PS re FISC

The NYT reported that the secret court received 1800 requests for warrants last year -- and issued 1800 warrants, some very sweeping dragnets not focused on a particular event or suspect.  Let's see: a year might be 50 weeks, a work-week five days, so 250 days; 1800 warrants, that's 7.2 per day, or nearly one per hour.  Quite a pace for careful jurisprudence by this secret court of eleven secret jurists. Feel safer?

McClatchy has brought a second item to light.  After young Spc. Manning dumped docs to WikiLeaks, Obama, in October of 2011, signed an Executive Order making it an offense for government employees not to inform on co-workers who display suspicious attitudes or behavior, employees who later come under investigation.  Called "Early Warning" or some such innocuous, positive name -- remind one of Stasi by chance?  No, perish the thought; our elected officials are so much more trustworthy than that, and it's for our own good, all in pursuit of security, right, right, right-oh, on we go!

Snowden Isn't the Story....

This Snowden kid has had me tongue-tied; I haven't blogged for a month because people keep asking me what I think, where I come out -- traitor or hero?  It's taken me time to take my eye off Snowden and look at the real story.

A novelist coming up with this plot would be laughed out of his editor's office.  Yet here is Snowden, on ice in Moscow, passport-less, cooling his heels in the Sheremetyevo Novotel's in-transit wing -- as deep in a freezer as the journalists' cell phones he demanded be checked into his hotel room refrigerator back in Hong Kong.  Bizarre....  No, he hasn't entered the Russian border their foreign secretary sanctimoniously assures us.  But you can bet his computers and thumb drives have crossed many a border -- seized. copied and cracked by China's MSB and Russia's SVR, FSB and FSO.

OK, so traitor or hero?

                                                                                                                        

Clearly, he is a traitor to his oaths, to his employers and their trust.  And among his employers to whom he swore oaths were the NSA and the CIA.  In releasing information about snooping on foreign governments -- friend and foe -- he has betrayed US government secrets.  His grand motive, he alleges, is to alert the US public to illegal snooping on us -- but that is quite different from his information on international snooping, which is merely unethical, immoral, embarrassing, unwise, self-damaging and stupid -- but not, unfortunately, illegal.  Now we learn that his real job was not system administrator but infrastructure analyst -- searching for ways to penetrate secure systems for intelligence gathering and, potentially, sabotage.  This, too, he has revealed.  So, yes, he is prima facie a traitor.  And his treachery has hurt the US -- with adversaries, allies and those on the sidelines simply keen on indulging their schadenfreude at our expense.

Hero?  Hardly.  Nothing heroic about this self-absorbed computer geek anointing himself as defender of truth.  His allegations about his plans, his job history, his course work at Johns Hopkins, his adoption of Buddhism in Japan while not liking their culture, running off to Hong Kong because of their dedication to liberty??? What kind of naif is this? Facebooking about his sexual prowess; unable to finish high school or community college; claiming he broke his leg in special forces training in the Army Reserve (there isn't such a thing -- there are two National Guard special forces units, otherwise the only five others are regular Army.)   No, no hero is this Snowden.

What of redemption?  

Well, perhaps he has performed a public service if -- a big if -- the public ire is finally aroused to demand a wholesale change, a dismantling of the intelligence-contractor-congressional complex.  Whatever happens to Snowden will be punishment -- whether put on trial here, eking out a living in Ecuador, accepting asylum in Russia, being a pawn in the game of let's embarrass the United States.  Whatever happens to Snowden is not the story.

The story is how our government has prostituted its values in the name of security.   Abraham Lincoln said "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."  The intelligence-contractor-congressional system of circular authorizations bolstered by sweeping warrants granted by a secret judiciary is no different than the star chamber justice of Tudor England.  That was finally overturned in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and we reiterated our rejection  of such process in 1789.

I could rant several more pages about the intelligence swamp we are hip deep in: about the contractors who hire geeks like Snowden despite a crazy personal and professional history, and pay him twice what a comparable civil service post can pay; about 850,000 people or more with top secret clearance, of whom 1 in 3 work for for-profit contractors rather than for the taxpayer; about Defense Secretary Gates testifying that  "I can't get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense;" about the training of CIA spies being contracted out to a for-profit company.  But I won't indulge ....

Suffice to say that information empowers.  And many believe that withholding information empowers absolutely, despite that information is fungible and eventually -- always -- leaks.  Yes power corrupts, but more to the point, John Adams warned that “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak."  We have seen it over and over -- the beguiling quality of "secrets" whether wielded by J. Edgar Hoover tempting the Kennedys, or IRS files tempting Johnson, or CIA tempting Nixon, and on and on.  The Frank Church hearings in 1976 restored some constraint on the Executive Branch, but it leaked away again in Iran Contra under Reagan, and again after 9/11 under Bush, Cheney and Obama.  I'm shocked to list Obama in that set but the hubris is the same.  In 2004, we learned of domestic spying; in 2010, The Washington Post explored the runaway intelligence establishment.  Haven't we come to see that these intelligence czars are just as self-anointed as Snowden, thinking alike that they know what's best for us?  When will we learn to distrust any and all of them?  They don't have souls any greater than yours and mine.

The American public accepts this pernicious intrusion because they've been sold a "War on Terror."  There's the root of the problem:  the paradigm of war, that sense of imminent danger which allows those empowered by information to trade us "security" in return for giving up our rights.  But they didn't forestall the Boston Marathon bombers or the guy who tried to blow up Times Square or the guy wearing explosive jockey shorts.  There is no such thing as "security."  And now, the administrations' (plural) lies and wholesale snooping are naked before us.  James Madison wrote "no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare" but that's what we've been sold -- and we have been losing our freedom.  Talk to those denied airline flights with neither explanation nor recourse.  Madison was talking about the danger of concentrating power in the executive long before NSA, CIA, DIA and a hundred other snoop bureaucracies were even dreamed of.

  

Snowden isn't the story.  The story is we are overdue for a sweeping change in what rights we cede to our government and how it accounts for its protection of our rights and its constraint of them.  Now is the time to begin writing that story....