Cobb

The Absurdity of Snowden's Challenge

I have read Edward Snowden's recent interview in the Guardian and recognize the depth of his heroism. I think he is challenging all of us on several levels. If it is possible for a double-agent to be respectable, then he has just about all I can give. That's because I beleive he is smart, conscientious and that he has the goods on the NSA. So much so that lots of people are scared to death to present them. 

...remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

At the core of Snowden's challenge is to consider the value of suspicionless surveillance from a cost benefit analysis to American citizenship. Most publications have picked up on that 'consent of the governed' piece. But then he throws us a deeper, moral consideration. If the NSA gives us civil libertarians pause, it is because its awesome apparatus is aimed at American citizens. Snowden challenges us further by implication - if we don't like our privacy violated because we have not given informed consent by our government, then what hope does any non-US citizen have? In this regard, Snowden is not merely asking a civil rights question, but a human rights question.

Except that he can't because there is no such thing.

Yes, I'm repeating that old line of paleo-conservatives that there is no such thing as human rights. Unless and until the actual New World Order comes into being, we are citizens of nations, and as such there are only those civil rights we are guaranteed by our constitutions, within the ambit of our nation's ability and willingness to defend them. Everything else is wishful thinking. Especially when it comes to SIGINT. It is thus absurd for anyone, especially an American vetted into the highest echelons of the American Military-Security Complex (aka Echelon) to expect some higher authority than the self-interest of American citizens to reign in that which was built for our benefit. 

It comes down to the simple question of whether or not we believe that the average American will be persecuted. And that eventually comes down to whether or not we actually trust our government in this matter, and I firmly believe that will come down to cases. 

My personal opinion is that I find it difficult to believe that the NSA is out of control. So long as there are appropriate controls and oversight, I think Americans' well-justified fears of abuse of NSA powers can and will prevail. I think that American military leadership will not be hushed. I also believe that the CIA and the NSA and all of the new intelligence organizations are more incompetent than evil. I have advocated for a separate MI5 domestic surveillance agency and for a separate counter-terrorism court a la Posner. Yes of course the possibility for abuse is there, but is this an area that we would rather not police? That's a tough question, and although I fall on the libertarian side of that equation, I do not believe that the system has been abused enough to justify its dismantling. This is a specie of a Cold War question of unilateral disarmament. We survived Cold War nukes. We can survive NSA snoops. But can we survive Islamist nukes without NSA snoops?

So the only real pressing question is whether or not we trust the FISA court. If we do not, and we believe that the NSA tail is wagging the FISA dog, then our problem is not at all with PRISM. Rather this is a specie of Iraq War torture. In short, either the Administration knows exactly what the NSA is doing or they don't. If they don't, then the answer lies in the direction of Snowden's admonishment - but only to the extent that we the people are willing to eyeball our consent with discipline. Of course we in the alarmed public will inevitably punt that duty to the attorney class. The law *is* transparent, isn't it? If we do know what the NSA is doing (wrong) then what is it?  So. Who has disappeared? Where are all the victims of this snooping and what pain has been visted upon them by our watchdogs? Are we, in this era of Benghazi incapable of sniffing out what goes horribly wrong? 

See the other side of the story here is that there probably, and I would say 95% probably, isn't very much that goes on in SIGINT that your ace hacker at DefCon or SchmooCon et al hasn't already figured out. And we also have a critical mass of people who understand very well what can and what cannot be done with data mining and all that other stuff. And to counter the paranoia, you really have to deal with more paranoia - which is to say, the people who know best what can be done hack and snoop wise, know it because they've done it themselves. And it just so happens that those people are not committing mass suicide. That's the thing about science. It works the same everywhere. 

Brewster Kalhe, who first started archiving the whole of the Internet a decade ago has done the math. It would cost less than $30 million per year to build, staff and maintain the facility to capture all the phone traffic in America. NSA has got way way more than that. They can do all the video on the planet, plus satellite streams and military telemetry that most people don't even know exists. How much do you want to bet that the American intelligence establishment never wants to make a mistake about stockpiles of chemical weapons again? How much do you want to bet that they knew what was going on at Benghazi?

Which interestingly brings us back to the matter of policy and judgment. The American public can and will be deceived, and they can and will be duped by politicians who will claim to have superior moral judgment. Everybody wants only their hands on the ring of power. But who is going to decide that? Americans. 

From the same pool of people who created the beast will be those who decide how long its leash shall be. Not the Chinese. Not the Koreans. Not the British or the French or the Canadians or anybody else we have decided to share the spoils of digital war. It is now and forever shall be Us vs Them. We can only hope for a better Us. 

Snowden's simple challenge requires only a change of complexion, a change of policy, a new CC on the email distibution list of NSA power. But it will not destroy the beast. It's still our beast. Snowden's deeper challenge requires that the US not be the power that decides US power, and for that he's a bit late. The Cold War is over. 

Unless he thinks he knows something about China that Washington doesn't already know.

Peacetime Sucks

War is Hell. Hell is well understood. Peacetime sucks. 

For the same reason that the noose focuses the mind, liberty allows for discovery of novelty in every sphere. I am reflecting for a moment on my discovery several years ago of the benefit of war. To reiterarte, the great value of war is that it becomes the excuse for everything, and it simplifies and accentuates the meaning of life. War is in every sense, reductive. 

Peacetime sucks because in peacetime, flirtations with the truth are sufficient. Nobody quite cares if you miscalculate because in general, nobody is going to lose an arm or a leg about it. Consequently, every mistruth becomes pretty much equal to every other mistruth, and the slippery slope ends up going down certainly. But not down to Hell. Because we are at peace with ourselves, our misdeeds, our mistruths and well isn't there delightful discovery in all that novelty? Yes there is. Peacetime breeds the corruptions of injustice, especially a peacetime with no death penalty.

Make no mistake. Peace is always preferable to war. Only during peacetime, with its attendent modes of discovery can we find value in the myriad permutations of human character and endeavor. Nobody loves humanity and all the diversions of society so much as during peacetime. In war, all we want is for war to end, by any means necessary - which generally means more war. In wartime, anything and everything goes to win, and blood debts give rise to greater commitments until the very end of human ability is tried. It exhausts the very soul. War makes zombies of humans, we become single-minded rabbits, astounding in our abject terror. Every face of every child reminds us that we are not our true selves in war, that we are reduced to following the orders of survival. And so we crave peace.

Peace is where a man can be a man, and a woman can be a woman, and a man can be a woman and so on. War does not allow us that luxury. So it is amusing as we contemplate our peacetime selves that women are wanting to be men and vice versa. The corruption is so vexing that it makes me entertain the clarity of Hell and the reduction of desire to survival. 

In between these extremes is Justice. I am sufficiently certain of this and don't feel compelled to backup this idea with my previous levels of investigation. I won't be looking up Adam Smith's version to compare it to somebody else's. I will simply rest on that certainty. More on Justice later.

Suspicionless Surveillance

Suspicionless surveillance is the term used by Edward Snowden to describe the ambit of the US government's ongoing SIGINT. It is, as I understand it today, a total capability which is limited only by policy. Being a database architect myself, the extent of this capability comes as no surprise. I guess I just finally heard what I needed to hear from Snowden's recent Guardian interview which I will publish here in its entirety...

We interrupt this post to entertain a paranoid fantasy.

As I am writing this, I am having trouble logging into Evernote and also in sending an email confirmation for something else entirely unrelated. And I am considering a phrase called 'direct access' and the likelihood that Cutlass and I here can be on a list which is a million lines long of 'owned computers'. With the presumption that NSA can bruteforce TrueCrypt, and/or are keylogging my machine, there is no doubt that somebody is watching me.

But what if that person watching me were sympathetic to my ethical discipline? What if they were a dude like Spy (of my existential partners Cobb readers may recall) that really is a genuine big brother - somebody who doesn't want to see me get in trouble? Somebody who says, look once you go play in this arena, you're going to lose all your legal support. Somebody on the inside who, for all they can see, is convinced that liberty as we once knew it, is gone and only the fantasy of it remains, but that the only real liberty left is a particular subset, a subset whose definitions are clear within the realm of the watchers, but not so clear in the civilian population. 

Well, then we are already dead. Let's have a bourbon. Let bourbon be in America, what vodka is in Russia and let us all sing together as we drown.

Da hoo doray!

That said, I will continue with what I was saying (and search around for my Gadsden flag). But first, a small video. 

Snowden & Obligatory Seriousness

Some young dude named Snowden with a clear and present risk to his own freedom has divulged something that may or may not be relevant to Americans' privacy and freedom. He is ratting out the existence of a tool used by the NSA which goes under the name of PRISM. As far as anybody can tell, and there are probably only a few who actually could, this PRISM tool is used on ordinary Americans without their knowledge to collect and/or organized data for the purposes of the American Intelligence establishment.

Now several months ago, I came to understand that the authorization of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act (how Orwellian is that?) would create secret laws authorizing secret laws. At the time there were several folks who ought to know, who vehemently protested these provisions. Knowing in my heart that President Obama has all the integrity of a Maitre D', I figured that Americans would get the responsible service in this regard that they paid for, which for most of us is a contemptible near-zero amount. In checking my archives on Security and Paranoia I can't find everything that I want, but thankfully there are enough bloggers out there with some history that hasn't been erased.

My gut is telling me that Snowden is about as reliable a source as can be had - which is to say very bloody unlikely to be left standing credibly at the end of the day. Whatever grains of truth he is able to reveal should be sufficient for society's wheels to start churning up the checks and balances we can rely upon to find out. Snowden is the pebble at the center of what should become a snowball rolling down the mountainside. The fate of the pebble is not the issue, but how big the waves are that ripple in a properly democratic pond. Snowden will sink and can only rise if we are not drowned or mired and actually drain the swamp. But of course there will be an ocean of resistance. 

On the one hand, Snowden either had to apprehend somebody abusing the system or find it easy enough to abuse the system himself to call its controls into question. Either one of those actions in a relatively closed organization can result in 'career limiting moves'. There is no way easy to leak what one knows as a professional - our shorthands and our Dilbertisms limit us. We all know what goes wrong and what can be improved - and in some way we are all in the same boat. There is no inconsequential way for him to leak if we are a serious society of law. The significance of all this must be hyped to a certain level - meaning those of us who care about the core issue of civil liberty must keep on the backs of the experts we will need to get to the bottom of this problem. I say this because I expect the Administration to cover its tracks. 

It seems we cannot keep up with the number of scandals coming out of Washington. But I will try to keep up with this one. As an IT professional, the ability for any to trust in what I aim to do is at risk. In the meantime, I'll be checking on Schneier, Spook86, Volokh and Fernandez in order to keep up. 

I like Snowden today better than I ever will sympathize with Julian Assange or with Bradley Manning, his agent. I believe that Snowden was simply astonished at what he found, and that the other two were angry men with knives just looking for someone to stab.