The Liberal Surveillance State

The confusion about which is the liberal state and which the surveillance state/drunken hegemon afflicted the New Republic long before Greenwald, Assange, Snowden, et al. appeared at the scene of Wilentz’s dismay. Since the present ownership took over, engendering that confusion has, in fact, been the New Republic’s entire raison d’être.

Wilentz has changed, too, from his days writing for Dissent. He seems to have moved to the right. Sad that there are so many former leftists. They were correct (right) the first time.

Also, it’s democracy in need of defending. Not the liberal state. Especially not the surveillance state. The surveillance state implies the loss of democracy.

To the degree that it goes against democracy, the liberal state is illegitimate and shouldn’t be defended.

@Plume

WikiLeaks last two big releases have been on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. They have published two leaked chapters of it, and have criticized both the governments involved in negotiating it and the private special interest groups and industrial giants that have captured the process. Their stance has been pro-environment, anti-globalization and anti-corporate.

There has been a popular undercurrent in commentary lately in US liberal circles (see NSFWcorp pieces by Mark Ames) that tries to identify Assange and Greenwald with Rand Paul, but a glance at the actual politics of either party over the years shows that this is misleading and inaccurate.

Whatever about the quasi-libertarian aspect to the online politics of characters like Assange and other cypherpunks (and that is definitely there) I think it is false to say that WikiLeaks politics have been identifiably libertarian. I think the common thread to all of their stuff has been the primacy of publics rather than of the individual, and the presumption in favour of public knowledge. That commitment is something, I hope, everyone can get behind.

Robert Manne had a great piece on Assange’s politics and I think Henry does Assange a disservice by saying his politics are not coherent. He doesn’t have a very broad political orientation but zero in on his issues and you’ll find him to be a solid thinker. As Manne points out in his fascinating essay, it is a strange sort of libertarian that takes a pro-union stance, as Assange does, and unpopularly in the libertarian circles he used to move in. But the quoted passage indicates that Assange is anything but one of these crass Ayn Randian individualists.

2 things –

first – in what world do people think that arguments amounting to “y’know person X you think did a Good Thing, well they aren’t a saint!” is a convincing argument? this sort of criticism measuring you against some standard of perfect ideological purity says more about the author than the subject of discussion, imho.

second – and forgive me for my youth here – but isn’t this just the proto-typical New Republic line on these sorts of things? i haven’t been keyed in to the NY culture industry for too many years now, but this seems pretty par for the course for them by my understanding. was there a time when we would expect different from this outfit? i mean, haven’t peretz and wieseltier maintained editorial control of that rag for decades now? what was the ‘change in ownership’ that Henry refers to early in the OP, was that the change?

The Liberal State is dead.

It is just a memory and a faded, peeling label for a far more authoritarian apparatus.

yeah Contrarily @ 8 raises a good point – libertarian political philosophy cannot be reduced to or even honestly likened to the self-professed libertarian-ism of select US political figures. the latter espouse any number of absurd positions which directly contradict the basic tenants of libertarian politics, such as their statist approach to women’s healthcare.
lest we forget, ‘libertarian’ means more than just ‘get the state outta my backyard’. Chomsky frequently identifies as a libertarian, for example. the tradition is a long one and libertarian issues are pretty much orthogonal to a lot of traditionally conceived left-right political debates.

@11 – didn’t see that when made last post, but way to take the words right out of my mouth. uncanny.

It’s as though a desperate all-points bulletin has been issues by the powers that be to take down Snowden and his supporters. Fortunately, it is not working, and this represents a turning point in the battle between state propaganda and independent voices. Even if no reforms whatever result from Snowden’s disclosures, he has demonstrated that a courageous individual cannot be stopped from blowing a whistle in the Internet Age.

Regarding the debate over “libertarian” leanings in anti-establishment activism, it seems that the existing taxonomy for political orientation is insufficient to discuss the emerging ideologies that are reflected in the Snowden affair. Because academics are so heavily invested in the alchemical nomenclature of traditional political science, they are reluctant to define new elements of political theory that would enable more constructive analysis and discussion.

Trying to place Snowden’s political motivations on a Left-Right spectrum is like explaining a chemical reaction with elements of air, earth, fire and water.

Frankly, no one has wounded liberalism more than Obama. Not even Bill Clinton.

Sad thing: neither of them are liberals.

A fact that the Fred Hiatts of the world want no one to know, but people who ARE liberals ought to be doing their damnedest to make clear.
~

Donald Johnson @9
To your question: I haven’t read much (virtually none, in fact) of Wilentz’s historical work but he’s considered a very good historian. (He also managed to slip a bk on Bob Dylan somewhere in there, iirc.)

Donald Johnson @ 9
I’ve read about the first two chapters of “The Rise of American Democracy.” I’ve taken it down from the shelf twice to help pass the time while I was looking for a job, and twice I got an offer within a month of starting reading it. (Go figure.)

It’s long and densely argued, and heavily footnoted. It’s in the tradition of the New Labor History that was very important a couple of decades ago. I learned a lot from it about little-r republican/revolutionary groups among artisans in the Federalist period and earlier. If I was looking for a topic for a research paper on American history, any one paragraph in the book could probably be worked into a twenty-five page paper–at times Wilentz seems to suggest that he’s taking sides in an argument, though attempting to represent the other side fairly. I wouldn’t necessarily expect a historian with a good argument about a movement that ended around 1863 to have something authoritative to say about politics in 2014, though. And anyway Wilentz doesn’t write about politics as a neutral scholar, he has always backed a specific candidate. His book about presidents from Nixon to GW Bush is more general and fairly completist, and comes down hard behind WJ Clinton (and against Carter).

@21

twisted interpretations of Obamas’ motives

No twisted interpretations are required. It is the consistent actions of Obama to defend Wall Street and the state security apparatus that are repeatedly and logically described by GG and other critics of Obama. Obama is out of excuses. His motivations are irrelevant; character is defined by action, and his actions make him a failure to those of us who hoped for a TR or FDR who would clean out the corrupt plutocracy and cut the Military-Industrial Complex down to size.

Obama will be remembered as the black American Tony Blair: charming, eloquent, and disastrously wrong on crucial policy decisions.

In retrospect Obama’s anti-war reputation was a fairy-tale and his attack on the individual mandate looks hypocritical, as were his attacks on NAFTA given his efforts on TPP and fast track. After the Clinton campaign Obama went on to eviscerate the McCain and Romney campaigns (Romney so efficiently that the campaign was over by June). So perhaps Wilentz’s description of the Obama campaign as cutthroat and misleading is not so far off the mark, unless you believe it was luck rather than skill that caught otherwise successful politicians so flat-footed.

Wilentz showed how the Obama campaign used outrage to obscure his conservative policies from progressive voters. He points out here Snowden, Assange and Greenwald’s use of outrage to obscure an ideological attack on the democratic state, and the peculiar spectacle of otherwise liberal supporters applauding that critique. How is that weird?

What a liberal state needs is deliberative process controlling governance, to make governance rational and oriented to a public-interest.

To get the deliberation necessary for rationality to emerge and impose its will, the liberal state requires the institutionalization of opposed interests and idealized constraints on the exercise of power. That’s what constitutional separation of powers, requirements for due process, the ritual honoring of the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, etc., is all about: creating procedural hurdles amid a diversity of state offices, to prevent the assembly of a stable and persistent, dominant coalition, and to force those, who exercise authority, to constantly rationalize its applications.

If you don’t have a clear idea of what the liberal state is, or was, I don’t think it is possible to have a clear idea of what the emergence of the surveillance state means in the context of administering the liberal state.

I think the emergence of an out-of-control surveillance state is an aftermath of the death of the liberal state. It’s a disease of the dead, like maggots eating a corpse.

Ubiquitous surveillance is largely a technical development, an irresistible possibility, built into the progress of the computer/communications revolution. Our computing machines are generating vast records willy nilly. A luddite resistance is doomed to futility, but I don’t know what shape a liberal response could take, if a liberal ideology could be revived to think through the problem. We have libertarians, whose ideology often follows a fairy tale template, in which the state is a monster source-of-all-evil, and weakening the state is a solution. This is, of course, directly opposed to the liberal idea of the state as a countervailing power representing a common, public interest, an idea, which has few effective advocates. And, we have the neoliberal idea of the public-private partnership, which dissolves opposed interests in favor of plutocratic domination and the exclusive pursuit of plutocratic private interests, under cover of the rhetoric of market liberalism.

If I had to guess, I would say the libertarians and the neoliberals will cooperate in further weakening the state and the concept of a public good or a public interest. And, the demoralized rump of liberals will, to use Plume’s phrase, act as a completely ineffective speedbump. Wilentz and The New Republic are looking for a broker’s role, I guess.

if the thunder…@25
LFC, given the topic and who is in charge of our surveillance state, how would you avoid it?
I don’t know. But I’m not spending time w another re-run of that argument. You cd follow Henry @15 and shift the focus of discussion to Europe, I suppose.

@28

an ideological attack on the democratic state

A democratic state does not spy secretly on its citizens according to secret laws. A democratic state does not torture and imprison innocent men. A democratic state does not wage illegal wars of aggression. The reasons why Obama has ripped up the Bill of Rights are irrelevant; it is the damage to our society that matters. It is a waste of time to debate Obama’s personal character and motivations. His actions speak for themselves.

GG, Assange, and Snowden are all defending democracy against an increasingly powerful and unaccountable concentration of government and corporate power.

tib@28
The notion that Obama’s policy positions as a candidate in 2008 were “conservative” is flat-out, arrant nonsense. His positions on the whole were indistinguishable from H. Clinton’s and in some cases to her left.

mcmanus:
A disintegrated society survives by propagating an epidemic [sic] of sociability and entertainment
I gather you were quoting The Invisible Committee, but what does the “epidemic of sociability” consist of? what does it look like? People chatting on Facebook? What are you talking about?
Why throw up a long blockquote from The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection anyway? At least 50 percent of that book (or manifesto) is probably gibberish.

Any book so beloved by Glenn Beck cannot be all bad, eh?

@31

I think nihilist pretty much covers it.

Julian Assange in 1996:

Put away your straw man … Nobel economic laureates have been telling us for years to be careful about idealised market models … This years [sic] Nobel for Economics won by George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz “for their analysis of markets with assymmetric [sic] information” is typical. You don’t need a Nobel to realize that the relationship between a large employer and employee is brutally assymmetric [sic] … To counter this sort of assymetery. [sic] Employees naturally start trying to collectivise to increase their information processing and bargaining power. That’s right. UNIONS Declan. Those devious entities that first world companies and governments have had a hand in suppressing all over the third world by curtailing freedom of association, speech and other basic political rights we take for granted.

That’s an unusual “nihilist” in my book.

@34 Democratic states have done all of those things and worse. Obama has not ripped up the Bill of Rights, at worst he has left the balance between liberty and security tilted too far toward security. He has not done enough to repair the damage done in the wake of 9-11.

While Obama puts more weight on security that I would it is not clear, in this democratic state, that his sense of the balance is much different from the public’s.

Wilder at 30: A luddite resistance is doomed to futility, but I don’t know what shape a liberal response could take, if a liberal ideology could be revived to think through the problem.

I believe there is a possible “response,” but it won’t be a “liberal” response or fit into a liberal ideology. But there is a way forward, that is not nostalgia or a conservatism that tries to preserve Fordist liberal-imperial institutions.

Which is why I pointed to The Collective and tiqqun, who may be very wrong, but would be wrong in the right direction. There are many others, cyborg feminism and post-anarchism for instance. I have a certain faith in the young, and a certain humility about understanding a society moving by me at breakneck speed. I don’t want to slow it down, but just get out of the way.

And don’t trust anybody over 30.

Isn’t trying to decipher Greenwald, Assange or Snowdens politics beside the point? Why does it matter if any of them support policy x or candidate y ? What matters is the information they are releasing and the arguments they’re pushing, and those things can be analysed without scrutinizing Snowdens opinions on Rand Paul or trying to find coherency in Assange’s politics.
All that matters now is the personality, not what they’re actually saying, how truthful it is etc And this goes for virtually *all* the analysis by ‘specialist commentators with a public platform’ that Ive seen. The overwhelming majority of it (to this layman) is useless. Why is that?

Digby pointed to this the other day:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edward-snowden-dead

The ideology of the apparatchiks, even if it is not widely shared, may be controlling, in the absence of political movements seeking to govern, and unexposed to daylight or criticism. It is hard to see what that ideology is, exactly, beyond an unthinking conviction that their own intentions are pure and their efforts, effective in some diffuse moral sense, which automatically excuses any event or datum. The expression of murderous anger collected for the linked article may not represent anything about the whole, of course; it’s a journalist collecting quotes, not a Gallup survey. But, I wonder.

For me, the larger context is the whole response to 9/11, which seemed to me to be, in every major respect, to be unthinking and ill-considered, from collecting shampoo bottles and nail clippers from passengers in airports, as security theatre, to the invasion of Iraq, followed by the totally corrupt and incompetent “Reconstruction”, to Obama’s repeat of the Surge in Afghanistan (like we hadn’t been there long enough already).

There just doesn’t seem to be any capacity in the post-mortem ex-Liberal State, to rationally choose a goal or apply means to an end. Nor much capacity in the popular imagination (or at least in the Media, which script writes the visible popular imagination) to recognize the sheer craziness of the “efforts to make us safe”, whether it is stupendously expensive perpetual war in Afghanistan or TSA security theatre. The behind-doors surveillance state was just as crazy, apparently: billions upon billions spent on vast efforts, unconnected to any rational targeting, objective or result. The well-intended effort, if strenuous enough, was self-justifying to those involved. The simple insight that collecting a million acre, mile-high haystack wouldn’t aid in finding a half-dozen needles seems to have escaped those in charge.

I imagine there’s an element of corruption involved, of course; the only “experts” are feeding at the trough of a vast expenditure and will cheer the vastness of the effort, but I wonder if there’s also a complicity born of complacency and the absence of any organized force in American politics that actually cares enough to sustain critical attention beyond a thirty-second emotional response. I’ve tried to talk to people about how silly TSA airport security is, and I get a lot of resistance to the idea that it is all a big, annoying waste. Guantanamo is another indicative case: the idea that the vast majority of inmates, past and present, were pretty much innocent victims never seems to register, even with many of the critics; and the apparatchiks in that case are apparently complete nutcases, interpreting the hunger strikes and suicides as asymmetric terrorism!

The NSA isn’t the KGB. It appears, instead like a reflection of totalitarianism in a funhouse mirror: authoritarian expediency with no clear object in view, imagining a titanic clash of civilizations, when its nominal opponent in Al Qaeda is a little more than a pathetic marketing effort by a failed franchise. Blowing up things in the wastes of Yemen or the Pakistani backcountry, while tracking down hapless donors to Islamic charities in the U.S., all without any real thought about purposes or consequences.

I don’t spend much time wondering about Obama’s motivations, but the evidence of disengagement with serious critics of policy seems to present a general pattern, with particularly pernicious consequences.

SusanC 45,

On most issues (with exceptions), I’d say Nixon was to Obama’s left. Then again, since American political power has shifted so far to the right over the years, that can be said about most of the presidents in the last three decades or so, with exceptions.

Ike was to Obama’s left, too. Except on some social issues.

But I do wonder: What if he had taken office without a 9-11, an Iraq War, a war in Afghanistan, a Gitmo, etc.? What if he had followed, oh, say, Howard Dean instead of Bush?

Personally, I see Obama as someone who loves to cut deals, facilitate agreements, work toward compromise. I don’t think he’s especially ideological. So if the sides lining up for the deal aren’t the current construct of center-right and hard-right, Obama’s compromises would be vastly different. If he’s dealing with center-left and center-right, for example . . . I think we have another presidency altogether.

Too bad we can never have a “far left” in the mix. Especially a Green Left. But that’s considered verboten, unlike the hard-right.

@B Wilder
The behind-doors surveillance state was just as crazy, apparently: billions upon billions spent on vast efforts, unconnected to any rational targeting, objective or result. The well-intended effort, if strenuous enough, was self-justifying to those involved. The simple insight that collecting a million acre, mile-high haystack wouldn’t aid in finding a half-dozen needles seems to have escaped those in charge.
I think NSA metadata collection goes too far, but no one on the outside can know for certain whether any needles were found, plots stopped, etc., or exactly how. Not to justify (all) the programs, just saying.

when its nominal opponent in Al Qaeda is a little more than a pathetic marketing effort by a failed franchise
that description may apply to ‘al-Qaeda central’ but not really to the various offshoots

Blowing up things in the wastes of Yemen or the Pakistani backcountry
things and, of course, people, including civilians; a story just the other week about a wedding party in Yemen hit by drones by mistake.

I share some of the criticisms of Obama on these issues, but note that on Guantanamo he has appointed two new officials w a mandate to get the stalled closure train moving again.

Two things:

Henry, ‘ any half-way competent editor would have decided that no amount of contrarianism was worth the damage to the magazine’s brand. ‘ Those who deal in contrarianism have no problem with ‘more is better’. And, of course, facts never bother contrarians.

Second, perhaps you should add the materials from the commenters about the fact that Sean flat-out lied: ‘Notice that Assange and Snowden had virtually zero big bombshells regarding corporate malfeasance. It was all about government’.

37, 51 – Good poetry:

A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse;
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.
But, soft! behold! lo! where it comes again.
_ _ _

O royal knavery! an exact command,
Larded with many several sorts of reasons
Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too,
With, ho! such bugs and goblins in my life,
That, on the supervise, no leisure bated,
No, not to stay the grinding of the axe…
_ _ _

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks;
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue;
For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg…

End good poetry.
–
It is a mighty struggle to understand how it can be so hard, for so many otherwise educated astute and discerning minds, to work to the idea that both Blair and Obama and God knows GWBush as well as a rank multitude of lessly-important others, were and are quite clearly played, not players. Tokens with speech capability.
Not so much as performers but as announcers, as Masters of Ceremony – well-dressed, articulate, and there to facilitate the show. Not to direct it, certainly not as authorial presences, but there to announce the acts and provide continuity between them.
So that the analysis would better and more aptly be of the motives and intentions of what powers and interests have placed these pleasant-looking ciphers in the center rings of our political circuses.
The difference between the surveillance state of right-wing wet dream and the surveillance state of left-wing fantasy is maybe the difference between an authority that wants to beat you into blind obedience and will watch your every move for deviant acts, or thoughts, to be punished; and an authority that wants you, collectively, to realize the beauty and rightness of co-operative obedience, and will watch your every move for opportunities to help you, collectively, to that realization.
In the one there is no privacy because none is deserved outside the secure perimeters of authority, only within them; in the other privacy is shared, between the insignificant individual and king/queen cloud the righteous.
The Stasi guy with genuine affection for the lives virtualized into his passive reception and lived participation of them.
The Stasi guy with a fixated Doberman hunger for the scent of wrong.
Really different guys, really different immediate effects on the surveilled upon, but, end of the day, both Stasi.

Get your robot hand off my leg.

Good article from Jacobin. Related. Not a commentary on the above. But connected all the same:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/12/cyberlibertarians-digital-deletion-of-the-left/

Philip Mirowski offers a useful analysis of these political formations in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Tracing the history of the founding figures of contemporary libertarianism, especially Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper and others, Mirowski notes that their writings were less about establishing a clear conceptual position than consolidating and managing political power. Over time, their thought came to function as a set of “shells” or “Russian Dolls” in which participants in outer shells need not, and often must not, understand their connection to members of shells closer to the center.

Neoliberals in the innermost shell (like the Koch brothers) use libertarians at farther removes (like the Tea Party) not always to realize their agenda directly, but to push political discourse to the hard right. The Tea Party attack on government has less to do with ending government per se than providing a political power base to support the drafting of regulatory programs (like “fiscal reform” programs organized at the state level by ALEC) and gutting regulatory enforcement mechanisms (like environmental oversight of energy industries) — even though most Tea Party members may not embrace much of this agenda.

and . . .

Cyberlibertarians across the political spectrum focus a great deal on the promotion of tools, objects, software, and policies whose chief benefit is their ability to escape regulation and even law enforcement by the state (including surveillance-avoidant technologies and applications such as Tor, end-to-end encryption, PGP and Cryptocat). They routinely portray government as the enemy of democracy rather than as its potential realization. Generally, they refuse to construe corporate power on the same order as governmental power; in close alignment with libertarianism, they implicitly suggest companies like Google and Facebook should be entirely unconstrained by governmental oversight.

I’d venture to say, on the part of Snowden and any “non-liberal” tendencies he might have (aka liking his gun), that most anyone hired into a classified position where they had access to the material he did, probably wasn’t going around in tie-dye shirts with a peace symbol on them. The types of people with access to classified or sensitive information don’t tend to be peaceniks or “liberals,” they’re people who’ve gone into the military or security professions for a reason.

Daniel Ellsberg was a military analyst for a defense think tank. He was a Marine. He’d served closely with McNamara as SecDef and in Vietnam in the State Department. Not a hippie. That’s why he had access to the material that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Prima facie, I was prepared to defend it, but the Wilentz is awful, relying too much on biography to make what may or may not be a relevant point about ES, GG, JA, and the politics of paranoia. I was ready to follow along what seemed to be the main line of an argument in the second paragraph and then quickly lost interest as that argument unraveled.

b. mcmanus upthread –
“Poetry maybe, polemic or elegy, but honestly the rational liberal argumentation of the last decade or so has not amazed me with its efficacy”

yeah, i just wanted to echo this, and drop this link to an (excellent) essay on the subject, hopefully without cluttering the thread
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/just-the-facts/

@Marc 21 “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Greenwald has an extremely deep personal animus towards Obama that is apparent in everything that he writes and says. ”

Easy to avoid this conclusion if you read Greenwald in the period leading up to, and immediately following Obama’s election. He made it clear at all points that he was judging actions rather than personalities, praised those actions of Obama consistent his campaign promises and criticised those that were not. The animus that is evident now is the result of the actions Greenwald criticised, not the cause of the criticism.

This kind of criticism is like the claim that people who opposed Bush’s policies or doubted his competence were guilty of Bush Derangement Syndrome or something similar (an affliction now widespread in the Repub party).

bob mcmanus @ 37, 44

I’d like to think the kids are alright, and, honestly, from my limited personal acquaintance, those under 30 are quite different from the Reaganaut late-boomer, early-X generation, which includes Obama. The kids may well have a phenomenal ability to come together — they are so oriented to teams. And, they are getting an intense education in not-respecting authority.

B. Wilder @63:
well, I’m not going to defend G.W.Bush, whose administration was, in the main, a disaster. On the other point, yes, we can see what they show us; all I was saying is that we can’t see what they don’t show us and we don’t really know what that is. But I think we are prob. more in agreement than disagreement overall here.

Ronan @65: link noted, thks. haven’t read it yet.

Marc @ 21

“it is possible to construct an argument where Greenwald et al. are acting as enablers for domestic right-wingers”

Please, let’s see the argument. After all, Wilentz thinks it’s possible to construct an argument with “the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it” as its conclusion, but apparently he couldn’t deliver.

Plume @ 59

“We also know that the private sector, using a capitalist engine, can be the enemy of democracy, but can’t possibly be the vehicle for democracy. Capitalism itself being anti-democratic in form and function. Capitalism seeking privatization, not democracy.”

You suggest that capitalism is in principle incompatible with democracy. What reason is there to think this? (I don’t mean to derail the thread; a link or two to what you take to be good sources would suffice)

darrelplant @60
I understand the point you’re making but re Snowden and Ellsberg —
hard to imagine two more different backgrounds, at least in certain respects. Snowden is smart, I have no doubt, but has relatively little formal education and was not political, I suspect, for most of his life, and prob. didn’t start thinking seriously about politics till fairly late in the day, biographically speaking. I think Snowden fell into his NSA job somewhat by chance (to the extent that is possible, which I believe it is). OTOH Ellsberg was prob. thinking about politics from early on, had a certain perspective, then changed it. Different trajectories; and also the two acts of leaking may not be exactly analogous, but I haven’t really thought that through.

@66: I could not disagree more strongly. He consistently reads the intentions of the man in the worst possible light; he minimizes anything positive; and his utter hatred of the man leads him to poor analysis. The most vivid example to me is when there was a Republican attempt to drum up war with Iran. Obama – to the rest of the planet – acted pretty decisively to tamp down the war drums. Greenwald had an opposite-day post where he had Obama gearing up to attack Iran. It doesn’t help that he leaves things out that aren’t consistent with the story that he’s pushing either. Advocacy has its place, but it’s not wise to get all of your news from advocates.

@76

You imply that GG is untrustworthy because his work is distorted by hatred of Obama. So please show us where Greenwald’s reporting in the Snowden affair has been inaccurate. The lies and distortions have all come from the NSA and its defenders in Congress. It is the facts that should determine our evaluation of trustworthiness, not attitudes and postures. In this regard, GG has been highly reliable. Obama, not so much.

[sic] among @IrinaSeverin’s most bizarre claims was that Stalin invented the tea party, by way of introducing the atheistic White Russian Ayn Rand into the American body politic. Um, ok. She also accused Sen. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz of being ‘Putin favorites’ for their anti-Syria intervention position.

@ Plume 58

“Cyberlibertarians across the political spectrum focus a great deal on the promotion of tools, objects, software, and policies whose chief benefit is their ability to escape regulation and even law enforcement by the state (including surveillance-avoidant technologies and applications such as Tor, end-to-end encryption, PGP and Cryptocat).” This Jacobin rag sounds like yet another Soros funded effort to dress up authoritarian corporatist globalism in Marx.

“They routinely portray government as the enemy of democracy rather than as its potential realization.”

“Don’t listen to friends or neighbors who tell you about tyranny…because the government is us.” — Barack Obama at Ohio State University

“Generally, they refuse to construe corporate power on the same order as governmental power;” that’s because they recognize that Corporatism and the Corporate State have been around nearly a hundred years since Mussolini thought it up, and that it isn’t State VERSUS Corporate Power but Statist AND Corporat-ist power. A corporation that can’t fine you or throw you in jail for buying their shitty health insurance, to name just one example, is a corporation that isn’t all that powerful unless they’re trying to put you in lifelong debt servitude AFTER you’ve had a life saving procedure and/or major medical emergency. And then they’re only powerful because they won’t let you declare bankruptcy too easily. The same goes for the Too Big to Fail Banks. We’ve had the Federal Reserve which isn’t exactly federal but may be slightly more federal than Federal Express for what, a hundred years? Even if the hated ‘Paulbots’ are wrong that the Fed isn’t secretly owned by the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers, it might as well be owned by the TBTFs because it behaves exactly as if it were!

“In close alignment with libertarianism, they implicitly suggest companies like Google and Facebook should be entirely unconstrained by governmental oversight.” This is a talking point NSA defenders have been advancing for months, ever since the Snowden thing broke. It might as well be called NSA Good Cop – Google Bad Cop. The reality is Google was a product of the CIA venture capital arm In Q Tel, anybody can look that up, and its search engine technology was conceived as a means for human analysts to solve the problem of being buried in infinitismale haystacks as (William Binney says) the NSA ramped up in the late 1990s and particularly after 9/11 with its ‘collect everything’ approach. Without the search engine tech the NSA’s vast pile would be useless both for legitimate and illegitimate spying. So let’s cut the crap about Google or Facebook being entirely innocent bystanders even if their lower to mid level people are pissed with the NSA. At the upper echelons Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State was right, the NSA has been in bed with the telecom industry from the 50s on!

Bikenap 72,

Have been discussing that in this thread. Apologies and warnings in advance. Some of my posts are relatively long.

https://crookedtimber.org/2014/01/13/the-repubs-wont-douthat/#comments

To me, it’s self-evidently the case.

9/11 simply would not have happened if the CIA hadn’t spent a decade building up a jihadist network against the soviet union and used Osama bin Laden in that process.

This had remarkably little to do with telecoms data retention.

Remarkably little, except it is the same damn incompetents doing it.

What is, exactly, the liberal critique of it?

On a certain technocratic level, yes, liberals love more and bigger data. The Obama Administration’s enthusiasm for digitizing medical records could be a prime example of technocratic liberal endorsement of Big Data. Just on the surface, people’s medical data seems a hell of a lot more personal than phone metadata (though if you throw in tracking the location of people carrying cellphones . . . )

But, medical recordkeeping isn’t funded in a black budget and the people, who catalog it don’t claim that they know secrets, which entitle them to murder people, imprison people or take money that doesn’t belong to them, or just generally run the foreign policy of the country.

“I do think one of the reasons why ioerror, Greenwald, and Co. tend to fall out so often and so badly with people who fundamentally agree with them is that they don’t get that everyone isn’t a libertarian.”

Greenwald doesn’t seem to be a libertarian, so I imagine he gets that some other people are also not libertarians. It seems to me that Greenwald is a civil libertarian, which is not the same thing at all.

r.gathman @79
9/11 simply would not have happened if the CIA hadn’t spent a decade building up a jihadist network against the soviet union and used Osama bin Laden in that process.
I’m somewhat skeptical of this statement. Yes, the CIA aided the mujahideen and their allies fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, but the impression I took away from Wright’s The Looming Tower is that OBL was not simply a creation of the CIA. The roots of al-Qaeda go back way before its formal est. in the late ’80s. I do think that U.S. foreign policy, more broadly, had a good deal to do with the emergence of jihadism in the al-Qaeda version but I don’t think the specific counterfactual “no CIA support for jihadist network -> no 9/11” is all that convincing. It might be the case but as counterfactuals go it’s not an open-and-shut one.

I am the author of the piece about cyberlibertarianism and the Left at Jacobin that @Plume mentions above, and while Wilentz’s piece may be over the top in some ways, I think that Henry dismisses it far too fast, in part by skipping over pretty large amounts of the evidence that Wilentz offers.

Consider just this:

1. Assange is an open libertarian and supports the Pauls in particular. If that does not give Left supporters of WikiLeaks at least some reason for pause, I don’t know what would. This is only the past summer: “‘[I] am a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the U.S. Congress on a number of issues,’ Assange said.” “The current libertarian strain of political thought in the Republican Party was the ‘the only hope’ for American electoral politics, Assange concluded.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/16/julian-assange-rand-paul_n_3768841.html

2. Greenwald became absolutely livid when some of us on the Left balked at partnering with the Pauls over his NSA revelations. Viewed from the perspective of coalitional politics, maybe that’s reasonable. But these same libertarians not four weeks prior to that had held the entire US hostage over the debt ceiling, threatening to do something that many very sane commentators, even conservatives, thought could irreparably damage the US in many different ways, and even threaten the political integrity of the nation. Further, those libertarians have a history of using Left coalitions only to their own advantage, and have held US politics hostage in general for all of Obama’s time in office. We can disagree over tactics, but it is appropriate to be screaming and shouting and turning red in the face at people on the Left who don’t want to join up with groups that have openly, recently, and overtly been working to tear the US apart into tiny pieces?

3. Both Pauls love Greenwald, have him on their websites and shows frequently, do not question him about his political orientation or that his work fits neatly into theirs (so do people like Amy Goodman, but my point is that both can’t be correct, can they?); Greenwald is livid about people questioning his relationship with Pierre Omidyar who has odd connections to Booz Allen and other aspects of the intelligence state; yet Greenwald’s statements that can be clearly construed as Left are few and far between, and have become fewer and fewer. On Twitter, he actually criticized Wilentz because former Facebook exec Chris Hughes owns the New Republic, while constantly jumping down the throats of–but never, to my mind, satisfactorily answering–anyone who tries to get him to explain why it’s good for him to be working on Omidyar’s dime.

4. Despite all the rhetoric, who did Snowden work for? Not the NSA; Booz Allen. Booz Allen does a lot of what it does regardless of government orders; it conducts its operations the world over, not just in the US; it is not just a corporate “bad actor” in the cribbed way Greenwald attacks Google etc. (much more to say about this), but a direct bad player, like hundreds of other transnational corporations, in the worldwide surveillance net Greenwald screams about. Now find me one single writing by Greenwald that talks about this in any way, or that would even suggest a way for democratic governments to get control of what Booz Allen and its ilk do. The writings of Tim Sharrock point this way, but Greenwald does not engage. Yet because Booz Allen is unconstrained by the oversight that the NSA has, its actions are even more obscured to us than are those of the NSA. Reporters like Jeremy Scahill have pointed this stuff out, yet are now strangely silent, and part of Omidyar’s new venture, all talking as if this is “bad US govt,” period.

I am sorry. Transnational corporate capital unencumbered by regulation, especially tied to military and intelligence, so typified by Booz Allen, and not the US government, is the single most destructive force in the world today, despite the benefits it also brings us. One finds virtually no critique of this kind of corporate power in Greenwald’s writing–this plus his working for and close association with libertarians is very concerning. Furthermore, we have the examples of Sharrock, the other NSA whistleblowers, and Barton Gellman, who present the same material or even better material without getting livid that the US gov is evil or that I won’t partner with the far right.

I don’t know what motivates Greenwald, but rather than getting so furious with those who raise questions about him, it would be easy enough for him to make far clearer how destructive corporate power is tied directly–not incidentally, directly–into the total surveillance he writes about. It would be easy for him to express clearly what he likes about democratic government. But these aren’t the passions that motivate him–they are something else.

the last I heard, it was deemed constitutional by a judge in New York

I believe there are conflicting decisions from two federal district court judges: one said it was unconstitutional, the other said it was ok. It’s presumably going to work its way up to the SupCt (unless it’s deemed moot b.c of the announced changes — depends on whether/how they’re implemented, I suppose). And as far as the usefulness of the data itself for anything (intelligence or otherwise), I’m not sure. I don’t know what kinds of inferences, if any, can be drawn from a humongous pile of phone numbers. But I’ll yield here to others who may know more about this.

LFC 01.20.14 at 1:15 pm @ 89:

‘@MaoChengJi83
What Ronan said @85 and BW @86.
Also, aren’t you aware that liberalism (in its contemp. meaning in US politics) is about more than a “robust and managed welfare state”? Liberals support the ideas of individual rights and privacy rights. …’

In my experience people calling themselves liberals with respect to mainstream politics have found individual and privacy rights secondary to ‘national security’, that is, limitless internal surveillance and policing, extensive war and imperialism abroad, and a comprehensive pursuit of corporate (rich folks’) interests in both realms. (They actually use the term ‘interests’ when killing people.) These practices go back a long way, to World War 2 at least. Once you decide that individual and privacy rights are subordinate to some other principle, you can make them as small as you like by enlarging that principle.

David Golumbia @92 Both Pauls love Greenwald… (so do people like Amy Goodman, but my point is that both can’t be correct, can they?)

Why can’t they?

You’re saying the problem is that Booz Allen is tarnishing the government for their misbehavior as a private contractor. Two people (Snowden, Omidyar)[1] who have some kind of connection with Booz Allen have been responsible for bad press about the NSA (are you suggesting Snowden was secretly working for Booz Allen?). Why would it be to Booz Allen’s advantage to paint gov’t mass surveillance of citizens in a bad light, and along with it show the complicity of so many huge corporations in that surveillance? Do you think these revelations have been good for Google?

You make a good point that it’s kind of a bad sign that people are only upset about all the corporations with massive amounts of data on people now that we know the government has the data too–as if corporations couldn’t misuse it themselves. But people are mad about it now, and they weren’t before, and I think people will continue to be more concerned about it, at least, even if it were ‘just’ the corporations keeping all that data & not the gov’t.

Really, a lot of your comment (repeated accusations that GG gets “furious” about people raising questions about him–some links, maybe?) sounds like CT, which I don’t say lightly.

1. You just say Omidyar has ‘connections’ with Booz Allen & give no specifics, but I’ll give this the benefit of the doubt.

Bruce Wilder: I’m heavily in favor of digitalized medical data myself, insofar as this can be done with serious privacy protection. I am myself disabled by an auto-immune disorder and know and love many people with chronic illnesses and injuries. Far too many of us have suffered significant harm because medical authorities tried treating us with inadequate info – records delayed in transmission, misunderstandings about what patients told them, whatever.

This is really common among folks as sick as us. There wasn’t a month in 2013 that nobody I know and like suffered multiple days’ pain and misery from this sort of lack of info. Every year at least one person I cared about dies from it.

Now it’s true that nobody force a doctor, nurse, or technician to read and understand the record of a patient’s diagnosis and treatment. But where it’s available immediately in a format the treaters regard as properly authoritative, this kind of misery goes way down. Way, way down. I like to think that being in favor of it doesn’t commit me to technocratic neoliberalism, or technocratic liberalism; I certainly regard a lot of what happens under the Big Data label as pernicious bullshit that a proper charter of rights would prohibit.

What is, exactly, the liberal critique of it?

My $.02: What LFC said @86, in part, but more: A belief in the power of anonymizing, firewalls, abstract rules, and so on, and a belief in the possibility of balancing conflicting values, that will permit appropriate helping (not “managing,” as LFC pointed out–it is for the individual’s good that he’s helped, not society’s) without violating anyone’s privacy. Then you’d probably have to add a willingness to believe conflicting values were in fact balanced, by deciding some groups just need to have less privacy than others, either for their own good, or because they’re less deserving.

I’d say that probably when liberals start to think of “society,” they go over either to neoconservatism, or to what I’d call the US version of neoliberalism (see a bunch of Ben Alpers’ posts on the S-USIH blog), or they don’t really mean “society,” instead they’re really thinking about groups of individuals and society has an instrumental meaning for them, helping individuals’ well-being. Is my guess.

Plume @58 Generally, they refuse to construe corporate power on the same order as governmental power; in close alignment with libertarianism, they implicitly suggest companies like Google and Facebook should be entirely unconstrained by governmental oversight.

This search for a hidden corporate agenda ignores a lot of the nuanced, interesting discussion that is going on. For example, I like Boing Boing a lot, it tends to be lighter reading, so maybe doesn’t receive the intellectual credibility of people who write non-fiction books about these issues, but it both promotes a lot of stuff this article associates with cyberlibertarianism (e.g. the EFF, making certain public records freely available) and clearly does not treat technology as a panacea, “portray government as the enemy of democracy rather than its realization,” or believe that “society’s problems can be solved by simply construing them as engineering and software problems”.

“WHO CARES what Greenwald’s or Obama’s or the Pope’s motives are? It is their actions that count and the facts that reveal them.”

I mostly agree with this. Not entirely–motives do matter to me to some degree, but I’ll worry about Greenwald’s motives and his own character flaws when he runs a drone assassination program or keeps track of my phone calls.

Furthermore yes both the Pauls and Amy Goodman can be correct because A) They are both extremist politically and do not appreciate nuance, and B) civil liberties are a part of both liberalism and social democracy and libertarianism. Is this really so hard?

This discussion is making clear the need for a political spectrum that is orthogonal to the Left-Right axis. At one end would be extreme individual humanism, and at the other would be institutional authoritarianism. The Left-Right spectrum is almost completely useless in dealing with political issues in the Internet era, yet because it is so deeply entrenched it blocks constructive discourse.

The greatest intellectual failure of our era is the inability to create radically new political structures appropriate to our greatly changed technological circumstances. We have lost the ability to think like founders and framers, and until we recover it we shall continue to stumble in political darkness.

David Golumbia 92,

Thanks for commenting here. I liked your article a great deal — and Jacobin overall — which is why I linked to it.

People also gloss over the fact that the Paul’s aren’t against state control. Just federal. They are fine with “big government” at the state level.

See Ron Paul’s odious legislation, with its Orwellian name of We the People, that seeks to enshrine the power of individual state governments over individual citizens who happen to live in them:

From the wikipedia entree:

We the People Act

We the People Act. H.R. 539

, 2009-01-14, originally H.R. 3893

, 2004-03-04. Forbids all federal courts from hearing cases on abortion, same-sex unions, sexual practices, and establishment of religion, unless such a case were a challenge to the Constitutionality of federal law. Makes federal court decisions on those subjects nonbinding as precedent in state courts,[58] and forbids federal courts from spending money to enforce their judgments.

Because it forbids federal courts from adjudicating “any claim involving the laws, regulations, or policies of any State or unit of local government relating to the free exercise or establishment of religion”, secularists have criticized the bill as removing federal remedy for allegations of state violation of religious freedom.[59] As an example of potential for violation,[citation needed] Article 1 of the Texas Constitution provides the (currently unenforced) requirement that office-holders “acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being”. The Democratic Underground online community published the holding that the bill would give state sexual-orientation laws special immunity.[60] The bill is comparable to other jurisdiction stripping legislation such as the Constitution Restoration Act.[61]

Paul told Congress, “The best guarantor of true liberty is decentralized political institutions, while the greatest threat to liberty is concentrated power.”[61] In April 2006 the Traditional Values Coalition encouraged its contacts to lobby their representatives for passage;[62] the bill was also endorsed by columnist Rev. Chuck Baldwin,[61] and cosponsors include Roscoe Bartlett, Tom Tancredo, Sam Johnson, Walter Jones, Jr., John A. Sullivan, John Duncan, Jr., and Ted Poe.

Corey Robin 111,

But from my reading, the people being tarred with one brush are those who do want to include a serious critique of the private sector. They’re the ones libertarians go after, often calling them “Stalinists” or, at least “Statists,” as if we were living in McCarthy’s 1950s.

And, what is easier to do these days? Get the media to deal with corporate power or government? Given the fact that the media are owned by corporate power, they’re all too eager to shift the topic to government — which, at this point in the American experiment, no one, left or right, seems to like. And with a lot of good reason.

To me, it’s damn healthy to have that skepticism about government. It’s about time. But not to match it with a healthy skepticism about the capitalist system, and to condemn all attempts to even talk about alternatives?

Actually, not just condemn. Completely shut out.

We have far more work to do in our focus on the private sector than the public. The emphasis is massively out of balance at present.

(Own and loved your book, The Reactionary Mind, btw)

LFC 01.20.14 at 4:16 pm

Barry @95
“Re “they can usually leak their successes” — they can leak some successes, prob. not all for fear of compromising things. Again, I don’t know. I have no part. interest in playing their defender on this thread though.”

They don’t need to leak all, or even most, and not even ‘many’; just some.

Again and again, commenters are diverted by searching for motives and prejudices, when the disclosed facts are sufficient to decide the issues.

Yeah, this. Once you’re liberated from judging Greenwald by his words and actions, you can talk about anything you want to. And people do.

It’s always interesting to me how rarely these discussions of Greenwald rely on links to his work. He’s a very clear and careful writer, and his critics have a hard time making his words mean what they want them to mean. Links are pointless anyway, because it’s not what he’s saying that matters, it’s what he really means.

I think he means what he says.

political football 119,

My experience reading GG on Salon was that he was really, really into questioning motives as well. And that was the general atmosphere amongst his clique of commenters. GG wasn’t nearly as bad as his clique. But he did set the tone.

(Of course, he did a lot of great work on top of that. I admire his tenaciousness in the face of a great deal of pushback from the powers that be. But he is not without his faults.)

I will try to find some links to demonstrate this. He’s no longer there, of course, but they should still be available.

“and I’m solidly also pro-privacy.”

Everybody is pro-privacy, like everybody is against Saddam Hussein; I don’t think this is the issue. But some are more fond of centralized technocratic solutions than the others.

The NSA wants to keep your phone records because they can’t tell today if 5 years from now you’ll become a suspect, a ‘person of interest’, or whatever they call it. You watch The Wire and you sympathize with the special task cops, of course, and you feel their frustration when their every attempt to catch the bad guys is defeated by one bureaucratic red tape or another. So here, when someone commits a crime, the NSA will be able to trace that person’s phone calls for years back and investigate the connections, the network. It sounds quite reasonable.

The objection, I think, is of a libertarian nature: you can’t trust them. Once they have this information, for sure they’ll use it for something else (as Donald suggested). But the ideological mistrust of the government is not a typical liberal trait; in fact, it’s usually actively discouraged and mocked. So, what gives? Is this just about the way this program is run (as Bruce suggested)? Can it be modified and become acceptable and desirable?

Simon 121,

It’s not a contradiction if you don’t put business ownership at the top of the heap, and privilege their wishes above all others, as the right does. At the individual level, it is both a civil right and a civil liberty to be able to, say, sit at any lunch counter and order breakfast. It’s only a violation of civil liberties from the point of view of a (bigoted) business owner. And since he or she has decided to open up to the public, he or she no longer gets to narrow their field of association, because they don’t get to determine the meaning of “the public.”

They’ve given up their rights of limited association by opening up their business (public) doors to all and sundry. They have no right to open up their doors to just X or Y or Z.

Their homes? That’s an entirely different matter, and that goes back to the individual citizen level again. Leftists support that distinction.

Plume 01.20.14 at 4:20 pm @ 114:

‘… To me, it’s damn healthy to have that skepticism about government. It’s about time. But not to match it with a healthy skepticism about the capitalist system, and to condemn all attempts to even talk about alternatives? Actually, not just condemn. Completely shut out. We have far more work to do in our focus on the private sector than the public. The emphasis is massively out of balance at present.’

I don’t see the great division. Where is it?

@ Plume 124: What about the customers? They are not business owners and their freedom of association is also being violated by forcing to sit with people they don’t like. I feel queasy stating this position, but I think that pretending that there is a clear distinction is wrong.

Anarcissie 125,

The dialogue is decidedly focused on government abuse and malfeasance. It rarely includes the capitalist system, which is the major reason for that abuse and malfeasance. Who, exactly, “corrupts” whom? Government officials and pols, when and if it happens, are generally led astray and into abuse by and for the rich, on behalf of corporate power, the private sector wealthy — for their donors, at least. That private sector pulls government strings. The government is its puppet and fall guy.

To me, it makes no sense to concentrate on the puppets. Go after the puppet masters, cut the strings, and the puppets fall to the ground, useless, alone, powerless.

Of course, we need to make sure new puppet masters don’t come online, and deal with government officials and pols who are themselves private sector puppet masters — like Art Pope. But I see a definite imbalance in the targeting.

Simon 127,

Individual customers don’t get to decide what constitutes “the public,” either. When they step out into public space, they, too, are giving up their “rights” of association in a certain sense. They don’t get to control who exists inside that public space, which is open to all citizens. As in, everyone.

It’s not rocket science.

David Golumbia 130,

Well said. That the private sector is at least as big a problem as government, and at least as big an obstacle in the way of real democracy.

The vast majority of our national conversation does not recognize this. And the media, owned by the corporate powers that be, all but refuses to allow the discussion.

Corey Robin,

This is very well put. I should have included “tension” as well above.

There is a tension (I’m not sure about contradiction). Nothing in what I’ve written here or elsewhere pretends that there isn’t. But tensions are an unexceptionable part of politics. I don’t see anything inconsistent in acknowledging that those tensions are there and have to be negotiated, AND saying that we should embrace both the defense of civil liberties AND the democratic project of toppling repressive and autocratic forms of private power. Historically, those two projects have gone hand in hand: it wasn’t the defenders of private businesses against labor unions who created the ACLU, I can assure you.

Again, the right almost always champions private property in the form of business ownership. They don’t seem to ever get the distinction between one’s home and a business open to the public. And they generally refuse to acknowledge that business owners don’t get to decide what constitutes that public. The public, by definition, is everyone. Business owners don’t have the “right” to limit that definition in practice. In their own minds? Certainly. But they can’t act to limit that definition.

Plume 01.20.14 at 5:26 pm @ 129 — Yes, what I’m saying is that I’m not seeing this division. Governments, corporations, institutions of various other kinds (academic, religious, and so on), are parts of the state and instruments of the ruling class. That is why there are so many revolving doors and channels between them. It’s not that governmental and ‘private’ corporate surveillance are both bad; it’s that they are two faces of the same thing.

But the ideological mistrust of the government is not a typical neo-liberal trait; in fact, it’s usually actively discouraged and mocked.

FTFY. (Thanks Mao, I’ve never used that acronym before.) Because since Watergate and Iran-Contra liberals have all fallen in line behind government and mocked anybody who failed to defend it?

Anarcissie @ 105: Just as no strategy survives contact with the enemy, no political philosophy entirely survives contact with the exercise of political power. Stevenson was about as honorable as a politician can afford to be, and he was lied to about both the Bay of Pigs and the Gulf of Tonkin. Sue me for his lack of perfection, or find me a better.

My point was that a healthy respect for privacy and support of standard liberal positions are not contradictory.

I think Golumbia nails it in 130. It isn’t that Greenwald doesn’t address Golumbia’s concerns. Indeed, as Golumbia acknowledges, not only has Greenwald addressed those concerns sympathetically, but has gone much further and actually facilitated the publication of reams of information that exposes the problems that concern Golumbia.

Greenwald is offensive because no matter how much he exposes the corporate and government surveillance state, he doesn’t do it with Golumbia’s emphasis.

I would appreciate it if your future coverage emphasized this in detail and discussed it at least with the vigor you apply to the government.

This is where you end up when you demand purity. Snowden has some poorly thought-through opinions, so it’s wrong for Greenwald to work with him. Greenwald, whose opinions are tough to argue with, is a problem because his tone or his emphasis is wrong.

I didn’t think there was much promise in collaborating with the Paul types, largely for reasons that are being rehearsed in this thread. In my defense, I will say that I held this opinion some years ago, before Snowden and Assange et al became such crucial parts of the international debate. I can’t imagine an excuse is for holding that opinion nowadays.

Anarcissie 137,

Apologies. I misread you, and agree with what you’re saying in your post.

“Everybody is pro-privacy, like everybody is against Saddam Hussein”
You know I wish this was true but I know a large number of people who have no problem at all with government surveillance and for whom privacy is not a concern at all.

Now I find that mentality weird but there you go.

bianca, “Because since Watergate and Iran-Contra liberals have all fallen in line behind government and mocked anybody who failed to defend it?”

Well, it is my impression that while it’s okay to criticize certain specific government actions, general mistrust is off-limits. Watergate and Iran-Contra were crimes perpetrated by corrupt individuals, and the solution is to be vigilant, to elect and appoint right-minded and principled candidates, and then everything will be great.

That’s why I’m asking if the program itself is unacceptable, or the only concern is the way it’s been handled.

This reminds me of that seminar on The Priority of Democracy from last year, and the idea that democracy is the second-order system for choosing a first-order decision-making mechanism. Libertarians and leftists disagree very strongly on their preferred first-order system. But some of both groups see the surveillance state as a threat to the second-order system, so they cooperate with each other in fighting it.

As a liberal it’s one of my core beliefs that Power should have to justify itself to the rest of us rather than the other way around. Given that, asymmetry of information is always going to be suspect. The problem is not (just) that the NSA is so secretive in what it does with this information, or (just) that government surveillance is accompanied by indefinite detention and drones. It’s that democracy is trouble if the government (or any corporation or other bureaucratic hierarchy) is better at monitoring the people than the people are at monitoring them. Such a government can “nudge” our behaviors and beliefs in the direction it prefers without the rest of us even being aware of it.

I think it is clear and beyond dispute and evident in the information you have released, but not in your own writing about that information, that the PRIVATE military-intelligence corporate world, including worldwide surveillance providers like Booz Allen (which I pick for Snowden’s having worked for them, not re: Omidyar) are every bit as serious a problem for freedom as is surveillance directly conducted by governments, and by dint of being formally outside of oversight, may be even more worrisome.

I’m surprised that this has gone unremarked-on, but here goes: the distinction between private actors like Booz Allen and public actors like the NSA are, at best, seriously fuzzy. There’s a great symbiotic relationship between these entities; indeed, if there weren’t, we wouldn’t even have the Snowden leaks. Trying to isolate the problem into little boxes isn’t going to produce anything useful, because to a large extent, military contractors and, well, the military operate in implicit if not always explicit synchronicity. That’s why the concept of the “national security state” exists in the first place, and it’s surely broad enough to encompass not just the NSA but all the contractors feeding at the public trough. Whether one “focuses” on this, that, or the other aspect of the problem, one should always keep in mind that these are just facets of a single complex system, not isolable independent actors.

MG 150,

Also, people focus more on gov’t wrongs because
can have an impact by voting. Much of private
industry wrongs are hidden and one has little direct influence.

This is true, and it’s why we should move the private sector into the democratic sphere. Democratize it. All of it. The means of production should be held, owned and controlled in common by the people. All of us. Not just through our reps, or political parties, but in actuality and legally, under constitutional writ.

Above and beyond those parties. Regardless of them. Despite them. A right to a commons that transcends and trumps the vagaries of politics — in perpetuity.

Consumatopia 156,

I think it’s difficult to talk about American libertarianism without a good degree of myth-making thrown in. The version generally discussed here isn’t the one with deep historical roots. That would be left-libertarianism, which goes back to Marx and prior to.

The American version (which ignores history and people like Chomsky and his leftist version of said), has rather dicey roots. Some would say it’s been largely astroturfed, as discussed here:

http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda

An excerpt:

Every couple of years, mainstream media hacks pretend to have just discovered libertarianism as some sort of radical, new and dynamic force in American politics. It’s a rehash that goes back decades, and hacks love it because it’s easy to write, and because it’s such a non-threatening “radical” politics (unlike radical left politics, which threatens the rich). The latest version involves a summer-long pundit debate in the pages of the New York Times, Reason magazine and elsewhere over so-called “libertarian populism.” It doesn’t really matter whose arguments prevail, so long as no one questions where libertarianism came from or why we’re defining libertarianism as anything but a big business public relations campaign, the winner in this debate is Libertarianism.

Pull up libertarianism’s floorboards, look beneath the surface into the big business PR campaign’s early years, and there you’ll start to get a sense of its purpose, its funders, and the PR hucksters who brought the peculiar political strain of American libertarianism into being — beginning with the libertarian movement’s founding father, Milton Friedman. Back in 1950, the House of Representatives held hearings on illegal lobbying activities and exposed both Friedman and the earliest libertarian think-tank outfit as a front for business lobbyists. Those hearings have been largely forgotten, in part because we’re too busy arguing over the finer points of “libertarian populism.”

Consumatopia: “Liberals want accountable, not necessarily small, government.”

I’m not even sure what ‘accountable’ means in general, in this context (elections?), but never mind. What does it mean for this particular program? Would this program be okay with a better oversight? With a congressional committee? FISA warrants for querying the database?

SoU 01.20.14 at 8:38 pm @ 161: ‘helping any who would exacerbate and then brush under the rug the challenges of being poor in america is, in my view, unconscionable’

There are some other fairly serious issues, like imperialism, war, militarism, and totalitarian surveillance and police power. Do you think the Bismarckian deal is worth setting them aside?

Anarcissie 162,

All of that is true. But what is so frustrating to me is that some on the left believe they have to go outside the left to find anti-imperialist, antiwar, anti-surveillance, anti-drug-war movements and champions. They don’t. Hell, the left invented those movements.

And since people like Ron Paul and his son carry truly odious baggage and views, and have truly disgusting policy ideas for the most part, why bother with them at all? Those proverbial stopped clocks get things right twice a day, but it’s better to find good, working clocks instead.

Ron Paul, for instance, spent two decades trying to kill UNICEF and all aid to impoverished kids around the world. That, alone, is enough for me to despise him, and he adds so much more on top of that. He tried his damndest to block undocumented workers from using emergency room services, and pushed to build a 700 mile long fence on the Mexican border. Of course, he did no such thing for our border with Canada. Just the one with Mexico. And, despite his reputation for “freedom and liberty,” and his supposed opposition to government coercion, he pushed a bill that would force university campuses to allow military recruiters on campus, despite their explicit objections.

He’s a phony. Always was. And he son is even worse.

“I’m not even sure what ‘accountable’ means in general”

No, stop right there. You and Wilentz are defining liberalism in a deeply illiberal way–as blind trust in authority. Liberalism is more than the welfare state. When we talk about a “liberal” faction in Egypt, for example, that has basically nothing to do with the welfare state, and everything to do with broader values like democracy, secularism, the rule of law, free speech, etc. Both liberals and libertarians recognize that the government is vulnerable to corruption and abuse of power. The libertarian solution is to shrink the government. The liberal solution is to enable to people to challenge and fix it. If you disagree with that, that’s fine, but that makes you an anti-liberal, not me.

Also, Paul, on his website, when he was running for prez, made certain to champion a strong military. He’s not against militarism at all, really. If he were, he’d call for steep cuts to the Defense budget. We could easily do without at least 75% of it, for starters. Move that instead to a new Green Complex, etc. But Paul doesn’t believe in preventing pollution or programs for sustainable developments, renewables, etc.

His perverse vision says let the pollution happen, then sue the perps afterward.

Also, one thing I noticed when trying to talk with the hordes of Paul bots who flocked to GG’s blog. They seem to agree that politicians are scum, and lie, and never make good on their campaign promises. Except when it comes to their messiah. He, alone, of all the politicians in history, supposedly would be the first.

American history is rife with presidents who change dramatically, once they hold power in their hands. They all do. There have not been any exceptions to that. But his bots truly believe he’s the last honest man.

Pleez.

Long comment eaten, damn. Short version: I think Greenwald comes off well in this argument. Those defending the NSA/the powers that be have general made poor arguments, and tend toward ad hom attacks on Greenwald, Snowden or both. It’s a bit like back in ’03 when if you were against the Iraq war you hated America and were “rooting for failure” and whatnot. It was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now.

That said, not everything revealed by leakers has me tearing my hair out (e.g. spying on foreign leaders, even if they’re allies. Come on. Not fainting couch material, that).

“when you choose the Pauls, rather than liberal senators with similar views on privacy (there are many)”. Name them. Name the Democratic senators who will stand up to Sen (D) Feinstein, Obama, and the security state Clintons. The reason he has to work with the Pauls is there are about four Democrats and three Republicans who will focus on these issues. That is about seven people. It isn’t as if there is a whole large party apparatus that is willing to lay down the law on real privacy concerns. If you can convince the Democratic Party to take it seriously, THEN, you can criticize using the Pauls.

@165 “The best we can do is settle for something like Denmark ”

Denmark, and the other countries with similar arrangements, did not get to where they are today through people thinking according to logic like your own. i don’t know the danish case specifically, but i know that in Sweden that during the crucial debates over the foundations of the social democratic state, people on the other side of the issue were leveraging arguments like yours against the very political-economic arrangements you are supporting.

there are good reasons why we should be distrustful of parecon type arrangements that plume frequently champions here. but these are not the reasons you give. your arguments have a status quo bias and repeat the classic conservative tactic of charging all attempts to better the world as futile. in fact, you could probably find conservatives saying something like “your proposed solution has never worked, will never work and whenever it’s been tried has caused just as much suffering” in the face of every major social change in the history of the modern world.

.. and I would have thought ‘the Pauls’ positives are pretty obvious. They have an ideologically committed base, strong media presence, weak temperaments not prone to thoughtfullness which can be utilised to make a lot of noise/simplistic arguments, plenty of money (independently – i think) for campaigns..etc
If you were politically active on this topic and *didnt* believe much could be done through normal political channels, I dont see why you wouldnt use the Pauls.

Consumatopia, “The liberal solution is to enable to [the?] people to challenge and fix it.”

This doesn’t sound like a solution, it sounds more like a slogan. That is why I’m curious about this particular situation: would the NSA database be acceptable, from the liberal POV, with some additional oversight, like a congressional committee? But you won’t answer; instead you tell me that my inquiry makes me anti-liberal. Fine, but could you answer anyway, please.

Well, there obviously is no such thing as *the* ‘liberal POV’ so you’d have a range of opinions from scrap, to reform, to more oversight, to do nothing, to expand..

SoU 01.20.14 at 9:15 pm @ 163 — I don’t think I’m understanding what you’re recommending. Let’s take a hypothetical: Suppose Mr. Obama wants Congressional authorization to embark on yet another military adventure in the Middle East. The ‘libertarians’ oppose his plan. Liberals and leftists should (1) support the plan because the libertarians oppose it? (2) oppose it because they don’t like it, but not talk libertarians because they’re bad? (3) ally themselves with the libertarians to oppose this particular war? What?

As far as the importance of things goes, I am most strongly opposed to killing even a single innocent person, even if he or she is a foreigner. I realize this takes me outside the realm of normal American political discourse, but I’m stuck with it.

@ Plume. You have to realize that most people who read Albert’s Parecon and similar works do not see libertation from economic apartheid but a bureaucratic monstrosity and endless tedium over “balanced job complexes” and regional planning. Most American voters don’t want it: Read the book “Stealth Democracy” If worker owned firms can take off that would be good but it will still be within the context of a market system.

Of course if we’re talking about a broad term like “liberal”, we can’t get any more detail than a “slogan”. When you say “In fact, from the liberal POV, the more data is provided to the experts managing society, the better”, that’s sounds like as much of a slogan as anything I said. The only problem is that your “liberal” slogan happens to be anti-liberal. It’s blind faith in authority.

You can make a liberal defense of a particular database employed for particular ends. That’s not what I’m arguing here, and I won’t discuss that any further because it has no relevance to any point I’m making, and answering any question from Mao Cheng Ji is pointless. I’m only pointing out the error in the way you defined liberalism because Wilentz (and possibly Golumbia) likely made the same error.

Simon 184,

My suggested system is different from Parecon in most respects. I’ve sited it in the past to show that others have alternatives and my hypothetical doesn’t come out of thin air, etc.

The whole point of my alternative is to simplify life, open it up to greater freedoms, eliminate power centers, including bureaucracies and make things flow with greater ease. The whole point is to get rid of the artificially manufactured hustle and bustle of modern life to the extent possible, not just replace one set of (capitalist) bureaucracies with another (ecosocialist) set.

Another major, major point is to get rid of classes altogether to the degree possible over time. Again, we won’t replace one ruling class with another. The goal is to get rid of all classes.

Sebastion H,

Which is one of the reasons we eliminate all political parties in my hypothetical.

Might as just stipulate there’s a big “I WIN” button, too.

@182.
the obvious response is to oppose the war from a leftist angle, allying with the many other leftist who would oppose such a war and build that coalition on your own terms. we don;t need libertarian political philosophy in order to argue that imperialist war is bad, so there is really nothing to be gained by joining that movement with all of its odious baggage.

also – through your hypothetical you are implying links between support for NSA surveillance and support for imperialist war which are very tenuous and quite frankly i do not think exist for many lawmakers. while in your mind they may be aspects of the same underlying issue, this is not generally the case.

Sebastian H: If there is one common theme explaining why US politics is so screwed up, it is because many of the political actors elevate Party over principle.

The problem is the Parties rest on Money, and not mass membership organization, so the general or public interest is always distorted at best. Money can buy elections from a largely disengaged public. But, even if there was effective mass-organization, civil liberties issues would be tricky, because the political attitudes of authoritarian followers do not usually find civil liberties legible; they have to be translated.

A narrow and supremely wealthy oligarchy can like a legal civil liberties, which mimics the chartered privileges of a feudal elite, and without mass politics, that’s what will surely emerge.

Bruce Wilder 195,

I, too, write lengthy posts, all too subject to TLDNR.

But 195 seems especially lengthy. Can you boil it down for mobile users?

Plume 197,

I bet the main reason why GG doesn’t call himself one is because, like most people, he’s not familiar with the term or its history. His political views are comparable to Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, two other libertarian socialists.

John Drinkwater 199,

I’m a socialist. Proudly so. And I read my share of GG when he was at Salon and even before that, when he had his own independent blog. Never did I get the impression that he was a socialist like me, and never did he refer to himself as a socialist.

And, sorry, but it’s patently false to suggest Greenwald attacks business as often or with as much passion as he does government. You’re waaay off about that.

But, since he’s responded here already, hopefully he comes back and settles this. Again, I would be totally and completely shocked if he called himself a socialist of any kind. Libertarian, ecosocialist (basically, my camp) or any other kind.

Plume 202,

I’m also a socialist. But not sure how that settles anything.

You didn’t answer my question: why would a non-socialist accept invitations to be the keynote speaker at socialist conventions? Just as importantly, why would socialists invite a non-socialist to be their keynote speaker?

Even if GG himself avoids the term, there must be a significant overlap of positions, otherwise socialists wouldn’t be ‘confused’ into thinking he was one of us.

I consider him a social-democrat, very much like Chris Hayes and the editors of Jacobin. It is often very difficult to see the difference between moderate socialists of this kind and left-liberals, which is why Bernie Sanders is often confused as a left-liberal and not socialist.

The real truth is that Glenn Greenwald knows nothing about domestic policy and economic issues and doesn’t pretend to as far as I’m aware/

actually, roger – looking back over it he does argue (afaict)that it led indirectly to Al Qaeda’s rise. Although I can’t really remember the argument tbh. I do agree with LFC though that the initial argument above was a little overdetermined

@ r. gathman 201

I’ll have to let you and ronan argue over Ghost Wars b.c I haven’t read it. I have notes on Looming Tower but I haven’t had time to check them — it does cover a lot of ground but it’s quite well researched. So this is sort of a cop-out response, sorry. I do agree on the other point that the Bush people were not focusing on the possible al-Qaeda activity closely. The immediate failure was the CIA-FBI breakdown in communication but clearly there were other failures going to the top of the Bush admin natl. security apparatus. Rice and Rumsfeld have both published memoirs, and so have Cheney and Bush himself I guess. I’ve glanced at Rumsfeld’s but I didn’t get to the 9/11 part. I assume none of them really takes responsibility for basic errors of (lack of) attention, etc.

..just to add and Ill leave it there, roger, I really wasnt trying to be a pedant, I just dont like these arguments (personally)about missed opportunities or easily resolvable, very specific causes for attacks(such as 9/11) .. as it lends too much credence to the risk aversion and strategic thinking (that these are events that can be prevented with more competent intelligence agencies etc) that drives the expansion of national security agencies. If you see what i mean

@ Plume. He is associated with Cato on issues that matter to libertarians and social democrats and liberals all. Who cares? That he defended a white supremacists is disturbing but also kind of admirable considering that he is Jewish. I’m afraid to be around those people.

@214
“He is associated with Cato on issues that matter to libertarians and social democrats and liberals all. Who cares?”

i care. i personally find the CATO institute a greater threat to the well-being of the average american than i find the NSA/national security apparatus, which i absolutely deplore.

since when did ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ become a principle of the left? i mean, i understand the idea of ‘political strategy’ and all that, but don;t forget that your collaborators on the right are making similar calculations, evaluating the ends and means according to their own abhorrent political objectives. to think that we can use them, without a corresponding threat of us being used in the process, is imho very naive.

It is difficult to maintain even a modest historical perspective on the blunders of the US intelligence apparatus, but the spectacle of a low-level technical employee walking away with most of the secret documents pertaining to spying is not their greatest embarrassment.

The cases of double agents Aldrich Ames (arrested 1994) and Robert Hanssen (arrested 2001) revealed that a pair of mediocre grifters operated for years peddling secrets from inside the elite US spy agencies. Add to this the decades long blunder of over-estimating Soviet military capabilities and utterly failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union and you have a picture of bloated and grossly incompetent bureaucracies incapable of reform.

The entire US national intelligence apparatus should be disestablished and rebuilt along rational lines. Edward Snowden is not the problem; he is just another diagnostic confirmation of a diseased bureaucracy. The criticisms of Glenn Greenwald for lack of ideological purity are ludicrous placed against the staggering incompetence of the NSA/CIA.

SoU 216,

But he’s not associated with Cato. He did one report for them years ago, arguing for the legalization of drugs. That hardly amounts to some imaginary grand strategy of calculated political re-alignment on his part.

In using the term, authoritarian follower, I’m referencing the work of the Canadian psychologist, Bob Altemeyer on conceptualizing the political psychology and attitudes of what he called, “right-wing authoritarian followers”, where “right-wing” is a highly misleading technical term.

Straightwood 217

The whole point of “classification” as it was originally devised was to compartmentalize critical technical knowledge, as a way of protecting secrets. Obviously, there’s very little compartmentalization going on, or low-level grunts like Manning or Snowden couldn’t download the whole shebang onto a thumbdrive. As Peter T observed, this is just another symptom of top management having absolutely no idea how anything works.

And, professional pundits, like Wilentz, or outlets like TNR, not being able to wrap their tiny minds around it is just another aspect of the same devolution.

SoU @ 222

Magna Carta was written for the Barons. Bush, Jr. jettisoning that is probably something the oligarchs could be persuaded to undo. You do what you can do. ;-)

At this point in the unfolding saga, it matters not a whit what the motiviation for Snowden (et al.) to do what they did. Wilentz seems to believe they were playing for the wrong team, and that this discredits the results. No. The results (NSA overreach, described in their own briefings, is creating the conditions under which a totalitarian system could be erected) are important enough that red/blue, left-right, Obama-hater/Obama-fan fades into the background.

I’m not surprised that the National Security State is going after them with all guns firing, but Sean Wilentz? Really? Did he at least get Wales?

SoU 222 at 12:10 am-
if no one among the legal profession decided to take up their case, that would be a clear message from civil society…
That no one among the legal profession was brave enough to go against the prevailing…
–
That all the lawyers in town were too scared for their lives and the lives of their loved ones to risk being exposed to the…
–
That nowhere in the land was there anyone in the legal profession who still believed in the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.

@220

On target and close to what Christopher Lasch was saying in “Revolt of the Elites.” It also explains the sharp class distinction between Ellsberg and Manning/Snowden. Alienation from the masses has made yuppie liberals politically impotent and ideologically confused. However, I believe the pending immiseration of America’s middle class will lead to an explosive anti-plutocratic reaction, of which Occupy was just a faint precursor.

Bruce @225
sorry but i am not sure i follow ?

@David Golumbia.

I agree that it’s not just about government intelligence agencies, but also corporations.

It might be useful to compare the British Telecom “Phorm” scandal, where — as far as we know — the interception was done for purely commercial reasons, with no prompting from the government. In that case, there were strong calls for existing wiretap/fraud laws to be enforced — basically, that people in BT’s management should go to prison for it.

There’s a substantial overlap between the people who were complaining about Phorm and the people who are complaining about the NSA spying as revealed by Snowden. If — purely hypothetically — the current NSA scandal had been done by a commercial company acting alone, e.g. if RSA Data Security Inc. had infiltrated the NIST standards committee, got a flawed algorithm into the standard, implemented it in their product, and then used the vulnerability to break into their customers’ computer systems — then I expect we would now be hearing strong calls for their management to be convicted of a long list of criminal charges. But it would appear that many of the parts of this that would have been seriously criminal if a corporation had done them, were instead done by government employees, with possibly some kind of judicial authorization. Which leads us to some combination of wanting a criminal investigation of the government employees involved, or raising it to a political (rather than criminal) matter if the legislature and judiciary had made it legal. i.e. if this was legal, congress should not have passed the laws that made it legal, and “vote the bums out” presents itself as the remedy.

@236
1) you have no idea who i am, nor what i have done, am doing, or will do. don’t pretend you do, and don’t attack my credibility or dedication to these issues without any knowledge of what you are talking. its very bad form and frankly i find it insulting.

2) the CATO institute is a vehicle and transmission belt for wealthy oligarchs to influence the political process. they might be talking about police brutality, but if you think that they are in some way working toward social justice broadly as the average leftist understands that term then i think you have been duped. its not that they are nazis or the devil, but instead that the organization itself is an ongoing corruption of our political dialogue and Glenn speaking alongside them lends them credibility which i believe any progressive would be uncomfortable with. did MLK hold back on his criticisms of LBJ regarding Vietnam because of the Great Society and Civil Rights work the latter did? no – no he did not.

3) your last paragraph does nothing to address the points i made above about the transferrability of political capital in today’s media dominated political environment. he is the leader of a national political movement, and his successes can translate into downstream successes for his ideological allies when he goes out and whips up support for their campaigns. Paul has a long term political vision – he is a political force and representative of a movement that very well could be a significant force in american politics. letting him take the lead on this issue, instead of making it clear that proper leftists oppose the national security state, is playing into his long term political vision which DOES entail massive curtailments of the welfare state, labor policy, racial progress, and a variety of other hard one achievements of the left. CATO is similar in that they are an advocacy organization with a broad reaching political program.

4) support is fungible, cross apply everything Bruce and others were saying regarding the need for informational mediators/trust and the authoritarian elements of political followings in defense of this position.

O

K

Sebastian H@236 – “Their work on police brutality and police oriented civil rights problems in general, and hiring and promoting Radley Balko in particular has probably done more for the progress of social justice than” blah blah blah

This line of horseshit – i’ve seen it used before, it seems to be a trope of internet ideological argumentation – reminds me of the “cute but not special” exchange in “Boyz n the hood”. It’s as if there were no civic organisations attending to these issues from the left side of the spectrum from well before – like decades before – CATO & Balko came along.

. . . we could just resort to tricking people, but I think we’d be handily outgunned. They have more organization, more resources, and a more homogenous political base.

I think we are already heavily outgunned, but I don’t think the plutocracy can ever claim an homogenous political base, short of instituting an hereditary House of Lords. The Really Richâ„¢ could never win an election by themselves — they are never numerous enough. So, they always have to tack on other groups, with which they have little enough in common; in short, they have to trick some people, and the tricks can be costly.

From a purely partisan viewpoint of Rs v Ds, mobilizing the masses is likely to set off a costly arms race, with significant risks, and so, is something to be avoided. From a Left ideological standpoint, though there are significant risks, the arms race would be desirable, because it would shift both Parties toward greater responsiveness to the masses.

At the risk of triggering the dread Obama derangement syndrome, I would point out that Obama generally tries pretty hard to have the option of mass support, while also avoiding having to mobilize that latent mass support, and in the last election, his very competent machinery managed a remarkably small margin of victory. If you followed Nate Silver’s commentary, you know that, though the margin was small — tiny, even, by historical standards — it was so rock-stable as to be close to risk-free, and very competently managed from day-to-day. The first debate performance was one of the few slips, and the campaign’s response in correction was swift and sure. Up against the poster-child for Vampire Capitalism — surely, the most-target rich environment nominated by the Republican Party since Herbert Hoover in 1932 — Obama avoided having to use much populist rhetoric or trot out populist policy proposals. In the end, the President was able to actually reduce the increase in the minimum wage he called for in his SoU in 2013 compared to 2009 — a nice symbolic marker of his political accomplishment.

Obama had potential mass support and the basic skeletal campaign machinery to mobilize it, but it remained a latent threat to plutocratic backers, who might dream of actually electing a pure plutocrat like Romney. Obama never had to unleash either rhetoric or policy options of a populist or seriously reformist nature, for which his more politically savvy plutocratic backers are no doubt grateful.

In early 20th century politics, everyone was mobilized in political competition. That’s what totalitarianism was — an escalation of competing mass membership movements, orchestrated through novel tools of of mass communication used for mass propaganda. Now, the game is to demoralize and demobilize everyone — an inverted totalitarianism (see Wolin) of political passivity and hopelessness, also orchestrated by tools of mass communication used for mass propaganda.

Paul’s popularity is not concentrated within the youth except for Conor Friedersdorf. It is concentrated within far right tea partiers. Wyden and other dems can pick up the movement easily without the anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-state social conservative baggage in all forms baggage that Paul has,

Ronan @ 224: “just another symptom of top management having absolutely no idea how anything works.”

Not really like the link, interesting as it is. That makes it a technical problem, one of the systems being too complex. It is, I think, more a social one. Complexity beyond the grasp of any single mind has been with us a long time. If you think about it, a Roman consul, for example, could hardly hope to be across the myriad technologies, modes of organisation, local economies etc that all were vital components of the social machine he could direct. But it was organised in such a way that information about the parts could be sent upwards, synthesised and balanced against competing resources and interests, well enough (most of the time) to avoid serious mistakes and keep the whole lurching onwards.

What we increasingly have is an elite which is not interested in how the machine works; in fact one whose interests themselves lie not with making it work better, but in cannibalising the parts. As one example, if they actually understood the scientists, they would be moving heaven and earth to avert climate change. For, after all, they live here too. Their failure is not a measure of their self-interest; it’s a measure of their disconnection and ignorance.

What the NSA did is not sensible intelligence – it’s intelligence as practiced by blinkered middle managers devoid of serious oversight.

@246 – “Historically, major revolutions have usually been occasioned more by some combination of elite overreach and institutional collapse than by rebellion. I would think it a pretty good bet that political violence in the U.S. will rise steadily and dramatically over the next half-dozen years”

and this is why we have seen the massive explosion in the reach and subsidy for the carceral state in the recent past.
im just not sure i see the violence on the horizon – at least not of the political kind. general anti-social violence (which of course generally has political economic roots but shhhh the baby is sleeping!) on the rise? yeah, i expect a lot of that. but when it comes to people at barricades? how does such a movement get off the ground in the present context of NSA surveillance and a militarized police force?
in my opinion – the best option is economic action: which is disruptive like outright violence, but not as easily warped into ‘terrorism’ (etc) by the media & police outfits.

@ Simon 245
i know far too many well-educated, otherwise left-wing types who have sympathies for Rand Paul to be as optimistic about this as you, but i guess we shall see

The huge culling of the Federal Work Force and Obama’s internal “War on Leakers” (watch for unusual behavior in your co-workers and report such to your superiors…Jeez) indicates to me that Power is trying to rule its internal bureaucracy by fear as they are trying to control the labor force by fear. This is pretty desperate and I am not sure why they think it work.

What will happen is indicated by the recent scandal about the officers in charge of the missiles.

The surveillance and control state for all its technology, still needs a dedicated, alert, and enthusiastic workforce. What we are going to get pretty quickly is not a flood of leakers or internal saboteurs but inside those caverns of recording machines and video screens a security workforce that is watching the Superbowl instead of doing their jobs.
The apparatchiks will cease to give a damn.

And that is when and how a State collapses.

John

GG has written papers for CATO, spoken at their events, and been cited in the press as a scholar from their organization. i mean, sure, he doesn’t run the outfit, but when they are hosting a paper with his name on it or invite him to speak at one of their conferences i don’t think its a stretch to say that they were cooperating? are you seriously going to be so obtuse about this?
wrt the Pauls – he has a number of times defended Rand Paul in print and made clear he sees a political alliance with Paul as advantageous and desirable for people who have sympathies to his cause.

but as i’ve told you already, im not really talking about GG here – he is a private citizen who is free to do whatever he wants and ally with whomever he will. i still read his work and value his insight and will probably continue to do so for a long time. the only reason he is relevant here is that he is a political actor who is clearing a lot of ground on these issues, and i was using his particular advocacy as a jumping off point for my own ideas on the subject.

my point is that i do not think it is strategic or proper for leftists hoping to challenge the national security state to ally with Paul, CATO, or similar political actors. i received a lot of pushback for those arguments, so i defended them. you seem to be caught up with what i think GG did or didn’t do, and i promise John, i really don’t care.

Found a response from GG reprinted on the Daily Kos. He tackles some of the things said about him which he says are patently untrue. It’s very long, but he goes into detail to make his case. I’m convinced by most but not all of it.

http://mcaf.ee/whymn

I shortened the URL using the McAfee site.

Some of it sounds overly sensitive to me, and has the ring of martyrdom, which I noticed on his blog as well. GG has thin skin in general, which is not a good thing to have when you’re often the one accusing others of this or that atrocity. And in his telling that he had little to do with CATO, other than one article and one speech, he seems to go out of his way to praise them, with some very questionable assessments of their awesomeness.

And I noticed another thing. He is correct to be upset when someone pushes lies about him or makes inferences based upon his past associations, or tries to pigeon hole him and put him in some box with this or that label. He is right to invoke the specter of McCarthy. But he has a history of doing the same with his critics, almost invariably labeling them as Obama apologists, or when the moment is more heated, something to the effect of Obamabots.

Basically, he needs to practice what he’s preaching.

When all is said and done, I’m glad he’s out there, writing what he writes. And I’m very glad he helped get Snowden’s message out there, and for all the work he’s done on the national security state.

John Drinkwater 253,

To me, neither party is worth a damn, though I do think the Dems are better on pretty much every issue. I like the Democratic constituency more as well. Unfortunately, the Dems seem to ignore them, ignore their base, whereas the Republicans tend to bow to the wishes of theirs.

This has the unsavory effect of two parties governing from the right, with one more extreme than the other. To play Woody Allen for a moment, I also see the Dems as rather neurotic, and the Republicans as psychotic. Neither is optimal but neurotics are less destructive.

I voted for Jill Stein this last go round.

bob mcmanus: The apparatchiks will cease to give a damn. . . . And that is when and how a State collapses.

You mean like Secret Service agents in the President’s detail hiring hookers in a foreign capital and having a party? It seems like someone would notice the fundamental lack of respect or pride. But, as Peter T says, they just don’t seem to care about understanding how it all works, in a social sense. And, the President’s life may depend on it, but, hey, why worry?

SoU 01.21.14 at 5:52 am @ 255:
‘… But again – a lot of my ire with regard to Paul came after a suggestion upthread that leftists should not be criticizing Paul because there are not any influential democrats challenging the national security state…’

I read over the discussion lightly and did not see anyone here suggest that leftists should not be criticizing Paul (either one). Could you point it out?

“What are the top two leftie organizations which you would claim are as good as CATO on condemning the security state?”

The ACLU comes to mind. But why do they have to be organizations? Conservatives and liberals are much better at forming organizations or think tanks like Cato and Brookings, because they have wealthy corporate backers. Lefties on the other hand are lone voices. So, lefties who have condemned the security state include, well, all of us. And we’re better at it than Cato, I would argue.

In terms of ‘visible’ leftie voices, of course you have Greenwald and also Assange – sort of institutions in themselves. But also Chris Hedges, another lone organization. These individual forces it seems to me are just as influential as Cato, and probably more so.

“What are the top two leftie organizations which you would claim are as good as CATO on condemning the security state?”

Center for American Progress and the international wing at CEPR. John @ 262 is also on point with regard to the corporatist bent to many think tanks due to their funding needs and how this really keeps a lid on issues like this.

Plume @ 251 Lefties, who still support the capitalist system, make a critique of the plutocracy, . . . But when someone like me actually takes that critique to its logical conclusion, and suggests a way out and a replacement, those same people spend an inordinate amount of time trying to trash alternatives. In short, your thoughts lead the reader to conclude you’re one of us, an anticapitalist. But you stop short of that and actually seem to be repulsed by the idea.

Reifying the political economy as “capitalism” and talking flippantly about “replacements” is not a rhetorical move, or analytic strategy I respect.

I don’t think “capitalism” is a particular, distinct and definite thing, which can be replaced wholesale. It is not, imho, an appropriate or productive way to think about the institutional problems of political economy, or their attendant difficulties.

I would not be as flippant as you are, for example, about the problems of holding an elite accountable. It doesn’t seem to me that it is possible to have a highly organized society without hierarchy, or hierarchy without an elite, so we are stuck trying to find ways, however imperfect, of keeping elites in check. You can have a revolution, sure, but there’s a real risk of “new boss, same as the old boss”. It is an age-old problem of who will guard the guardians. Liberalism has some suggestions, in a political separation of powers, popular elections, legitimate political opposition and rotation in office, etc. I think anarchists have some useful suggestions, too, in a diversity of public and private economic organization — we ought to have non-profits and cooperatives and publicly sponsored firms, as well as private, for-profits in a mixed ecology. It is not creative solutions I object to; it is what I regard as a failure to appreciate the very real difficulties and inherent constraints. And, asserting without foundation in experience that we can simply do without elites in the glorious future as you imagine it, is not providing an alternative; it is blowing smoke.

Another thing I don’t understand is millennial-ism: expecting the end of history, or that a crisis of capitalism is going to end magically in a glorious advent of a new era. The institutions of political economy are as organic as our bodies — they grow, develop, age and die, and are replaced in the cycle of reproduction as surely as our individual bodies.

I’m sometimes accused on these comment threads of nostalgia for the New Deal, and it is true I admire those institutions and the political problem-solving they represented, and I regret the Reaganite project of dismantling the New Deal. But, the larger context of my critique is a recognition that the New Deal institutions, after a good long run, are past their sell-by date. Predictably, they have aged past their useful lives, and must be reproduced, replaced by new institutions, adapted to our present circumstances and development. Institutions, which functioned very well in “youth” are now decayed and corrupt and dysfunctional in advanced old age.

I’m past 60, and pretty much every thing in my body is beginning to fail, in at least minor ways. I wouldn’t expect my doctor to examine me, find my heart arteries clogging up, or my kidneys failing a bit, and announce, therefore, that I should consider re-fashioning my grandchildren without hearts or kidneys.

In the same way, I suppose, I see the failures of our monetary, banking and financial institutions as, in important ways, the outcome of “aging”. I look to reform and renewal, but I don’t look to a world without money or finance. It’s not that I shy away from radical measures; I’d be fine with nationalizing the banks, and simply wiping away many of the toxic securities they’ve created in recent years; I think it would be perfectly reasonable to claw back the proceeds from employees going back a decade or more. I think the banking regulatory reforms advocated by neoliberals can be dismissed out of hand. If it were up to me, a new system would entail a high degree of “financial repression” and much smaller units, and a diversity of strategic orientation. I’d ban usury. And, then the whole cycle would begin again. Whatever system we devised would age, too, and a future generation would have to deal with euthanizing it and birthing a new system.

Bruce Wilder @265
Doesn’t Animal Farm say the same thing better?

Consumatopia: ” I’m only pointing out the error in the way you defined liberalism because Wilentz (and possibly Golumbia) likely made the same error.”

I wouldn’t dream of defining liberalism. Liberalism can be a million different things, some of them more important than others, to different people. But the characteristics I mentioned – the welfare state, the technocratic management – I don’t think they are particularly controversial or uncommon.

“You can make a liberal defense of a particular database employed for particular ends.”

Exactly. Not that anything is wrong with that. I actually think that liberal answer “it depends” is better than libertarian “absolutely not”. It’s just that while I understand libertarian righteous indignation vis-a-vis this database (like I said, a very reasonable idea on the face of it, compared to something like the cointelpro), I don’t think it’s a good idea for the liberals to get carried away denouncing it, because tomorrow you might find yourself defending it. That’s all.

This also explains, btw, why the Pauls and not a Democratic senator.

Plume to Bruce Wilder:

There is nothing “flippant” in what I said. I’m passionately anticapitalist and committed to alternative visions… It’s clear that you don’t get what I’ve said and you aren’t trying to.

Hey, I have an idea that I think merits everyone’s attention. In fact, I think I’ll make a habit of posting promiscuously in comments about it. Here it is: I am passionately anti-war and I believe we should replace war with a new approach to life which I call, “peace.” War is bad for people, and peace is much, much better. Let’s replace war with peace! Will you all now see my light and follow me to a glorious new world?

Ah, thanks Peter T, that makes sense

heres another pretty interesting link for anyone interested

http://www.thestraddler.com/201412/piece2.php

” compared to the sense of agency we are permitted to experience daily as individual consumers and labour-market competitors”

Sense of agency? I wish!

William Timberman @ 2: “The confusion about which is the liberal state and which the surveillance state/drunken hegemon afflicted the New Republic long before Greenwald, Assange, Snowden, et al. appeared at the scene of Wilentz’s dismay. ”

It goes back to Herbert Croly, at least.
Sean Wilentz’s position is basically unvarnished Wilsonism. A very authoritarian, top–down coopting of progressivism in the service of the military-industrial complex.

Alex @ 81: “It’s quite possible to believe that they have a point, while not actually thinking that the police are obliged not to ask Vodafone for a trace on the suspected kidnapper’s car because FREEDOM.”

You really don’t see the difference between targeted surveillance of specific criminal suspects and blanket surveillance of everyone all the time?
The Fourth Amendment makes this distinction quite clear. If the cops want to do surveillance on a suspected criminal, they’re supposed to go to a judge and get a warrant. I don’t see why this is so hard to understand.

@261 “What are the top two leftie organizations which you would claim are as good as CATO on condemning the security state?”

The ACLU comes to mind.

I thought they were sekrit libertarians. This thread is moving too fast for me.

This thread has become a textbook example of the political impotence of progressive intellectuals. It has centered on a debating contest over the ideological purity of Glenn Greenwald, abandoning entirely the substance of the Snowden revelations and instead trying to make nostrums of the “left” and “right” elastic enough to stretch over any set of positions. When intelligent and highly educated people can’t engage matters of substance and instead dissipate their energies in meaningless disputation over inadequate political nomenclature, then there can be no productive discourse.

“The ACLU is a conservative organization” Spencer Coxe
Free speech for Nazis. No banning of political parties. The rule of law for all, not the rule of the reason of some. Call it Burkean socialism.

@284 Yes, I got that from the earlier comments, I was being facetious.

@285

Please tell me how an extended debate over the purity of GG’s “liberal” credentials is in any way relevant to the Snowden disclosures. Please explain how Glenn Greenwald should be the logical focus of discussion of a scandal involving outrageous malfeasance at the NSA. Please describe how attempting to precisely locate GG on the left-right political spectrum has enhanced your understanding of the world and made you a better citizen.

@289

I’m not interested in becoming “a better citizens” – whatever *that means.

QED

“So, lefties who have condemned the security state include, well, all of us. And we’re better at it than Cato, I would argue.”

Better at talking about it? Maybe. Better at doing things about it, not so far. Especially those who don’t want to include Wikileaks and Snowden.

As for the ACLU, I would argue that once Greenwald got the Snowden revelations out there, they have been good about trying to advocate for Snowden. That’s good. Before that, I would say they had a very different focus then the CATO/Reason side and that the two were complements, not ready replacements.

The problem here is that Plume, SoU and the other fundamentalist purists are doing is DRAMATICALLY overestimating a) how much lefties in general are against the security state, and b) how many of them there are, with a possible set of c) I’d rather lose than lose my purity.

Lefties in general have a horrible history on the security state. Nearly all of the semi-successful totalitarian states were leftist with very deep security state features. That isn’t to say that there haven’t been voices on the left against the security state. But the idea that the left in general is against the security state is frankly bullshit. This isn’t typical both sides do it crap either where pointing it out is meant as a distraction. This is a case where the left as a whole has been horrible on an issue.

There aren’t enough people on just one side of the left/right divide to expect to get the security state under control without alliances. And despite your ‘being offended’ upthread, I’m confident that someone who doesn’t realize that hasn’t done as much social good in the world as libertarian Radley Balko.

That isn’t a slam, I certainly haven’t done as much social good in the world either. But if you can’t recognize people who can be true allies on very important issues, you risk losing on the very important issues.

LFC @ 276

I agree that just repeating “let’s get rid of capitalism” is not very illuminating or helpful, but to react to this by proposing that the word “capitalism” be banished from pol./ec. discourse is going too far in the other direction.

I don’t think Bruce did any such thing. That is, he was objecting to a particular use of the word, not to its use in general. Of course the word is useful and has meaning. But, as you suggest, it is shorthand. As I understand Bruce he is objecting to idolatry, and I agree completely with that perspective.

Isn’t left libertarianism just being a liberal? ie trying to shift the focus of government policies – replace criminalisation of drugs with treatment of addiction, replace criminalisation of prostitution with regulation, replace mass incarceration with reform, have a more sensible approach to national security threats etc
My understanding is libertarians just dont want the govt involved, that the problem *is* the government and if that can be dissolved all with be good – is that the same with left libertarians?

295,

“I’m amazed that people need to defend the existence of left-libertarianism”

I’m amazed that you’re amazed, since most people (or Americans anyway) deny the very existence of libertarian socialism, dismissing it as an oxymoron.

These days, whenever someone says “libertarian” they are almost certainly referring to libertarian conservatives and not left-libertarians like Chomsky.

Ronan 296,

Depends on the left-libertarian. Anarchists like Bakunin and Emma Goldman were militantly anti-government. Even Chomsky is not keen on the welfare state, but at the same time he would not, as he put it, want children to go hungry in order to remain an anarchist purist. Left-libertarians are anti-capitalist and anti-State while looking to rebuild society from below through directly democratic forms of organization.

Bob Wilder 265,

You may believe it’s not useful to discuss alternatives, or speak in terms of “capitalism” being a thing. But I don’t agree. And all of your sophistical counters to what I’ve said make me think of some classroom in, oh, say, Georgia, in the middle of the 19th century.

You’re the teacher, and you overhear some students talking about slavery, and a desire to end it and replace it with something else:

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Be like me!! Smug, certain, above it all!! I know slavery is here to stay, and we have to accept it! We have to accept that elites will always be with us, and bad things happen and just get on with our lives. Oh, and all of that talk of inevitability? Nonsense. History won’t save us and slavery will always be with us. It’s just the natural state of man.”

. . . .

Of course, your comment about “millenialism” is rather bizarre, at least if you’re referring to me. Because, while being a non-orthodox and non-doctrinaire Marxist, I don’t agree with historical inevitability of any kind. I’m more inclined to see accidents, chance, chaos in degrees, pivot points and crossroads and such. That could go in many different directions, etc. Pretty much nothing is inevitable, including capitalism’s continued existence.

I also disagree with Marx that primitive accumulation ended with the transition to capitalism. It’s ongoing, as we speak — especially in the so-called Third World.

In short, Mr Wilder, Me Thinks Thou Dost Project Too Much.

John Drinkwater,

I’m still having a great deal of difficulty in seeing GG as a libertarian socialist. Would you admit, at least, that he hasn’t embraced the label, as others we both admire have?

. . . .

And for those wondering why Greenwald is even in the conversation in this thread, he’s a major part of the Wilentz article, which I started reading late last night and got through a goodly part of before bed.

It’s very long.

My initial take? I don’t see what the fuss is all about. It struck me as well-researched, reasonable, measured, filled with direct quotations backing up his points. While admittedly not finishing it yet, or getting to the Assange part, it in no way strikes me as a defense of Defense, NSA, etc. etc. . . . It reads more like a cautionary tale of American hero formation. For instance, Snowden’s own words (directly quoted in the article) indicate someone seriously in opposition to the left on pretty much every issue, and someone who, up until recently, was quite supportive of the Security State.

And that’s key. Snowden was not some long-time opponent (secret or otherwise) of our rotten, indefensible Security Apparatus. He was a staunch defender and completely complicit in it. I think we should pause a bit before setting him up as beyond all critique. No one is above that. No one.

In 1946 he self-identified as a socialist. In the 1950s he worked for a CIA-funded publication. Also in the 1950s, and afterward he vehemently defended an extreme elitist version of liberal culture. He wrote books about the poor. He did scholarship on Alexander Herzen.

If these facts make Macdonald a model for contemporary socialism, they equally work for Irving Kristol, Morse Peckham, and Isaiah Berlin. The only work of Macdonald’s that’s still read was in the veins of neoconservatism or even outright conservatism

mao @ 150
Distrust taken to such an extreme that you’d rather have bad or no evidence for wrongdoing than good evidence (and Wilentz is right to the extent that some pieces of evidence that came out near the beginning of the Snowden affair–I haven’t followed them all since–were not evidence of what some journalists claimed–this was true of some of the claims w/r/t the corporate violations of rules that were at issue in the immunity cases, too), because needing good evidence is seen as not distrusting enough, seems to me counterproductive.

Unlike Kristol et al., Macdonald never became a neocon or even a con. As late as 1970, he identified as an anarchist and also libertarian socialist.

His views on culture are certainly elitist, but they have no little or no bearing on his political socialism.

john drinkwater @300

okay, yeah, ive heard people self describe as such. Though I guess if you dont aspire to dissolve the state/markets (even if you accept thats unlikely) its just a form of liberalism

Plume,

I agree with much of what you wrote, but it (libertarian socialism) has been tried and succeeded in Spain in 1936 by the anarchists and syndicalists, a point made very frequently by Chomsky over the years, since you seem fond of him.

@ 297

I don’t do “idolatry.”

My friend Plume.

Ronan 312,

That sounds almost right. I think you can be an anti-capitalist, a real socialist, and seek an end to “free markets” but see the state as a temporary but necessary step toward the end goal.

There are, of course, people who don’t want to take that next step. They seek a socialism that remains socialism. If they include markets in the mix, then, yes, that would seem to be more a left-liberalism than the real deal.

The idea of “free markets” is comforting to many. And a dodge. It takes people off the hook so they don’t have to look under the hood of those “free markets” — thinking, well, “freedom” is always good. In reality, it’s just cover for economic apartheid. The playground bullies will always take over, force subservience and run the show. Which is why I think the only way out of that trap is to do away with markets, money and profit and switch to use-value, made-to-order, by necessity, localized, commonly-held production.

With an emphasis on work to live and a ton of free time, rather than our live to work, rare free time system.

Mattski 316,

And that’s supposed to prove, what, exactly? You’re getting more petty and childish by the post.

Why not, for once, actually try to contribute your own ideas about the topic, instead of spending your time on incredibly lame insults?

John Drinkwater 314,

I meant on any national scale. I thought that was clear from the references to various nations.

I love what they attempted in Spain in the 1930s. And Mondragon seems to be a kind of offshoot to that. Though it falls short in many key ways. In relative terms, however, it’s a major leap beyond its context.

Better at talking about it? Maybe. Better at doing things about it, not so far. Especially those who don’t want to include Wikileaks and Snowden.

I’m all for more cooperation with libertarians and conservatives on specific issues. That’s how legislating works. But so far, Democrats in Congress, even under Obama, have voted better on these issues than Republicans in Congress have, once votes are counted. When it comes to these issues, Senator Paul tends to have more Democratic than Republican allies. (Democratic voters in polls are currently worse than Republicans, but not as bad as Republicans were under Bush.)

Worth noting that a President Paul wouldn’t necessarily be better than President Obama. On some issues–constitutional protections for non-citizens–he’s much worse. And I think there’s a bit of flimsiness to his stances. e.g. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or policeman kills him” I’m not even sure President Balko would be so great–he was initially pro-torture.

One has to take allies where we can find them, but to the extent that libertarians get to lead the conversation it’s worse for these causes, because they get some fundamental things about the debate wrong. In the case of surveillance, they focus on the government when corporations conduct more extensive surveillance (and anything corporations know the government should be assumed to know). They focus on citizenship when surveillance crosses national borders. If we eliminate NSA surveillance of American citizens, that in itself won’t do much to give us much more privacy–the CIA would be perfectly happy to rely on contractors or even foreign governments to spy on us by proxy.

Plume,

Why not, for once, actually try to contribute your own ideas about the topic, instead of spending your time on incredibly lame insults?

I did not insult you. Seriously. AND, I have often ventured ideas of my own. You would know this had you been paying attention.

Mattski 326,

No insult? Really? Then why the link with the title (and the article linked)? What was the point?

Bruce Wilder @195 – Your paragraph below was one of the most cleverly written I’ve seen in some time and well summarizes a multitude of the points presented. If there had had been a “like” button I’d have clicked it 10x…..readers who may have skipped it should read the full comment. Bravo.

“Where is the Left?” is a re-current question in this thread, and in political discussions on CT, because there’s a power vacuum. It may be hard to see, when the corporate plutocracy seems so powerful, but there’s little in the way of mass politics in the U.S. or Western Europe. The politicians and political parties and some of the interest groups and other institutions have stumbled on like zombies drained of blood and animating passions, but there’s no mass politics, beyond a bit of cheerleading on cable news for jerseys of this color or that.

Bruce Wilder 323,

Prime (moral) mover? I have no idea how you got such grandiose notions from what I’ve written. Same with the accusation of “millenialism” already discussed.

I’m talking about capitalism’s internal mechanics, its nuts and bolts, why it does what it does, “naturally.” Its intent and its effects. Its contradictions and tendencies. In the real world.

I’m pointing to the insanity of an economic system designed and implemented with one purpose and one purpose only in mind: To increase capital holdings for capitalists. To increase their person accumulation of wealth.

As mentioned in another thread, if a capitalist could make money by selling shit on a stick, they would do it. We know this based upon all the things they sell that cause cancer, various diseases, obesity, diabetes, the destruction of ecosystems, the rain forests and so on. Capitalism is the first economic system severed from the land, severed from use-value, severed from the needs of local populations.

Not that the record of previous economic systems is at all good. Far, far from it. But it’s capitalism that has taken all the worst aspects of previous systems, concentrated them, making them portable and exportable, while completely jettisoning the few rays of hope in the past . . . . such as set-asides for the commons, a host of “holidays,” much shorter work weeks and the possibility of self-provisioning.

Please stop distorting what I’ve written with your projections. They’re truly not even remotely applicable.

@ Plume

I was wondering more than making a point. I dont know for sure exactley how it all developed (how much was an outgrowth from civil war anarchism etc)

Ronan 334,

I’m no expert at all on Mondragon. But I really like the concept, at least within the context of capitalism — which, as said, I want to dump. It is a definite step (and major improvement) in the right direction.

Here’s one of my favorite economists, Richard Wolff, on Mondragon:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/24/alternative-capitalism-mondragon

And on youtube:

B. Wilder @323:
Thks for the reply. I’m mulling it over. Yr reference to Polanyi @327 is I think pertinent. I once had a prof. who was big on Polanyi’s ideas of ’embeddedness’ and ‘the double movement’, and I know there have been efforts to apply them to contemp. conditions and flesh them out somewhat programmatically.

Bianca Steele @299: I didn’t propose using “socialist” in those ways you object to, so I think we do not disagree here.

Anarcissie @280: You raise interesting issues which I can’t deal w adequately in a comment box or actually have time to get into right now. Sorry, I know that’s a cop-out. [Sometimes life interferes w participating in comment threads. ;)]

“Why would one have terrible suspicions about the NSA, but not (e.g.) the FDA or FEMA.”

Because there’s evidence the NSA is spying on us, while there’s no evidence the FDA or FEMA are? What’s complicated about that?

Define ‘spying’. They keep everyone’s phone bill in a database, so that they can run a query (with a court warrant, according to the latest proposal) and find the associates of a suspected terrorist. Does it mean they are spying on you?

Besides, I just gave you an example of the FDA (arguably) killing people suffering from AIDS. Is that more complicated?

Plume @ 332: I’m talking about capitalism’s internal mechanics, its nuts and bolts

From my perspective, that’s the one thing you are not talking about, the thing you consistently avoid. I recognize hierarchy as useful, necessary for highly specialized social cooperation, but problematic. That’s what the nuts and bolts are about.

You insist against logic and experience that hierarchy is superfluous. Refusing to recognize its functional usefulness, you can hardly have much interest in, or understanding of, the “nuts and bolts”.

“Were the Catholic Church also involved in the anarchists successes in Barcelona ?”

Sorta. It was “involved” in the sense that it was persecuted, churches were seized and demolished, thousands of clergy were murdered, as indeed was anyone considered anti-revolutionary or “fascist.” And then, of course, the murderous Anarchists were ousted by the equally murderous Communists, who did the same to them. If this is success, give me failure every time.

I’ve read a couple books by and on Polanyi and found them weak tea Marxism.

Who or what is it that does this embedding or dis-embedding?

And Capitalism is no more or less a thing then we are. The social and ontological analysis of Capitalism, the one that says “Capitalism” (or liberalism, or the economy) are not “out there” and are not disembodied is the Marxian I am interested in, and is the Marx of Capital.

Which starts Chapter One with alienation, re-ifiction, and commodification, social relations between an individual and her agency, volumes before Marx writes of institutions, markets, corporations or states.

It, Capitalism, is about turning oneself into an embodied abstraction (worker, owner, patriot, liberal, revolutionary). Just as sexism, racism, colonialism etc are about turning oneself and others into objects (Sartre, Levinas, Butler) in a structured sociality in order to facilitate communicative exchange within universalized value systems.

Marxism is about becoming a empathic subject in a body. Its praxis starts in interpersonal conversation. Reform of the banking system can wait until we have one, two, an army of persons.

You’re not being polite, you’re being disingenuous. You’ve used up all good faith anyone would extend to you, I only replied because you illustrated Wilentz’s mistakes pretty well.

Yes, a list of who-called-who is extremely useful for censorship and profiling. If that’s not obvious to you, tough.

if you presume (that’s what it sounds like) that the government is inherently racist and politically repressive,

Didn’t say that, if it sounded like that to you it’s entirely the fault of how you read it.

Also, Bruce Wilder 342,

Talk about generalities. It’s rather meaningless (and disingenuous) to toss out talk about “hierarchies” without acknowledging the proposed system to replace our current rule by the few over the many. Or, without defining what you mean by said hierarchies, or what you see as my view. Instead, you’ve just made empty accusations, repeated them, filled with insults and dismissals without foundation.

I’ve suggested full on, participatory democracy, as pushed by people like Chomsky, Harvey, Alperovitz and Wolff, among others; rotational representation, via lottery; local, community rule via “town hall” meetings/assemblies; regional and national reps also by lottery. Plus, four stages for vocations.

The above is very similar (in many ways) to the core offerings of the Occupy movement. They also preached a kind of horizontalism, to replace our indefensible and severe vertical rule.

Apprentice; senior apprentice; teacher; senior teacher . . . or some such designation. Same thing would apply to reps and civil servants. No more than 4-1, top to bottom wage ratio. One earns the progression to the next stage, similar to the idea of guilds. Artisanship, craft, serious skills and expertise, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, all seriously treasured.

Unlike our current system, and capitalism itself, the purpose of production would be to fill community needs, not the bank accounts of capitalists.

Ooooh, the horror!!! To actually make things we all need, and make citizens the sole focus of production, instead of the personal accumulation of wealth at the top.

How dare I suggest such an outrage against the holy and virtuous establishment!!!

A list of who-called-who is the opposite of profiling. And censorship, WTF? Does it also give you the clap? Alright, never mind, forget it.

Alright, never mind, forget it.

I’m pretty sure it’s obvious to everyone else that a list of who-called-who is extremely useful for censorship and profiling. You could probably figure it out if you tried.

Plume writes: We seek to “flatten” the pyramids.

You got a mouse in your pocket?

The central difficulty of Capitalism is that it relies on an inadequate measure of social value, the monetary unit. Human happiness depends on properly balancing factors whose measure is both monetary and non-monetary. Because Capitalism renders dignity, security, trust, friendship, and social harmony invisible, it is distorting and destructive when unchecked. The advantages of hierarchies and market efficiencies can be preserved if the Capitalistic system is augmented with non-monetary measures of wealth. The emerging school of behavioral economics may eventually establish such measures. This is probably the best hope of taming the resurgent jungle capitalism that threatens world society and the global ecosystem

bob mcmanus @ 351

For me, the key phrase in your Durkheim quote is this: …are in large part…. The other, smaller part does exist, and is in fact crucial, in that it saves us from a secular predestination every bit as nasty as Cotton Mather’s theological one.

Thinkers of the Nineteenth Century spent a good deal of time and effort disabusing us of the idea that we’re any of us entirely the rational free agents who seemed to erupt from the Enlightenment like Athena from the brow of Zeus — and rightly so, I think. Still, the transformative agency of the individual, and its reciprocal influence on the collective is worthy of consideration, even if it considering it does introduce eddies in the smooth surfaces of our isms.

@353

This utopian fantasy ignores the natural distribution of human traits on a spectrum ranging from ruthless predation to saintly altruism. If we were all saints, we could do without laws and hierarchies, but short of bio-engineering ourselves into a better species, it is fatuous to believe that a simple commons with all voices given equal weight would eliminate the need for a large and powerful government.

The notion that a small band of wicked people is holding us all in bondage is a fairy tale that allows us to deny that meanness, pettiness, and irrationality exist in all of us to some degree. Our aim should be to correct the flaws and distortions in a complex hierarchical society, not to tear it all down and replace it with some kind of simplistic Great Leap Forward.

As in, any and all transactions are always already mutually acceptable and beneficial.

This has been the official capitalist fairy tale going back to Smith, Ricardo, Steuart, Malthus and the rest of the classical political economist brigade.

See for instance, Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism.

http://libcom.org/library/invention-capitalism-michael-perelman

@363: None of this assumes that we are all saints.

No, but it assumes we are all Plume.

There is another assumption involved.

Over time, we humans adapt to new circumstances, change with the change in systems. We always have.

Over time, given a system that revolves around the needs of all citizens, instead of the 1%, with cooperative planning and implementation key, that “self-interest” begins to expand to include society overall. Our “moral compass” grows. Instead of being bombarded daily with calls to our individual wants and desires and their immediate satisfaction, we live in the absence of that brainwashing. There is no mass advertising campaign to get us to buy buy buy, just like everyone else. There is no mass advertising campaign that would push us to keep up with the Joneses.

Over time, the fairy tale of instant gratification fades, and the realization of social justice, cooperation (instead of competition), solidarity, the enjoyment of community and the desire to improve it replaces me mine me mine culture.

Peace.

Straightwood 375,

I’m not suggesting a centrally-planned economy. Far from it. I’m suggesting a full on participatory democracy, including the economy. The focus would be on small is beautiful and local control — within the framework of a constitution fully emphasizing social justice, needs met, use-value and egalitarianism.

Now, I demonstrated the logic for doing this above, and have done so many times. Please defend the following, which you assert without any attempt to back it up logically, or rationally:

Restoring the rule of law to our mixed economy, together with properly valuing non-monetary considerations in our regulatory framework, is the best path to reform.

Why do you want to keep a system based upon and requiring economic apartheid to function? Why is it logical to seek reforms, rather than finding a system that doesn’t need those reforms you suggest in the first place?

I’ve used this analogy before. Capitalism is like cigarettes. Typically, liberals seek to minimize their damage by putting filters on those cigarettes. Conservatives say, hell no! Give us the straight nicotine fix without any filters!! Puts hair on your chest!!

Better idea. Get rid of the cigarettes altogether.

Btw, in the system I (and others) propose, there is no unemployment. Anyone and everyone who wants to work gets a job. There is always work to be done and under the constitution, there can be no unemployment — unless someone chooses not to work at all. There can never be a case where more workers exist than jobs available.

Instead of leaving all of that up to the markets — meaning, the whims and desires of individual business owners — we proactively make sure everyone who wants to work can. We do that as a nation, together. The nation, together, owns the means of production.

The free education and training for life; the free health care for life; the free public transportation for life; and the free access to all cultural venues for life . . . along with the absence of profit and money will do away with your slum issue.

Michael Harris 377,

Oh, there will be fights. But we will hash those out, debate, argue, debate some more and finally, vote. Majority rules. And even if it’s just 51% in favor of X, and they get their way, and 49% doesn’t . . . given the structure in place, a “loss” is hardly a loss. Far too many benefits already in place. And the above is certainly better than our current system which has the 1% rule — or the .01%.

It’s strange that so many liberals seem to be against collective ownership of the means of production, and fine with a tiny fraction owning it. Especially strange when they so often appear to get that this is wrong. They just refuse to follow the logic of their own critique.

I finally realized this, which is why I’m no longer a liberal.

@383 – very funny, quite true.

@ Plume –
i can tell you are energized by these discussions, but not every thread needs to descend into a debate re: the merits and faults of a participatory economics. save that for threads that are a bit more centered on the issue of capitalism vs. socialism, or what have you. I say this as someone who is likely more sympathetic to your views than 99% of humankind. still, there is little to be gained by these back and forth exchanges between you and whoever woke up this morning with a real bone to pick with the planned economy. i;ve seen enough of this basic format of a long somewhat off topic post from yourself, met by some snarky and tired critique from a detractor, to know that these micro debates are not going anywhere unless they are in the proper setting.

Bruce @ 367

I want to buy you a quality beverage.

Well you’ve got to love someone who managed to wedge into a post on the NSA an argument in favour of workers cooperatives in Northen Spain

Well, I will put a bit of my own theory into practice. The majority at CT seems to be against further discussion on the topic, so I will exit stage left.

Here and there, the discussion has been enjoyable. Regardless, I wish you all good cheer in the NEW year.

Peace.

What is the argument against the NSS? Are people arguing the US can do without an intelligence gathering apparatus ? If not then where is the cut off point?

The NSS is too powerful. It has become an attractive nuisance. Keep enough warships and spies lying around and pretty soon you’ll be thinking of problem-solving in terms of war and spying.

I would heartily second Consumatopia’s recommendation to disband the NSA altogether. I’d also be ok with defunding all of its offensive operations and leaving it the sole mission of developing better security for modern communications and the technologies they rest on.

In reality, at best I might hope for some European-style data protection laws to prevent private companies from accumulating huge, potentially dangerous data sets that they might use for their own nefarious purposes or be required to hand over to a government for its nefarious purposes. I would also hope for fresh legal checks on the powers of the NSA and a rejection of secret courts. Even were these hopes fulfilled, I can only imagine that a new layer of even-more-secret exceptions would grow up eventually, so I would like to take the few years’ reprieve to aggressively build up security and surveillance resistance in the world’s most widely used communication protocols and technologies, so that when the spies get their legal powers back in secret they will still be hobbled trying to rebuild mass dragnet surveillance.

Now the Harry Potter solution:

If I could lay a handy Imperius Curse on the top echelons of the NSS and federal legislature for a year, I wouldn’t just bother to outlaw and defund every nefarious thing the NSS is currently up to. After the mind control was over the NSS would start growing back, perhaps via a new layer of super-DUPER secret laws that can ignore all the previous public and secret laws that were supposed to apply. Instead I would work to leave such a monument of shameful wreckage that people would fear to conspire against the public even 4 generations later. I’d do stuff like: name, shame, and prosecute to the maximum extent of the law everyone identifiable who enabled torture, warrantless wiretaps, assassination, falsehoods promoting wars of aggression, financial fraud, bribery, illegal environmental destruction, COINTELPRO, and about 100 other things to be attached in a later appendix. The classified archives of the State Department, CIA, NSA, FBI, DEA, and DOD will be scanned to PDF — excluding only dangerous technical blueprint type information like “how to build modern nuclear warheads” — and they will be posted to the Pirate Bay. $10 billion of previously-CIA funding would endow a crowdsourcing initiative to track key figures mentioned in old documents and build wiki-style biographies tracking their current whereabouts and activities, linked with the shameful acts documented in secret archives, and updated for the rest of their lives, like a more advanced version of public sex offender registries — regardless of whether their actions were technically legal at the time.

This doesn’t mean I would stop at the US government if I were a Dark Wizard of such power. There would be analogous action for the leaders of the world’s most economically and militarily powerful nations, leaders of the Fortune 1000 and the largest privately held companies, and individual billionaires. The scorched earth combination of legal prosecution for past wrongdoing, plus exposure and shaming for things that might have been technically legal but abhorrent, would be applied to all of them. And that might give future generations of people pause when they’re asked to do something underhanded with the promise that their involvement will never be prosecuted or publicly known.

@Ronan(rf) the metadata is definitely not the worst alleged NSA overreach. Tapping into private companies is worse, subverting standards bodies and software companies to weaken public security is insane.

The surveillance of foreign heads of state isn’t so much a terrible loss of privacy (who cares about foreign heads of state?) as an indicator of out-of-control scale. Spying on Angela Merkel is a sensible use of time and money? And, yes, I do think “the NSS is too big” as an agenda could make a meaningful difference–both lefties and libertarians would sign on to that. Leaks over international spying can also be useful politics given that the fight over surveillance is an international struggle (surveillance being a product of international cooperation, i.e. the Five Eyes).

As to the metadata program, I think it’s enough to ask “do they need it? Can it be abused?” The answers seem to be “probably not” and “definitely yes”. Maybe stronger safeguards could change the second answer–although Dianne Feinstein has made clear that she opposes anything that would stop the NSA from using the database in unanticipated ways–in other words, she won’t accept a database that can’t be abused. This would be a major point of disagreement–they consider it very important that the mechanisms of surveillance are concealed. I don’t consider that very important–wiretapping telephones seems to be useful to the police even though everyone knows phones can be wiretapped, and avoiding known surveillance methods tends to impose costs on the people avoiding surveillance. I also consider public understanding of surveillance more important, and don’t have any confidence in either Congressional committees or the FISA court, at least not as they are currently composed.

But at a higher level, here’s a radical idea: the U.S. government should make it it’s policy to enable anonymous, untraceable communication for everyone in the world, by putting the same amount of resources they now do into surveillance into secure, anonymous technology and promoting its usage. This would complicate life for law enforcement, yes. (It wouldn’t necessarily make us less safe, though–our systems would be more secure against cyberwarfare). But it would complicate life much more for our rivals, the kind of countries that practice mass censorship. I don’t expect the US government to ever do this. But, apparently, some in the government think the way I do–why else would they keep giving money to TOR?

Even all that leaves the issue of corporate surveillance. I don’t blame blame Snowden or GG for the focus on government, but that focus is something we have to push against.

On another note, while I think what Snowden did was laudable, I don’t think it’s ethical to ask people to emulate him. Not because these leaks are intrinsically immoral, but because I don’t think it’s right to ask people to join the growing list of hacktivist martyrs. People shouldn’t join militaries or intelligence agencies unless they share the goals of those organizations. If someone joins and laters discovers specific activity that they ethically feels needs to be told to the public, they should, for their own sake, leak that and only that–hopefully after having first fled to someplace safer than Hong Kong. If we were in a situation in which the only reason the public remained silent is ignorance of what was being done in our name, I might give different advice, but so long as so much of the public is pro-NSS, it just isn’t worth it for lone wolves to sacrifice themselves kamikaze style to bring information to the public that the public largely ignores (currently proposed reforms being insufficient to justify sacrifice, in my view).

Peter T

Are the large scale data captures pretty much useless in operational terms? So what would you see as the best way of approaching intelligence work on national security threats(leaving aside the privacy issues and domestic spying for a minute) – in this context primarily transnational terrorists, gangs etc * (rather than the threats posed by states which I assume could mostly be done through open source info) ? Is human based intelligence still the best option?

* part of this I guess is what they want to use it for. Is it to try and discover criminal networks by analysing call patterns (or what have you) or to have information on hand so they can build a case against someone after the fact? You’re thinking it’s just an internal bureaucratic maneuver without much thought and in the absence of competent leaderhip ?

Sorry for all the questions, its complicated and Im trying to get my head around it.

btw Matt, I was largely agreeing up until the harry potter solution. After which I was in complete agreement

Telephone metadata can be used to build social maps, that is, graphs where the nodes are persons (with certain attributes) and the edges (lines between them) can show connection and be weighted in various ways. Such maps have many uses.

For example, suppose the node Alice A. is connected at not too many steps (two or three, say) from Bob B., Charlie C., and Doreen D., and you know that Bob, Charlie, and Doreen are actively involved in a particular political project or group. Without knowing any more about Alice whatever, the possessors of the graph can be pretty sure Alice is also involved or sympathetic and that there is a good probability that Alice is a channel of communication between the activists. Should they wish to inhibit or obstruct the activists, removing or harassing Alice may be a reasonable strategy even if it happens to be incorrect in this individual case.

Not only the government may use this data. Since even government officials may sometimes exhibit less than exemplary morals and behavior, it is quite possible such information might be transmitted to a corporation, mafia, or favored foreign power which was being inconvenienced by the activists.

Just to clarify one particular thing – Greenwald is *not* a libertarian, at all.

He has covered this a couple of times in detail, after one or another articles has been published referring to him as such. I can’t actually find them at the moment, but they should be on his ‘utdocuments’ blog that he’s been updating while between gigs.

From what I remember, he was more of a libertarian in his youth, but these days he understands how important a strong government is in minimising the damage to society inevitably wreaked by the worst aspects of capitalism. He supports a welfare state, he definitely supports single-payer healthcare.

He really gets upset when people just assume he’s some extremist goldbug.

Being a first-amendment absolutist and wanting to halt the NSA’s excesses doesn’t magically make him Ayn Rand.

“suppose the node Alice A. is connected at not too many steps (two or three, say) from Bob B., Charlie C., and Doreen D., and you know that Bob, Charlie, and Doreen are actively involved in a particular political project or group. Without knowing any more about Alice whatever, the possessors of the graph can be pretty sure Alice is also involved or sympathetic and that there is a good probability that Alice is a channel of communication between the activists.”

IF Alice were only one step away from Bob and co, then it’s still possible that she’s a mutual friend or relative, or connected through some unrelated activity (they all found each other and the political light through ballroom dancing, and Alice is the local paso doble expert). Two or three steps, and the probability is that she’s pretty much anyone at all. Seven steps and she is all 7 billion of us. Unlike military units, which basically communicate in military mode all the time, political activists have friends, family and other interests – and join and leave groups constantly. So communications analysis of what are fairly ordinary people is pretty time-intensive. It’s much better kept for confirming and enlarging the intelligence picture produced by other sources. If you use it as a first source, then there is a high risk that you will alienate the people that are your best sources of good intelligence.

As 404 notes, you have to think of the trade-offs, and they are often quite subtle, long-term and outside the purview of the investigator or analyst on the ground. That’s where skilled top management comes in.

For me, the main issues Snowden, Manning, Assagne or Greenwald are working against are wrong on a much deaper level than any neoliberal economic program short of outright social darwinism could ever be. So i find it highly disturbing to have a debate about purity of allies in this dull 2 party hate game in the first place when the issue is so critical. Besides that, i dont see how the leakers political leanings, personal motivations etc. would make the leaks any less relevant. Why do people who did a great service to the public at sometimes gigantic personal cost have to be pure altruistic saints, while powerfull/rich assholes are legitimate by default in every shit they do?

Peter,
your recent first level to/from connections G-men can get from the phone company (with a warrant) already; they don’t the database for that. And the second-level connections must be in tens of thousands, so it’s useless, like you said. Therefore, the way I see it, the main value of this database must be (apart from longer retention) the possibility of cross-reference.

Cranky, if you can’t trust the government under any circumstances (even with the warrants, as Obama proposes now), then it’s clear and understandable that you don’t want this database, or, for that matter, any other government database. If that’s the case, then the NRA, for example, is being perfectly reasonable resisting gun registration. But then, this doesn’t sound like the attitude of a proponent of benevolent liberal welfare state. So, maybe you aren’t.

I would like to live in Andrew’s universe, when Edgar Hoover was never head of FBI and NSA aim is to fight terrorism.

Manta, I live in the universe where Hoover died over 60 years and several iterations of important reforms ago.

40 years ago, thanks Salem

Andrew, the result of those “important reforms” was Scott Ritter.

At the end of the day, Hoover was a cog in the machine: the machine is still there, doing the things it was built to do.

Mao – “if you can’t trust the government under any circumstances (even with the warrants, as Obama proposes now), then it’s clear and understandable that you don’t want this database, or, for that matter, any other government database. If that’s the case, then the NRA, for example, is being perfectly reasonable resisting gun registration. But then, this doesn’t sound like the attitude of a proponent of benevolent liberal welfare state. So, maybe you aren’t.”

I agree that a *completly* paranoid view of the NSS isnt compatible with supporting a strong state in general. Most liberals *dont* have such an opinion of the NSS though, which is why you’ve been running with a strawman throughout this thread on this topic. (not saying whether this is Cranky’s position or not, but in general)

Matt@394:
giving the NSA the mission “of developing better security for modern communications and the technologies they rest on” is like giving a fox the mission of guarding the hens, since one of NSA actual accomplishments is to make modern communications LESS secure.

“And that would’ve been the end of it.”

I doubt it. You would have looked for a response from every ‘liberal’.
It was said continually that there’s a huge area between oppossing it in it’s entirety and supporting it, where a liberal could place themselves (and at either extreme). A liberal could also oppose it entirely – say its a waste of resources, rests on exaggerated threats, worry about long term consequences, have somewhat complex views on how much secrecy the state should work under etc
A liberal could probably not oppose it on the grounds ‘OMG we’re marching towards tyranny !’ But who is ?

” You would have looked for a response from every ‘liberal’.”

Well, when people reply and want to argue, it’s rude to ignore them. Unless they are trolls, of course.

Ugh. The second paragraph not supposed to be in the block quote.

Yes, a liberal can look at a particular component of the government and say it should be completely dismantled without wanting the entire government or “the liberal state” overthrown. If our government had a Censorship Bureau, I would oppose that entire bureau as corrupt and illegitimate.

A liberal can say that while tracking weapons is a legitimate activity for government, monitoring private communications is not.

Liberals invoke principal agent problems when resisting covert action or classified activity. Libertarians instead invoke public choice theory–they don’t even trust publicly discussed and monitored government activity.

Instead of invading Iraq, we could have clarified its social ocean with information technology, revealing Saddam’s submarines, his instruments of tyranny. It would have been a matter of inundating the place with satellite phones and satellites/drones overhead, and good editorial selection of what to send back down as TV broadcasts. It would not have been easy, but we could have done it, saved many lives, given the Iraqis much better preparation for self-rule. It would have been an empowerment of Iraq’s people, overbalancing the tyranny of Saddam. Alas, we instead focused on spending taxpayer dollars on a military operation that began with expensive and violent shock and awe, with the privately-acknowledged purpose of acquiring beneficial access to Iraq’s oil for self-described “American” interests.

Now the reverse has happened. An ocean-clarifying set of technologies has been unleashed, extra-legally, on the American public, not with a view to empowering it to support the rule of law, but instead to maintain the power of those in power. (If you think that’s not true, consider the DEA’s “parallel construction” of prosecutions that actually rested on illegally-obtained NSA data. Curiously, the President’s panel somehow found no evidence of any such abuse. Maybe it’s because the actual abuse occurred at the DEA, a whole different part of the Executive Branch. A part that, unlike the NSA, uses guns in its daily operations.) So now, all the people’s submarines are now plainly visible, but only to the American government, while the American government’s instruments of enforcement remain largely invisible, even to the people it is supposed to serve.

It’s probably not a coincidence that both of these acts are easily understood as those of a paranoid hegemon, and that neither act even remotely reflects a goal of liberty and justice for all.

Manta @427: The question is fairly basic: can we trust the government to do the “right” thing when it works in secret and without accountability?

My answer is “Yes, you can. If you are an idiot.”

Sure Manta, but there isn’t just “the government” really, no? There are different branches of government, different parts of each branch, different political parties that overlap the branches, and different individuals filling (or not, depending on how silly Congress is being) the various positions and offices.

Accountability and oversight don’t necessarily require publication in a newspaper. The Administration made information about the metadata program available to every Senator, requested that it be made available to every Representative, briefed the intel oversight committees, and obviously obtained numerous court orders from 15 or so different judges.

Now, that’s not quite publication in a newspaper, but that’s just about as close as you can come to keeping a program confidential while enabling as much transparency and oversight as possible.

The transparency and oversight weaknesses in these programs as implemented in different forms just after 9/11 were largely fixed in later amendments. Those fixes were achieved by working within political institutions, and – in the best tradition of American governance (and there are lots of bad ones) – the repairs balanced the efficacy of the means with checks against the abuse of those means.

The paranoid-libertarian solution by contrast is to assume that there is no institutional way to guard against abuse, because institutions are corrupt and there’s a conspiracy of politicians who are power/wealth hungry and… well, you get the point.

James Madison was correct when he said that if men were angels, there would be no need for government. But of course, if they’re all devils, no good government would be possible. Madison viewed human beings as mixed, and argued for a government that restrains itself, by dividing power amongst its different parts appropriately to that purpose.

That is actually a practical approach to government. It leaves room for a range of policies and constructive arguments. Paranoid libertarianism, though, believes that approach to be impossible; freedom from tyranny rests in a well armed population of private citizens, not voting and rule of law; fiat currencies are necessarily less trustworthy than gold; you must always be ready for the collapse of society.

In some ways, it’s amusing to see libertarians fulminating against the silly fears of law enforcement and intelligence agencies; the libertarians have a more fearful outlook on life than most in those lines of work ever will. And that’s remarkable.

“You could’ve said, from the beginning: I don’t have a problem with mass state surveillance, as long as it has strong safeguards and meaningful oversight. And that would’ve been the end of it.”

It wouldn’t have been the end of it, but as to substance: wise benevolent dictators would be better for society than democracy if they were wise enough and sufficiently benevolent. But they aren’t so most people wisely oppose dictatorships.

Part of the problem is that we’ve set up such silly binaries that the discussion gets muddled in stupid definitional games. Libertarians aren’t monsters and they aren’t even generally anarchists, they are people who-on the continuum of legitimate government power– have a very low threshold for what they believe the government can be trusted to do. And by trusted to do, they mean trusted to do without opening up way too much corruption and trampling on personal rights. They are not generally anti liberal, they have a much lower threshold for government tolerance than many.

By overdrawing the libertarian ‘enemy’ we see overreaction in the definition of liberal. Liberals have a much higher threshold for government activity than libertarians. They generally believe that the government can do quite a bit more before they invite lots of corruption and counter productive trampling on personal rights. That doesn’t make them anti libertarians. That doesn’t mean they believe ALL powers if given to the government can be controlled to avoid corruption and counter productive behavior. Their threshold is just higher.

And that is why some libertarians and some liberals could work together to curb the national pants wetting security state. They can agree that whatever their differences in understanding the threshold level of power the government can be trusted with, this exceeds that threshold.

Accountability and oversight don’t necessarily require publication in a newspaper.

Maybe not in principle, but in practice we’ve never come up with a set of institutions that don’t tend to be abusive when we aren’t able to publicly evaluate their results. The committees and courts have (theoretical) oversight over intelligence work, but their work is secret too so it moves the verification problem up one direction, but doesn’t solve the problem.

I mean, sure, classified oversight is better than nothing (well, probably better than nothing. The intelligence committee chairs always seem to be the loudest pro-spying voices.) but not very much better.

When the government can keep its actions secret, it becomes dangerous. That doesn’t mean the government should never act in secret, it does mean that it should do so only rarely. This is not an illiberal position–liberal government is transparent.

@Sebastian H

Part of the problem is that we’ve set up such silly binaries that the discussion gets muddled in stupid definitional games.

The definitional games are so stupid in this case because we have a couple of people who probably aren’t even liberals using a definition of liberalism that is actually the opposite of liberalism.

“Libertarians aren’t monsters”

Welllll…. Some of them are moral monsters. I mean anyone willing to take the food out of a six year old’s mouth because “taxes are theft” isn’t going to be on the side of the angels right?

Which is why I am nervous about working with libertarians on the few matters that we do agree on. Who knows what kind of Frankenstein monster we might create to run a mok in the body politic.

This discussion thread exhibits that the dominant ideas of a society ruled by financiers will be libertarianism, like it or not.

MPAVictoria 01.22.14 at 7:18 pm @ 440:
‘ “Libertarians aren’t monsters”

Welllll…. Some of them are moral monsters. I mean anyone willing to take the food out of a six year old’s mouth because “taxes are theft” isn’t going to be on the side of the angels right? …’

The ones I have argued with over the years don’t think they are advocating that. The nearer libertarians generally concede some degree Welfare is necessary, at least in the present. The further libertarians envision a world which is nothing like what you see around you — hence, anything can be said about it, such as that charity and other voluntary activities would take the place of Welfare. If you’re dealing with a fantasy, you can take it on its own terms or envision an alternative fantasy, but there is no reasonable way of arguing with the fantasy from present material circumstances because they are constructed on different principles.

Sebastian: Libertarians aren’t monsters and they aren’t even generally anarchists, they are people who-on the continuum of legitimate government power– have a very low threshold for what they believe the government can be trusted to do. And by trusted to do, they mean trusted to do without opening up way too much corruption and trampling on personal rights.

I think your description of libertarianism is too narrow.

A libertarian could believe: Government X, with structure Y, will act within the scope of its authority to e.g. collect and use metadata. However, Government X has not been and could not legitimately be granted the power to do so.

Granted, the loudest libertarians are often the more paranoid. And it’s easy to forget how paranoid some of them are. Like many people, they can talk quite calmly and rationally about numerous topics – and then casually mention that they’re 100% invested in gold because the Fed/Wall St./liberal welfare state/anti-constitutionalist/whatever cabal is going to fall any day now.

But libertarianism doesn’t require radical distrust of government institutions.

For me, much of this goes back to the importance of the debate in the early 20th century as to the role of government in providing for forms of liberty, security, and opportunity. Herbert Croly and others pointed out that, in the modern economy, a powerful, robust set of government institutions is more conducive to desired values and modes of life than a small, weakened set of government institutions. If you have a radical distrust of government institutions, and buy into much of the rhetoric emanating from the Assange/Snowden/Greenwald supporters, then you’ll likely be unable to endorse certain core insights of Croly and other progressives – and that’s really problematic given the particular challenges we face today as a society.

Consumatopia: Maybe not in principle, but in practice we’ve never come up with a set of institutions that don’t tend to be abusive when we aren’t able to publicly evaluate their results. The committees and courts have (theoretical) oversight over intelligence work, but their work is secret too so it moves the verification problem up one direction, but doesn’t solve the problem.

Since FISA was passed in 1978, there have (to the best of my knowledge) not been any instances in which the NSA as an institution abused its powers to provide any politician with advantages over other politicians, to enable the suppression of First Amendment protected expression, or to otherwise intrude into anything that would fall into an American’s reasonable expectation of privacy as described in law. Indeed, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, NSA was incredibly scrupulous about avoiding domestic surveillance.

So that’s a pretty good example.

As to accountability, if we can’t rely on a review by the entire Senate, the entire House (intended by the Administration), and multiple federal judges to determine whether an intelligence program is legal/illegal…

Look, I agree with a bias towards transparency. But we have a representative democracy, and we rely on confidential government proceedings all the time. By including a diversity of interests and persons in those proceedings, and ensuring that some of those persons are independent of the authority of one another, and that some even have competing interests, we achieve substantially the same check on power as accomplished by full public disclosure.

I don’t think we should be designing all policy, particularly policy that depends on secrecy to be effective, with the idea that even if the legislature, the executive, and the courts are ALL corrupt, it will still be possible for the public to (somehow) stop the policy by virtue of their knowledge. This is close to “we need guns to keep our liberties” territory. Instead I think we should be designing policies that make it very difficult for all those branches and parts to become corrupt by allowing separate parts and branches to check, and be exposed to, each other.

Don’t misunderstand me: public disclosure of government activities is vital to a democracy. But it’s reasonable for certain policies, which depend on secrecy to be effective, to be – with the consent of the public – kept confidential from the public. And that’s the system we have today. It works. There is no Hoover pulling strings in Washington.

As to why most of those on the intel oversight committees aren’t backing the more radical “reform” proposals, personally I think the answer is in part politics (they supported these programs, and will look silly) and in part they supported these programs because they agree that the benefits are worth the costs, and they still think so.

Andrew F @448
“But it’s reasonable for certain policies, which depend on secrecy to be effective, to be – with the consent of the public – kept confidential from the public.”

It’s the “with the consent of the public” part that’s the problem — the public can’t consent to things being kept secret unless it knows first, in general terms, what those things are.

Andrew F at 448

“As to accountability, if we can’t rely on a review by the entire Senate, the entire House (intended by the Administration), and multiple federal judges to determine whether an intelligence program is legal/illegal… ”

Beginning at the end, it seems to me from the data that the FISC is a rubber stamp. According to the government’s own reporting, FISC has never in any year approved fewer than 95% of such requests; and the approval rate before 2009 fell below 100% – to 99% – in only 1 year. In recent years, some requests have been denied (or have been withdrawn when denial seemed likely), but even then the approval rate is 96%.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/charting-33-years-of-fisa-report-data/

As to Congress, we have no idea what Senators or Representatives were told. We do know that some Senators claim they were briefed, they were alarmed by what they were told, but they were warned they could not reveal the programs on penalty of prosecution. Thus there was no way for them to object as a practical matter. How does such a procedure rise to the level of oversight?

As to Congress, we have no idea what Senators or Representatives were told. We do know that some Senators claim they were briefed, they were alarmed by what they were told, but they were warned they could not reveal the programs on penalty of prosecution. Thus there was no way for them to object as a practical matter. How does such a procedure rise to the level of oversight?¨

The fundamental problem with this discussion, as with many similar discussions, is an unwillingness to let facts interfere with narrative. For example, compare the narrative above with the well known facts:

“”I can assure you that this isn’t about spying on the American people,” said Franken, who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I have a high level of confidence that this is used … to protect us, and I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism.”

Franken told WCCO he had been briefed on the controversial program and believed Snowden should be investigated for leaking sensitive documents.

Though he defended the program, Franken is also advocating for increased transparency. He’s part of a bipartisan group of senators now pushing a bill to declassify secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance rulings.”

“The fundamental problem with this discussion, as with many similar discussions, is an unwillingness to let facts interfere with narrative.”

Yes, apparently that is the problem.
_____

“There are very significant limits [on what you can and cannot say], and they are very cumbersome and unwieldy. If you want to play a watchdog role, you try to work within the rules. This is a sensitive subject,” Wyden told the magazine.
“A lot of people have just said to me, ‘Well, you feel so strongly about [these issues] — when you knew this, why didn’t you just go to the floor of the United States Senate and just, you know, read it all [into the record]?’ And, of course, anybody who does this kind of work thinks a lot about that. You think about it all the time,” he said.

“I can see why plenty of people would criticize me — progressives and others. I can understand why plenty of people who have views similar to mine would say they would have done it differently.”

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden has access to classified national security information.

For years, he and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) tried to raise the alarm about how the NSA was using its power under the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to gather information, including on people in the United States. But because they were unable to disclose details of the programs, their warnings garnered little attention.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/317319-wyden-considered-disclosing-nsa-secrets-on-senate-floor#ixzz2rAqU5viZ
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

The idea that because I voted for a legislator I should trust their party to appoint a committee to conduct work in secret ignores how public debate functions.

Take the issue of torture. Infamously, congressional committees were for it before they were against it. Once the debate became public, there was a bipartisan coalition against it. Including some legislators who probably knew about it. It would seem that there were some legislators who were okay with something in private, but once confronted with it in public felt the need to object.

Someone on a secret committee has completely different incentives than someone acting in public. Some legislators probably feared (and still fear!) that if they reject any Administration request, and a terrorist strike happens, they’ll be blamed. (Whereas they by-and-large weren’t blamed for torture. The only legislator who got a hard time for torture was Pelosi–because she tried to start talking about it again post-Bush.)

It’s always been true that depending on how you word the question you can get majorities both for and against torture. No doubt there is a substantial number of Americans who, deep down, wish we had never found out about Abu Gharib. The public debate in a democracy isn’t just majority rule–it’s also a chance for the minority to confront the majority. A minority can still have influence in a democracy. They can join in coalitions with other factions. They can outright shame the majority into action. So it isn’t surprising that when legislators elected by a majority get a chance to act secretly, they act differently than they do publicly. They prefer that some complicated issues that might divide their coalition just quietly go away. This is a fundamental problem with delegating oversight to people acting in secret–it deprives minorities of their public voice.

To be honest, given the record of torture, I have even less confidence in the congressional committees than I do in the NSA itself. The NSA is definitely not the worst actor in the world of government secrecy.

No, you made some good points. It actually gets to a dilemma I have with Greenwald’s writing. Sometimes, especially during the Bush years, he would describe security state overreach as if it was this unprecedented new travesty, as if none of the madness that went on during the Cold War had ever happened. That makes it easier to rally opposition, but it means that any solutions coming from that perspective are ahistorical.

Sometimes it seems like the every actor in the NSS has their own incentives, but their actions don’t come together to form a coherent agenda, other than to grow ever bigger. Perhaps the libertarian institutional critique is the right one after all?

For most people in the USA, the current age is one of unprecedented civil liberties and civil rights – sadly enough. It is always fascinating, though, to see how angrily privileged white men insist that the golden age, perhaps of the Truman years, has been thrown away by this horrible black guy. In one screed, Greenwald locates the end of the rule of law precisely at the moment Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. Because 100 years of lynch law doesn’t matter – at least to him. But even though our Libertarian Hall Monitors disagree, vehemently, for some of us the small steps President Obama has been able to take to limit the prison state are far more important than the violations of Al Alwaqi’s supposed right to make war on the United States.

My impression is that the torture program took the form it did b/c US inteligence agencies and the executive branch have become more constrained by laws in the past couple of decades. But after it was disbanded, afaict, they just resorted to targetted killings (through drones and special forces)

No, the US remote assassination program was contemporaneous with its torture program. Torture wasn’t replaced with assassination. The US began torturing* in 2002. The first drone assassination was in Yemen in November 2002. Drone assassinations in Pakistan have happened every year since 2004, and there have been quite a few more in at least Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The torture program is no longer operational — or at least not visible — but drone attacks continue to the present.

*To the extent that the formally approved War on Terror torture committed last decade can be considered as an episode — US soldiers have tortured before, US police have tortured before, US corporate security goons have tortured before.

Matt @464

Thats Mark Mazzetti’s argument anyway. Targetted assasinations increased substantially after torture stopped. His argument is it was ramped up due to fears internally in the CIA that people would start being prosecuted for torture

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/stephen-holmes/whats-in-it-for-obama

For those still claiming that the NSA program was aimed at terrorists and was properly supervised:

Via Kevin Drum:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/01/review-board-splits-whether-nsa-phone-record-program-legal

“conclusion that Section 215 of the Patriot Act doesn’t authorize the government to collect bulk phone records” … “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation”

Ronan, I think your support for US security state and distrust for Irish security state stems mostly from the fact that you know the latter better than the former.

Also without Qatars social policies, obvs

I’m not speaking about the US domestically. I have no real opinion on domestic spying etc, b/c as you say I don’t live with it. That’s an issue internal to the US which American citizens have to deal with. (Although my sympathies would be with rolling back internal security polices, reforming the justice system etc)
Im talking internationally. As the worlds major power the US has *some* obligations to the global liberal order. It has a role in maintaining security in certain regions, allowing the global economy to function, tackling global threats etc. I dont always agree with the way these things are dealt with, but theyre still expectations and obligations that major powers have. Which was implied in my comment ‘ Irish security is gauranteed by .. ‘ etc etc
This all needs to be backed up, to some degree, by a large military and the other institutions of the NSS, but what role these institutions play domestically in the US isn’t my business. (my sympathies notwithsatnding)

“Can you identify one case where this program saved lives? ”

As I said in the link before, the review board concluded
“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/independent-review-board-says-nsa-phone-data-program-is-illegal-and-should-end/2014/01/22/4cebd470-83dd-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html

I somehow doubt Elisee would manage to do better than the review board.

@467 “Ah, yes, the “only racists would care about privacy” argument.”

I don’t have the slightest clue how one could come up with this as a summary of my argument in good faith. Obviously the FBI’s campaign against Dr. King and larger programs such as Cointelpro are far starker and more egregious violations of privacy than NSA collection of metadata. Thus the libertarian hysteria over the national security state we have at this moment shares more with the Dixiecrat party’s attacks on “big government tyranny” than it does with an genuine concern with the operation of a democratic state. The tradition of complaining about government over-reach in defense of private power reaches back in the USA to Calhoun or before. The other component of this hysteria seems to me to be an attempt to minimize the crimes of George W. Bush.

¨The link I posted in 451 shows that the same things were going on in the 1950s and 1960s, so it’s hard to know what you’re talking about.”

They were not the same things at all.

@475 “I think you’ve got it backwards. If the warrants are rubber-stamped in secret; and some members of one Congress say they were told some things, objected to them, but were bound to secrecy; and some other members of Congress say they weren’t told at all; how can one truthfully claim there was oversight?”

Al Franken claims to have been well informed, so it is clear that there was some oversight. Whether Wyden was told, bothered to go to the meetings, or realized the implications of what he was told, is something else.

@476
It’s very easy to see why access to the metadata might be critical. Imagine if NSA were competent enough to have analysed calls from the 9/11 conspirators before 9/12 (it’s easy if you try) and FBI had then been able to question the network of people who had conversed with them. Now try to imagine the Executive or Legislative branches ruling out such a search. There are many other such hypotheticals that can easily be constructed: A chance intercept of a call from a Zeta leader to an associate in Texas, for example. If the review board is correct, then we might want to ask why the security community has been so inept in using this valuable source of data.

The parallels between the libertarian critique of the intelligence branches and their critiques of social welfare branches of the government are striking. Abuses, fraud, waste, and so on are either evidence of a need to reform a government operation or of a need to abolish it, depending on one’s ideological understanding of the proper role of the state – which is Wilentz’s point. Consider that Ron Paul proposed that chartering privateers and private assassins was the appropriate response to 9/11.

Elisee Reclus Jr. 01.23.14 at 2:53 pm @ 480: ‘… The parallels between the libertarian critique of the intelligence branches and their critiques of social welfare branches of the government are striking. …’

Usually, fans of the Welfare state — social democrats — have not been very forward about its connections with war, imperialism, and police-state surveillance and internal control, but they certainly exist in the Bismarckian model and in the regular behavior of the U.S. ruling class during and after World War 2 (at least). The problem with the libertarians is not that they’re incorrect about these connections, but that they don’t go far enough and also critique capitalism and its class system, which necessitate these projects.

“Al Franken claims to have been well informed, so it is clear that there was some oversight. Whether Wyden was told, bothered to go to the meetings, or realized the implications of what he was told, is something else.”

In other words, you like what Franken says, so it’s the truth; and you don’t like what Wyden says, so he lies.

That aside, if the briefings are secret, and Senators who oppose the program can only do so in silence, where is the oversight? How could a Senator legally oppose the program?

I linked to this above but it gives figues on how successful the program has been

http://natsec.newamerica.net/nsa/analysis

“far more important than the violations of Al Alwaqi’s supposed right to make war on the United States.”

Do you think the assasinations of Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were justified? Whatever the importance of the subject in general

Shorter Elisee:
“Since I approve some of Obama’s policies, I accuse people who oppose some other of his policies of being racists”.

Even shorter:
“I am a hack”.

For me, the civil rights/liberties implications of e.g. the crack sentencing reform, the revival of the DOJ civil rights division, and the various immigration reforms among others are very important and far outweigh the supposed effects of the metadata program.

I would agree with this, but I don’t see how it implies that the metadata program is a good idea.

So far as I can tell, by the legal arguments used to defend that metadata collection (that we have no privacy interest in our metadata), there isn’t any Constitutional reason why the FBI couldn’t collect this data just like the NSA has, then data mine it to their hearts’ content to profile whoever they want, foreign or domestic. Counterterrorism efforts, both at the national and local level, are already engaging in activity that’s too close to profiling in my opinion, and I fear that if this program stands that all of the legal machinery is in place to make that much worse. The next time something COINTELPRO-like emerges, it will be backed by Big Data and far more ubiquitous electronic communication.

If the complaint is just that Greenwald is unfair to Obama personally sometimes, well, Greenwald is kind of unfair to everyone sometimes ;).

“Two reasons: 1) Verizon has no duty to preserve records so they may not be there when requested and 2) the Courts have held that this type of information is not private ( no expectation of privacy) and does not require search warrants consistently. For example, collecting postal “meta-data” found on physical envelopes has been collected without warrant for 100 years or more.”

Yet any prosecutor with a need for this information and a showing of probable cause would go to a judge for warrant to get this information (undercutting point 2), and would have a reasonable expectation that Verizon could provide it (undercutting point 1). Isn’t that so?

Elisee Reclus Jr. 01.23.14 at 4:38 pm @ 489: ‘… As illustrated by Hayek’s enthusiasm for Pinochet’s torture regime or Margret Thatcher’s critique of the nanny state, state coercion is not a problem for libertarians as long as it is in the cause of privilege….’

I’ve been arguing with libertarians for decades, so I know something about what they think. As with ‘socialist’, the word ‘libertarian’ is given many meanings and is often abused. At the risk of playing a No True Scotsman game, I have to protest that people who favor state coercion when it serves their privileges, like Thatcher or Reagan and their followers, are not real libertarians. Another example is Rand Paul, who pushes ‘Right To Work’ laws, which are a clear example of government interference with the classical liberal rights of association, assembly, expression, contract, and personal property in one’s labor, and which, therefore, any consistent libertarian would reject. Perhaps you have encountered only phony libertarians.

Because people like Thatcher, Reagan, and Paul are not very smart or not very honest, they’re uninteresting as theoreticians, but they may be important as political operatives, and it is a good idea to see what fuels their political careers. A part of that is reaction to the Bismarckian welfare-warfare state which you seem to favor: lightly pay off the poor and the working class in order to get a license to wage constant imperial war abroad and set up the machinery of a totalitarian police state at home, just in case. A lot of people don’t like it, and in the absence of prominent liberals opposing it, a lot of people are naively gravitating to Paul, who is now making a career out of flogging the issue. One might say it’s a case of one hand washing the other.

Elisee @ 495

“Germany finds a cell phone in a garbage can that has 5 month ago calls from both a known AQ number in Yemen and an unknown US number. NSA asks verizon for the call records. Verizon notes that they only keep those records for 3 months. Problem?”

There is a problem, and it’s that we know Verizon (and everyone else) keeps such information for more than 5 months. If they don’t keep it long enough, enact legislation to require them to keep it longer. Problem solved.

Weren’t you the one lamenting ignorance of the facts earlier?

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/09/retentionpolicy.pdf

Just a reminder that there is still no reason to believe that mass collection of phone records is of any actual security value. Arguments which pretend otherwise should be treated with contempt.

I think the Anti-Combination acts were actually more evidence of the oppressiveness of ‘Old Corruption’ Britain rather than the ideological realisation of classical liberalism. Francis Place, who argued successfully against it in the 1820s, was a lot closer to free-trade liberalism than Lord Liverpool and the Tories, and he argued that repeal of the act would actually create more harmonious relations and avoid secret worker conspiracies.

a legal requirement that huge corporations keep data around so that judges can hand it over to NSA is fundamentally different than having NSA keep the data

First of all, no corporation has guaranteed access to the data held by all the other corporations, so the corporations don’t have that data around in the same way that the NSA does.

Second, It seems like it’s a pretty significant expense for the NSA to hang onto all that data, of course corporations would be holding a lot of data anyway for their own purposes, but the NSA is also subsidizing ‘big data’. One reason the tech companies have been so quiet about their deals with the NSA is that it’s been lucrative for them. This mass data collection involves a significant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to Google et al.

Elisee Reclus Jr. 01.23.14 at 6:22 pm @ 497 — I’m well aware of the theoretical deficiencies of libertarianism. Even within libertarianism, however, it is obvious that laws prohibiting or inhibiting unions are explicit violations of the property rights of laborers in their labor. Therefore, libertarians who admire such laws are either fakes or not too bright.

As Americans are soaked in liberalism from the day they’re born, their instinct to resist the domination and exploitation inherent in the present capitalist state is often something naive like libertarianism, a kind of fundamentalist flight into a fantasy of the past. Some of them might be on the road to Kropotkin, or not — it is hard to change one’s deep ideas. In any case, the forces of imperialism, war, privilege, and the police state are large and many, and in matters of practical politics those who want to resist them, being few and scattered, have to take their allies where and as they find them.

The welfare deal offered by the Bismarcks of today is not that good, anyway, because when they no longer think they need it, it will be rescinded, as we have observed in the United States since the decline of the Soviet Union.

I don’t particularly trust NSA with that data, but I don’t trust Verizon or Chinese military with it either and it is far down on my list of things to be worried about. The kidnapping and torture of Padilla: 5 alarm bells. The NSA predictable use of big data – maybe a little unease.

Despite our differences in tone and emphasis, I’m not sure that our positions are all that far apart. (Well, you might not sign onto my government-funded Super TOR proposal @396, but at least our personal Overton windows intersect.) I also think having the phone companies hold onto the metadata longer is a stupid idea (what stops Booz Allen from paying Verizon off?) and I wouldn’t even put the metadata at the top of the most serious Snowden revelations (that would be corrupting the standards bodies.)

I guess I would put it like this–my unease that metadata collection will be abused exceeds my unease that ending metadata collection will cost lives, for reasons discussed amply above.

I first joined the ACLU in 2002 when it appeared that the USA had lost its collective mind and wasn’t going to find it again soon. I was furious at the war, spying, kidnapping, assassination, and torture under Bush. It looks like under Obama that the kidnapping and torture are probably over but we’ve still got one open war, an assassination program bigger than ever, and a spying program that looks as malignant as it did back in 2005. Nobody was prosecuted for the Bush-era state supported crimes and it looks like it will be the same for the Obama era: Snowden is in far more danger than the people who lie in open congressional hearings or murder Yemeni wedding parties.

I voted for Obama twice and I believe he’s done some good things. That doesn’t mean I am going to be silent or supportive about the bad things. It’s an insulting rhetorical move to say that people who criticize the national security state under Obama are just trying to minimize Bush’s crimes, fantasizing about a time when things were better for white men, or crypto-Friedmanites who will put the EPA and unemployment benefits on the chopping block next if they make gains against the unpopular NSA.

Looking at the Snowden case where the view that we should value him as a hero because he is pointing out how the government is intruding on our rights versus we should despise him as a traitor because he is weakening the power of our executive branch and intelligence agencies to defend us seems to me to tacitly grant that the executive branch and the intelligence agencies have successfully defended us.
Let’s make another case. Let’s use a counterfactual.

Suppose a Snowden figure had gotten hold of the briefing papers Bush was given in August 2001, which famously reported that Osama bin Laden was planning on attacking America, and had given them to the papers – and the papers had published them in August of 2001. Of all the ways in which Mohammed Atta could have been thwarted, in my opinion, this would have been the single most efficient one. It would have been impossible for Bush not to alert the Transportation secretary, and it would have been unlikely that the suspicious behavior of the hijacking crew would have passed unnoticed.

So instead of granting the tacit premise (secrecy/greater security, transparency/greater risk), maybe we should consider that more Edward Snowdens will protect us more than a whole roomful of datastealing NSA-ers? More transparency, more security.

“Can you point me to any evidence that the metadata program was used for spying on political opponents?”

Well, it seems to have been used for spying on everyone, and it is hard to see political opponents being specifically excluded. Further, this info is saved. Even if the Obama admin is not interested in retaliating against, say, Occupy activists. In a few years. President Santorum or Cruz or Gingrich could be making that call, and when they make it, they will have access not only to the information current then, but to everything happening over the previous several years at least. Your data today has to not be a target for any potential president, not just the current one.

@509 “Can you point me to any proof that (a) it was not and (b) could not be so used? Don’t you think that a turn-key app for totalitarianism should have a little more in the way of controls and limits?”

That is a quintessential Libertarian/Conservative argument. It is Ronald Reagan saying that the most frightening thing in the world is someone saying: “I am from the government and I am here to help you.” Any authority or capability the government has is an opportunity for abuse. One can, with better logic, argue that gun registration is a “turn-key app for totalitarianism”. After all, is there any proof that the instant background check system is not being used to track potential Wolverine Freedom Fighters and to direct a plot to secretly put fluoride in their tap water? Hmm?

“Actually, from what we know, which is quite a lot, it was not used for spying on everyone at all, and there were numerous checks and balances”

Since you say so, it is true.

What I don’t understand is: if the program is so awesome, why was it kept a secret?
The simplest explanation is “for the usual reasons why a government would keep secret a massive spying program on its citizens”: but I am sure you will give us the real reason.

” and there were numerous checks and balances”

Can we not at least agree there were no meaningfull checks & balances? The data is technicallyavailable to dozens if not hundreds of people, and we now know of cases where they abused that access. There was some theoretical approval process, but we now know NSA requests sometimes misled FISC judges. We know FISC judges actually approve such requests by rote anyway. We know some members of Congress were not told, while others objected but were under a gag order and therefore unable to raise the alarm. We know NSA officials made false statements, both public and under oath, about these programs – telling the least dishonest lie they could, they say.

So the checks and balances don’t exist or don’t work. Isn’t that right?

“Can we not at least agree there were no meaningfull checks & balances? ”

We could if you could point to a single serious use of the data to spy on political opposition or otherwise violate citizen rights. If you cannot, don’t we have to agree that they did work – just some minor abuses, caught and stopped? For an example of what happens when there are no working checks and balances, see the purge of USAGs or use of torture – both during Bush’s era. And note that in both those cases, formal processes that are supposed to act as checks were ineffective. Power trumps process every time.

parallel construction seems an interesting phenomenon in general

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/counterinsurgency-to-fight-us-crime-no-thanks/

As used by Steve, “parallel construction” means that the NSA uses its snooping to develop leads on drug or tax matters, refers it to the FBI, DEA and/or IRS but instructs them to come up with some other pretexts for their searches so that the origin of the information isn’t traced back to the NSA. In the context of evidentiary hearings a better label for it would be “lying to the court”.

In reply to Glenn Greenwald @ 5:08pm,

“This guilt by association method – he worked with someone Impure on an issue and now is infected with that impurity! – is just childish. But worse, it’s rarely applied consistently. It’s usually just a means to enforce partisan loyalty ..”

That is a good refutation of those who’ve expressed disbelief at Mr. Snowden’s change of mind with regard to his employers and what he described as his “hardening”. That’s a standard response from that community, see the CIA’s organizational response to Philip Agee’s disclosures.
As if it weren’t credible that someone could be repulsed by “subversive capitalism” in the form of employment of third world police to further first world corporative interests. Mercenary security forces bought to subvert their country of origin. “Evolution not revolution”, is it? The “evolved” business of Constitution(s)-shredding, is it?

Rest assured that Mr. Omidyar’s business relationships have sparked a concentrated interest. Perhaps he could explain these things the best of all.

And speaking of business, Sibel Edmonds is under some sort of gag order in relation to 9/11 events. Perhaps you could reconcile that silence with some of the demands made upon Mr. Snowden, Ms. Edmonds? It really is most unfitting what with the allusion to “boiling frogs”. I’ll put this in quotes: “We” are much too intelligent to rest easy with such partial disclosure.
If there is a recent culture of taking pleasure in Mr. Snowden’s “lack of welcome” in certain communities, are “we” partaking of it?

Rather than question the hardening of Mr. Snowden, question the hardening of “W”.
Quoting Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman,
“this country has spent a jaw-dropping $791 billion on “homeland security” since 9/11.
To give you a sense of just how big that is, Washington spent an inflation-adjusted $500 billion on the entire New Deal.”
And that 791 keeps growing.

Breaking Bad Bread Government

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175655/

@525 “Besides, I don’t grant your premise. I think the NSA having your metadata at all, absent a warrant and a showing of probable cause, is already a violation of your civil rights. I offered you a parallel example involving home searches, but you didn’t respond to it.”

So your example of why safeguards on NSA use of metadata failed is that they had the metadata in the firstplace? Really?
Your parallel example is illustrative of the other point: the records were not in anyone’s house or personal possession. They were held by a giant corporation. The Supreme Court decided in the 1970s that telephone metadata was like postal address information, not something came with an expectation of privacy. The reasoning was that, far from being something in your home or in your effects, that information was something the user provided to a third party with the expectation that the third party would use it! That was for data obtained by police without a warrant by tapping phone lines (pen registers)! In this case, the third party had already accumulated and stored the data and was, no doubt, guarding it with all the ferocity and care that Target used for credit card data.

Layman Beginning at the end, it seems to me from the data that the FISC is a rubber stamp. According to the government’s own reporting, FISC has never in any year approved fewer than 95% of such requests; and the approval rate before 2009 fell below 100% – to 99% – in only 1 year. In recent years, some requests have been denied (or have been withdrawn when denial seemed likely), but even then the approval rate is 96%.

Three things.

First, requests can be modified before being approved or denied, so those numbers are a little misleading. In other words, a request is submitted, the court is unhappy with something, the request is modified, and the request is approved.

Second, more importantly, the attorneys for the government understand well what the FISC will approve and what they will not approve. So requests that are unlikely to be approved simply aren’t submitted. Think of it this way. The IRS accepts most tax returns as filed – that’s not because the IRS is a rubber stamp.

Third, not all requests are created equal. Routine requests are likely to be approved, but the FISC has subjected the metadata program to substantial scrutiny. You can read many of the declassified opinions and orders resulting from the FISC’s examination of that program. This one, for example, required the government to submit any term it wished to use to search the metadata database to the Court before being permitted to do so.

If you read through that opinion, and the many others, you’ll see that the FISC hasn’t acted as a rubber stamp at all.

Manta Eliesee, while you are busying imagining things and construct scenarios, the plain reality is that the NSA spying program from a counter-terrorism point of view was completly useless.

According to Gen. Alexander, the metadata program “contributed to our overall understanding” and was of “help to the FBI” in 12 terrorist “events.”

The Privacy Board says that the program made “no concrete difference” in those cases, by which I suspect it means that if the contribution of the program were removed then the outcome of those 12 cases would remain the same.

While the statements of Gen. Alexander and the Privacy Board differ in emphasis, they actually don’t contradict one another. Taken together, they don’t support the idea that the program is “completely useless” however.

Now, this type of tool may be more useful in other types of cases. And there’s no difference in the degree of intrusion since the standard for accessing the database is no different than the standard for issuing a subpoena. At least in the case of the metadata database, access attempts are the subject of an oversight process by the courts and by Congress. Subpoenas are actually subject to less oversight or review.

At best, I view the program as arguable – that is, I can see reasons for changing it, and reasons for preserving it. But it’s nowhere near the grave violation of civil liberties, or alarming harbinger of tyranny and abuse, that the most strident advocates of its destruction so often claim.

Is it a “great” or “amazing” program? No. It’s a tool used in conjunction with other sources and methods to enable the government to trace down possible leads as quickly as possible.

Look, if the government wants to intimidate political figures, this program isn’t what they’ll use. They’ll conduct targeted, deep surveillance on the target, they’ll know his schedule, habits, behaviors, better than anyone else, and then – unless circumstances hurry them – they’ll make the approach at just the right time.

I’m sensitive to the civil liberties concerns with respect to this program, but they’re overblown. And if you think that policy and institutional review and oversight isn’t enough to protect against abuse, then your real worry should be targeted search and electronic surveillance warrants. But those have been around for a long time, after all, and a headline has to have something new if it’s going to sell…

Nobody says the government has to be efficient in its targeting.

‘According to Gen. Alexander, the metadata program “contributed to our overall understanding” and was of “help to the FBI” in 12 terrorist “events.”’

Yes, but apparently he was lying:

“Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA’s huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two — far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration.”

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/nsa-chief-figures-foiled-terror-plots-misleading/#ixzz2rQrAjQgf
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Layman, nope. The hearing took place in October. Alexander’s speech took place in June. All of the numbers in Leahy’s questions are straight from Alexander’s speech, which I linked to above.

Leahy and Alexander are distinguishing between “plots” and “events.” In Alexander’s original speech, in June, he explicitly notes the total number of “events” in which the two programs then at issue had helped (54 events) and the total number of “plots” disrupted (42 plots). Of the 54 events, Alexander notes that 13 had a nexus to the domestic US, and that the metadata program was helpful in those cases.

What’s grossly misleading is that article. To give one example of its many inaccuracies, it states:

Mr. Leahy, who has been a chief critic of the NSA, asked Gen. Alexander to admit that only 13 of the 54 cases had any connection at all to the U.S., “Would you agree with that, yes or no?”

“Yes,” Gen. Alexander replied in a departure from normal practice.

This makes it sound as though Leahy is revealing new information, and forcing Alexander into fessing up. The problem is that Leahy’s numbers come from Gen. Alexander’s speech back in June. Seriously, read the speech. Not only was Leahy not forcing Alexander into admitting anything, he was merely confirming what Alexander had already told the world 4 months prior.

Just another example of bizarrely sensationalist media reporting on the NSA surveillance story.

Andrew F @ 536

I read the speech. It is full of vague claims designed to create the impression of anti-terror success by the program. If you read it carefully, and read the follow up exchange from the hearing, it’s perfectly clear Alexander’s speech overstates the value of the program, deceptively. It seems well established that the administrators of this program lie about it routinely. Why do you continue to believe their lies?

Layman, here is Gen. Alexander verbatim in June:

Here are some statistics of those 54 events. Of the 54, 42 involved disruptive plots — disrupted plots. Twelve involved cases of material support to terrorism. Fifty of the 54 cases led to arrests or detentions. Our allies benefited, too. Twenty-five of these events occurred in Europe, 11 in Asia and five in Africa. Thirteen events had a homeland nexus. In 12 of those events, Section 215 contributed to our overall understanding and help to the FBI — twelve of the 13.

That’s crystal clear.

Here is Senator Leahy questioning Gen. Alexander months later:

SEN. LEAHY: Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and out of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S. Would you agree with that, yes or no?

DIR. ALEXANDER: Yes.

And how did the article you cite (among many others) report this exchange? As Leahy showing that Alexander lied. Obviously that claim is silly, and is perpetuated by those in the media who don’t bother to read any statements coming out of the government.

Steve – the government apparently approved all of 300 “selectors” (telephone numbers, and other search terms) in 2012. That’s not running a dragnet, and that’s unlikely to be high volume trolling for random drug and tax enforcement information. Everything that’s done with that database is recorded, and details are reported to the FISC and to Congress (including and especially if the NSA shares any information from those queries with personnel outside the NSA, such as the FBI).

My high point of concern about this was the day the story broke. Everything we’ve learned since then has shown this program to be of lesser and lesser concern, whether from a civil liberties, counter-terrorism, or simply fiscal perspective.

If the government decides to systematically abuse the phone metadata collection, it would just throw it onto the pile with all of their other Big Data work. Build a giant graph of every thing you know about everyone, assign numeric scores depending on what you know about their politics, their faith, their habits, their relationships between each other, etc, and apply extra scrutiny to the highest ranking people. Profiling by algorithm instead of skin pigment.

Phone metadata alone isn’t enough for such a project–but once such a project existed, phone metadata would be a useful addition.

This is, admittedly, a theoretical danger. But so is the massive plot that we would fail to catch if we dismantle this program.

It is already misusing the data. Using it to develop leads for the DEA and IRS is not the counter terrorism use it is advertised as. It is domestic spying for big government.

At the level of corruption needed for the type of misuse discussed, though, the metadata program is the least of your worries. If the federal government is able to evade the checks of the courts and Congress by repeatedly, massively, and in a well-orchestrated conspiracy, lying about what they’re doing for the sake of political intimidation, blackmail, and extortion, then the checks we have on the obtaining of search warrants and wiretaps are likewise ineffective.

My point is this. If you think judicial and Congressional checks are ineffective, then you simply don’t think government can do much at all. And we can have that discussion, but imho it’s not a credible assumption. If it is a credible assumption, then you’re probably in favor of dramatically limiting the power of the government in every possible way, as there is no way to effectively check the power of its parts.

That’s the key to understanding the radical critique of the program: the idea, to paraphrase Snowden, that there are only technical checks, i.e. strong encryption or an armed populace, on government power; political and legal checks and balances don’t work and can’t be relied upon.

That lurking assumption in so much of the rhetoric emanating from the libertarian critics is what triggers Wilentz’s sense that there’s something deeper here than the criticism of the metadata program.

That lurking assumption is what unites Snowden and Paul and Assange (I’m much more hesitant at this point to attribute it to Greenwald, whose tactical acumen as an advocate can obscure the precise nature of his views).

Liberals hear the libertarians speaking in terms familiar to themselves: distrust of government and power, the need to verify, the possibility of abuse by authority. And liberals believe, mistakenly, that the libertarians are making the same type of claim.

But they’re not. There’s a huge difference between the reasonable distrust of liberalism, which allows for a rich institutional structure of government, needed, desired, and necessary in a modern economy, and the radical distrust of the libertarians, which views government as susceptible to limitation only by depriving it as completely as possible of any power and by locating more substantial power elsewhere (private firearms, private firms).

Be wary of giving the radical distrust of the libertarians too much credence, since in doing so one undermines arguments on a variety of subjects far, far more important than this metadata program.

” If the federal government is able to evade the checks of the courts and Congress by repeatedly, massively, and in a well-orchestrated conspiracy, lying about what they’re doing for the sake of political intimidation, blackmail, and extortion, then the checks we have on the obtaining of search warrants and wiretaps are likewise ineffective.”

If the criminal justice system used the FISA courts to obtain such warrants, you’d be right. Isn’t that what we’re complaining about?

Actually, there’s plenty of evidence that some level of post-2001 security vigilance has had a good impact on the security of the US – there’s been a lot of attempted bombings foiled and no major plot has succeeded since. The only way to dismiss that evidence is to believe that WTC was an inside job and all the plots uncovered were just faked.

I agree that we’ve been spending far too much on it, though – the evidence for that is sketchier, but given some common sense, it’s clear that the huge increase in the security apparatus and private sector contracts (many of which are duplicating each others’ efforts) is a gigantic money pit.

“There’s no evidence these secret programs have any beneficial effect on the problem. It is a law enforcement matter, addressable with law enforcement methods. There’s no need for this abject fear and unreasoning flight from the rule of law.”

Congress passed a law setting up FISA courts. Your disagreement with this law does not make it a non-law.

One of the things I most love about this debate is the idealized view of the criminal justice system in the United States that our libertarian comrades insist upon. FISA judges are “rubber stamps” because, apparently, getting warrants from other judges is such a rigorous process. In a nation where people are being routinely jailed by state/municipal courts acting as debt collection agencies, where the cops execute people on a routine basis, and where murdering a teenage kid is not a crime but defending yourself against an abuser is a crime, our Glibertarian Moral Leaders insist that removing phone records from the careful management of Verizon to the UN, I mean the Feds, is should incite shudders of fear and indignation. Indeed.

“so any claim that we have direct evidence of the uselessness of secret programs is actually false”

I’m not sure it is possible to prove the program is useless – you can’t prove a negative & all that. But it seems to be the case that there’s no evidence it is useful. Isn’t that the more reasonable measure?

If you think judicial and Congressional checks are ineffective, then you simply don’t think government can do much at all.

This is idiotic. No, I don’t think the public can rely on secret courts and legislative committees acting in secret, because those institutions are designed to rely on adversarial processes and public accountability. I think the government can be both trustworthy and effective when acting in public.

Yes, when a program must be operated in secret, I demand that the broad outlines of the program be public and that technical checks force the secret program to adhere to public law. This has absolutely nothing to do with libertarianism–one could imagine a anti-libertarian utopia in which the central planning algorithms are implemented in formally verified code guaranteeing that resources are distributed according to some agreed upon standard.

Liberals are not required to have faith in illiberal programs operated by illiberal means. No matter how much Wilentz or AndrewF wish logic worded that way, it doesn’t.

FISA judges are “rubber stamps” because, apparently, getting warrants from other judges is such a rigorous process.

Apparently, it was too much rigor for the people who set up the FISA courts.

“Glibertarian Moral Leaders insist that removing phone records from the careful management of Verizon to the UN”

You should try to address your comments to people’s arguments rather than try to label the people themselves. It should be irrelevant to this conversation, but for what it’s worth I’m a lifelong Democrat, an unrepentant liberal, and I despise libertarianism. I supported this President financially twice & voted for him twice, and would probably do so again were that possible; but that doesn’t make me blind to his failings.

“I supported this President financially twice & voted for him twice, and would probably do so again were that possible; but that doesn’t make me blind to his failings. ”

I have a number of critiques of this President and of NSA for that matter, they just don’t happen to be based on Libertarian fantasies or directed by Libertarian “thought leaders”. I don’t care about metadata. I do care about ICE. I don’t care about FISA courts – I do care about the arbitrary nature of no-fly-lists. I don’t care about NSA spying, I do care about failure to protect abortion clinics against domestic terrorism and failure to use law enforcement against Right Wing treason. I’m far less concerned about big Federal government than outsourced prison and security, not to mention out of control city and state police forces.

Excuse me, that’s simply not true. There are zero indications that NSA abused the metadata. All we have are libertarian nostrums about the potential for abuse and the horrible untrammeled power of the Federal Government and libertarian alarmism about how letting the BIG BAD FEDERAL GOVERNMENT access data already accumulated and stored and searched and probably sold by giant corporations is DEEPLY ALARMING for some obscure reason and threatens the purity of our wonderful slaver Constitution.

You don’t have what anyone 20 years ago would have called a leftist critique of NSA/FISA, you have a libertarian critique in drag.

“You don’t have what anyone 20 years ago would have called a leftist critique of NSA/FISA, you have a libertarian critique in drag.”

There you go again – you don’t address people’s actual arguments, you just label them ‘libertarian’ and mock them.

What, in your view, is the legal basis which permits the government to compel telecoms to turn over all calling metadata. Please articulate it. If you cannot, do you still say it is legal?

Why do we care?

We’re worried, as all reasonable liberals would, that government might abuse secret power, given its record of tending to do so against the already underprivileged.

I support the efforts in the EU to restrict corporations and the efforts in the US to restrict secret government surveillance programs. That, by definition, disqualifies my position from being a libertarian one. You can disagree with my position, but you can’t call me a libertarian if you care about the truth at all, which is very much in doubt.

Elisee Reclus Jr. 01.26.14 at 7:32 pm @ 569:
‘… People like me, I dunno how to characterize myself, are more interested in seizing power than in what seems like a counterproductive campaign against government power in itself. …’

Well, that’s the problem.

Legal basis? They had a Court order. Jesus. Feel free to disagree with the legal reasoning of the FISA Court, the FISA powers granted by Congress, decisions like Smith v. Maryland, 100 years of precedent on envelopes, Judge DeLeon etc etc. but don’t pretend that Greenwald’s bullshit is a consensus legal analysis.

@570 But don’t you think that’s peculiar: you are all about leftist rhetorical flourishes (“ruling class … imperial wars … “) and at the same time about legal niceties. The legal system is merely a codification of the system of exploitation and dominance, no? It peculiar that you keep talking in revolutionary slogans in the cause of some milquetoast legalistic liberalism. For me the Constitution means what power makes it mean, nothing more or less.

Elisee Reclus Jr. 01.26.14 at 9:57 pm @ 572:
‘… @570 But don’t you think that’s peculiar: you are all about leftist rhetorical flourishes (“ruling class … imperial wars … “) and at the same time about legal niceties. The legal system is merely a codification of the system of exploitation and dominance, no? It peculiar that you keep talking in revolutionary slogans in the cause of some milquetoast legalistic liberalism. For me the Constitution means what power makes it mean, nothing more or less.’

I’ve been discussing the Constitution and other elements of milquetoast legalistic liberalism because that is the predominant ideological framework in this venue. Part of my usual game is to show that liberalism is indeed a system of exploitation and domination, and will never produce the freedom and equality it advertises; but now you’ve gone and taken the net down. Oh, well. So, what have you got against classical slavery? You’ve associated the Constitution with slavery it what seemed like a disparaging manner, so I’m assuming you think it’s bad, but a political order based entirely on power ought to include many levels of it, with powerless slaves on the bottom, no?

Layman @547: What were those 54 cases? He doesn’t say. […] Because he’s trying to inflate the utility of the program, in order to justify it. Put another way, he’s lying. Can you find any report from any body which corroborates Alexander’s statements on this?

Whoa. Layman, this was me:

According to Gen. Alexander, the metadata program “contributed to our overall understanding” and was of “help to the FBI” in 12 terrorist “events.”

and this is you in response:

Yes, but apparently he was lying

So we went around about that, and it turns out of course that, contrary to the article you cited, Leahy merely used Alexander’s figures in asking his questions and never showed, or claimed, that Alexander was lying.

Now your claim is that Alexander is being vague (and that being vague, somehow, constitutes lying – you’re rather vague as to how). Beyond specifying the number of events in which the Section 215 program helped, he is indeed being vague because the details of those cases are classified. So what?

= = = Elisee Reclus Jr. @ 4:42 pm
Excuse me, that’s simply not true. There are zero indications that NSA abused the metadata.= = =

= = = = = = http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/28/usa.comment
The Bolton confirmation hearings have revealed his constant efforts to undermine Powell on Iran and Iraq, Syria and North Korea. They have also exposed a most curious incident that has triggered the administration’s stonewall reflex. The foreign relations committee has discovered that Bolton made a highly unusual request and gained access to 10 intercepts by the National Security Agency, which monitors worldwide communications, of conversations involving past and present government officials. Whose conversations did Bolton secretly secure and why?

Staff members on the committee believe that Bolton was probably spying on Powell, his senior advisers and other officials reporting to him on diplomatic initiatives that Bolton opposed. If so, it is also possible that Bolton was sharing this top-secret information with his neoconservative allies within the Pentagon and the vice-president’s office, with whom he was in daily contact and who were known to be working in league against Powell. = = = = = =

I’m sure Andrew F. has an explanation for why Bolton’s words didn’t mean what he said, and in the alternative why it wasn’t really a violation of numerous laws and the Constitution for Bolton and Cheney to be using national security assets to spy on political opponents (probably something to do with them being in same political party + Cheney having granted himself plenipotentiary 4th branch of government powers).

Cranky

What Wilentz argues is that the meaning of the Constitution proposed by Greenwald and friends is not compatible with the modern liberal state.

In the case of Greenwald, he doesn’t have any evidence for that claim. Greenwald can’t be assumed to agree with Assange’s radical views.

The libertarian argument is that government cannot be trusted with power. My argument is that the right cannot be trusted with power and that believing that liberal institutions will continue to operate as liberal institutions when that “faction” is in power is naive.

Those aren’t the only two views. No one faction is ever totally “in power”. Bush had all branches of government, but still couldn’t privatize social security. He abused his power, but he didn’t call a halt to elections and make himself president for life. Under your logic, maybe Obama should do that? Maybe he should tell all of his followers to buy as many guns as they could, and do whatever they could to gain power over other factions? When, in your view, does it make sense to adhere to procedural norms?

Elisee @ 569: I don’t say you are a libertarian. I say you have accepted the premises of the libertarian analysis without dealing with the ramifications of that argument. And that is what Wilentz says as well.

Well said.

Consum: No, I don’t think the public can rely on secret courts and legislative committees acting in secret, because those institutions are designed to rely on adversarial processes and public accountability. I think the government can be both trustworthy and effective when acting in public.

Grand jury investigations are confidential (including with respect to any recipients of subpoenas, in some cases). Judges review applications for search warrants secretly. Classified information within a judicial proceeding is subject to the Classified Information Procedures Act which, as it turns out, requires reviews by the court in secret. So lots of things that the government does are kept confidential with respect to the public.

What’s important here is that the judiciary be independent, that a diversity of political interests are aware of the program and have oversight of it, and that agencies focused on corruption and official malfeasance are well supported.

Would disclosure to the public be an additional check? Not significantly in this case, because the search terms used by the government are (for obvious reasons) confidential. Who in the government has access to the results of the searches? That’s kept confidential as well. So there is no way for the public to detect a corrupt use of the program simply by knowing of the existence of the program.

As to the usefulness of the program – that’s tough to say. Critics actually briefed on its use say that the information gleaned could have been obtained through “traditional” methods. And that’s certainly true – any information obtained by this program would also be information that can be obtained by a subpoena from a grand jury.

But the critics miss – or pretend to miss – the point of the program, I suspect. This is a program designed to facilitate certainty of scope and speed of inquiry – it’s not designed to collect new types of information. It means not relying on a phone company to execute your search terms correctly or to preserve records adequately, not having to disclose your search terms to various private firms, and if speed and scope are critical – as they could be at some point – having the critical capabilities at hand.

For anyone who accepts the premises of radical distrust, however, all of that is irrelevant. You can’t trust “them”, no matter how many checks and balances are present. And if I can’t trust three branches of government to stop each other from abusing a collection of business records subject to multiple levels of oversight, why should I trust “the bureaucrats in Washington” with anything related to my health-care?

I say you have accepted the premises of the libertarian analysis without dealing with the ramifications of that argument. And that is what Wilentz says as well.

I explicitly discussed the problems with those premises and their ramifications @332.

So lots of things that the government does are kept confidential with respect to the public.

As I said @457, “I don’t have a detailed theory on this, but I’m a lot more tolerant of small or time-limited secrets. ” Your grand jury can be secret, but before you convict anyone you should have to publicly show your evidence. There might need to be exceptions, but they are currently deployed far too often. A database of all phone metadata in the U.S. over the course of years is not small, and the government did not intend it to be time-limited–but thankfully, their illiberal impulses were thwarted.

What’s important here is that the judiciary be independent, that a diversity of political interests are aware of the program and have oversight of it, and that agencies focused on corruption and official malfeasance are well supported.

I went into the problems with this view @458. But that aside, it would definitely be possible to provide much, much better guarantees that this program isn’t being abused (if it has to exist at all, which I don’t think it should, see my proposed alternative @396.)

We should not know the specific queries made to the database, but the kinds of queries and the kinds of intentions the government has in making them. The government has given the example of a known suspected terrorist who switches between several phones. Fine, then make it so the only query you can make of the database is “which other phones is the same person who used this phone using?” Make it explicitly illegal to use the database for any other purpose. If the government has other uses in mind, they should be explicitly described in public law. This imposes some costs on the law enforcement/intelligence work. Just like the burden of following the law imposes costs on any other government agency–if Kathleen Sebelius could implement any health care system she wanted, she would be able to save many more lives than the NSA or Pentagon is likely to. (But then, just as with the NSA, I would worry about what her successor would do with the same power.)

Anyway, I’ve spent way too much time dealing with anti-liberal authoritarians telling me I’m anti-liberal. You guys have done nothing but mis-characterize our positions, over and over again. You keep talking about what “premises” we’re using, but then you describe logic that’s completely alien to ours. ‘You can’t trust “them”, no matter how many checks and balances are present.’ Bullcrap. I, and others, have repeatedly said I would find this program tolerable (if misguided) with a different set of checks and balances (190, 396, probably others). There’s no sense engaging with either of you on this, because there’s no relationship between the position you claim I have and my actual position. Bye.

Andrew F @ 576

“Now your claim is that Alexander is being vague (and that being vague, somehow, constitutes lying – you’re rather vague as to how.”

No, now my claim is that you’re being deliberately obtuse. Vagueness is a form of deception. Alexander talks about 54, when it seems 42 are irrelevant. Then he talks about 12, when it seems 11 are irrelevant. Then he talks about 1. If there was 1 example, what was the point if claiming first 54, then 12, then 1? Because the headline for that speech will be 54.

As to the 1, it seems that’s not true either. It’s perfectly clear that the metadata program hasn’t produced any successes.

“Based on the information provided to the Board, including classified briefings and documentation, we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation.”

Not 1. Not 12. Not 54.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2014/jan/23/privacy-civil-liberties-board-nsa-report-text

“Which part of the government are we talking about? The judiciary (the government) placed the 5 year expiration on results from database queries.”

This is false. Any record which is the result of a 3-hop query becomes part of a permanent database. There is no expiration or purge requirement.

This isn’t a conundrum. The liberal state is incompatible with sweeping surveillance prerogatives. Surveillance has always been a key element of social control in authoritarian and colonial regimes. Surveillance lets the PTB neuter dissent by blackmail over personal details and selective enforcement of cherry-picked, otherwise dormant, criminal-code violations. The surveillance state opens any would-be organizer for progressive causes with an imperfect life to extortion, and everybody – see the title of this blog – lives an imperfect life.

We do not even have to adduce slippery slopes here: we already live in a country in which federal and local law enforcement work hand-in-glove with corporate security departments to vitiate protests. We can see how promiscuously elites apply terms like “terrorism” and treason. Then we can note that the NSA will not say it doesn’t spy on lawmakers and consider that even its most determined critics in Congress have not availed themselves of the immunity powers that their predecessors did in the Pentagon Papers/Church Committee era.

We joke, with some justice, that “conservatism” has collapsed into support for anything liberals dislike. Wilentz and his defenders are their counterparts: impelled to support anything they think “libertarians” oppose. They’ll help destroy the liberal state by defending the panopticon state from bogeymen.

This isn’t a conundrum. The liberal state is incompatible with sweeping surveillance prerogatives. Surveillance has always been a key element of social control in authoritarian and colonial regimes. Surveillance lets the PTB neuter dissent by blackmail over personal details and selective enforcement of cherry-picked, otherwise dormant, criminal-code violations. The surveillance state opens any would-be organizer for progressive causes with an imperfect life to extortion, and everybody – see the title of this blog – lives an imperfect life.

One could easily argue the reverse. The liberal state is incompatible with the privatization of public life via excessive secrecy and the application of reactionary doctrines of property rights to public speech. While to the libertarian, the actions of a person communicating over a common carrier are private and the actions of an innkeeper operating his or her inn are similarly private, the liberal understands that democracy is fundamentally about the public life and there is no right to “use the community roads in secret”. One cannot expect to conduct a criminal operation on the communications highway in private anymore than one could expect to launder money in the banking system or refuse service in a restaurant based on race or gender or sexual orientation. And it clearly is the responsibility of the government to police the use of these public venues – as it is the responsibility of the public to make sure that such policing is subject to appropriate oversight and limits. We want the government to intervene when a person is refused service in a hotel on the basis of race and at the same time we are properly cautious about the government tracking every citizen’s every hotel stay. We don’t find the hysterical arguments of the neo-confederates about the inevitability of government tyranny deriving from the regulation of public accommodations persuasive and would be naive to believe they are offered in good faith.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140124/07511725976/fisa-court-waited-until-after-snowden-leaks-to-actually-explore-if-bulk-phone-record-collection-was-legal.shtml

It would seem that that legal authority was only obtained after the Snowden leaks: FISA Court Waited Until After Snowden Leaks To Actually Explore If Bulk Phone Record Collection Was Legal

Yes Elisee, but maybe it would be more credible if they did that before they built the program, and not after people got mad about it?

“You can read Judge Deleon’s decision for an argument as to why the court order was correct.”

I can, but apparently you can’t. At least you’re unable to articulate it, or unwilling to try. It’s a lot harder than shoulding ‘Glibertarian’ at people. Funny, huh?

“I can, but apparently you can’t. At least you’re unable to articulate it, or unwilling to try. It’s a lot harder than shoulding ‘Glibertarian’ at people. Funny, huh?”

I don’t care about the merits of DeLeon’s decision, which I do not have any particular expertise to evaluate or any religious faith in – obviously one’s interpretations of laws, even good faith interpretations can vary dramatically. I simply point out that there is no evidence that the government did not try to follow the law and there is substantial expert disagreement about whether the law was correctly interpreted. These are matters of fact that vitiate Greenwald hysteria and support e.g. Franken’s analysis. Note that we are not disagreeing about whether there should be more oversight and stricter guidelines – which is what Franken and I both support – we are disagreeing about the need for massive hysteria about the Stasi State.

@595. They did.

Can we use “liberalism” and “capitalism” interchangeably, and then does liberalism require capitalism to work unimpeded

No, and I certainly hope not. I do see currently existing liberal states as inextricably bound to propertarian rights, but I fervently do hope that an unpacked “liberalism”, where for example a free press can coexist with a severe diminution of private property and accumulation is both possible and foreseeable.

Whether Capitalism can exist without liberalism is a different and more complicated question. Capitalism does I think require the consent of the free laborer to the social structures that exploit her. Capitalism is also incredibly dynamic, and tendential, and requires an ever more intricate and sophisticated superstructure to increase gradients and differences for exploitation and surplus.

Having said the above in 603, I don’t deny that there is a more radical critique of bourgeois liberal capitalism, and whether for example the “right to a free press” as a property right accruing to an individual or as a social or communal right.

This is often where some socialists, communists, and communitarians see capitalism and liberalism as theoretically intertwined, in methodological individualism.

@ 600 — The fundamental idea of the state is coercive, so any state would require means of coercion to exist, including surveillance. The reason I particularly mentioned liberalism-capitalism is that it is the currently predominant variety, and that its fans so often succeed in portraying it as a vehicle of freedom, equality, and prosperity, evidence and logic to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet in this discussion, a couple of people came along and simply gave the game away, a rare opportunity.

In regard to state-smashing, it seems to me that that sort of thing usually just leads to other and often worse states, so I prefer different means.

This just restates what many others here are saying:

If the documents being released are authentic (and this has never really been challenged), I do not care about the character or motives of those making them public.

I have been dismayed by the very personal attacks on Snowden by the national security establishment on the talk shows most Sundays. Not only is it a distraction, but each time it is done it just reinforces my thought that these are not men I want to have access to my personal data.

I also would not want to be ruled by the type of people who would dismiss anything originating with Snowden unless he is, and has always been, in 100% agreement with a laundry list of liberal orthodoxy.