PRISM

Reading this, my first thought was of the Soviet Politburo. The formula for bureaucratic power also seems to be the formula for ossification, isolation, and eventual irrelevance. A pity, from the individual’s point of view at any rate, that even institutions doomed in this way more often than not outlive the individuals who find themselves at the pointy end of their attentions.

The term “securocrats” is really overdue for catching on in the USA.

Weber.

Fortunately the terrorists are not winning …

Berlusconi did a pretty good job of power consolidation with news. What if he was a young man?

Eh… The Guardian (and Washington Post) stories about “PRISM” manage to bury a rather key fact:

the “PRISM” program is aimed at information and communications originating in foreign countries that would be of interest to intelligence and counter-terrorist operations, much of which is routed through infrastructure owned by US companies. And of course the NSA collects such information. Undoubtedly, so do the intelligence services of any nation with the technical capability of doing so. Perhaps there will be a follow up story: CIA Steals Property from Foreign Governments!

Anyway, kudos to the New York Times for nailing it in the first paragraph. Imho, this is much ado about nothing. The interception of foreign communications into the US isn’t an expansion of government power. Nor is the cooperation of various companies with such efforts new. What is fairly new are the laws designed to bring FISA into the 21st century, and under which these programs now operate.

Is the full set of slides online anywhere? All I can see is three of the 41, eg here. I feel like there is still a lot of uncertainty about the scope of the program and the kind of material it acquires. The flat denial from (seemingly) all the tech companies fingered is hardly conclusive, but given the reputation capital some of these companies have spent on proclamations of openness I suspect the end result when it comes to access will be somewhere between the “everything at all times” interpretation that seems out there at the moment and “nothing”. Apart from anything else, I am not convinced the NSA has the hardware and expertise to acquire the volumes of data that are being implied. Each company’s infrastructure is built on entirely different software stacks, and “access to the servers” is a pretty vague statement.

Tom Slee: “Apart from anything else, I am not convinced the NSA has the hardware and expertise to acquire the volumes of data that are being implied. ”

They don’t actually need to acquire huge volumes of data, they only need to be able to acquire whatever they want when they decide they want it.

Andrew F. is putting out the authoritarian fantasy that this is about foreign countries and intelligence. But there’s a technological fantasy too, that this is about analysis. It’s about social control. What most often happens is that a thug somewhere in the security system says “Get me everything on Joe Blow, American citizen. I think he’s suspicious, and I want to charge him with something.” So people obligingly trawl through all of Joe Blow’s stuff.

“Andrew F. is putting out the authoritarian fantasy that this is about foreign countries and intelligence. But there’s a technological fantasy too, that this is about analysis. It’s about social control. What most often happens is that a thug somewhere in the security system says “Get me everything on Joe Blow, American citizen. I think he’s suspicious, and I want to charge him with something.” So people obligingly trawl through all of Joe Blow’s stuff.”

Andrew F is continuing to uphold (downhold?) a hard-earned reputation.

What worries me is that I think that it’s worse than you think, Rich. You (and many others) are sorta operating in a 20th century mindset, where there’s actual effort involved in pulling a dossier. I assume by now that somebody can just pull one up in 30 seconds, with a few mouse clicks, and that a huge amount of condensation, summation and profile construction will have been done.

Rich, Tom: They already had the ability to acquire data whenever they wanted whenever they wanted it. This is written into existing regulation. We already knew they were asking for data without formal authorization, based on some vague “you know we’re really authorized” rationale. We already knew there was some kind of data mining going on, which would require some kind of large data set, presumably. This is new. But this is a lot of data people are talking about. At a minimum, it would impose enormous costs on everybody involved in gathering and producing the data. The four slides I’ve seen don’t actually pinpoint where on the continuum between “you know we’re really authorized” and “here’s a piece of paper telling you exactly what to do” this is.

This is written into existing regulation.: for phone, I don’t remember whether it’s also for ordinary IP traffic. I think I initially read the headline as being about phone traffic. Either way it’s an awful lot of data to “make a copy” every day.

Rich, that the collection effort is aimed at foreign sources of intelligence was reported in The Guardian and The Washington Post on the basis of the leaked information they received. This was confirmed by government sources to The New York Times, and was confirmed by a public statement Thursday night by the Director of National Intelligence.

All of those statements – from the leaker (also an authoritarian fantasist, in your view?), from documents provided by the leaker, from anonymous government sources, and from named government officials – are consistent with the actual mission of the NSA and with the very laws that were passed several years giving the government the power to collect such foreign intelligence in this manner. It’s astounding to me – though it shouldn’t be – that we seem to have forgotten detailed discussions of these laws.

So what I’m repeating isn’t “authoritarian fantasy” but the facts as we currently know them.

As to the idea that an operation like this would involve an unregulated and unsupervised ability for one person to simply say “get me all the information we are technologically capable of getting on citizen Joe Blow, he just seems suspicious to me”, that strikes me as very implausible given the effort expended on law and regulation constraining programs like this, given the obvious sensitivity of those who work in this area to the possibility of investigations and recriminations for any illegal activity, and simply given the bureaucratic nature of what appears to be a large and continuing government program.

Imho, there is a far greater likelihood of abuse of power by a local police officer, who operates more independently and often with less scrutiny, than a program of this size and profile, in which every keystroke can be recorded for investigation by an inspector general.

Rich @ 2:01,
By joining your Choicepoint profile, your Google search & click history, your phone logs & network map, and your e-mail logs & map. Plus more detailed records from the credit card companies, grocery store affinity cards, and whatever Palantir has on you if necessary. Trivial with today’s technology. Even the smallest mom-and-pop e commerce site has far more information about those who buy from, or just visit, it’s site than anyone realizes, and the Choicepoints & Googles (including Google Analytics) know you better than your psychiatrist.

Cranky

“given the obvious sensitivity of those who work in this area to the possibility of investigations and recriminations for any illegal activity”

Is anyone supposed to actually believe this? Service providers have been immunized for illegal activity, whenever it was revealed that they were sharing data with the government in ways forbidden by law, time and time again in recent years. Government employees openly tortured people and then destroyed the tapes when ordered to turn them over, without punishment. No inspector general is ever going to investigate whatever keystrokes are generated in pursuit of whatever the security agencies want to do. Or if they do, it’ll just be another case where it’s declared that we have to look forward, not back.

But I do like the continued slippage of the justifications for why we shouldn’t be worried that every electronic communication we make can be used to incriminate us whenever an example has to be made, or some boss just decides that he was disrespected. At the beginning it was “Oh, we’re only collecting communications from foreign countries.” Then it turned out they were collecting everything. Then it was “But you need authorization to look at that, from a judge.” But you don’t, the judges rubber-stamp everything, and anyways you don’t need authorization to collect data for data mining — you need all the data for that. So finally it’s “given the bureaucratic nature of what appears to be a large and continuing government program.” Yes, the protection for our rights is not law or regulation, but Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss being too incompetent to infringe on them. No, not credible.

Further to Andrew and what it means to be foreign..

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/06/dnis-non-denial-mass-surveillance-americans

The distinction between Americans and us foreigners is disturbing. In yesterday’s statement

[U.S. Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper said the internet program, known as PRISM, can’t be used to intentionally target any Americans or anyone in the U.S. He said a special court, Congress and the executive branch all oversee the program and that data accidentally collected about Americans is kept to a minimum.

Google claims that internet censorship is a trade barrier, but providing routine access to info on terrists and furners would defenestrate that argument.

This is an interesting suggestion that the technology behind Prism (whatever that may be) may be from Palantir, who has or has had software by the same name. The Palantir Prism software looks like it attaches to relational databases only, and I think that would not fit the trawling of emails that is being suggested, but the connection looks pretty plausible to me.

Here is Palantir on their beliefs:

From protecting privacy and civil liberties to promoting open software to pursuing philanthropic engagements to a host of other initiatives, we put our values to work in the service of making the world a better place, every day.

So that’s all right then. I will refrain from leaping on my open scepticism hobby horse for several minutes.

TraderJoe, if you’re going to talk about Bayesian analysis, it would behoove you to understand how it actually works.

Imho, this is much ado about nothing.

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism security state authoritarianism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos doing something.

Let’s have a book event on Nick Harkaway. I can’t find his set piece on how surveillance systems make criminals — `stat-fillers’, from _The Gone-Away World_ — but here are two from _The Blind Giant_:

“Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important – it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not – but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.”

“A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.”

@ peggy #10 – I read Maria’s post about a minute after she posted it, and the story about the family getting the bad news after he was home and thought to be safe, hit me hard. I agree with most of what you wrote, but I think that dividing 3000 (I suppose you are referring to the World Trade Center) by 12 is not a good argument. I also think we are beyond the destructive ability of spear points.

Ronan, on the 51% number:

There are a variety of phrases implying different standards of proof which may have given rise to the 51% requirement. “Reasonably believe” and “substantial likelihood” are two contenders found in the text of relevant laws. “Reasonably believe” can be interpreted to imply a “more likely than not” standard, i.e. greater than 50/50 odds, though interpretation varies and in some cases it can imply less than 50/50 odds. Depending on when and how the PRISM program was first authorized, that “reasonably believe” phrase may be the source of the 51% requirement (the phrase forms an important part of FISA amendments that were passed in 2007, and then repealed in 2008, with certain exceptions for programs already in existence). Alternatively, if authorized under a different section, the “substantial likelihood” phrase may be the source.

Of all the aspects of this program, that “reasonably believe” requirement (or a close relative) is the most likely to be revisited, imho. But I suspect that the “selectors” used are likely strong enough to satisfy scrutiny by members of Congress (indeed, they have been for years now, apparently), and will likely be considered strong enough to exist under any modification to the law that makes it through.

Rich, the controversial interrogation procedures were the subject of numerous legal memoranda and investigations – they weren’t conducted ad hoc or in secret from the government; there wasn’t a thug somewhere who ignored regulations, went rogue, and decided to do things his way for his own interests. It was – for better and for worse – an institutional decision. To my mind, the use of this program by some rogue bureaucrat is only slightly less plausible than the idea that a pilot of a U-2 might be using it for spying on her ex-husband – it’s possible, but would be quickly detected, and those whose careers and legal freedom are tied to the program have every incentive to prevent and punish that kind of violation.

As to whether these would be the types of programs subject to investigation or oversight, they of course would be. These would be precisely the type of programs subject to the most monitoring for abuse, for reasons ranging from obvious prudential and ethical reasons to legal requirements to pure bureaucratic CYA.

Anderson, if you can’t trust Sauron, who can you trust? Uses of his Eye are, of course, subject to monitoring for abuse.

#40, Rich, it’s worth looking at what Sully actually had put in the e-mail compared to what the NYT published.

http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.hk/2013/06/nytsullivan-email-exchange.html

That NYT article on Greenwald is bizarre. The shock that Greenwald is, gasp, wait for it …. not edited! And, also too, has opinions on the stuff he writes about!

P O’Neill, even I, with my minimal contact with journalists, read that Sullivan Email and understood exactly which part of it would be used — before I read the NYT article. Sullivan knew that too. When a reporter calls you asking for a quote, they don’t run with “Sullivan says of him that ‘I genuinely like him as a human being.'”

And Andrew F. is providing quite the object lesson on governmental propaganda. “The controversial interrogation procedures were the subject of numerous legal memoranda and investigations – they weren’t conducted ad hoc or in secret from the government”, which is why the tapes of them had to be destroyed, in response to official requests from a investigation to see them. No number of actual events will be allowed to discredit the bland facade. The request to see the tapes was from Senator Jay Rockefeller, on behalf of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but apparently that’s just not an important enough investigating agency within the government. OR the 9/11 Commision. No, none of that history even actually happened, because it categorically doesn’t happen that way.

The purpose of the justice system is to punish people and put them in prison, and thereby further the careers of the people doing the punishing. It doesn’t matter whether the people punished are innocent or guilty, so long as they sound guilty. No one is talking about this overwhelming surveillance being diverted to some private purpose — it’s being used for the same purpose that all such measures are designed for.

@ Arnold #39
The assumption that terrorist abilities have been amplified enormously by modern technology is not historically grounded. Assassination was a popular protest one hundred years ago, felling Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and also Archduke Ferdinand. Black powder, as used recently in the Boston bombs, was invented in Tang China, about 850 A.D. Long distance communication was previously available (although not cheaply) through couriers, pigeons and telegraph. Venerable internationally organized social structures include the Catholic Church and hawala, the Arabic system for money transfer which had its origins in the Quran. Crooked Timber readers are familiar with the spread of the ideas underpinning the French Revolution.

Small groups, internationally motivated, plotting and carrying out mayhem, is not new. Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Guy Fawkes are different versions of the same theme.

@ #39
Counting the deaths of 3000 US residents over a dozen years is apparently callous. Living in resolutely gun controlled Boston, I keep track of the murders of my inner city neighbors at 40-80 per year for a total of over 600 for that dozen years. Their grief, measured out in daily gunfire, is just as intense as the horror of 9/11 despite having only a thirteenth the population of NYC.

The social structures of those deprived neighborhoods and their church funerals allow them to overcome their quite rational fears and live normally, without embracing the false comfort of a police state. Why is the rest of the USA not so resilient? Answering that question will do more to resolve the problems of terrorism than untold billions spent on high tech spying.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

Trader Joe:

“Perhaps I’m naive, but I think there are more protections than just good intentions. There’s a reasonable leap involved between the ability to collect data (both meta and non-meta), actually collecting said data and then crucially, using that data in some manner and finally that the use is unlawful. I agree with your point about the potential for abuse – perhaps its not worth the potential benefits. I don’t think your point was the adequacy of the controls however, it seemed your point was the legality of the collection in the first place.”

Except that (1) as far as we can tell, they are collecting the data, (2) they have abundant resources to collect and process the data, (3) ‘using that data in some manner’ is easy (100% efficiency is impossible, but irrelevant), and (4) ‘unlawful’? Are you really that stupid?

I wonder how much of this information has been used to blackmail political opponents.

I don’t mean to imply the Tsarnev’s were an example of it being used – its not as though they’d make it known if it was. But…Maybe the reason they went to question him was following the application of the protocol I described?

I get your point – but anterior Baysian analysis is done all the time and if (as someone else posted) all you need is 51% confidence there are a lot of ways to make the math work. This discussion began when Ronan (@16) included a reference to what the NSA could get out of a Baysian analysis of the data and I suggested that said blog was looking at the problem the wrong way around.

I would tend to agree with your point on priors, which is why the collection of massive amounts of data (meta or not) is not truly as helpful (or as harmful) as people want to imagine. I’m not going to go to bat for the reliability, but the more data they collect the better chance that they do find causal pairs that are predictive.

“This discussion began when Ronan (@16) included a reference to what the NSA could get out of a Baysian analysis of the data and I suggested that said blog was looking at the problem the wrong way around”

Well I didn’t know it would be so controversial! But I’m largely ignorant of stats so found your back and forth with Jerry interesting
Just to say, I don’t think the link did say ‘what the NSA could get out of a Baysian analysis of the data’. By my reading (which could be wrong) it just used a Bayesian analysis to work out what sort of success rate the program could have under certain conditions.

@52
Whose job is it at Verizon/Google/wherever to comply with a warrant? How many warrants would there be in a week? How much work involved in extracting all and only relevant information from their records? Would this be a 24/7 service? Who pays?

I grasp the potential for abuse, but find it worrisome how several of the more vocal participants in this discussion take the worst of motivations as unquestionable fact. Is it truly unthinkable that the government collects and organizes such data to support legally-sanctioned use cases?

Emma, foreigners are chicken. Just because Maher Arar was detained during a layover at JFK on his way home to Canada and then sent to Syria to be tortured for a year is no reason for “good” aliens to be nervous.
If You Haven’t Done Anything Wrong, You Have Nothing to Worry About

“Just because Maher Arar was detained during a layover at JFK..”

But Andrew F says the intelligence agencies don’t make mistakes!?

Andrew

But I linked to an article @29 that covers the technicalities? And your contention is wrong
But lets put it more generally. Your argument is that the program is okay because it ‘targets foreigners’? (But we’ll leave what ‘targets foreigners’ means unexamined) So by your logic, you might have an issue with the program if US citizens get caught in the surveillance. And we know they do, both by the 51% rule that’s been reported (and your only response to that is a gibberish history and a guess that it might be repealed) and by Jennifer Granick in the link above, an expert in this area, who says, adamantly, that Americans do get caught in the surveillance. There is no real world scenario where this program could be run without also catching Americans in the surveillance. None.
So what exactly is your argument? Is it that it’s necessary, and effective? If so then make that case!
Or is your argument simply that its good because it exists? Or it’s good because it’s legal? I genuinely have no idea..

Also, this:

“As to the idea that an operation like this would involve an unregulated and unsupervised ability for one person to simply say “get me all the information we are technologically capable of getting on citizen Joe Blow, he just seems suspicious to me”, that strikes me as very implausible given the effort expended on law and regulation constraining programs like this, given the obvious sensitivity of those who work in this area to the possibility of investigations and recriminations for any illegal activity, and simply given the bureaucratic nature of what appears to be a large and continuing government program.”

Is all a strawman

“Just a quick geeky point: the Bayesian bit linked above seems irrelevant.
What they’re doing, surely, is leveraging the power of lots of records..”

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks

Andrew

Reading back on your comments, I’ve noticed I’ve caricatured your position. So apologees. You’ve stated it clearly enough(though I think I disagree)

Peggy #49: “The assumption that terrorist abilities have been amplified enormously by modern technology is not historically grounded.”

I observe that 19 irregulars with little more than spearpoints needed only two hours to kill 3000 people while destroying two of the largest buildings in the country.

What you may not know is that for years before that, local hazmat teams around the country were being trained by the feds to respond to bio & chem attacks on subways and sports stadia. Any place where there are lots of people.

I am sitting one mile from where some asshole just shot up Santa Monica College.

Pretty soon you are going to be able to assemble sub-visible nanotech killing machines with a desktop printer. You have no idea what is not “historically grounded”.

@72 Tom, what Peggy writes is that to think about the fact that the world is headed into greater insanity is to believe that a police state is necessary. I didn’t write that, I don’t want it to happen, and to imply that I believe otherwise is ignorant and a bit offensive. I think we should think about things clearly. Do you think the “rest of the country” can be made more “resilient” with “church funerals” in order to “allow them to overcome their quite rational fears and live normally”? I observe that instead, most of the country got talked into invading Iraq, to have even more funerals. The argument that the rates of death in 9-11 aren’t any worse than regular homicide rates is absolutely true, and that is the roughly same argument that is used AGAINST gun control: the U.S is having a big gun massacre about once every two years, and the gun lobby’s strategy is (roughly) to defeat legislative measures until nearly everyone (but the loved ones) cools off and forgets about it three months later. So I don’t trust people who say cool off. You should think clearly about the fact that there may be bad times ahead. Putting your head in the sand about it, is the real way to end up in a police state.

what Peggy writes is that to think about the fact that the world is headed into greater insanity is to believe that a police state is necessary

Not sure where you’re getting this from really. Seems to me like both you and peggy are making a fair bit of sense and should be more on the same page than not. (Kind of like what Tom Slee said.)

It seems to me there is a way to create an “immune response” so to speak that is both strong vs. external threats and at the same time benevolent to the organism itself. To me how we deal with this should involve a constitutional amendment outlining how these type powers can be used – and strictly codifying their limitations. In a biological sense we need a response that is strong when needed, but stops short of destroying damaging the organism itself – similar to autoimmune disorders like Lupus, arthritis, or type 1 diabetes. My gut tells me law big data is here to stay – but insulating citizens from its usage by the government can still be outlined. A bigger question might be how do we protect ourselves from non-governmental uses of big data?

Well, as christian_h said, it does seem similar to Stasi, NKVD, and such. The distinction between a citizen and foreigner is probably meaningless; they just need to file one more paper, a probable cause. Make a list of the disloyal and keep an eye on them; probably the oldest play in the book.

= = = Andrew F @ 11:29 PM: “There is always the possibility of the FUTURE abuse of such programs, in which the argument is about whether the oversight mechanisms in place are adequate. Is this the key criticism? If so, what are the inadequacies and how can they be remedied?” = = =

We already have the example of Richard Cheney and John Bolton using intelligence assets to spy on the the United States’ UN delegation – which they suspected was too squishy – so I’m not sure why you think that abuses of wide-net data gathering programs are in the ‘FUTURE’.

Cranky

Phone records are not secret. Maybe, they should be. No, forget the maybe. Phone records should be private, and the customer should at least share a proprietary right in that data with the phone company. But, they’re not private. At least not to the customer.

I don’t know why, but Verizon does not effectively protect your privacy with regard to your phone bill. A clever private detective can probably retrieve your latest phone bill within a few minutes.

As long as phone records are not private, then observing phone records, even en masse is not unlike a policeman standing on a street corner and observing the passing traffic of pedestrians and automobile drivers, and making inferences. Does that behavior look suspicious? Is that guy running down the street fleeing a crime? Or, jogging? Is that furtive look an indicator that that person is a shoplifter? a drug dealer?

What’s weird about this is that the policeman needs Verizon. It is as if the policeman has to go to the shopping mall, where people are spending their time, and get special permission, to observe the goings-on, in what is now the functional public square, but no longer, actually, public.

I appreciate the efforts to restore violations of the 4th amendment to the status of taboo, but I don’t think that will work as a ground of policy administration. We need fear. We need fear to work for us, instead of against us (meaning liberals), on these issues. Fear can protect a lot of stupid, and, frankly I expect that this trolling through phone records and the like — at the moment — amounts to a lot of stupid: analogous to making grandmothers take off their shoes and give up their nailclippers and family-sized shampoo bottles, in airports.

I don’t want to raise my blood pressure, trying to conjure up a fearful scenario of government stupid morphing seamlessly into repression. An easy script to write, but would it be revealing? Or, distracting?

I don’t fear the government. Government — the state, the public sector, public purposes — seems weak to me, hobbled. You don’t need Bayesian analysis to see the crooks, who brought down the global financial system, but the government is too palsied to prosecute them. In the story of Verizon feeding records to the NSA, I am more worried about Verizon. Our cellphones, supermarket affinity programs, credit and debit cards, etc. put an enormous amount of data into a weird kind of public private sphere. Just as we have moved from the public space of commercial main street, or high street, to the private (“private” as in proprietary to the corporations, not “private” as in private to the individual) world of the shopping mall, so has our data. Our lives are not secret; they are “private”, but not private.

We can raise a hue and cry, about the no doubt clumsy and artless efforts of our super-sleuths in government to make use of a vast sea of data, but I fear that all we will motivate in the end is further privatization. NSA may be a dark and mysterious Big Brother, but at least it is a public institution, with no obvious motivation to cheat or exploit me. But, NSA’s efforts to spot Waldo the terrorists, are not as worrying to me as Target Store’s success in spotting the newly pregnant shopper.

If phone records are not secret, and my phone bill is not my property — and it is not, under current law; even my dna is not mine — then, successfully invoking the 4th amendment will just serve to push all of this monitoring and inference into the for-profit private sector, alongside private security and prisons. Won’t that be nifty?

It seems to me that we should be pushing things in the opposite direction, into the public sphere. We should fear the movement of personal identification, property registration, judicial arbitration and the payments system into the private sphere, and see those as of a piece. We are drifting into a neo-feudal system, and all this data is in private corporate hands, which means the very system of personal identification, along with allied systems, like payments system or systems for property registration and adjudication, will also be in “private” hands. (“Private” in scare quotes because this the proprietary of feudalism, where governance is a private service provided by the feudal Lord, without a strong state or a concept of public space outside of the church.)

I’d like it to be the case that NSA has the data, and Verizon has to go to them to get it and put it together, and the scandal is NSA being too and free and easy in authenticating identities, that can be used to correlate information for data mining. I don’t like it that it is some bank that decides whether I own my house, not, as it used to be, a local register of deeds and a public court, where I had the same rights and presumptive right of action as the bank. I think the Federal Reserve should control MasterCard and Visa.

The nightmare scenario (here goes the blood pressure), to me, is when data monitoring merges with IP law, and we are all assessed the maximum for every song we listen to, every medical test and drug, and then turned into soylent green to discharge the student debt we incurred in kidnergarten.

“In what respect do you think the procedures already in place to prevent abuse are inadequate?”

What procedures? You don’t know about any procedures to prevent abuse. Unless you have more knowledge of this program than I do?

You may well assume that there are procedures, or take the government’s word that there are procedures. But so what? When government employees were caught torturing people — certainly a more serious act than spying on them — they just destroyed the tapes and dared anyone to do anything about it. And no one did. “Procedures” without enforcement are meaningless.

And your entire attitude is authoritarian. So it’s been revealed that there’s a secret government program by which the government can admittedly read anyone’s Email. We know about 4 four slides from a presentation. How do know that there’s a system of oversight in place? Because you’re willing to take their word? They already lied, and will continue to lie. But you think that their word should be good enough, because they’re from the government.

Bruce: “But, NSA’s efforts to spot Waldo the terrorists, are not as worrying to me as Target Store’s success in spotting the newly pregnant shopper.”

Here’s where I think you’re wrong, Bruce. So Target spots the newly pregnant shopper. That’s annoying, but Target doesn’t have the ability to put her in jail. Look at our incarceration stats. The “weak” “hobbled” government currently has a comparable number of people in jail to the number held in the Gulag. Of course they aren’t powerful people: that’s part of the system.

Bruce Wilder @ 82

Whether it’s Verizon or the government tracking everyone doesn’t seem to me to matter very much. The point of all this monitoring is to influence or control the behavior of people — defenseless people in terms of the technological means being deployed against them — who might, if organized, inconvenience the organizations doing the monitoring. If you’re a manager, or a liberal, you call this rational prioritization. Only a dirty hippy would call it administrative paranoia.

As for me, I’d call it the modern condition, I suppose. I’d even admit that the reasons we’re given for it seem plausible enough at first glance, e.g. If we know what you’ve bought in the past, we can produce more of what you’ll want in the future, and at the same time increase our profits, or, if we can figure out who’s going to protest at a meeting of the G-20, we can lock them all up beforehand, thereby reducing the municipal police bill, reduce property damage in the city center, and permit people to get to and from work on time.

The collateral damage to civil society can be left to the imagination of worrywarts like Glenn Greenwald. (To use a ridiculous example to illustrate Greenwald’s sublime concerns, I’m frequently annoyed by the fact that I don’t fit the demographic represented by the majority of the shoppers at my local supermarket. With a fully developed system of discount-card inventory tracking in place, things which don’t sell in volume in this market don’t remain very long on the shelves, which means that my fondness for Belgian endive, say, or obscure varieties of imported beer, is never indulged for longer than the week or so that it takes to remainder a new product that doesn’t move off the shelves at an optimum rate. Asking that such a product is kept in stock invariably falls on deaf ears. I’ll pass along your request to corporate is the best I’ve ever managed by asking.)

There’s no point going any further to explain why this is a lamentable state of affairs, and no point in thinking too strenuously about what to do about it as long as a majority is comfortable with it. For the moment, I’ll even concede that as long as you’re not Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, or Julian Assange, you’ve probably got nothing to worry about. I definitely would remind everyone, however, that the long-run implication of this state of affairs is best expressed by a quote from Blade Runner: You know the score pal — if you’re not cop, you’re little people….

“Perhaps you don’t like the word “illegal” because only those in power get to decide what the law is.”

Exactly. Nixon got it almost right: when the establishment (the president, the congress, and the supreme court, all together) does it, it’s not illegal. It can’t be.

Rich Puchalsky: Here’s where I think you’re wrong, Bruce. So Target spots the newly pregnant shopper. That’s annoying, but Target doesn’t have the ability to put her in jail.

There’s this box conservative libertarians have built for us, in which power is a zero-sum game, and reducing the power of the state somehow protects us and makes us more powerful. I don’t think it works that way. I gave the example of Target and pregnant ladies, because it was an example of a data-mining result that received some attention in the news recently and was kind of humorous.

The darker uses of personal data, held in private (aka corporate business) hands have become ubiquitous. There’s the MERS database, used by big banks to track the securitization of real estate mortgages; it is well on its way to becoming a real estate registry, handing the banks the authority to determine who owns a house or who owes very substantial debts. There are the credit bureaus, whose data is regularly used now to screen job applicants. There’s the growing use of debit cards for the unbanked, channelling even government benefits through the hands of private banks. Then, there’s the whole murky world of intellectual property, in software, drugs, and various cultural productions.

The “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” rests on a common law notion that a man’s house is his castle, in which he has sovereign control of things in his own possession. In our brave new digital world, it is not clear that one is even in possession of one’s own identity. Certainly, you are not in possession of your phone records or your bank records; they are the property of the phone company or the bank. That’s a problem.

In the three-way dance between the individual, the state, and business corporations, a weakened state is the servant of business corporations, which may be secure enough in their possession of information about you, but I see that as making the underlying problem worse, not better. We may want the government to have to knock on the front door, before entering, but where’s the front door and whose front door is it?

If Verizon is free to do as it will, with data about you, but protected from the government taking the data, where does that leave you? It strengthens Verizon’s power; it has the data and can do as it pleases. The government’s power and capacity is diminished; the government is more dependent on the business corporation than ever before, for information. If the government is making decisions about you — what your credit history is, your criminal history, whether you own property, whether you have educational or professional credentials, your medical history, reading your DNA to inject a bit of futurism — based entirely on private companies say they know about you, and acting as governments do, is the power with the state or the private business corporations?

If the outcome of our moral panic over PRISM is some constraint on government or a diminishing of public capacities, which simply increases the “private” power and scope of business corporations, I don’t see that as a step forward. It isn’t enough to constrain government in these cases. The possession and control of the source data has to move, in some virtual sense at least, into the individual’s hands, where the individual has some real potential to constrain Verizon, as well as the government. Your phone bill and calling history has to become something which is among the papers and effects of the individual.

I see this as revolving around the issue of establishing a public, i.e. governmental, system for individual identification, authentication and limited self-disclosure, tied to a publicly-controlled payments system. Privatization of payments and identification is a root problem.

“I’m not sure what your point is regarding the destruction of interrogation tapes. Government employees sometimes break the law? Sure, of course. Does this mean that the executive thinks it can do what it wants with impunity?”

The point is that they did just break the law, and they did just do it with impunity. Everyone knows about this incident, and nothing can be done. On previous occasions when spying hadn’t been authorized under FISA or any other program — people found out, and nothing could be done. The presumption at this point is not that a newly discovered secret program is “following procedures”. The presumption is that they are doing whatever they want, secure in the knowledge that when it is found out, nothing will be done.

As just happened when Obama invoked the military and state secrets privilege.

Bruce: “There’s this box conservative libertarians have built for us, in which power is a zero-sum game, and reducing the power of the state somehow protects us and makes us more powerful. ”

The state and business work together: business (and powerful oligarchs of all kinds) capture the state and use it. For that matter, “individuals” — if you generalize them into groups of people that are not part of the state, or part of business — are hardly averse to using their power to oppress others. If you’re looking at why the U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate, you can blame government, you can blame business (all those companies building prisons and using prison labor, and lobbying for it), and you can also blame the people who liked the idea of stricter sentences, perhaps because like Trader Joe they give a “quiet cheer” whenever they hear about bad people being locked up, perhaps because they think it keeps black people in line. And you can also blame the sainted unions — the California prison guard unions, for instance.

But after all that, you still arrive at the fact that we live in the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. It’s not all a conservative fantasy, propounded so that the government will have to get out of the way of the so-called job creators. In another recent thread, you wrote about how we had to be able to listen to populist voices — well, there’s a huge amount of resentment against the police state. Some of that is from 1%ers who want to privatize everything, but some of that is for very good reasons.

Apparently we’ll learn about PRISM even earlier.

Portions of the program are now declassified. Here’s the statement today from the DNI on the subject: PRISM Program

Rich, that statement confirms my earlier points regarding procedures that would likely be in place for the program. With respect to your last post, that no one was prosecuted for the interrogation program does not mean that “nothing happened.” It’s also not the case that simply “nothing happened” in the case of the “warrantless wiretapping” program. No one wants to be the target of Congressional or criminal investigations, or even tainted with the name of a program that attracted so much negative attention. The enormous legal preparation that preceded the interrogation program, and likely accompanied the surveillance program, also demonstrate that the law isn’t something which the executive can blithely ignore. This is NOT to say that the executive never breaks the law; it is to say that there are some pretty serious incentives to not break laws in place, not least of which is the presence of incentives others have to exact a price for doing so.

As to Bruce’s broader points about information privacy, I tend to agree with them. The US model for handling information privacy as a subject for case by case negotiations between companies and consumers is not working. There has been some movement to change that in the US, and also in the EU (which has advanced further than the US). It will be interesting to see if this story has any effect upon those efforts.

Andrew, surely the torture program is an example of how contingent the ‘legality’ of these programs is. As you say, it was the subject of ‘enormous legal preparation’, but then you left out the end of that sentence .. ‘which was shown to be largely erroneous’. Do you not know how the program was challenged?

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2053/the-legal-campaign-against-american-torture

@11: ” Anyway, kudos to the New York Times for nailing it in the first paragraph”

The NYT isn’t so bad at fourth paragraphs, either:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/obamas-strong-embrace-of-divisive-security-tools.html?_r=0

“Whatever his ambivalence about what President George W. Bush called a global war, Mr. Obama has used some of the same aggressive powers in the name of guarding national security even, in the view of critics, at the expense of civil liberties. Rather than dismantling Mr. Bush’s approach to national security, Mr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing.”

It is in a way comforting that the security establishment is striking so many secret deals with large Internet companies, because it suggests that tapping telecoms isn’t enough for the NSA; strong encryption still thwarts anyone trying to operate an information dragnet without insider collaboration. A nerdy technical plea: can Crooked Timber please support HTTPS connections? I see that you are on Dreamhost, so it would cost an extra $43.15 per year to get the necessary dedicated IP address: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Secure_Hosting

I would be happy to contribute to the cost. Encrypted web communications do not enhance privacy if the NSA has negotiated special access inside the secure perimeter, as it has allegedly done with Skype, Facebook, Google, and so on. But if there is no special insider arrangement, it restricts security services to collecting metadata like “IP address X sent requests to crookedtimber.org and received responses at the following times…” rather than actually seeing which articles you read or comments you posted*. It is important to establish a norm that electronic communications should be secure by default, not just secured for special occasions like sending credit card numbers or plotting the overthrow of the government.

If anyone in the relevant capacity takes my advice to heart, I would also suggest that you stick with a self-signed certificate rather than one purchased by a certificate authority. This will cause more browser warnings but is actually more secure than the browser-trusted certificates you pay money for from an authority, when the threat model is a secret government agency hoovering data from everywhere and anywhere. It would be unsurprising if the NSA can get secret copies of certificates provided by “trusted” commercial authorities under the same spirit of everything-goes-for-national-security that led to the phone records and PRISM programs in the first place.

*Not entirely true: even without being able to see the contents of communications, you can statistically correlate the size and timing of data exchanges to infer what someone was probably reading or even identify likely comment authors. But this requires more computing resources. The goal should be to make opportunistic spying more difficult, if not completely impossible.

No one wants to be the target of Congressional or criminal investigations,

Which is the point of classified briefings–to make sure that Congress is complicit in any wrongdoing (e.g. Pelosi and waterboarding.).

or even tainted with the name of a program that attracted so much negative attention.

It’s pretty easy to come up with new programs trying to do the same thing. Data mining metadata might not be called “PRISM” or “Total Information Awareness”, but it’s still data mining.

PRISM apparently doesn’t involve direct taps of servers

Where does it say that? It claims that any collection of information permitted by Section 702 of FISA is under the supervision of FISC. I don’t see anything that indicates how that information is collected. “Service providers supply information to the Government when they are lawfully required to do so” could mean anything, including a direct tap–nothing seems to indicate that manual intervention (or even any awareness that its happening at any given time) is required on the part of the service provider.

I must wonder–once PRISM capability has been set up, could the government use laws other than Section 702 of FISA to justify using it in any given instance? Even if not, it’s not hard to see potential wiggle room in interpretations of “intentionally target any person known to be in the United States”.

It’s pointless for the law to be made public when the interpretation is kept classified. You shouldn’t have to imagine any sort fractal turtle hierarchy to see that.

But that doesn’t *only* apply to private telephone companies. I’m sure the same intrusions of privacy existed in the old state monopolies (having worked at a private telephone company when younger I do agree that there’s no protection of privacy from the staff – at least in my experience – but plenty of data privacy regulations in general. I’m just not sure it’s an example of private abuse of power. I also agree that this is probably something the resonates more widely with people, who are going to more likely be the victims of this petty personal intrusion rather than victimised by the state..but still, the stakes are much lower)

I don’t think Andrew F passes the Turing Test – but I’m sure they’ll keep working on it.

Contra myself @102, leaks from tech companies seem to suggest that that compliance with FISA orders is a manual process.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html

Martin Bento: “One of the problems with invoking a “police state” as the endpoint of this is that people think they know what that looks like – East Germany or Chile under Pinochet – and that is not where we are likely to end up.”

All of the things that you wrote are true, but … look, interpretations aside for the moment, the incarceration rate is a social fact. Unless you believe that Americans are inherently more prone to criminality than people elsewhere, we are creating criminals via enforcement. You can certainly say that it doesn’t look like a classic police state, in that menacing guards will not ask for your papers (unless you live in Arizona). People will not be “disappeared” and dropped out of airplanes. But it still functions as a police state in the important sense that it’s designed to lock up 50% more people than anywhere else. (Well, actually, North Korea may have the same rate.)

That’s why the “at least we don’t use Stasi tactics” things are — well, probably written by white people, though of course I don’t know, but kind of foolish in any case. If you’re looking around the world for police states, we’re it.

I loved Jon Stewart’s paraphrase of Attorney General Holder: “Due process is the process we do.”

I haven’t written anything in a while, but I feel like I have to say something about the recent PRISM/NSA stories.

META: I think this is an improvement over the previous 3 bullshit Obama scandals. Even if its not really a scandal or even news really, it is still a story that deserves some attention.

I can’t remember all the back story that I’m aware of but I do remember a bit. I first became aware of the general shape of the thing somewhere around 2005 I think. There was a POOR MAN post about data that also talked about people in the Bush administration threatening to resign over the, then without any legal cover, program and people trying to get Ashcroft to sign off on it in his sickbed.

In 2007 there was the washington post story about how the NSA had installed splitters in a trunk line (fiber optic) for sweeping up internet communications.

Which lead to my insight that maybe the NSA doesn’t have a “back door” they just get copies of the latest proprietary software from facebook et al so that all that traffic they are sweeping up( ie all of it) makes more sense.

Consum @102 – the opening sentence in the DNI’s statement is the most interesting, where he states that PRISM is not a collection program, that it’s an internal program, and that it’s used to facilitate actual collection efforts. Along with his other statements, this suggests what some journalists with deep experience in this area have already guessed: PRISM is likely a computer program that NSA analysts use to bring together, organize, and analyze data from different collection efforts.

As to the question of whether the government could start a collection effort under FISA procedures, and then continue the effort without continuing the FISA procedures, the answer is no.

Rich, yes, and now certain facts about the program have been declassified. You claim that the government’s statements regarding those facts are “all lies.” To me, the incentives not to issue a public statement regarding this issue that is “all lies,” particularly when it’s clear that someone with actual knowledge of the program is out there leaking documents, are rather clear. Less so from your perspective, I assume.

Is there anything the government could say that would cast doubt on your thesis Rich? My sense of the logic you’re using is: “if the statement conflicts with my thesis, it’s a lie; if it doesn’t conflict with my thesis, then it may not be a lie.”

As to the enhanced interrogation program – there were numerous criminal, internal, and Congressional investigations; criminal prosecutions; resignations; a fair number of careers were certainly given an early expiration dates; and it was at a minimum uncertain as to how far the prosecutions would go. If you were a career CIA officer who liked your job, would you want to be anywhere near a program with that kind of fallout? I’m not sure how you draw from that affair the conclusion that, in the case of electronic surveillance programs subject to judicial review AND subject to Congressional disclosure AND subject to clearly stated statutory requirements, the government is almost certainly abusing these programs as tools of “social control.”

Outside of making the programs and the FISA courts’ opinions public, I’m not sure what additional oversight can be added here.

What about the Verizon case Andrew, which does appear to be a ‘stretched interpretation of the law’ and which took place with congressional and judicial approval for 6/7 years?
More on how PRISM works

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/08/cooperation-methods-protected-innocents-from-prism/

Should be “far more effective” above. Typed far too quickly.

And of course the NSA collects such information. Undoubtedly, so do the intelligence services of any nation with the technical capability of doing so.

No absolutely not. Those crazy technical surveilance programs are only typical for authoritarian governments, that try to scare off democratic organisation at home with compelete disregard for costs.

The German secret service has 6500 employees. The IT infrastructure for such a surveilance system alone most require a multitude. Then someone must try to make use of that indiscriminate collected data. Now that requires so many people that the overall US intelligence budget exceeds the entire military budget of other high developed nations. Snooping to pre organised public data often gets better results.

Even putting the very real risk that such an organisation poses a threat to democracy and lobbies for policy responses that are of outright negative value for achieving the claimed goal (drones vs terrorism really…), the cost return tradeoff for such a system just does not make any sense. The same money spent on public transport or healthcare would save a multitude more lives, even if that organisation would work perfect.

Is sexual innuendo made at a 4th grade level really what shocks the bourgeoisie in the 21st century? Consider this bourgeois underwhelmed.

Almost all the complaints about PRISM have been about the lord of the manor abusing his powers, not about manorialism itself. Even Ed Snowden accepts the global system presided by the US since he did not want to undermine its power by revealing all its spy stations around the world. When he says the “public should decide”, he clearly means the American public should have input as to how the US should exercise global power without inconvenience to its citizens. It is like the daughter of the lord of the manor wanting more input as to how many balls she is permitted to attend while her dad’s tenants are obligated to make her bed, dress her, feed her, and attend to her whims.

I doubt the “public will decide”. Most likely, the whole system centered on US internet companies and servers in the US will begin to be dismantled by the likes of India, Brazil, Russia – even European countries, that it, the “foreigners”.

The US has abused its manorial privileges. I say this as a tenant.

@120: Saying ‘We knew about this a long time ago’ might mean, in some contexts, ‘Now that you’ve gotten caught up, what do you think we should do about it?’

@127: While Russia, China, India, etc., may wish to get the U.S. out of their business, they may well be perfectly okay with the transformation of the U.S. into a totalitarian state. Indeed, their ruling classes may find it reassuring.

Before we get to Snowden, digby reminded me that the DNI, Clapper, who Andrew F. quoted above as a reliable source is the same person who claimed that Iraqi WMDs weren’t found because they’d been moved to Syria.

That’s pretty much perfect. It disposes at once of both “How could a high official lie?” and “When officials lie and are found out it’s a career killer”, with a side order of “How could anyone believe the statement is all lies when nothing like this has happened before?”

Since he’s effectively a deserter in the Cyber-wars, perhaps they’ll build Snowden a statue.

He’s a ‘real time’ example of the recently held thread about when desertion could be justified and when it should be held to be a crime. Its rather difficult to condemn exactly what he did, which at minimum opens the curtains on some dark rooms, though I’m sure he will be in some quarters.

“That’s pretty much perfect. It disposes at once of both “How could a high official lie?” and “When officials lie and are found out it’s a career killer”, with a side order of “How could anyone believe the statement is all lies when nothing like this has happened before?””

Long before this point, those who make arguments such as Andrew F did are beyond a reasonable doubt fools or liars. They’re invoking what would not happen in a perfect world as an argument that it’s not happening in the real world.

In the case of PRISM, not only are there three branches of government involved, including one whose members have lifetime tenure and are not beholden to anyone, but there are also opposing political parties involved.

This is just beyond asinine. As Rich and others have pointed out, it means literally nothing that there are “three branches of government involved.” Judge-shopping means you get to pick your arbiter ahead of time, both on the macro scale – appointment to the FISA court – and the micro (who you go to for any given warrant). Gag orders mean that anything you tell a bare handful of legislators who get informed stops with them: they literally cannot act on the information. That’s not “oversight.” That’s either pornography or taunting.

As Rich also noted, only public, adversarial processes come close to providing a check on abuse, whether abuse under color of law or abuse coloring way outside law’s lines. The FISC is a star chamber by design, and the Gang of Very Few Congresspeople is formally neutered in their function.

Note that when Ron Wyden tried to warn the public as effectively as he could without violating secrecy, he said “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” He didn’t say that members of the government were violating the law. Who’s trying to turn this into a debate about legality rather than public oversight and rightness? If the formally required provisions of legality have been followed that’s only the lowest and least interesting bar to clear.

Formal legality (or at least “not yet deemed illegal”-ality) is especially weak since secret programs can’t be challenged in court. Local, state, and federal government have passed many laws in the open that could not survive court scrutiny. Are we to believe that secret legal interpretations, secret courts, and limited information to legislators are so much better than traditional lawmaking that open court challenge would never find overreach or other problems?

And one last thing about that legislative oversight: in public Ron Wyden asked extremely clearly if the NSA collects any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, and James Clapper extremely clearly lied “no.” His excuse now is that he answered a question that he wished he had been asked instead of the one actually asked: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/clapper-wyden-least-untruthful-too-cute-half.html

We have very limited public oversight, and some of that oversight is compromised by bald-faced lies from people who know they can get away with it. Get away with it until a whistle-blower acts, anyway.

Oh right, Hoelzer: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-hoelzer/what-you-should-know-abou_1_b_3399584.html

..and the Verizon case seems to be one of those examples of stretching the law that Andrew finds so unlikely

Jim, a few more notes:

1 – you’re referring here to notification procedures for “covert actions” under the National Security Act. So two things. First, we’re talking about notification requirements under FISA, and those requirements are clear and much broader than those for covert actions under the National Security Act. And it appears that the intelligence committees not only were briefed, but were given the ability to share, under controlled conditions, the information with other members of Congress. Second, PRISM would not qualify as a covert action, nor would intelligence collection activities generally.

2 – “judge shopping” refers to an attempt by a party in a legal action to ensure that a particular judge presides. In the case of the FISC, the judges are appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who as far as I am aware is not a party to any legal action over which the FISC has jurisdiction. Will the judges selected by the Chief Justice reflect his own ideological preferences (which hopefully will include a concern for rule of law)? Of course. That may be dismaying to someone who doesn’t share those preferences, but it doesn’t constitute “judge shopping.”

3 – The Hoelzer article is a bit confused on certain aspects of FISA. First, those on whom a FISA order is served can challenge it, and have done so. Second, the opinions of either the FISC or the FISC of Review are sometimes declassified and released (though usually with redactions). For an example of both, see In re: Directives

4 – I did not say that an open adversarial process is just as much a check on abuse as a closed adversarial process. Of course it’s not. But we do have closed proceedings when it is determined that the information being considered should not be made public. Other courts often consider a broad range of matters, some which will require more protection of information than others. The FISA courts, however, were instituted precisely to review cases in which most matters would require protection of information. This means that the default is towards classification, though some opinions have been released. There’s been discussion, and recently, about moving the FISC to release additional opinions. Personally I think that might be a good way to improve the process. What I took issue with was your assertion that a public adversarial proceeding is the only way to check executive power. It’s not.

Ronan, imho the Verizon matter is much more interesting, and possibly concerning, than the PRISM program, but I’ve tried to stick to PRISM given the subject of the thread.

Finally! The anglophone media has started to mention the reactions of foreigners to PRISM. For example, we have now heard about the American Chamber of Commerce successfully lobbying the EU to not implement data-protection laws for its citizens and about the US State Department’s belligerence in flooring talks on the governance of communications technology at the UN World Summit.

I really hope Canada, Australia, and the EU states stop behaving like Scotland Yard under Murdoch and help liberate the world of this vampire squid arm called PRISM. Many lesser states have been courageous enough to derail WTO talks, overthrow Western puppets, break AIDS drugs patents, declare moratoriums, and nationalize industries. Is it too much to ask 1st world states to get Google to adhere to their privacy laws? Could the 1st world media declare a moratorium on publishing information unearthed by PRISM about the vices of their government officials until this tentacle is removed?

Western powers are good at producing individual unmarried men willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause: Assange, Manning, Snowden. However, collective action in the form of the power of foreign states is also necessary to confront full-spectrum dominance by the US.

BTW, the publicly tossed about figure is something like well over a 99% approval rate by that court. Either it’s rigged, or – well, it’s rigged.

@150
Don’t prepare Mr. Nacchio for martyrdom and sainthood too quickly. Its true that Nacchio made the aforementioned claims and they may or may not be true…Nacchio’s insider trading charges date to more than 2 years before 9/11. He was run up on 42 separate charges and convicted of 19 most of which pre-dated the run in with the NSA and some of which he essentially admitted to.

QWest and Nacchio (+ his insiders) made billions selling stuff to the government before they turned on each other. This is better thought of as a mafia-don taking out one of his capos, even if it was a frame job.

Not a defense of the NSA by any means – but Nacchio was no “innocent” billionaire who crossed the g-man.

“…Nacchio’s insider trading charges date to more than 2 years before 9/11. He was run up on 42 separate charges and convicted of 19 most of which pre-dated the run in with the NSA and some of which he essentially admitted to.”

Um, that doesn’t disprove the original comment, which asserted that he was prosecuted for things which the DoJ generally doesn’t look into that much. As for his confession, if he had a choice between rolling the dice on a trial and risking 30 years in prison, or taking a plea bargain for several years in prison……………

Canada Australia, NZ and UK run the global data surveilane together with the US. They sure are not going to stand up against something they are part of.

Not sure what Nacchio has to do with this, but on the subject of federal prosecution Snowden seems to be doing everything he can to make a government case against him easy: South China Morning Post

Disclosing aspects of intelligence gathering against China is well beyond the bourne of any reasonable definition of whistle-blowing (he had already broken through the legal definition).

Given earlier reporting by The Washington Post that Snowden had insisted on a promise that they publish the entire presentation relating to PRISM, and insert a message coded in a key that he could use to prove his authenticity to a foreign embassy, in exchange for exclusivity (which the WP turned down), it seems likely that this latest disclosure is intended to do one or both of two things: (1) persuade the PRC to help him stay in Hong Kong, although the PRC would want something in return; (2) stoke popular support in Hong Kong for his fight against extradition.

My two thoughts are (1) if what he took is sufficiently revealing, the PRC may be interested in doing a deal, and (2) if he does a deal, he’ll strengthen a massively authoritarian government and weaken the community of liberal democracies.

I’m beginning to wonder whether his motivation is truly a libertarian ideology, or simply well rationalized ego (the latter would fit some of his more grandiose claims). And it would be easy enough for him to rationalize the disclosure of intelligence operations against Hong Kong, his intended new home. Unfortunately, that is also what would strengthen a treason case against him.

That said, he may be playing a clever PR game while being careful not to reveal anything purely harmful to the US – but given his disclosure of 41 slides to The Washington Post and The Guardian, and their decision to publish only 4 because the rest would be harmful, I have to say that I have some concern about his judgment. If he truly wants to take a stand on the issues he raised, he should return to the U.S. of his own accord, and fight at trial and for public opinion.