Why It Matters.
By Michael Reynolds | Related entries in Foreign Policy, The War On TerrorismI hate it when people say about those with whom they disagree, “they just don’t get it.” It’s elitist, arrogant and obnoxious. But, here I go anyway: people just don’t get how dangerous this NSA surveillance of domestic phone calls is.
As I demonstrated with the post below, it takes just a few seconds on Google to connect an unidentified originating phone number, and a called number, and draw conclusions. In this case connecting Senator Kyl of Arizona with a manufacturer of high end (no, no, not a pun) sex dolls.
If I can do it, and you can do it, the NSA can do it. In fact, given the ease of the thing, and given the NSA’s technical capabilities, it is simply absurd to pretend that a phone number and the owner of that number are seperate.
So, let’s take a scenario. Let’s say the NSA wants an increase in its budget. Let’s say the hold out is Senator X. The NSA has the following data: two late night phone calls from the Senator to a woman not his wife, a phone call to the reservations desk of a local motel, and a phone call from that motel to a liquor store that delivers.
The NSA needs that budget increase to fight terror. The only person standing in the way is Senator X. Explain to me why the NSA won’t arrange to let Senator X know what they know?
Let’s walk the scenario a little further forward. Senator X says to the NSA, “Well, you could embarrass me sure, but I have an explanation. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be bothered to have this information come out, but not so bothered that I’ll just roll over for you. I won’t give you what you want, unless you have a carrot to go with that stick. Now, have I mentioned that I face a tough race for re-election?”
So, always pursuing its vital goal of defending us from terror, the NSA pulls up phone records from Senator X’s opponent, Candidate Y. Turns out Candidate Y is clean. In fact, he’s a saint. But one of his chief campaign aides, Z, made a phone call to a gay chat room, even though this aide is happily married.
Campaign Aide Z is approached and he folds up. He offers a preview of his candidate’s media plan and some suspicions he has about one of the campaign’s donors. Senator X, armed with this information, wins re-election. In gratitude he supports the NSA funding increase. And, from the NSA’s perspective, the war on terror is advanced.
Now. Explain to me how this scenario is impossible, or benign, or irrelevant.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 and is filed under Foreign Policy, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 13th, 2006 at 11:10 am
I had very similar thoughts when the apologists started shoveling the whole “anonymous� database bull.
America seems to be slowly acquiring a very Soviet Union flavor, and the public is blissfully going along. Trading freedom for security is always a bad idea.
May 13th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
It’s weird. You don’t think things like this could happen, but they are, and all we’re really being offered is more and more fear.
If this is safety, I’d kind of like to see what danger looks like so I can compare the two and choose for myself.
May 13th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/shattered/index.html
May 13th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Trading freedom for security is always a bad idea? I bet that sounded good when you first heard it. Think about it again. Always? In every case?
I haven’t really spent time thinking about this, so maybe I shouldn’t comment. Perhaps you all have spent enough time examining the details to do more than spin elaborate hypotheticals (by the way, I like the options: “impossible, or benign, or irrelevant.” How about unlikely?). I’ll get right on reading that when you write it, as long as our ‘flavor’ isn’t too “soviet union” like and I’m still allowed to read it.
Ah, hell. You mean well, I’m sure.
May 13th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Did I say trading freedom for security is always a bad idea? Um, no.
But I appreciate your facility for deploying world-weary sarcasm against straw men. Later maybe you can respond to what I actually wrote. That might be fun, too.
May 13th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
I don’t know. This is beginning to feel like one of those issues where the shouting is making any sort of reasonable discussion impossible. And in this case, I have to say that it’s my side – the civil libertarians, in particular – who are doing most of the shouting.
The problem is
a) We *do* need some kind of effective, reasonably nonintrusive surveillance system to prevent terrorist violence, and
b) That system needs effective, transparent checks and balances, but otherwise needs to be free to make quick technological and tactical shifts.
I am not sure the current system fails to meet that standard.
There’s a bigger issue here, too, which is that in a society whose informational technology is growing by leaps and bounds, the very notion of privacy is about to be extinct. We need to figure out how to preserve meaningful levels of democracy and liberty in the face of that. But that conversation is about much more than who’s in the Oval Office.
May 13th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Tom:
I agree we need the ability to conduct surveilance. But we don’t have a basis in law for a lot of what is being done, and we don’t have oversight. On the contrary, the president insist on his absolute right to do as he pleases, whether or not it complies with law.
I am 100% in favor of conducting whatever surveillance is legal, necessary, relevant and subject to judicial and congressional oversight. Give me law and oversight and I withdraw all my objections.
May 13th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
The question that keeps running through my head is: when did Republicans stop caring about privacy? What happened to the Dick Armey wing of the party? Is it so impossible to fight terrorism fully AND care about personal freedoms? Are we to believe that any and every monitoring program set-up to thwart terrorists is vitally needed? That it is impossible or highly unlikely that such programs will EVER be used improperly?
Look, this is not about an inability to view the world in post-9/11 terms. This is about an unwillingness to believe that 9/11 has somehow altered us so much that we must either void our traditional freedoms or die in a horrible terrorist attack.
It’s not so black-and-white. We can have freedom AND security and to pretend otherwise is, well, useless and ignorant. The trick is to find a balance–but I’m not sure how many people on either side will even admit that a balance is possible. It’s a damn shame because we could really use some smart, honest leaders these days.
May 13th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
MR – your post demonstrates the fantastic counter-terrorism intelligence that can be achieved through this program. And I believe that a person, nor a nation, is truly healthy without a fundamental mistrust of government and those in power. With that said, the excrement of the digital age is our life data – and Little Brother has been selling it as a commodity for sometime (see ChoicePoint). We are the prisoners in Bentham’s Panoptigon, our silhoutes perpetually cast, every act recorded.
The victory that civil libertarians need to win is in awareness. As it stands one does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, barring certain statutory protections for certain types of information (medical, SS#, exc.), in most information divulged in the course of most consumer transactions.
I think it was in 1995 that the E.U. passed their Privacy Directive which boldly grants fundamental privacy rights to all citizen of member states. It also set up an elaborate system of enforcement. It hasn’t been very effective in “protecting” European identities, but he sentiment was there. It has caused some stress with U.S. corporation because if the Directive were strickly adherred to (which it is not) – the privacy directors of the members states would have to block the U.S. from internet access to the country. So far Luxembourg hasn’t gotten any uppity ideas.
Here in the U.S., California has a privacy law and whole department, but I believe it is incredibly unstaffed. Anyway, it is an important issue and it should be debated and, maybe now is the time to introduce a Privacy amendment to the Constitution, because as it stands now, this is legal under the Constitution. (There has been some talk that there might have something statutory go after, but I think the government would easily defeat it).
May 14th, 2006 at 12:39 am
Commerce has illegally been selling our personal data with impunity for quite a while … because enforcement is nil. The government getting our data for auspiious purposes is not about commerce, but about future control.
If we responded to the attack by the Japanese in the same manner as the attack on NYC and D.C. …. we would be wearing kimomos ot jack boots. It is incredible that we, as a nation, are debating what we are going to tolerate in mitigated freedom …. all while our loyal, patriotic Ad-whores are hawking military garb to beach brats! Where are we headed?
May 14th, 2006 at 9:43 am
GN —
It is not illegal in most circumstances. Sorry. If you can give me a concrete example of what illegality it is that you are referring to, I would appreciate it. Maybe it should be illegal, and that was somewhat of the idea of my comment, but it is not. Bush Co. was/is within their legal authority to buy this information and it is the right of QWest to refuse. And here is the rub, it is the right of the other telephone companies to sell that information. If you don’t like, I think we should be a law or a constitutional amendment.
May 14th, 2006 at 10:17 am
I’ve always been of the opinion that we have a couple of amendments to address this problem. They are just being ignored because it’s bad for business.
I don’t see any exception for ChoicePoint or the phone company in either amendment. People may choose to interpret these rights away, but to me they seem self evident.
The IV Amendment say: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
While the XIV Amendment say: …..No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. ….
May 14th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
It is funny, the last time I checked blackmailing someone was still illegal. So we are supposed to believe that with this database the NSA is going to start blackmailing everyone in Congress to get their budget increased.
O.K.
Why stop there? People with guns can use them to do illegal things to people as well, so by all means lets take guns away from cops.
Police also have the ability to arrest people, but they COULD abuse that and detain people illegally. But instead of relying on false inprisonment laws lets take away their authority to detain people at all.
Look! I’m saving the world one imaginary threat at a time!
May 14th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Iconic, your examples are right, but you interpret them wrong. Yes cops COULD abuse their power, that’s why their power is strictly defined and carefully overseen. The NSA has no strictly defined powers and no oversight outside of the executive branch. It’s a bad recipe…as bad as if we allowed our police forces to do whatever they thought was necessary to protect us, without approval of the citizenary.
No one is saying the NSA shouldn’t be allowed to vigorously seek out terrorists. We just don’t want that agency and the executive branch being the sole deciders of what’s in our best interest.
May 14th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
My biggest beef with this program is that it seems wholly unnecessary, and even counterproductive. You want to track down terrorist networks? Well then do some old-fashioned investigative work. Find some real suspects – and we have them. Get a warrant and track every call they make. If anything turns up fishy, get a warrant and track the person they’re calling. Once you get enough leads and you get evidence of a conspiracy, you move in and arrest them. Had we done that to Mohammad Atta – who we knew was in the country, we knew was up to no good, and we knew some of his contacts – we could have prevented 9/11. Some bizarro-world mega-database with every phone call ever made will do no better than real HUMAN-based investigative. And that’s the whole problem with the Bush Administration’s approach to terrorism. Too much gadgetry and not enough spies (same in Iraq: great high-tech weaponry but not enough soldiers). The cynical side of me says that this is all a result of intense lobbying from manufacturers of this high-tech gadgetry.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:02 am
Well, of course, but now are the times of ultimate data gathering…the time of Google. I think that perhaps we’re abandoning more basic methods for easier paths, and that’s concerning. I hope we find a better middle ground, that being we limit our data gathering to those who are truly suspicious, instead of the whole. After all, we had good old fashioned intelligence of the 9/11 terrorists, but simply ignored it. If we had paid more attention to that…well…who knows.
In the end, with our present level of comprehensive (yet dumb) tech, nothing can substitute for human intuition.
May 15th, 2006 at 7:55 am
Americans have a bias in favor of quick technological fixes for complex problems. Remember McNamara’s electronic wall in Vietnam? Many a wandering deer was blown to hell by B-52’s, but the war was still lost. We’re still waiting for drones armed with smart missiles to get Osama. People love a simplistic, cathartic answer, especially if it involves technology.
May 15th, 2006 at 9:09 am
The scariest thing in the world is not “big government,” but rather multinational corporations, correct? And was it not those huge global telecom corporations who originally compiled those massive databses of every phone call made in the United States? In fact, they have been doing it for nearly 100 years now, since the telephone was invented!
I say the government needs to step in and stop multinational corporations from collecting information on us and invading our privacy. They need to pass a law that prevents all phone calls from being made in the first place. That way, multinational coorporations wont be able to access our private information (which they have traditionally used to bill their customers).
Speak truth to power gentlemen!
May 15th, 2006 at 10:02 am
DosPeros,
I stand corrected … but some parts will be illegal if the following gets done ( http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5599516.html) and should be illegal now. My point is that the melding of commercial tracking and marketing strategy is being taken up by this government in an attempt to make people feel safer, but will be used for political and law enforcement (read political) ends.
May 15th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Tp answer your implicit question (why don’t people get it?) consider the following: You (and I, and virtually everybody involved with this or other blogs) use the Internet all the time, and have understandings of how it works and what it can do that range from pretty good to excellent. But a majority of the population of Internet users can just about manage to do e-mail and maybe a couple of other things that they find particularly interesting/useful. And that doesn’t count those who don’t use it at all.
So the answer to your question is: ignorance. They don’t get the threat of the NSA program because they don’t get the technology. It’s an issue which will get resolved either (best case) by generational changed, i.e. slowly, or (worst case) by the government being caught doing something extremely (not just very) reprehensible with the technology.