Privacy for Me But Not for Thee

I'm almost done reading Glenn Greenwald's new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Metropolitan Books, 2014), and it's well worth my time.  It doesn't tell me much that I didn't already know, but it's a good roundup of what has been learned and what it means.

In particular, Chapter 4, "The Harm of Surveillance," is an excellent discussion of the meaning of privacy and its violation by the State, along with a history of illegal spying on citizens by the American government and its agencies.  If you don't feel like reading the entire book (though it's not very long, and quite readable), read this chapter.

And guess what?  I finally found the video clip I've been trying to find for a couple of years now, in which President Obama not only declared, improperly, that Private Manning "broke the law," thereby prejudicing Manning's chances of a fair trial, but that "people can have philosophical views [about Bradley Manning] but I can’t conduct diplomacy on an open source [basis]… That’s not how the world works."  As another writer argued, "Nobody thus far has suggested that all diplomacy be conducted out in the open," but the key point about Obama's remark is that NSA spying has extended to the governments of friendly countries.

In 2009, for example, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon wrote a letter to [then-Director of the NSA] Keith Alexander, offering his "gratitude and congratulations for the outstanding signals intelligence support" that the State Department received regarding the Fifth Summit of the Americas, a conference devoted to negotiating economic accords.  In the letter, Shannon specifically noted that the NSA's surveillance provided the United States with negotiating advantages over the other parties ...

The NSA is equally devoted to diplomatic espionage, as the documents referring to "political affairs" demonstrate.  One particularly egregious example, from 2011 [that is, around the time Obama was protesting that he couldn't do open-source diplomacy], shows the agency targeted two Latin American leaders -- Dilma Roussef, the president of Brazil, along with "her key advisers"; and Enrique Peña Nieto, then Mexico's leading presidential candidate (and now its president), along with "nine of his close associates" -- for a "surge" of especially invasive surveillance [138-9].

In other words, the Obama regime expects other countries to do open-source diplomacy, but doesn't want to be held to the same requirement.  This sort of double standard is virtually universal among governments, of course -- it's justifiable for us to spy on you, but your spying on us is criminal! (My skepticism about this attitude makes it difficult for me to read most spy fiction.)  And closer to home, our government expects its citizens to live open-source lives while increasing its own secrecy exponentially.

I'm going to quote myself from an older post: Was the information Snowden released "private" in the first place? No, except in the narrow and circular sense of "secret." It was public in the truest sense of the word: it concerned events that were paid for by the public dime, and then concealed from the public by public agencies. Governments do not have a right to privacy, especially when they are engaged in criminal enterprises; nor do government officials in their role as government officials. Whether Barack Obama wears boxers or briefs, for example, is a matter I'm happy to leave private, though it's just the kind of fact that many Americans, and the corporate media, would claim that the public has a right to know. (I suspect that Obama would address the boxers vs. briefs question more readily than questions about dead Afghan or Pakistani children, however.) But what our government is doing with its weapons and its troops and its vast amounts of money is what the public has not only a right but an obligation to know. I would include the world, not just Americans, since so much of our crimes are committed on foreign soil, but also because our government is spying on the entire world now.

Thank You for Pressing the Self-Destruct Button

In a story on the Obama administration's attempts to stop information leaks (except for those it commits itself, of course) Democracy Now! quoted a speech President Obama made last month defending his seizure of reporters' phone records:

Leaks related to national security can put people at risk. It can put men and women in uniform that I’ve sent into the battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers, who are in various dangerous situations that are easily compromised, at risk. I make no apologies, and I don’t think the American people would expect me, as commander-in-chief, not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them killed.

This is getting old.  It's the same rationale Obama and his apologists have waved around every time their malfeasance has been exposed.  So far, there has been no reason to believe that any of these leaks he's working so hard to block have put anyone at risk, but notice that the rhetoric is always conditional: it can put men and women in uniform at risk; Julian Assange potentially has blood on his hands.  As with anyone who cries Wolf, it's possible that sooner or later Obama's dire warning will be vindicated.  But so far, no.

But notice: "as commander-in-chief" Obama (like his presidential predecessors) has made decisions which have not only put American "men and women in uniform" and other operatives at risk, his decisions have gotten them killed (and wounded and maimed) in large numbers.  For no good reason.  Not to mention all the innocent non-Americans who've been killed and wounded and maimed by his decisions.  It's even possible that by exposing and forestalling Obama's attempts to extend the US war in Iraq, Wikileaks saved American lives.  There's much greater danger -- not potential danger, actual danger -- to world peace and human well-being from the US government than from any unauthorized leaks by whistleblowers.

The Democracy Now! story went on to report an internal government program aimed at stopping leaks from within, the Insider Threat Program.

And beyond places like the National Security Agency or the Pentagon, Insider Threat also covers employees in agencies or departments like the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration, the Departments of Education and Agriculture. As part of the program, staffers at the Department of Agriculture and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have taken an online tutorial called "Treason 101," which instructs them to look out for employees fitting the psychological profile of spies. The Department of Education has told its employees that, quote, "certain life experiences ... might turn a trusted user into an insider threat." These experiences include, quote, "stress, divorce, financial problems" or "frustrations with co-workers or the organization."

In addition to demanding that government workers monitor their colleagues’ behavior, the Insider Threat Program even encourages penalties against those who fail to report what they see. And it regards leaks to the media as a form of espionage. A Pentagon strategy document instructs agency superiors, quote, "Hammer this fact home ... leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States." All this leads McClatchy to warn, quote, "The [Insider Threat] program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations."

I can't help thinking how all that would sound if it were paraphrased by substituting the names of relevant organizations in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  As McClatchy warns, this program will surely create "toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations."  Thank you for pressing the Self-Destruct Button, Mr. President.

Even funnier (in the worst way) is the reference to "the psychological profile of spies" in the first paragraph I quoted there.  Many employees of the organizations under Insider Threat are hired to be spies; now they and their fellows are being encouraged to spy on each other to root out spies.  And who came up with that psychological profile?  People like Philip Zimbardo, who are very concerned with figuring out why people disobey authority, and why they obey authority.  (I don't assume that Zimbardo had any involvement with this program, understand: but when the government sponsors psychological research, it isn't in order to foster dissidence, civil disobedience, or a critical attitude towards the government.)  The professionals who do such research have no interest in ethics, political ideals and principles, or any other elements of a free society: their job is to come up with ways to support policy, whether it's good or bad.  Psychiatrists and psychologists were deeply involved in the modernization of torture in the US and elsewhere; see Al McCoy's A Question of Torture (Metropolitan Books, 2006), as anthropologists have counseled them on how to win the hearts and minds of locals in Afghanistan and Iraq after we bombed, strafed, and incinerated them and their families.  (Public-relations professionals were hired to try to sell Brand America in the Middle East as we went to war there; they at least had the sense to give up after drawing comfortable paychecks for a while.)  They're probably aware that not bombing, strafing and incinerating people is a necessary though not sufficient approach to winning hearts and minds, but that method isn't on the table.  Whoever built that psychological profile of spies in the Pentagon and the NSA was doing the same kind of work: to prop up a totally corrupt enterprise by getting your employees to adjust to the job, rather than question whether the job is worth doing.