“A Self Styled Decider”: Edward Snowden Got Everything Wrong
Edward Snowden is now out of his limbo at Moscow’s airport, presumably ensconced in some Russian dacha, wondering what the next phase of his young life will bring. Having spent 30 years in the intelligence business, I fervently hope the food is lousy, the winter is cold, and the Internet access is awful. But I worry less about what happens to this one man and more about the damage Snowden has done — and could still do — to America’s long-term ability to strike the right balance between privacy and security.
Ever since Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, leaked top-secret material about its surveillance programs, he and the U.S. government have locked horns about the nature of those programs.
But those following the Snowden saga should understand two key points. First, though many things need to be kept secret in today’s dangerous world, the line between “secret” and “not secret” is fuzzy rather than stark, and if the goal is security, the harsh truth is that we should often err toward more secrets rather than fewer. Second, despite the grumbling from Snowden and his admirers, the U.S. government truly does make strenuous efforts not to violate privacy, not just because it respects privacy (which it does), but because it simply doesn’t have the time to read irrelevant emails or listen in on conversations unconnected to possible plots against American civilians.
Incidents like the Snowden affair put my former colleagues in the intelligence community in an impossible position. Yes, the official explanations about the virtues of data-collection efforts can sound self-justifying and vague. But they’re still right. I know firsthand that Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, is telling the truth when he talks about plots that have been preempted and attacks that have been foiled because of intelligence his agency collected. I know because I was on the inside, I have long held security clearances, and I participated in many of the activities he describes.
I spent years in the middle of the effort to identify, disentangle, and ultimately attack Al Qaeda. We didn’t operate in secrecy because we were ashamed. We operated in the dark because we had to. Al Qaeda and its affiliates study our actions. They learn from our mistakes. America is safer because we’ve made a point of understanding their methods better than they understand ours.
I understand the trade-offs here. But the intelligence community isn’t keeping things from the American people because we don’t trust them, but rather because once important security information is out there, anyone can access it, including those who would do us harm.
That’s why I find the Snowden controversy so frustrating. I realize many Americans don’t trust their government. I wish I could change that. I wish I could tell people the amazing things I witnessed during my 30 years in the CIA, that I’ve never seen people work harder or more selflessly, that for little money and long hours, people took it for granted that their flaws would be scrutinized and their successes ignored. But I’ve been around long enough to know that deep-rooted distrust of government is immune to stories from people like me. The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt.
Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader. More than 100 billion emails were sent every day last year — 100 billion, every day. In that vast mass of data lurk a few bits that are of urgent interest and vast terabytes of tedium that are not. Unfortunately, the metadata (the phone numbers, length of contact, and so forth, but not the content of the conversations) that sketch the contours of a call to your family member may fall into the same enormous bucket of information that includes information on the next terrorist threat. As Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff of the CIA, memorably put it, “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack.”
Unfortunately, during the Snowden affair, many news outlets have spent more time examining ways the government could abuse the information it has access to while giving scant mention to the lengths to which the intelligence community goes to protect privacy. We have spent enormous amounts of time and effort figuring out how to disaggregate the important specks from the overwhelming bulk of irrelevant data.
This is done under tight and well-thought-out strictures. I witnessed firsthand the consequences of breaking the privacy rules of my former organization, the National Counterterrorism Center. As the center’s deputy director, I had to fire people, good people, and remove others from their posts for failing to follow the rules about how information could be accessed and used. It didn’t happen often, and it was never a malicious attempt to gather private information. We had mandatory training and full-time staffers to supervise privacy regulations. We used precious resources to hire lawyers and civil liberties experts to oversee our efforts. And on those few occasions when we made mistakes, the punishments were swift and harsh.
Yes, some things that are classified probably don’t need to be. That may undermine public trust and dilute our ability to protect the data that really need protecting. But some things — especially U.S. sources and methods — must be kept secret. Snowden didn’t offer fresh insight about a massive policy failure. Rather, he took upon himself the authority to decide what tradecraft the intelligence community needs to keep his fellow citizens safe. Sadly, Snowden has captured the public’s imagination and attention, and the government’s reaction now seems too little, too late and too reactive. But the intelligence community — always a less sympathetic protagonist than a self-styled whistle-blower — actually has a good story to tell about how seriously the government takes privacy issues. We should tell it.
By: Andrew Liepman, Senior analyst at Rand Corp., was a career CIA officer; Former Deputy Director of the National Counterterrorism Center: Op-Ed Columnist, The Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2013
“Hoping To Cash In”: The GOP Versus Hillary Clinton’s Celebrity
I’m not sure whether to file this under “pointless” or just “dumb,” but the Republican National Committee is threatening to boycott NBC and CNN if they go forward with, respectively, a mini-series and a documentary about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I guess you could file it under “oblivious”?
Here’s why: The last time I checked, Republicans were supposed to be fierce defenders of the free market. And to the extent that these companies are trying to catch the Hillary ’16 presidential wave, it’s more likely that they’re hoping to cash in on it rather than promote it.
Earlier today, the Republican National Committee issued a release saying that if NBC and CNN go ahead with their plans, Chairman Reince Priebus “will seek a binding vote of the RNC to prevent the committee from partnering with these networks in 2016 primary debates or sanctioning debates they sponsor.”
It goes without saying that media companies shouldn’t let political parties dictate their programming choices. But honestly, this is silly. Yes, Hillary Clinton is widely expected to run for president in three years. So are a lot of people, but she’s also the biggest celebrity in the potential presidential field, and by a long shot (sorry, Donald Trump, I’m only referring to serious potential candidates).
Does it make good business sense for these companies to try to capitalize on that celebrity? Yes. So much so that you’d think there would be a Hillary Clinton move in the works … which, it turns out, there is. NBC announcing a miniseries about Kirsten Gillibrand or Peter King would raise eyebrows. About Hillary Clinton? Come on.
Occam’s Razor (the maxim that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one) applies here: The simpler explanation – that two media conglomerates think there’s a market for Hillary-related programming – is more plausible than the idea that they are engaged in a vast, collusive media conspiracy to promote the candidacy of someone who has universal name recognition and is already widely seen as the most likely person to become the next president.
Were I conspiratorially minded, I might suggest that the GOP really doesn’t want CNN and NBC to broadcast its presidential debates in 2016. There’s fairly wide agreement that the party did itself no favors with the traveling circus that was the 2012 primary debates. So limiting both the number and the reach of its 2016 tilts in one fell swoop? Well that would be a win-win. Could that be what this is all about? Alas, probably not.
So what are Republicans up to? Part of this is probably working the ref: They likely hope that whoever writes the scripts for these shows will bend over backward to make them – to borrow a phrase – fair and balanced, putting extra emphasis on her shortcomings in order to stay the braying on the right. (And if any conservatives want to argue that content is beside the point because any exposure is good exposure, please explain to me what exactly is the problem with Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan.) And probably the RNC is itself trying to capitalize on Hillary Clinton’s celebrity by issuing a press release about her.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 5, 2013
“Mitch McConnell Is Congress: It’s Hard Out There For An Obstructionist Minority Leader
To many people, a poll released today by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling probably came as a surprise. Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader in the Senate, is shown trailing his challenger, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, by a point. But he’s a Republican in a conservative state, and one of the leaders of his party. How could he be in danger of losing?
For starters, Grimes looks to be a serious opponent. Her father is a well-known former state senator, she’s already won a statewide campaign, and she’s made some terrific videos with her grandmothers, tapping into Kentucky’s substantial pro-grandma vote. But that’s not the real source of McConnell’s problems. While one might think that the more important and influential a senator is in national politics the easier time he’d have winning re-election, the opposite is true, especially at a time like this.
Almost 40 years ago, political scientist Richard Fenno identified a curious phenomenon among voters: they hate Congress, but love their congressman. Congress is seen as corrupt, incompetent, venal, beset by infighting among competing interests each driven by its own bad faith. But Congressman Smith? Why, he’s our boy! He went to the same high school as my cousin. I saw him at the Fourth of July parade. He helped my buddy’s grandma get her Social Security check. He got money for the new bridge over the river. That’s a big reason why even when Congress is incredibly unpopular, almost all incumbents-over 95 percent in some years-get re-elected.
And it isn’t just the personal connections that drive this phenomenon, it’s also the media. A friend of mine wrote his dissertation on the way members of Congress are covered in local media, and what he found is that unless you get embroiled in a scandal, the coverage is almost all positive. The local papers and TV stations will run your picture when you cut the ribbon at the senior center you obtained funding for, or seek out your sage words on whatever the issue of the day is, but they rarely write anything critical about you.
But if you’re Mitch McConnell, you don’t get the benefit of that glowing coverage, because you’re in the news all the time for your role in national issues. The people of Kentucky don’t get a different view of McConnell than people anywhere else, and what they see is a guy who, pretty much by his own admission, is one of the prime forces creating and sustaining congressional gridlock and all other manner of Washington dysfunction. Other voters might have the liberty to hate Congress but love their senator, but Mitch McConnell is Congress.
The truth is that McConnell has never been hugely popular in Kentucky. He’s not a particularly lovable guy, even though he is one of the shrewdest and most ruthless politicians you’ll ever encounter. I’d hesitate to bet against him. But don’t be surprised if he ends up losing next year.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 1, 2013
“Big Money Begets Massive Influence”: How The Koch Brothers Are Buying Silence Without Spending A Dime
Between buying elections, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch shop for big pieces of American media and culture. And, hey, why not?
We already knew of the Kochs’ efforts to buy Tribune Company, the parent of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, among other major newspapers. Then, last week, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer took a thoughtful, in-depth look at the machinations that led New York’s PBS station, WNET, to pull from the air a documentary critical of David Koch, one of the station’s biggest funders. The story raises plenty of questions about the extent to which the public owns public media and the role of money in the arts and culture (see anything at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater lately?). But it also provides a rare intimate look at what happens when big money begets massive influence, often without a dime changing hands.
Mayer describes the fate of two documentary films. One took on income disparities in America by profiling the inhabitants of one tony Park Avenue building — including David Koch. Under pressure, WNET aired the film but, in a highly unusual concession, offered Koch airtime to rebut it after it aired. The second film, “Citizen Koch,” made by the very talented, Academy Award nominated team of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, explored the influence that Koch and others like him have on our elections in the post-Citizens United world. But in the face of Koch’s wrath, the film’s distributor, a public television player with a history of gutsy moves, uncharacteristically lost its stomach for the fight and dumped the film entirely. Regardless, Koch decided to not give a hoped-for gift after the first film aired. Without lifting a finger or even taking out his checkbook, Koch cast a pall over the documentary film world.
The process that led to “Citizen Koch” being pulled from the airwaves illustrates exactly the point that Lessin and Deal’s film makes: Money can not only buy action in our democracy, it can also buy silence. As former Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer points out in the film, “Sometimes it’s a check. Sometimes it’s the threat of a check. It’s like having a weapon. You can shoot the gun or just show it. It works both ways.”
Koch and his brother Charles, both billionaire industrialists, pledged to spend a whopping $400 million on the 2012 elections, the overwhelming majority of it on behalf of Republican candidates. But that doesn’t just mean that Republicans are jumping to please the brothers — it means that many of those in positions of influence, regardless of their political leanings, need to take into account whether or not it’s worth the trouble of unnecessarily antagonizing the Kochs. Just as the public is unlikely to hear about the film PBS didn’t run, it’s almost impossible to know about the principled progressive stands that our allies in government decided not to take.
Koch’s billions are a formidable political weapon, even without owning any influential newspapers. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, it’s a more powerful weapon than ever, and we know it’s having an impact even when they don’t choose to deploy them. The result is a distorted government that responds to the whims of billionaires more easily than the needs of ordinary Americans.
As activists work to undo the damage being done by Citizens United, one of our main challenges is reminding voters of the dangerous, invisible effects that decision has on the country. It’s a remarkable irony that by trying to hide a film about the danger of money in politics, the Kochs may have made it clearer than ever before.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, July 31, 2013
“Cherry Picking The Facts”: Why The Right Doesn’t Really Want European-Style Reproductive Health Care
U.S. conservatives want Europe’s abortion restrictions, but they oppose the generous systems and legal exceptions that support women’s health.
Earlier this month, Texas lawmakers witnessed and participated in passionate debates about one of the nation’s most sweeping pieces of anti-choice legislation. That legislation, known as SB1, was initially delayed by Wendy Davis’s now-famous filibuster before Governor Rick Perry signed it into law last week during a second special legislative session. It bans abortions after 20 weeks, places cumbersome restrictions on abortion clinics and physicians, and threatens to close all but five of the state’s 42 abortion clinics. Throughout the many days of hearings, anti-choice activists relied on religious, scientific, and political evidence to argue that the new Texas law is just and sensible.
Many of those arguments are tenuous at best, but it is the continued reference to European abortion laws that most represent a convenient cherry-picking of facts to support the rollback of women’s rights. Many European countries do indeed regulate abortion with gestational limits, but what SB1 supporters conveniently ignore is that those laws are entrenched in progressive public health systems that provide quality, affordable (sometimes free) health care to all individuals and prioritize the sexual and reproductive health of their citizens. Most SB1 advocates would scoff at the very programs and policies that are credited with Europe’s low unintended pregnancy and abortion rates.
Members of the media have also seized on European policies to argue that Texas lawmakers are acting in the best interests of women. Soon after the passage of SB1, Bill O’Reilly argued that “most countries in the world have a 20-week threshold,” and Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, wrote, “It’s not just that Wendy Davis is out of step in Texas; she would be out of step in Belgium and France, where abortion is banned after 12 weeks.”
It’s hard to imagine any other scenario in which O’Reilly and Lowry, and most conservative politicians and activists, would hold up European social policies as a beacon for U.S. policy. After all, the cornerstones of Europe’s women’s health programs are the very programs that conservatives have long threatened would destroy the moral fabric of American society. One cannot compare the abortion policies of Europe and the United States without looking at the broader social policies that shape women’s health.
Both Belgium and France have mandatory sexuality education beginning in elementary school (in France parents are prohibited from removing their children from the program). France passed a bill earlier this year that allows women to be fully reimbursed for the cost of their abortion and guarantees girls ages 15 to 18 free birth control. Emergency contraception in both countries is easily accessible over the counter, and in Belgium the cost of the drug is reimbursed for young people and those with a prescription. Both countries limit abortion to the first trimester but also make exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and fetal impairment, to preserve woman’s physical or mental health, and for social or economic reasons. None of these exceptions are included in the new Texas law, and I’d guess it would be a cold day in hell before the likes of O’Reilly and Lowry advocate for more expansive health policies or for including such exceptions in abortion laws.
But it would be wise if they did. This availability of preventative care contributes to the overall health and wellness of women in Europe and enables them to make free and fully informed decisions about their bodies over the course of their lifetimes. The demonization and lack of progressive sexual health policies in Texas, and in the United States more broadly, drives high rates of unintended pregnancy, teen pregnancy, maternal mortality, sexually transmitted infections, and abortion.
Unfortunately, Texas couldn’t be further from France or Belgium when it comes to the care it provides to women and families before, during, and after delivery, as I’ve written about before. The Texas teen birth rate is nearly nine times higher than that of France and nearly 10 times higher than that of Belgium. Nearly 90 percent of all teens in France and Belgium reported using birth control at their last sexual intercourse, compared with only 53 percent in Texas. The infant mortality rate in Texas is twice that of Belgium and France. The poverty rate among women in Texas is a third higher than that of women in Belgium and France, and the poverty rate among Texas children is 1.5 times higher. Less than 60 percent of Texas women receive prenatal care, while quality care before, during, and after pregnancy is available to nearly all women throughout Europe.
None of those hard facts were compelling enough to amend – let alone negate – the new law. It seems impossible these days to find a common ground between anti- and pro-choice individuals, but if conservatives wanted to have a conversation about enacting European-style sexual and reproductive health policies in the United States, that just might be something that could bring everyone to the same table. The more likely scenario is that once conservatives have plucked out the facts that help advance their anti-choice cause, they will promptly return to tarring and feathering Europe’s socialized health system.
By: Andrea Flynn, The National Memo, July 24, 2013
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