholly sure I know where the servers that store my e-mail are located, though I think they're all in the U.S., though I might just as easily, from D.C., read an e-mail from my nextdoor neighbor routed through an account on a server in Madrid. The growth of Internet-based telephone services like Vonage means that the same is increasingly true of voice converrsations as well. Matt Welch is in Prague right now, but if I wanted to reach him on his Vonage phone, I'd dial a number with a California area code. Presumably the converse might be true as well: I might call an international number to reach someone staying in a hotel across town. Which of these various communications would the NSA feel at liberty to listen in on?
Joe_M | December 17, 2005, 11:04pm | #
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say that the fact that this story was delayed indicates it was being used as a bargaining chip in an interagency squabble between the NSA and DOD. Politically speaking, things that are true are revealed proportional to the amount of harm they could do to the original perpetrators after the fact.
But I don't need to be a conspiracy theorist. I've got Occam's Razor. With stories like these, it's much simpler to let other people turn fiction into fact:
1. The Pentagon plants news propaganda in Iraqi newspapers.
2. Republican Party fundraiser Jack Abrahamoff is indicted for fraud and conspiracy, not the least of which was his ethical lapse when he paid writers to plant stories in US news outlets.
3. Doug Bandow, Cato Institute fellow and Libertarian, resigns and is suspended from Copley News Service after admitting to accepting money from Abrahamoff. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/051217/columnist_suspended.html?.v=1
I've met Bandow twice. Once at a conference on Religion and Economics at Grove City College (with ties to George Mason Uni), and once at an Acton Institute conference in North Bend, Washington.
I remember thinking that he had an interesting presentation, but much of his material was canned from previous speeches. While it sparkled, it was obviously a hack job.
And now he's toasted his career, for what? Will he get paid handsomely for being a fall guy? Will he be trying to rehabilitate himself on the speaker's circuit?
But, of course, you won't hear any of that at Reason Magazine. Unbiased libertarianism and such. Provocative, my ass.
So one answer to your question, Julian, is that it's apparently ethically acceptable to spy on ephemeral communication (like speech, email, websites), but once you commit something to a hardcopy that falls irrefutably within national boundaries (like newspapers, wire services, or your printer), you have to get your ducks in a row.
Getting one's ducks in a row apparently took the TIMES a whole year. It was a big story, and people needed some space to create plausible deniability.
After all, it's not that the permanence of print media is at stake once the story is "set in stone." It's that tangible forms of information like newspapers are a two-way street: they may be harder to publicly distribute, but they also make it more difficult to erase links between news media, government intelligence gathering, and other forms of political manipulation.
Bandow, Abrahamoff, and the Pentagon's GI-journalism all suffered because they were under pressure to produce results without failure. They present us with three separate but interrelated lessons in peer-to-peer networking and content development in the Internet Age. And that's your lesson in freedom, political fortune, and hypocrisy for today, my friends.
Joe_M | December 18, 2005, 11:59am | #
Sorry, my previous post seemed clearer to me before the coffee kicked in. I've been up all night working on programming spreadsheet code, so I'm a little logey.
My first point was that manipulation of media occurs on all sides of the fence, and that this manipulation is usually to protect self-interest. Media-use is simply a battleground to strategically expose someone else's weakness. This seems obvious (even without my sarcasm).
My second point was that the planted stories we hear about are the result of ineptitude which ultimately comes down to basic human weakness.
People make mistakes. And they make big mistakes when their personal beliefs are too brittle to allow the admission of weakness. This point can be extended further, because there is little to distinguish international behavior from domestic and personal behavior when it comes to partisan-driven policy that is rigidly in lock-step.
The third point was that because ephemeral media doesn't exist in a tangible form (except for media storage, which itself can be also easily modified), the tendency is to dismiss the utility of such media as outside the governance of typical social and ethical behavior.
It is possible to dismiss concerns about abuse as a victimless crime, since perfect anonymity and perfect surveillance would specifically preclude the victim knowing who is abusing authority anyway.
The irony is that the illusion of freedom is much more readily obtained when covert intelligence is able to manipulate without detection. The net result would be absolutely no distinguishable effect from real freedom. The crime doesn't exist if you can't detect it.
The ability to DETECT or to be made undeniably aware of manipulation is what has become distasteful to many people, not the actual breach of privacy and public trust. This seems to me to be dangerously amoral.
To ask what has changed to allow a one-year story to be published, is to ask the wrong question. That's a question of detection. A better question would be to ask how the story itself became delayed by the fact that the public probably wouldn't believe the truth of this story a year ago.
But that was before the hurricane Katrina debacle.
Before the debate about whether torture is a really, really, really bad thing?
Before CIA prisons.
Before the stories of Presidental hissy-fits over having to obey the Constitution.
In the Internet Age, the relative delay or acceleration of information distribution may serve someone's interests, or provoke mistrust, when in reality a need for accuracy slows down and tempers the process, whether or not the process is transparent.
And information accuracy itself is the result of people determining the clarity of their social network: e.g. can I really trust what I learn from others, if I don't know how other people value my own input?
Under pressure, people try to cheat. They pretend to be better than they really are. They are usually only sorry to get caught. My question: is it really worth it to compromise personal quality of character and disciplined thought for the sake of shifting public attention? In the short-run, perhaps.
I had previously omitted mentioning that Bandow (he once reminded me that his name is pronounced Bon-doh) was reputed to be an evangelical Christian. The reason I omitted it was that it seemed an attack upon personal belief. The point is that this personal belief appears to be in direct contradiction to what evangelical Christianity purports to be. Hence, hypocrisy. Just like the President, I guess.
Politics, contemporary covert opinion-shaping, and ideological self-interest go together. Is it going to far to suggest that forthright exposure of a person's true nature is much less damaging than any attempt to deny, ignore, or rationalize a person's behavior?
If George Bush is an idiot, then the Republicans should admit it. Openly. They won't because the evanglical base won't allow it and are in denial about the fact that they were tricked into supporting a person who is not really a Christian, but an opportunizer. Just like lots of evangelicals. And the Republican moral agenda will collapse, taking the policy agenda along with it.
Adam | December 18, 2005, 2:53pm | #
This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. . . . Yesterday [Friday] the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk... - Bush radio address
And by "our enemies," he means Russ Feingold, most of the commenters here, and the ACLU? Because, tarran's objection re: technological blunders notwithstanding (hell - they were trying to avoid being listened to), it really seems that all of the terrorists would operate under the presumption that they were being listened to. Pre-PATRIOT, pre-Fuck The Constitution, pre-9/11, terrorists were careful on the phone. The 9/11 commission report is full of post-disaster broken codes and transmissions.
Where the hell's Bob Barr when we need him?
And for anybody who gives a shit, just a historical note, the Bill of Rights was ratified 214 years ago this past week - December 15, 1791.
Oh yeah - and this is the shitbag we're supposed to entrust with nominating a "strict constructionist" to the Supreme Court?
And how about that argument presented by the Administration that they informed Congress? First of all, where the hell were the Congressional Dems to scream bloody murder about this? Did they only tell majority members, or were the Democrats in collusion? And second of all, we have THREE branches of government. Making backroom deals between two to violate the rights of the citizenry while excluding the third branch sure as hell seems to undermine checks and balances.
If Bush had ever taken a goddamned history class in his life, maybe he'd know what "checks and balances" are.
And I'm game for thoreau's divided gov't 2006 project. Divided government, fuck yeah!
And if this isn't impeachable, I don't know what the hell might possibly be.
narciso | December 18, 2005, 9:25pm | #
i don't see the connection, Miller did a long drawn out tome on biological weapons, which happened to be published right around the time
of the anthrax attacks (You're not saying she
was responsible for that too, right).Ironically,
much of the comments on this board, are of a
piece with the Michael Moore view, that there
is "no terrorist threat", that the Afghan war
was because of the natural gas pipeline, and
that Bin Laden, had nothing to do with it. This
naturally allows one to ignore the German identi-fication of Marwan, a year before September 11, when he flew the second plane, into WTC # 2 ;to
forget how the FISA court failed in granting
access to Massoui's laptop. Or other links in the string of dots,including a message from Yemen on Sept. 10th: which purportedly would predict the attack. It further ignores the possibilities of further sleeper cells and/or Al Queda operatives like Iyman Faris, Abdullah Mujahair; AKA Jose
Padilla, Suleiman Faris, aka John Walker Lindh Adnan El Shukrijumah,(still on the loose,
somewhere in Latin America,) Adam Gadahn, or member of the Gitmo crew including Mohammed Al Quahtani; (the wing man on the 4th plane)or Yasir Hamdi, the Saudi from Southern Louisiana oil refineries. All those persons, and many others
could have made communications with other parties
after September 11th. and we'd be very limited
in tracking them. Jamal Zougam, the crew chief on the Madrid bombing, was a cell phone salesman along with Imam Yarkas; another part of the plot. Mamoun Darkanzali, tied to both Madrid and 9/11
is now out on the streets, doing god knows what;
mostly due to European guilt over their inability
to deal with evil, totalitarian ideologies; and which they still can't figure out.
Randolph Carter | December 18, 2005, 9:31pm | #
Ken Shultz,
I'm sorry to say, but congressmen are by and large protected from the nasty voices of their constituents. In the interest education, here's what happens to communications to congressmen:
Letter:
The letters are opened by interns. If they are from a foundation, business, or VIP (there is usually a VIP list in the offices), they are placed in the appropriate legislative assistant's mailbox and responses come from them. If it is from your average civilian, it is put in the "constituent mail" box and, after being sorted according to issue by interns, an appropriate form letter (written by a legislative assistant) is found on the "Capitol Letters" software, the proper names are filled in, and the name and address of the sender are added to the "Capitol Letters" database, for future use in mailings.
Phone calls:
An intern or the office co-ordinator answers the phone. If it sounds like someone important, the intern/co-ordinator asks the scheduler if that person can talk to the congressman, usually the answer is no. The intern/co-ordinator takes out a "phone log" sheet, records the name, address, and phone number of the caller and their comment. It then goes to the constituent mail box and is treated like a letter.
E-mail:
E-mail sucks. Every office gets thousands of identical e-mails from Moveon.org or Focus on the Family and they all have to be organized according to topic by interns. After they are organized, they are treated like letters and phone calls.
The point? Probably 1%, maybe less, of all the correspondence ever sees the congressman's desk. The LAs get some idea of what people care about, and sometimes they get to tell the congressman.
Oh, and P.S. - if you get a letter back that's hand-signed, chances are it's been done by one of the older LAs in the office who have been taught how to forge the signature. Sorry.
