“They Elected Me, The Overseers”: No Clemency From Snowden’s Self-Importance
Eh, I suppose I could find myself coming around to what the New York Times editorial suggests the United States should do to Edward Snowden. That is, offer the Russia-residing national security leaker, “a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.” Snowden should be held accountable in some way for stealing government secrets. What I don’t think I could stand is a public life of advocacy.
My views on Snowden are pretty clear. They were mostly negative views that were reinforced when I read his interview with The Post’s Barton Gellman published just before Christmas. No need for me to go into detail about what I thought because my colleague Ruth Marcus did it masterfully in the opening paragraphs of her Tuesday column.
Time has not deflated Edward Snowden’s messianic sense of self-importance. Nor has living in an actual police state given the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower any greater appreciation of the actual freedoms that Americans enjoy.
Insufferable is the first adjective evoked by Snowden’s recent interview with Barton Gellman in The Post, but it has numerous cousins: smug, self-righteous, egotistical, disingenuous, megalomaniacal, overwrought.
“Let them say what they want,” Snowden said of his critics during the Moscow interview with Gellman. “It’s not about me.” A side-eye-worthy statement as it came near the end of a story that was one long aria of Snowden self-importance.
It’s not about him, but “I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said.
It’s not about him, but “That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”
And it’s not about him, but he said, “somebody has to be the first” since no one else felt as compelled as he to steal government secrets and violate an oath of secrecy to shed light on the activities of the National Security Agency.
With all the political enemies arrayed on Capitol Hill against President Obama, why didn’t Snowden take his ample concerns to Republican lawmakers? Lord knows, they are always casting about (unsuccessfully) for the latest “-gate” they believe will bring down the Obama administration.
Despite my dim view of the man and his actions, there is no denying that what Snowden revealed demands attention. That’s why one thing he told Gellman had me nodding my head.
“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”
On Dec. 18, the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies issued its report on the government’s surveillance activities and offered recommendations on how to limit its vast scope and capabilities. At his year-end press conference two days later, Obama said, he would make a “pretty definitive statement” on it all upon his return from vacation this month.
No doubt, there is nothing the president could propose that would go far enough for most folks in curbing the excesses of the NSA. But, to borrow a phrase from Snowden, “somebody has to be the first” to try.
By: Jonathan Capehart, PostPartisan, The Washington Post, January 2, 2013
“It’s Not Like The TSA”: In The Scheme Of Things, Stop And Frisk Is Worse Than NSA Surveillance
My black friends in New York, particularly those who don’t live in the fancier precincts of Manhattan, have been harassed by the NYPD in a way that I, as a white guy, will never experience.
They’ve been stopped and frisked, for reasons known only to the officers. Almost every young black male I know has a story to tell.
The news today that a federal judge found this deliberate policing policy to be unconstitutional is a welcome one.
If you have never been stopped and frisked by a cop, it might not seem like a big deal.
So you lose, what, a few minutes of your time. You get frisked, there’s nothing on you, and you get sent on your way. It’s like the TSA.
Except that it’s not. It’s an encounter between powerless citizens and highly empowered police officers. It is scary. The confrontations are often aggressive, which is entirely appropriate from the perspective of the police officer: The person might be carrying. You’ve been singled out for your proximity to a place where a crime might be committed and because of the way you look, the way you move, the route you take. Your attitude towards the police will harden.
I think the NYPD is by and large an incredible organization and that its policing strategies have made New York City immeasurably safer; the city’s minority residents live with much less fear than ever before. But I think the “stop and frisk” policy is overzealous and counter-productive. And I think, in a small but tangible way, the practice harms those who come into contact with it.
The NSA’s surveillance capabilities and even its bulk collection programs do not damage or degrade Americans’ rights; they do not harm our ability to participate in the political process. (I think the FBI’s policies are MUCH more worrisome on that end.) To me, the symbolic harm is enough. I want the bright line to exist to prevent potential abuses by unsavory politicians.
There are many, many important debates to have about civil rights and liberties. Because of the NSA’s size, scope, and reach, I would be very concerned if the potential for willful abuse, and by extension, the potential to do something tangibly bad to Americans (and other innocents) was more than negligible. But it is negligible. Figuring out how to make sure NSA does everything right is important, but there is not one iota of evidence that the over-collection, even if it was broad, was (a) willful (b) not immediately reported and (c) ever detected by the Americans whose data passed through computers it shouldn’t have.
Yes, it would make me feel weird if I knew that an analyst somewhere was able to read my email; yes, I am totally and resolutely in favor of strong oversight procedures that are recognized by everyone as legitimate; but all the same, I am not being stopped by the police, or tortured, or arrested, or asked not to write something, or harassed, or, really, impacted in any way by that over-collect.
We have to make distinctions between what gives us the willies and what hurts or harms us. We have to make distinctions, fine ones, within topics; the NSA is not the CIA is not the FBI is not the NYPD.
Torture is evil. False wars are evil. Companies manipulating the data they collect to make you buy things and vote for people — that’s pretty wicked, too. What NSA does is not remotely close to that. To circle back to the point that’s obvious: They’re the government. They personify executive power. Our skepticism ought to be higher. I totally agree. But at the same time, we should not invent a caricature of what NSA does in order to polarize the debate about it. The facts don’t warrant that, just in the same way that the facts about the history of intelligence collection should absolutely force us to be vigilant.
In the scheme of things, the stop and frisk policy is a greater threat to civil rights than the NSA’s bulk collection programs.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, August 13, 2013
“Illusions Of Grandeur”: Imaginary Republican Scandals Don’t Need Distractions
The “White House rocked by scandals” narrative clearly didn’t work out well for President Obama’s critics. The Benghazi conspiracy theories proved baseless; the IRS story quickly evaporated (even if most of the political world ignored the exculpatory details); and the AP subpoenas and NSA surveillance programs turned out to be policy disputes — on which many Republicans agreed with the administration’s position. As Jon Chait recently put it, “The entire scandal narrative was an illusion.”
But a funny thing happened after Scandal Mania 2013 ended: the right decided to pretend the narrative remained intact.
National Review ran a fairly long piece this week, arguing, “The truth about Benghazi, the Associated Press/James Rosen monitoring, the IRS corruption, the NSA octopus, and Fast and Furious is still not exactly known.” The headline read, “Obama’s Watergates.” (Yes, the president doesn’t have a Watergate; he has multiple Watergates.)
Yesterday, Marc Thiessen’s latest Washington Post column insisted that the IRS’s “political targeting of [Obama’s] conservative critics” — which, let’s remember, didn’t actually happen — is “undermining our nation’s security” and “has exposed Americans to greater danger.”
And on Fox News, Steve Doocy has cooked up a conspiracy theory that addresses his conspiracy theories.
“Remember last week all the talk was about ‘phony scandals’ and all that other stuff and the NSA and the IRS and suddenly we get this alert that something could be happening in the Arab world somewhere toward western interests, and it is pro-administration. We’ve heard this a million times. […]
“Just that they would reveal such detail. They burned a source and a method, and that’s the problem. They could still say be careful if you’re in these areas. But to be so specific to make it look like the administration is working overtime, look at these fantastic avenues of intel, that is troubling.”
So, for Doocy, the White House leaked sensitive national-security information to distract attention from scandals that don’t actually exist.
It’s awfully difficult to take this line of argument seriously.
Several news organizations learned of the administration intercepting al Qaeda communications — we do not yet know the source of the leaks — which led to the closings of many U.S. diplomatic outposts in the Middle East and North Africa. For some on the right, this was part of an elaborate White House scheme.
But that really doesn’t make any sense. For one thing, Scandal Mania is over, and there’s no incentive for the administration to turn attention away from stories that the political world has largely given up on. For another, the administration doesn’t gain anything by leaking news of the intercepted messages.
Wait, the right responds, the White House now gets to implicitly argue, “NSA surveillance is really important so these programs shouldn’t be shut down.” But the administration doesn’t need to say that — efforts to stop NSA surveillance aren’t going anywhere, at least not now, and the programs were going to continue anyway.
There are no Watergates for the right to play with here.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 7, 2013
“An Un-Patriotic Paradox”: How Could We Blow This One?
I just finished a five-month leave from this column, writing a book with my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and what struck me while away from the daily fray is a paradox that doesn’t seem quite patriotic enough for July Fourth.
But I’ll share it anyway: On security issues, we Americans need a rebalancing. We appear willing to bear any burden, pay any price, to confound the kind of terrorists who shout “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) and plant bombs, while unwilling to take the slightest step to curb a different kind of terrorism — mundane gun violence in classrooms, cinemas and inner cities that claims 1,200 times as many American lives.
When I began my book leave, it seemed likely that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut would impel Congress to approve universal background checks for gun purchases. It looked as if we might follow Australia, which responded to a 1996 gun massacre by imposing restrictions that have resulted in not a single mass shooting there since.
Alas, I was naïve. Despite 91 percent support from voters polled in late March and early April, Congress rejected background checks. Political momentum to reduce gun killings has now faded — until the next such slaughter.
Meanwhile, our national leaders have been in a tizzy over Edward Snowden and his leaks about National Security Agency surveillance of — of, well, just about everything. The public reaction has been a shrug: Most people don’t like surveillance, but they seem willing to accept it and much more as the price of suppressing terrorism.
Our response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and international terrorism has been remarkable, including an intelligence apparatus in which some 1.4 million people (including, until recently, Snowden) hold “top secret” clearances.
That’s more than twice the population of the District of Columbia. The Washington Post has reported that since 9/11, the United States has built new intelligence complexes equivalent in office space to 22 United States Capitol buildings.
All told, since 9/11, the United States has spent $8 trillion on the military and homeland security, according to the National Priorities Project, a research group that works for budget transparency. That’s nearly $70,000 per American household.
Some of that money probably helped avert other terrorist attacks (although some of it spent in Iraq and Afghanistan may have increased risks). We need a robust military and intelligence network, for these threats are real. An Al Qaeda attack is an assault on the political system in a way that an ordinary murder is not. And overseas terrorists do aspire to commit mass murder again, perhaps with chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, and our government is right to work hard to prevent such a cataclysm.
But there are trade-offs, including other ways to protect the public, and our entire focus seems to be on national security rather than on more practical ways of assuring our safety.
The imbalance in our priorities is particularly striking because since 2005, terrorism has taken an average of 23 American lives annually, mostly overseas — and the number has been falling.
More Americans die of falling televisions and other appliances than from terrorism. Twice as many Americans die of bee or wasp stings annually. And 15 times as many die by falling off ladders.
Most striking, more than 30,000 people die annually from firearms injuries, including suicides, murders and accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. American children are 13 times as likely to be killed by guns as in other industrialized countries.
Doesn’t it seem odd that we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars, and intercept metadata from just about every phone call in the country, to deal with a threat that, for now, kills but a few Americans annually — while we’re too paralyzed to introduce a rudimentary step like universal background checks to reduce gun violence that kills tens of thousands?
Wasn’t what happened at Sandy Hook a variant of terrorism? And isn’t what happens in troubled gang-plagued neighborhoods of Chicago just as traumatic for schoolchildren, leaving them suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?
I don’t see any glib solutions here, just a need for a careful balancing of risks and benefits. I’d say that in auto safety, we get it about right. We give most adults access to cars, but we regulate them with licenses, insurance requirements and mandatory seat belts. In the case of national security and terrorism, I wonder if we haven’t overdeployed resources.
In the case of guns, we don’t do enough. Baby steps, consistent with the Second Amendment, would include requiring universal background checks, boosting research to understand gun violence and investing in smarter guns. A debit card requires a code to work, a car requires a key — and a gun, nothing at all.
By: Michael Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New york Times, July 3, 2013
“We Can’t Get Nothing To Stick”: When Politicians Ponder Optics And Atmosphere, The Red Flag Should Go Up
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) appeared yesterday on “Face the Nation” and seemed wholly unconcerned about the scope of the NSA surveillance programs. Indeed, like many of his congressional colleagues, McCaul expressed far more concern with prosecuting Edward Snowden for leaking the information than scaling back intelligence-gathering operations.
But notice how the Republican Texan chose to use the story to criticize President Obama anyway.
“The optics are terrible in this case when you consider the recent scandals,” said McCaul on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Ah, yes, the “optics.” McCaul has no problem with the NSA’s expansive surveillance programs, and has no intention of criticizing the efforts or voting for new restrictions, but he nevertheless sees a political problem for the White House — because of the “optics.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said something similar last week on “Meet the Press”:
“You know, when you look at the IRS and you look at the Benghazi issue and you look at the AP issue, I think the trouble here isn’t even the individual specific scandals, it’s this broader notion that there’s a pattern of this activity.”
See what he did there? The “individual specific scandals,” according to the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, don’t really matter. Indeed, they can’t really matter since the so-called “scandals” are either unrelated to the White House, deal with actions that are probably legal, or both.
So it becomes necessary to shift attention to “broader notions” and “optics,” since factual details are politically unsatisfying. It turns politicians into pundits, reflecting less on policy and more on perceptions.
Greg Sargent had a sharp take on this last week after hearing Rogers’ comments.
Those who remember the 1990s well … will recall that this is a time tested tactic. The goal is to create an overarching atmosphere of scandal, because this intensifies pressure on news orgs and reporters to hype individual revelations within that framework with little regard to the actual importance or significance of each new piece of information.
It’s worth emphasizing that all of this predates the NSA revelations. But it nevertheless provides a context to McCaul’s quote: “The optics are terrible in this case when you consider the recent scandals.”
Or to put another way, “We couldn’t get any of the scandals to stick, but we created an environment with some vague notion of the White House in crisis, despite the absence of wrongdoing. We can therefore opportunistically complain about NSA activities, even if we endorse them and want them to continue.”
When politicians talk about “optics,” instead of specifics, red flags should immediately go up.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 10, 2013
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