“The Naivety Of An Ideologue”: Leaker Or Leader? Edward Snowden Claims Victory
In an interview last week with NBC’s Brian Williams, NSA secret-leaker Edward Snowden set himself a low bar and claimed success: His leaks, he said, have gotten us talking about these important issues. Mission accomplished? Let’s think about that…
While Snowden has in fact displayed several admirable leadership qualities – like taking bold action, operating in integrity with his stated beliefs, and communicating (to Brian Williams, anyway) with gravitas – he, like many would-be-good leaders, has fallen short in the results department.
Good leadership takes balancing cost versus benefit to achieve something. The measure of such a costly breach of national security as Snowden committed, then, should be significant positive change, rather than fresh fodder for our hapless Congress and paying NBC’s bills for a few news cycles.
For example, could there follow from all of this, say, a thorough and unbiased audit of our intelligence services showing specifically if, and in what ways, the US Government discarded its checks and balances and/or hindered our constitutionally-guaranteed protections and freedoms? Such an audit could then result in positive reforms.
Similarly, for the US Government to be the leader here, it would need to show, rather than simply assert, that Snowden’s admittedly criminal actions have created harm, and also show that it has used its powers in strictly constitutional ways.
Neither will happen. Instead, Snowden’s sensational actions reflect the naivety of an ideologue: Someone intensely devoted to a cause, yet guided more by the image of perfection than by the real world. This “national conversation” is more likely to fester and fizzle than to lead to policy reform — after all, that’s the status quo state of the union these days.
Whether he was a patriot or a traitor in leaking NSA secrets is a dumb question being asked by smart people in the media who know better, but need to sell cars and paper towels. Patriot or traitor? He is, as are those in government guilty of “overreach,” both and neither. The two sides here are more alike than not.
I’m not suggesting that whiste-blowing isn’t important to our democracy — it is. Nor am I saying it’s Edward Snowden’s responsibility to make any needed changes. Yet if something productive beyond dialogue is to come of this, then we’ll need actual leadership.
That’s the challenge when it comes to the dark arts of intelligence. We can’t and shouldn’t ever know what great leadership looks like when it comes to the content of collecting and analyzing intelligence to prevent violence and terrorism. Yet if Snowden’s actions are to be seen as good leadership, then bring it on, Snowden: Let’s see the benefits that more than cover the costs of what you have done.
By: David Peck, Politics Blog, The Huffington Post, June 1, 2014
“Like A Rooster Taking Credit For The Sunrise”: Evidence Of Rand Paul Losing Another Fundraising Stream
The relevant details are still elusive, but President Obama is reportedly prepared to propose sweeping changes to U.S. surveillance policy, including an end to the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection. The reforms will be dependent on congressional approval, but for privacy advocates and civil libertarians, the White House’s apparent intentions are most welcome.
But this is still silly.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he takes some credit for President Obama’s decision to end the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program.
In an interview after Obama announced the change on Tuesday, Paul was asked on “Fox and Friends” if it would make him happy for phone companies, not the government, to retain the metadata.
“Well, you know, I don’t want to take all the credit for ending this, but I think our lawsuit had something to do with bringing the president to the table,” Paul said.
Look, if Edward Snowden and his defenders want to take some credit for NSA reforms, they’re on solid ground. Putting aside the debate over the legality and propriety of his leaks, Snowden’s revelations obviously were dramatically consequential, caused an international controversy, and were directly responsible for the debate that led to the administration’s review.
If Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and other journalists responsible for reporting on NSA surveillance want to claim some credit, too, they also have a credible case to make, for many of the same reasons.
But for Rand Paul to toot his horn on Fox is just foolish.
For one thing, the senator’s timeline is badly flawed. President Obama delivered a speech in January ordering an internal review of possible changes to U.S. surveillance policy. When did Paul file his lawsuit? Nearly a month later.
In other words, according to Rand Paul, the president didn’t launch this process in response to a global firestorm, but rather, in anticipation of a stunt lawsuit from a senator that hadn’t even been filed yet.
For another, Paul’s lawsuit wasn’t exactly a credible effort. It was a redundant case, largely mirroring a case that had already been filed by someone else, and it was organized through the senator’s political campaign, rather than his official Senate office. (Supporters were supposed to endorse Paul’s lawsuit against “Big Brother” by giving the senator their name, address, zip code, and if they didn’t mind, credit card number.)
It’s very hard to believe the White House was scrambling to change their national-security policies in response to a Rand Paul p.r. stunt.
It makes sense that the senator is trying to turn this into a positive for him, but as a practical matter, if the reports are accurate and the administration is prepared to scrap the controversial NSA program, it’s not evidence of Paul winning; it’s evidence of Paul losing a fundraising stream.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 26, 2014
“It’s About The Guy In The White House”: The GOP Hypocrisy On Privacy And The Pill
I’m sure you chuckled at this weekend development as much as I did: At its winter meeting, the Republican National Committee, , passed a resolution condemning the NSA’s data-mining policy. The language about “unwarranted” government surveillance being an “intrusion on basic human rights” passed by voice vote, with only a few dissenters.
This is being read in the media as evidence for the party’s continuing turn away from war-mongery, Ari Fleischer-style, “watch what you say and do” Big Brotherism and toward a Pauline (as in Rand) libertarianism. And I wouldn’t deny that there’s something to that. The libertarian streak is very in vogue on the right, and neocons can’t seem to get Americans agitated about anything.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The passage of this resolution is mostly about the guy in the White House. If you want to try to tell me this was an act of principle by the RNC, then put Mitt Romney in the White House for a moment. Do you think the RNC would have considered such a resolution? Please. Reince Priebus would have had a stroke. He’d have quashed it in minutes. But with Barack Obama in the White House, the rules are different. The RNC passed this resolution to kick a little extra sand in Obama’s face.
This isn’t new of course, this rancid hypocritical sand-kicking, but it keeps getting worse, more comically transparent and more brazen. You may have read last week, for example, after Mike Huckabee’s birth-control throw down, that back in 2005 when he was Arkansas governor, Huckabee approved legislation requiring health-insurance plans in the state to cover contraceptive pills and devices. In fact, according to The Arkansas Times, Huckabee’s exemption for religious employers and organizations was narrower than the exemption in Obamacare.
So how did this policy go from being something a Southern Baptist fundamentalist could endorse to something that’s fodder for the next front in the culture war? What’s changed? Well, let’s see. It’s not that government is forcing insurers to pay for contraception. That’s what Huckabee approved in 2005. It’s not that contraception is different. True, we’ve had controversies in the past year about the age at which girls could have legal access to emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), but that has nothing to do with “Uncle Sugar” providing women with birth control, which was the crux of Huckabee’s lament. And besides that, it’s not as if ECPs [what does that stand for?] themselves are new—they’ve been legal for 15 years. It was George W. Bush’s FDA that changed ECPs from prescription-only to over-the-counter (for adult women), back in 2006.
No, those things aren’t very different. What’s different is who’s in the White House. What’s an acknowledgement of modern reality when a Republican is president becomes, with Obama as president, another manifestation of how he’s taking America straight to hell. If you believe the president is the Manchurian Candidate, acts that were once benign or ignorable take on a new and more sinister coloration.
Do liberals do this too in reverse? Sure, to some extent. But on the topic of the NSA and data mining, you certainly can’t say that liberals and Democrats have been silent. Many have been fierce critics of the administration, far more so than conservatives and Republicans, in fact. To the extent that Obama is changing his policies in these realms, it’s because of pressure from the left, not the right.
But now the GOP wants a piece of this action. I’m sure that to some extent the sentiment among the RNC members—national committee-people from across the country, many of them local politicos, few or none of them members of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment—is genuine. Most people don’t like the idea that the government has a log of their phone calls. It’s not exactly hard to get a bunch of conservative activists to cast a voice-vote against the government and against anything Obama is doing.
But proof of libertarian dominance in the GOP? Don’t buy it. If the Republicans nominate Rand Paul, then sure, they’ll keep sallying forth down the libertarian alley. But if they nominate a more conventional Republican who has ties to the neoconservative establishment, the delegates stand up at the 2016 convention and cheer their heads off every time that nominee talks about the homeland. And should that person become president, and do the same things Obama has done and worse…well, I wouldn’t be looking for any censorious RNC resolutions if I were you.
In the meantime, the thing to keep looking for is Republicans having no memory of LB09—Life Before 2009. It makes no difference what position the party or any individual Republican took before January 20 of that year. All that matters from their way of seeing things is that on January 20 of that year, everything changed. That’s the governing emotional reality of the GOP opposition, and it will remain so until the day the black guy leaves the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 27, 2014
“Data Is Digital Gold”: Beyond The NSA, What About Big Data Abuse By Corporations, Politicians?
Taking steps to end, or at the very least to constrain, the federal government’s practice of storing information on the personal communications of Americans is a good thing. There is every reason to respect initiatives that seek to prevent the National Security Agency’s metadata programs from making a mockery of the right to privacy outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
But the moves that President Obama announced Friday to impose more judicial oversight on federal authorities who might “listen to your private phone calls, or read your emails” and the steps that may be taken by Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials to check and balance the NSA following the submission of proposals on March 28 ought not be seen mistaken for a restoration of privacy rights in America.
What the president and his aides are talking about—in response to revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, congressional objections and public protests – are plans to place some controls on the NSA and perhaps to keep most data in “private hands.”
But what controls will there be on those private hands?
As long as we’re opening a discussion about data mining, might we consider the fact that it’s not just the government that’s paying attention to our communications—and to what they can reveal about our personalities, lifestyles, values, spending habits and political choices.
There’s a reason the NSA has been interested in accessing the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. When you’re mining, you go where the precious resources are, and technology companies have got the gold.
Data is digital gold. Corporations know that. They’re big into data mining.
This data mining, and the commercial and political applications that extend from it, gets far less attention than the machinations of the NSA or other governmental intelligence agencies. Tech publications and savvy writers such as Jaron Lanier recognize these concerns. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Senate Commerce Committee have taken some tentative steps to address a few of the worst abuses. But that’s not enough, especially when, as Fordham University’s Alice E. Marwick noted in a smart recent piece for The New York Review of Books,
there are equally troubling and equally opaque systems run by advertising, marketing, and data-mining firms that are far less known. Using techniques ranging from supermarket loyalty cards to targeted advertising on Facebook, private companies systematically collect very personal information, from who you are, to what you do, to what you buy. Data about your online and offline behavior are combined, analyzed, and sold to marketers, corporations, governments, and even criminals. The scope of this collection, aggregation, and brokering of information is similar to, if not larger than, that of the NSA, yet it is almost entirely unregulated and many of the activities of data-mining and digital marketing firms are not publicly known at all.
Significantly, it is not just financial profit that data can yield.
As Robert W. McChesney and I note in Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Books), data is also mined by those who seek power.
Political candidates, political parties, Super PACs and dark-money groups are among the most ambitious data miners around. They use data to supercharge their fund-raising, to target multimillion-dollar ad buys and to stir passions and fears at election time.
Both parties do it. All major candidates do it. Obama did it better than Romney in 2012, and that played a critical role in providing the president with the resources and the strategies that allowed him to easily defeat a well-funded and aggressive challenger. The Grand Old Party’s response was to begin hiring the best and the brightest technical talent. A recent headline announced: “Republican National Committee to Build Platform to Share Voter Data.” Another reported: “RNC Pledges $20 Million to Build Data-Sharing Operation.”
So campaigns are going to do more mining. And so are the billionaires who fund so-called “independent” political operations. Last spring, Politico announced: “Karl Rove, Koch Brothers Lead Charge to Control Republican Data.”
Data already drives the money-and-media election complex that is rapidly remaking American democracy into an American dollarocracy, where election campaigns are long on technical savvy but short, very short, on vision.
So, give the president credit for wading into the debate about how the government uses and abuses phone data. Give key members of Congress, like Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, credit for pointing out that what the president has proposed is “not enough” to “safeguard against indiscriminate, bulk surveillance of everyday Americans.”
But then go the next step. Recognize that addressing governmental actions and abuses does not begin to restore privacy rights. For that to happen, there must be recognition that Marwick is right to argue: “While closer scrutiny of the NSA is necessary and needed, we must apply equal pressure to private corporations to ensure that seemingly harmless targeted mail campaigns and advertisements do not give way to insidious and dangerous violations of personal privacy.”
And that recognition must extend beyond concern regarding abusive commercial applications to include an examination of and responses to new approaches to fund-raising and campaigning that have the potential to warp our politics—and democracy itself.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 17, 2014
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