I'm really getting sick of the rationalizations of the surveillance state.

In judging the action of whistle-blowers, three criteria apply. They must have clear and convincing evidence of abuse. Publishing the information must not pose a disproportionate threat to public safety. And the leak must be as limited in scope and scale as possible. Snowden failed all three of these tests.

The documents published thus far do not depict a rogue agency. They indicate—with partial, out-of-date and ambiguous evidence, mostly consisting of out-of-context presentation slides—that the NSA has plenty of flaws. How could it not? Like other government agencies and bureaucracies, it pushes the limits of its regulatory, political and judicial constraints. That is not surprising. Like people everywhere, NSA officials brag. They make mistakes (and get disciplined for them). Again, not too surprising.

To justify even a limited breach of secrecy, Snowden would need to prove something far more: evidence of systematic, gross wrongdoing, based on wilful contempt for judicial, legislative and political oversight. In such circumstances, the actions of a Daniel Ellsberg can be justified.

But nothing published by Snowden shows that. The NSA revealed in these documents looks nothing like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. And Barack Obama, for all his faults, is not Richard Nixon, using the power of the state to go after his domestic enemies. On the contrary: The United States has put the most elusive and lawless part of government—intelligence—into the strongest system of legislative and judicial control anywhere in the world. Some want it still stronger (I think it’s too cumbersome and intrusive). But such questions are for the political process to settle. They do not justify catastrophic and destructive leaking.

The Snowdenistas’ second line of defense is that they have at least sparked a debate. But a public discussion, and limited reforms, on issues such as the use of National Security Letters (secret FBI orders to force people and businesses to cooperate with law enforcement), the privacy risks of warehousing metadata and whether “zero-day” exploits (vulnerabilities in computer hardware and software) should be instantly patched or exploited for espionage—are limited benefits, not overwhelming ones. They do not justify catastrophic damage either. The question of whether we house telephone metadata at the NSA or house it at tech companies is not exactly the difference between tyranny and freedom.

Edward Lucas tells us that a public discussion about this totally unprecedented mass domestic electronic surveillance program is of "limited benefit." Well, he is entitled to his own opinion, but as this country is supposedly a democracy, most Americans also feel entitled to their opinions about major domestic public policy issues, and that would be impossible if not for the fact of... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Edward Snowden NSA Snow Job - POLITICO Magazine

Americans’ alienation from our political system and its leaders has been building for more than a decade. This extended period of dissatisfaction has had an extremely corrosive effect on the nation’s social fabric.

The current discontent with the leadership in our country, coupled with long-term domestic economic trends dating back to the early 1980s, is beginning to force a redrawing of the political lines that have separated Americans since the culture wars of the 1960s.

Which Side of the Barricade Are You On? - Doug Sosnik - POLITICO Magazine

Dr. Nichols suggests four rules of thumb for engaged citizens that he believes would improve matters...

The trouble with this advice is that there are plenty of perfectly rational reasons to distrust those with political expertise.

The Limits of Expertise | The Scholar's Stage

What they are really interested in is the battle itself...

French Terrorism Expert: “Bin Laden Has Won” | The XX Committee

As the gap has grown between Washington’s global reach and its shrinking mailed fist, as it struggles to maintain 40% of world armaments (the 2012 figure) with only 23% of global gross economic output, the U.S. will need to find new ways to exercise its power far more economically. As the Cold War took off, a heavy-metal U.S. military — with 500 bases worldwide circa 1950 — was sustainable because the country controlled some 50% of the global gross product.

But as its share of world output falls — to an estimated 17% by 2016 — and its social welfare costs climb relentlessly from 4% of gross domestic product in 2010 to a projected 18% by 2050, cost-cutting becomes imperative if Washington is to survive as anything like the planet’s “sole superpower.” Compared to the $3 trillion cost of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the NSA’s 2012 budget of just $11 billion for worldwide surveillance and cyberwarfare looks like cost saving the Pentagon can ill-afford to forego...

Surveillance of foreign leaders provides world powers — Britain then, America now — with critical information for the exercise of global hegemony. Such spying gave special penetrating power to the imperial gaze, to that sense of superiority necessary for dominion over others. It also provided operational information on dissidents who might need to be countered with covert action or military force; political and economic intelligence so useful for getting the jump on allies in negotiations of all sorts; and, perhaps most important of all, scurrilous information about the derelictions of leaders useful in coercing their compliance.

NSA Surveillance is about Control & Leverage, not Security | Informed Comment

Pipkin and a team of lawyers handled the case pro bono, spending $300,000 in court costs and racking up $3.8 million in legal fees covering some 11,000 hours of work, she said. “Why in the United States of America does it cost that much to clear a woman’s name?” she asked in a telephone interview.

The woman, who is now a professor in Malaysia, eventually was allowed to leave the United States but has been denied a return visit, even to her own civil trial.

Everything is cool and there is no problem...

Scholar Wins Court Battle to Purge Name From U.S. No-Fly List | Threat Level | Wired.com

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave | The Economist

The safeguards in place to prevent such abuse are therefore critical to the "reasonableness" of the program

This is absolutely true.

The NSA's Telephone Metadata Program Is Unconstitutional | Geoffrey R. Stone

The trouble with kompromat is, though, that nobody needs to actually use it, or threaten its use, for it to become an effective deterrent to political activity. We can see this in western societies already: It is not uncommon for qualified and capable individuals to decide against standing in elections for fear of having their lives examined under a microscope. When everything you have ever done has been recorded, are you sure that none of it could be used to make you look bad?

What about the famous "three felonies a day" that even well-­meaning and law­-abiding citizens run into?

Clapper's argument that "it isn't collection until you look at it" is disingenuous and dangerous. By this logic, vast files tracking people's lives in pedantic detail are not problematic until that data is retrieved from a filing cabinet and read by a human. Transporting his logic into East Germany of the early 80's, collecting excruciating detail about people's private lives was OK, it was only when the StaSi actively used this data that things went wrong.

The discussion whether phone metadata records should be held by the government or by private entities does not matter. Data should only be held for the period which is necessary to perform a task, and storing data in excess of this period without allowing people to view / edit / remove this data carries the implicit threat that this data may be used to harm you in the future. Involuntary mass retention of data is oppressive. And while checks and balances exist now, we cannot be sure how they hold up over time. Deleting the data is the only prudent choice.

Well-­intentioned people can build highly oppressive systems, and not realize what they are doing. Erich Mielke, who had built the most oppressive security agency in living memory in order to protect "his" country from external and internal foes, famously said "but I love all people" in front of East German Parliament. He did not grasp the extent of the evil he had constructed and presided over.

Nobody wants a full-­packet­-capture society. It is fundamentally at odds with freedom. Arbitrary collection and retention of data on people is a form of oppression.

Well said.

ADD / XOR / ROL: Full-packet-capture society - and how to avoid it

Without issuing a ruling, the justices let stand an appeals court’s decision that U.S. border agents may indeed undertake a search of a traveler’s gadgets content on a whim, just like they could with a suitcase or a vehicle.

I think the reporter here might be making too much of this decision by the Supreme Court.

In this case the court ruled that a border search was OK because reasonable suspicion existed. A stronger statement would be a ruling that border search evidence was inadmissible in a particular case because reasonable suspicion did not exist.

Nevertheless, these court battles have been useful because they indicate a framework in which random searches of electronics are really not permissible. As long as the government doesn't step outside that framework, everything is fine. If these searches are only performed where reasonable suspicion exists, there won't be an example of evidence obtained in a situation where reasonable suspicion did not exist, so there won't be an argument in court where that evidence has to be thrown out.

For me the big question is the factual one - Is CBP doing random electronics searches or not? They do random searches of bags. Administration officials have suggested that they are not doing random searches of electronics, but perhaps I can be forgiven for lacking confidence in the statements of government officials regarding civil liberties issues. As long as they are not and the door to that is firmly shut, our rights are secure.

Of course, it would be preferable if the standard at the border was probable cause rather than reasonable suspicion, but I believe such a change would need to happen at the legislature rather than the court, and the political will to enact such a change does not exist.

Supreme Court Lets Stand Ruling Bolstering Gadget Privacy at U.S. Border | Threat Level | Wired.com