“Bad History And Bad Policy”: The Hidden Consequences Of Snowden’s NSA Revelations
There is more than a little hypocrisy to the outcry that the government, through the National Security Agency (NSA), is systematically destroying Americans’ right to privacy. Edward Snowden’s revelations have been stripped of their social, technological and historical context. Unless you’ve camped in the Alaskan wilderness for two decades, you know — or should — that millions upon millions of Americans have consciously and, probably in most cases, eagerly surrendered much of their privacy by embracing the Internet and social media.
People do not open Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts because they wish to shroud their lives in secrecy. They do not use online dating services or post videos on YouTube because they cherish their anonymity. The Internet is a vehicle for self-promotion, personal advertising and the pursuit of celebrity.
The Pew Research Center’s surveys confirm that these behaviors are now entirely mainstream. In 2013, 85 percent of Americans used the Internet. Of these, almost three-quarters (73 percent) belonged to social media sites (the biggest: Facebook). Almost one-fifth of adult Internet users have posted personal videos, many hoping, says Pew, that “their creations go viral.” Among people “single and looking” for mates, nearly two-fifths (38 percent) used online dating.
If Americans think their privacy is dangerously diminished, there are remedies. They can turn off their PCs, toss their smartphones and smash their tablets. Somehow, this seems unlikely, even though another Pew survey finds that “86 percent of adult Internet users have taken steps . . . to avoid surveillance by other people or organizations.”
To these conscious sacrifices of privacy must be added murkier, collateral losses that are orchestrated by the world’s Googles, Facebooks, service providers and “data brokers,” writes Alice Marwick of Fordham University in the New York Review of Books. They scan users’ digital decisions (sites visited, products and services purchased, habits and hobbies favored) to create databases, often merged with other socio-economic information. These target advertising, improve political appeals — President Obama’s campaign excelled at this — and influence hiring decisions, as Don Peck notes in the Atlantic.
The NSA’s damage to privacy is dwarfed by the impact of market activity. The sensationalism surrounding Snowden’s revelations obscures this. Case in point: The disclosure that U.S. telephone calls are open to NSA monitoring. Suddenly, Big Brother looms. In our mind’s eye, we see the NSA’s computers scouring our every phone call. We’re exposed to constant snooping and the possibility that the government will misuse the information it finds.
The reality is far more limited. The NSA is governed by legal restrictions. It does not examine the full database. It searches individual numbers only after it has determined there’s a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a number might be linked to terrorist groups. In 2012, there were 288 of these findings. After one is made, the NSA can retrieve three items about the number: the dates of calls made and received for five years; the other phones’ numbers; and the calls’ length. The NSA is not entitled to listen to conversations, but it can order similar searches on the other numbers involved. Thousands of calls are caught in the dragnet, but the total is puny compared with the untold billions of annual calls.
Whether these searches are effective in fighting terrorism is disputed. The NSA says they’re valuable. A panel of experts appointed by Obama concluded that the monitoring “was not essential to preventing attacks.” But more important for civil liberties and privacy, the panel found that present practices don’t approach past abuses. During the Vietnam War, the panel noted, the CIA investigated 300,000 anti-war critics. The government also sought to “expose, disrupt, and neutralize their efforts to affect public opinion.”
By all means, let’s debate the NSA. Some policies seem suspect, spying on the heads of friendly governments topping the list. It’s also important to recognize that government can coerce and punish in ways that private markets cannot. The potential for abuse is greater. But let’s also keep the debate in perspective.
In a digitized world, spying must be digitized. Then there’s cyberwarfare. Our electronic systems remain vulnerable, as the recent theft of data from millions of credit and debit cards at Target demonstrates. Government and the private sector need to collaborate more closely to protect vital systems. But these “efforts are as good as dead for the foreseeable future,” says Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm. The NSA controversy has “significantly damaged the trust between the private sector and government.” This may be the Snowden affair’s most insidious (and overlooked) consequence.
Vilifying the NSA — letting Snowden dictate the terms of debate — promotes bad history and bad policy. It’s bad history, because the most powerful assaults on privacy have originated in markets. It’s bad policy, because weakening the NSA leaves the United States more exposed to cyberattacks.
By: Robert Samuelson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 5, 2014
“Nuttier By The Day”: The Right Wing Is Eating Its Own, Again
The nut jobs on the right are getting nuttier by the day.
A new national survey for the Wall Street Journal and NBC News indicates that only one in four Americans (24 percent) support the tea party. The events of the last week demonstrate why the wingnuts in the Republican Party are so unpopular.
Overnight, tea party poster boy Paul Ryan became a RINO (Republican in Name Only). Ryan negotiated the new budget deal with his Senate budget counterpart, Patty Murray, D-Wash., who has not been accused by liberals of being a DINO (Democrat in Name Only)
I don’t understand why the wing nuts have gored Ryan so hard for being a RINO. Ryan embodies everything the GOP is all about: indifference to the plight of the poor, insensitivity towards the rights of women and toadyism to the super rich. He is getting pilloried for supporting a budget that denies unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed, reduces nutrition assistance payments to almost 2 million Americans, preserves tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires and restores billions of dollars to the bloated Pentagon budget. How dare he? The tea party should give this guy a medal.
Right-wing Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Newt Gingrich, the spiritual grandfather of the wackjobs, are taking flack for praising the recently deceased former South African President Nelson Mandela. These two guys are giants of right-wing extremism, so the wacko birds are eating their own young. But I can understand why right-wing extremists are so upset. Mandela fought for universal human rights and suffrage for blacks, goals which the wacko birds completely disdain.
Will Ryan, Cruz and Gingrich be disinvited to the holiday – excuse me Christmas party – at the Heritage Foundation? Inquiring minds want to know.
Then the wingnuts went nuts when they saw President Obama shake hands with Cuban dictator Raul Castro. The right considers the greeting grounds for removing the president from office. But the wing nuts would demand his removal from office if he issued an executive order for the U.S. to celebrate Mother’s Day twice a year instead of once.
But the right clearly underestimated the power of social media. Immediately after the handshake went viral, the web was full of pictures of Republican leaders shaking hands and chatting with dictators. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was one of the first Republicans to pounce on the president. And sure enough, the next thing you know, reminders of the senator in a tote a tete with Libyan dictator Mohamar Gaddafi popped up on the web. Then the social media produced pictures of the first President Bush chatting with communist dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Donald Rumsfeld glad handing Saddam Hussein.
Compared with Gaddafi and Saddam, Raul Castro is a joke as far as dictators are concerned. Cuba has been toothless since the Soviet Union went under a quarter of a century ago. And Obama’s handshake with Castro doesn’t even begin to compare with Ronald Reagan’s sale of missiles to the Islamic radicals running Iran. I’d take a handshake with a dictator over an arms sale to one any day.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, December 12, 2013
“Individual Activists, Not Just Organizations”: The Social Network Behind Wendy Davis
It had to be orange. Pink is overused, green is for environmentalists, and purple isn’t a Texas kind of color. But orange is Texas, it’s the color of the UT Longhorns, and it’s gender neutral. Months before the special session of the Texas legislature was called, the main organizers of the pro-choice protests had already decided that their t-shirts were going to be orange.
By the end of the special session of the Texas State Senate on June 25th, a sea of orange t-shirted pro-choice supporters in the capital’s rotunda were capping off Wendy Davis’ filibuster with fifteen minutes of raucous cheering.
Davis became an overnight sensation because of her singular feat of courage and stamina. But her effort was the last piece of tile fitted into a much larger mosaic of people and actions that brought Texas progressives back to life. The success of the effort hinged on not just the existence of outstanding grassroots organizing and social media activism, but their integration.
Grassroots organizations playing in the same sandbox often behave like rivalrous siblings clamoring for the same donors and public recognition for their efforts. But for the first time in recent memory, according to several activists I spoke with, the local pro-choice groups in Austin played nicely with one another. Their guess is that the threat to access to reproductive health was great enough to put aside their usual differences.
Even with the advanced planning, there weren’t enough orange-shirted protesters to make a difference when the special legislative session began in late May of this year. The protester’s efforts were listless. Something was missing. Every energetic protest effort needs a spark, something personal that makes ordinary people go extraordinary lengths to make their voices heard. The Texas House Committee on Public Affairs’ decision to cut off public testimony with over 700 people in attendance at 4 am on June 21st was the needed catalyst. Word spread locally and online that women were being muzzled on a critically important piece of legislation just four days before the special session was due to end.
But the reach of traditional organizations online tends to be limited to their current supporters. The protest needed more than the usual suspects to grow significantly. And that’s where the secret ingredient came in: free agent activists. Free agents are individual activists who are savvy using social media and able to accelerate the spread of social protests and movements very quickly. Every successful protest movement over the past five years, from Wall Street to Cairo to Brazil, has had free agents stirring the social media waters and turning local events into national and international conversations.
Jessica Luther is an individual activist, unaffiliated with any particular organization, but adept at using her multiple social media platforms as vehicles for communicating with and organizing large numbers of people, and in this case, many who had never been involved in Texas politics before. Organizations were asking her for help in spreading the word about the special session and Jessica was tweeting as fast as she could. Her followers on Twitter increased by over 3,000 people from around 5,000 followers before the special session to over 8,000 afterwards.
Virginia Pickel was another critically important free agent. She lives in San Marcos, 30 minutes south of Austin, but the trip to the capital is often too much for her as she suffers from fibromyalgia. She posted contact information for reporters on her blog for other activists to use to send emails, Facebook messages and tweets. She also created a private Facebook group to orchestrate rides to the capital. Virginia administered the Facebook group but no one owned what happened on it or needed to take credit for organizing rides.
Moving large numbers of people to the capital, making sure they knew where to go and had food and water in the brutal heat required the online/on land nexus to work extremely well. And it did. The local ACLU created the hashtag #standwithwendy and others followed suit to create one narrative stream on Twitter and Facebook rather than multiple messages on multiple platforms. Facebook groups were created to organize rides, deliver foods and drinks to protesters and update people on the legislative process (critical with a Senate that does not have a formal schedule.)
The protest effort was like a fireman’s brigade, everyone pitching in and coordinating with one another in an emergency without asking for permission. This is in contrast to general grassroots organizing, when too many groups are rowing in different directions.
The final piece of the mosaic was Senator Wendy Davis. She fit the role perfectly with her pink running shoes, compelling personal story and incredible endurance. Again, the individual activists I spoke with said that they heard through the grapevine that Davis was going to filibuster beginning on Sunday afternoon, but there was no direct involvement between her efforts and the organizing efforts of the free agents and grassroots organizations. When she stood up on Tuesday morning for the first of her thirteen hours on her feet, she didn’t start a movement, she brought one home.
Jessica Luther said in reflection of the events of the first special session, “I’ve always believed a lot that Texans want to be politically engaged but don’t know how because it feels so stacked against us.” It is difficult to sustain the level of energy and enthusiasm the filibuster created. The job of organizations is to fill the quieter times with more field building and relationship building online in order to turn once again into a well-organized crowd seemingly spontaneously again.
By: Allison Fine, The American Prospect, July 10, 2013
“Leaning Towards Darkness”: The Mind Of A Terror Suspect
While the Boston area lay paralyzed by a lockdown, with one terror suspect dead and another on the loose as a massive manhunt filtered through the area’s arteries, we got a better sense of the second young man.
It’s complicated.
The suspects were brothers. The one who was on the loose was taken into custody on Friday evening. He was the younger of the two, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19. The elder, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a confrontation with authorities, but not before participating in the fatal shooting of an M.I.T. police officer, the carjacking of an S.U.V. and the shooting of a transit police officer, who was critically injured.
They were of Chechen heritage. Tamerlan was a boxer; Dzhokhar, a college student.
“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into an act of terror,” The Boston Globe reported Friday.
The Globe quoted a person named Zaur Tsarnaev, who the newspaper said identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, as saying, “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”
But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?
On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a middle-of-the-road 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness.
Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music, saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in his tweets.
He tweeted quite a bit about women, dating and relationships; many of his musings were misogynistic and profane. Still, he seemed to want to have it both ways, to be rude and respectful at once, tweeting on Dec. 24, 2012: “My last tweets felt too wrong. I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions.”
He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.”
His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” This sounds like a take on a quote from Edmund Burke, who is viewed by many as the founder of modern Conservatism: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had strong views on the Middle East, tweeting on Nov. 28, “Free Palestine.” Later that day he tweeted, “I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate.”
Toward the end of last year, the presence of dark tweets seemed to grow — tweets that in retrospect might have raised some concerns.
He tweeted about crime. On Dec. 28 he tweeted about what sounds like a hit-and-run: “Just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching my car into reverse and driving away from the accident.” And on Feb. 6 he tweeted, “Everything in life can be free if you run fast enough.”
He posted other tweets that could be taken as particularly ominous:
Oct. 22: “i won’t run i’ll just gun you all out #thugliving.”
Jan. 5: “I don’t like when people ask unnecessary questions like how are you? Why so sad? Why do you need cyanide pills?”
Jan. 16: “Breaking Bad taught me how to dispose of a corpse.”
Feb. 2: “Do I look like that much of a softy?” The tweet continued with “little do these dogs know they’re barking at a lion.”
Feb. 13: “I killed Abe Lincoln during my two hour nap #intensedream.”
The last tweet on the account reads: “I’m a stress free kind of guy.” The whole of the Twitter feed would argue against that assessment.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 19, 2013
“Still A Long Way To Go”: Four Lessons From Steubenville
Thanks to a trial overseen by a juvenile court judge, justice in Steubenville was administered remarkably quickly. On Sunday morning, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were found delinquent of the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl, for which they will serve, respectively, a minimum of two years and one year each. But this isn’t the end of the story, which went national with the help of Anonymous but was truly laid bare in the four days of testimony last week. The only unique aspect of the story was its prominence and the abundant, inarguable recorded evidence, so it’s worth taking stock of what those factors tell us about rape in America:
1. They thought they could get away with it. The release of text messages sent that night and immediately afterwards make it clear that at least some of these kids, particularly Trent Mays, knew what had happened was wrong. It’s just that they had reason to believe they would operate with impunity. One teen texted Mays the next day, “You’re a felon.” Mays subsequently said, “I shoulda raped now that everybody thinks I did.” (He had at one point said he’d had intercourse with the girl, then said he didn’t; digital penetration is rape under Ohio law.) But Mays’ damage control is telling: In a text, he referred to football coach Reno Saccoccia: “I got Reno. He took care of it and shit ain’t gonna happen, even if they did take it to court.” Mays also said that the coach said that next time they got into trouble, they’d be suspended for three games. ”But I feel he took care of it for us,” Mays wrote. “Like, he was joking about it, so I’m not worried.” Unluckily for Mays, the coach wasn’t quite as powerful as believed.
2. The bystanders could have prevented it. One of the witnesses, Evan Westlake, wasn’t drunk, and when he realized one of his friends was too drunk to drive, Westlake tricked him into handing over his keys. Yet as Yahoo News’ Dan Wetzel points out, Westlake didn’t think to intervene in the same way when he saw the girl passed out on the floor being violated by Mays and Richmond. (On Sunday, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said he would ask for a grand jury to investigate whether there would be further charges.)
The national expert in bystander intervention, Jackson Katz, told the Daily News, “I assume there were people in that room who were uncomfortable with what was going on, but they were silenced by the dominant ethos of their culture. Nobody spoke up. If you are a teammate and you really have someone’s back like you say you do, you would have intervened before they committed a crime.” There was one exception, after the fact: Sean McGhee, Richmond’s cousin, who testified against him. He had been at the party early in the night and then learned about the sexual activity from the photos and texts. “You are dead wrong,” he texted his cousin. “I’m going to choke the [expletive] out of you for that. You could go to jail for life for that.” Of course, by then it was too late.
3. Education about rape and consent needs to happen, and earlier. Westlake’s rationale for failing to intervene was that “It wasn’t violent. I didn’t know exactly what rape was. I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone.” If Westlake truly believed that, as Katz put it, “The failure of adult men’s leadership is a primary factor in this case… How many athletic departments have mandated sexual violence education?” Much of what exists tends to happen in college and tends to be aimed at women. A report on rape prevention by the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence notes, “The data suggest that first sexual experiences typically occur at a much younger age, that a notable percentage of these first experiences are forced, and that sexual and physical violence occur at alarming rates among middle school and secondary school students.”
4. Even now, victim-blaming is all but inevitable. The equivalent of a conviction doesn’t mean the girl’s suffering is over. If you need evidence of that, check out the Public Shaming Tumblr,which includes social media commentary like, “Be responsible for your actions ladies before your drunken decisions ruin innocent lives.” Closer to home, two of the girl’s friends testified against her, calling her a liar and saying they were no longer friends because she had insisted on staying out that night. The victim’s attorney told the press, “The mom and the daughter and the family want people to know rape’s not acceptable conduct.” On Sunday, the legal system recognized that. But the broader culture still has a long way to go.
By: Irin Carmon, Salem, March 19, 2013
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