NSA spying and the national security priesthood

Digby makes an important point in The political perils of the security state Hullabaloo 11/20/2013 about NSA spying, one so obvious that of course the Beltway Village normally cheerfully ignores it. She's refers to legendary FBI Director and cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover's using information he had obtained to blackmail lawmakers, and notes:

The reason I bring this up is not to talk about politicians getting blow jobs, although that's always fun. It's because this story about the foibles of powerful people in Washington points up the fact that all this information "collection" can serve a very useful purpose for people inside the secret government if they choose to use it such ways. It's been done before and it can be done again. I don't care about the inner lives of politicians or their sexual proclivities. But no humans can live like humans under a microscope and I think it's quite clear that politicians are human. The ability to spy on people in powerful positions and use that information to manipulate the government has always been a problem. This "metadata collection" puts that danger on steroids.

The big question I have is why the politicians who so vociferously support these programs do so. It might be that they do it on principle. It might not be. [my emphasis]

If anyone thinks that a Liz Cheney wouldn't use NSA domestic spying information for reasons that have nothing at all to do with national security or preventing terrorism probably needs to spend some time searching the Internet on the name "Cheney."

Foreign policy über-Realist Stephen Walt raises another skeptical question about the current Bid Data version of massive spying - Big Spying? - in NSA Spying: Where's the Beef? Foreign Policy 11/04/2013:

As a realist, I'm neither surprised nor horrified to learn that governments spy on each other, or that a wealthy, powerful, self-important, and slightly paranoid country like the United States might ... ahem ... do a bit more of it than others. But this unthinking, unstrategic Hoovering of data, megadata, and actual conversations is obviously out of control, and the diplomatic and other costs could easily outstrip any putative benefits.

In particular, given our capacity and willingness to spy on virtually everyone, you'd think that American diplomats would be entering foreign policy contests and diplomatic negotiations with an enormous advantage over their counterparts. If we're as good at extracting private information from other countries' networks, cell phones, emails, and the like, you'd think U.S. officials would usually have a good idea of our antagonists' bottom line and would be really skilled at manipulating them to our advantage. We now know that the Allies in World War II got big strategic benefits from cracking German and Japanese codes; I want to know if we're getting similar benefits today.

It is hard to believe we are, given that America's foreign policy record since the end of the Cold War is mostly one of failure. And that leads me to suspect that one of two things is true. Either 1) the NSA is good at collecting gazilla-bytes of stuff but not very good at deciding what to collect or figuring out what it means, or 2) the rest of our foreign policy establishment is not very good at taking advantage of the information the NSA has worked so hard to acquire. In other words, either the NSA is not worth the money we're paying for it, or the rest of our foreign policy establishment is less competent than we thought. To be frank, I'm not sure which possibility I prefer.

But why don't we see more of our media establishment, even the liberal ones at MSNBC, actively questioning the lawlessness and the usefulness of the mass information dragnets the federal government is conducting?

One big reason is quasi-religious. Or maybe idolatrous in the Christian theological sense. Fred Kaplan did an excellent book years ago called The Wizards of Armageddon (1991), which told the story of the top nuclear strategists. Andrew Bacevich relying on Kaplan's book in The New American Militarism (2005), when he describes the historically important connection between the first-strike nuclear war advocates and the neocons of the 2000s who advocated preventive war against countries like Iraq and Iran. "Wizards" is an apt label because they conjured abstract ideas about nuclear war strategy as part of a select group of initiates with occult knowledge (occult=hidden).

Yanis Varoufakis in Being Greek and an Economist While Greece Burns: An intimate account – MGSA Keynote 2013 (blog link 11/16/2013) gets in touch with his inner Veblen and explains how this works in the case of economists:

Allow me to enlist Evans-Pritchard, the renowned British anthropologist, to explain more graphically how it is that economists lose not a smidgeon of their discursive power despite their pathetic incapacity to predict economic crises or, indeed, to say anything useful about really existing capitalism. In his study of the social dominance of the Azande priesthood, Evans-Pritchard asked a fascinating question: How did the priests and oracles retain their hold over the tribe’s imagination given that they consistently failed to predict or avert disasters? His explanation of the Azande's unshakeable belief in their oracles goes like this:

"Azande see as well as we that the failure of their oracle to prophesy truly calls for explanation, but so entangled are they in mystical notions that they must make use of them to account for failure. The contradiction between experience and one mystical notion is explained by reference to other mystical notions." [Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937]

Possessing the occult knowledge of their profession with its arcane mathematical models, they get to be the ones who give the expert opinion on their own failures resulting from their own lack of understanding and, far too frequently, their lack of integrity:

Economics is not much different. Lacking a macroeconomics laboratory, when economists fail to predict some pivotal economic moment, which is always, for instance the Crash of 2008, that failure is accounted for by appealing to the same mystical economic notions which failed in the first place. Occasionally new notions are created in order to account for the failure of the earlier ones. And so predictive failure leads to more, not less, social power for the economists who are entrusted by society to offer scientific explanations of their ... failures.

A similar priesthood presides over national security matters, with a much greater claim to secret knowledge - bugging and recording a huge portion of the communications in the world - with all the aura of patriotism and their claims to protect us from The Terrorists and all other threats.

The fact that the national security priesthood fails repeatedly to detect threats typically has only limited effect on the prestige they enjoy, especially among the Very Serious People but also among the general public. But ordinary people are not quite so willing to accept endless wars and government lying as those who are well-compensated for doing so.

But there is a ceremonial and magical aspect to the rituals associated with the conventional economists and the theologians of national security that gives them credibility and authority far beyond rational evaluations of their actual accomplishments.

Tags: national security state, nsa spying, us economy

The NSA redefining of the Internet

Nicholas Weaver in Wired Our Government Has Weaponized the Internet. Here's How They Did It Wired 11/13/2013 looks at how the extensive NSA spying drastically reframes the way governments and companies have to look at Internet information traffic:

The internet backbone — the infrastructure of networks upon which internet traffic travels — went from being a passive infrastructure for communication to an active weapon for attacks. ...

If the NSA can hack Petrobras, the Russians can justify attacking Exxon/Mobil. If GCHQ can hack Belgicom to enable covert wiretaps, France can do the same to AT&T. If the Canadians target the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, the Chinese can target the U.S. Department of the Interior. We now live in a world where, if we are lucky, our attackers may be every country our traffic passes through except our own.

Which means the rest of us — and especially any company or individual whose operations are economically or politically significant — are now targets. All cleartext traffic is not just information being sent from sender to receiver, but is a possible attack vector.

Tags: nsa spying

Merkel complicates the trans-Atlantic trade negotiations (Updated)

Since I'm no fan of the neoliberal vision for the the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), aka, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), I'm pleased to hear news of just about anything that might impede it.

This article about the instruction European business lobbyists have been giving to EU negotiators about what to include in the treaty would also be largely acceptable to the American lobbyists calling the shots on the US side of the negotiations (European Officials Consulted Business Leaders on Trade Pact New York Times 10/08/2013):

Internal documents obtained by The New York Times offer a window into the extent that European trade negotiators allow big business lobby groups to set the agenda. Among other things, the business community was seeking an active role in writing new regulations — the trans-Atlantic rules that might one day cover things like how poultry is cleaned and how trade secrets are protected.

"It's a bit like enshrining a right to lobby in the E.U./U.S. trade agreement — that is what it is about,” said Pia Eberhardt, who follows trade issues for the Corporate Europe Observatory, a nonprofit group in Brussels that is critical of corporate ties to government. ...

Although last year’s preliminary discussions could end up having little influence on any final trade pact, the documents offered some hints at the ripest targets for business executives — as well as insights into the officials’ responses. The auto industry was seen as being “first and foremost” among industrial sectors where a melding of regulations from Brussels and Washington made sense, according to an assessment last December by the European trade commission. And the issue of duplicative trans-Atlantic testing procedures was seen as particularly relevant for the pharmaceutical industry.

Among the proposals made last October by business groups that are still on the table is a regulatory oversight group that would have the authority to continue to ensure that any new or existing trans-Atlantic rules are compatible, even after trade negotiations formally conclude. Businesses and other stakeholders would be able to propose regulatory changes to the council.

In other words, what the lobbies are seeking to incorporate into the treaty is a kind of lowest-common-denominator function that would force the level of regulations down to the lower standard between the EU-US area and could override national regulations.

So it's encouraging to hear that German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel is making better protection against NSA spying an issue in the talks, as reported by Stefan Wagstyl et al, Berlin seeks privacy rules in EU-US trade pact Financial Times 11/03/2013.

Berlin’s unexpected move highlights the anger generated in Germany by claims that American intelligence eavesdropped on a wide range of targets, including Chancellor Angela Merkel. German officials are particularly angry that even when Berlin set up high-level talks with Washington over the extent of US surveillance activities earlier this summer, US officials failed to disclose the monitoring of Ms Merkel’s mobile phone.

Even though German officials insist the relationship with Washington remains strong, Ms Merkel’s position seems to be hardening in response to the public controversy and to concerns in German business about commercial spying. Industry representatives said they were aware that the question of data protection was being “politically discussed” in the context of the trade deal talks.

The proposed safeguards in the trade pact would not be catch-all privacy rules but specific regulations to protect companies worried about industrial espionage.

Merkel's Heinrich Brüning economic policies are awful. But if her personal pride leads her to do constructive things, in this case putting up impediments to TAFTA/TTIP, that's fine by me.

Leonid Bershidsky notes in Bershidsky on Europe: Merkel Turns on US Bloomberg View 11/04/2013:

Germany's volte-face [on the privacy issue and the trade negotiations] is a way to put pressure on the U.S., but also respond to voter sentiment. In Germany and across Europe, the idea of keeping user data on the continent is gaining popularity, with local telecoms offering cloud services as an alternative to U.S.-based ones. Deutsche Telekom even advertises "email made in Germany," saying it routes German internet traffic inside the country only.

Update: Big business on both sides of the Atlantic really want this deal. That's why I'm not too surprised by this story, Data protection ruled out of EU-US trade talks James Fontanella-Khan Financial Times 11/04/2013:

Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission and the EU’s top justice official, said that data protection was outside of the scope of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiation.

"The Commission'’s view and the position taken by all leaders at the recent European Council is clear: let’s not mix up the phone tapping issue with the ongoing trade talks,” Ms Reding told the Financial Times.

"Including data protection in the trade talks is like opening Pandora’s box. The EU is not ready to lower its own standards . . .  That is why the free trade agreement negotiations are not going to include privacy standards."

EU officials stressed that at present there are no common transatlantic standards on data protection and therefore they fear that finding a middle ground with the US would only lower overall EU privacy standards.

Translation: Big business lobbies in Europe really, really want this deal. Plus, who knows how much dirt the NSA has dug up on key EU officials to pressure them with?

But the official statement by Reding might not be all hot air:

Privacy advocates also warned that Germany’s call to include commercial spying rules in the trade talks would inadvertently favour tech groups such as Google and Facebook that have been trying to water down EU attempts to set tough standards.

Lobbyists for the US technology industry have long wanted to introduce data protection in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations as they believe it would give them a better chance to set less stringent standards than the ones currently proposed by the European Commission and EU lawmakers.

US companies argue that the current EU legislation is unworkable because, they claim, it gives little legal certainty on how businesses can use individuals’ personal information. They also want to scrap a clause that would limit the US government’s ability to obtain information on EU citizens without the European data protection watchdog’s consent.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, european union, nsa spying, tafta, trans-atlantic free trade agreement, transatlantic trade and investment partnership, ttip

EU summit ruffled by NSA spying revelations

I wonder if governments are now using carrier pigeons and invisible ink to deliver confidential messages again.

EU summit overshadowed by spying row as US faces tough questions Euronews 10/24/2013:

Spying row - German Chancellor warns the US Euronews 10/24/2013:

Europe mad at US spying? Say it like you mean it 10/24/2013:

EU leaders furious over US spying claims Deutsche Welle English 10/24/2013:

Tags: angela merkel, nsa spying

Spying on European allies

It's understandable and necessary to have a certain amount of cynicism about leaders like German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel professing to be shocked, shocked to find out he US is spying on them.

But for what it's worth, my reading of the news is that there are aspects about the spying revelations that some countries are generally surprised and angry about. The spying on EU trade negotiators, for instance, whose only likely purpose is to gain an extra advantage in trade negotiations that will primarily be applied to the advantage of American corporations at the expense of European ones. The massive spying on French citizens, of whom it's unthikable that millions are involved in terrorist plots against American interests or American citizens.

There are formal and informal rules governing mutual spying between allied nations, the latter not being posted on government websites. Whatever those informal rules are between the US and the EU nations and NATO allies, it certainly looks like not only European citizens but numerous European officials think the US has drastically overstepped them with the NSA spying. Roland Nelles writes in Merkels Wut, Obamas Versagen Spiegel Online 24.10.2013

Der Lauscher kann die Politik des Belauschten voraussagen. Er kann sich auf Verhandlungen besser einstellen, weil er alle Absichten und Erwägungen seines Gegenüber bereits kennt. Er kann - zumindest theoretisch - geheimes Wissen sogar nutzen, um dem Abgehörten massiv zu schaden, um ihn oder sie womöglich sogar zu erpressen oder bloßzustellen.

Wer die Kommunikation anderer Staatschefs abhört, verhält sich wenigstens niederträchtig, wenn nicht sogar feindselig. Es gibt Hinweise, dass die Bundeskanzlerin im Visier von US-Geheimdiensten gewesen sein könnte. Der SPIEGEL hat darüber zuerst berichtet. Ist Deutschland ein Feind der USA?

Barack Obama hat bislang den Eindruck erweckt, der Gute im miesen Spiel rund um die Sammelwut der US-Geheimdienste zu sein. Es ginge den USA bei allen Überwachungsmaßnahmen allein um Terrorbekämpfung, lautete das Mantra, mit dem das Ausland besänftigt werden sollte. Alles Bluff: Fast täglich kommen neue Enthüllungen über Abhörangriffe auf "befreundete" Nationen ans Licht: Frankreich, Mexiko, Deutschland. Wie lang ist die Liste noch?

[The eavesdropper can predict the politics of the one being eavesdropped. He can adjust himself between to negotiations because he already knows the intentions and considerations of his opposite number. He can - at least theoretically - even use secret knowledge to cause massive harm to the one being intercepted, in order to blackmail him where possible or ruin him.

Whoever eavesdrops on the communications of another chief of state is conducting himself in a miscreant way, if not downright hostile. There are indications that the Federal Chancellor [Merkel] could have been in the sights of the US spy agencies. Spiegel first reported on it. Is Germany the enemy of the USA?

Barack Obama has up until now awakened the impression that he's the good guy in the filthy game around the collecting mania of the US secret services. All the spying measures had to do only with fighting terrorism, ran the mantra by which foreigners should be put at ease. All bluff: Almost daily new revelations come to light about new spying attacks on "friendly" nations: France, Mexico, Germany. How long will the list wind up being?]

One good outcome for ordinary citizens in the US and the EU from the fallout from the NSA spying scandals might be the torpedoing of the negotiations for the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), aka, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a new neoliberal treaty to weaken consumer protections and workers rights and lower the incomes of the majority for the benefit of the wealthiest. (Annett Meiritz, EU vs. USA: Spähverdacht gefährdet Freihandelsabkommen Spiegel Online 24.10.2013)

Claus Christian Malzahn in the conservative Die Welt writes about the possible serious implications of the latest revelations about NSA spying on our nominal ally Germany. (Ein Skandal von ungeheurer politischer Sprengkraft 24.10.13) Presseurop's English-language version of the story has a less dramatic headline. Die Welt's would translate, "A scandal with monstrous political explosive power." Presseurop uses a more sedate, American Eavesdropping: Communication lines under tension:

... it would be good to know why this incredible breach of trust was exposed not by German intelligence services but by journalists. Does the BND [German secret service] consider the eavesdropping on the most powerful politician in Europe a mere trifle? ...

Only a few days ago in Paris the American Ambassador was hauled into the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs because of suspicions that the war on terror is serving to cloak industrial espionage as well.

Just this question was brought up during the election campaign by Chancellory candidate Peer Steinbrück. At the time, some thought it overly dramatic. Today it turns out that Steinbrück’s question was more than justified.

At least the hapless candidacy of Peer Steinbrück did something right!
Malzahn notes:

Western values are not protected by this sort of practice; on the contrary, this practice can lead to the end of the West as political formation. The political consequences of the recent scandal can certainly not be predicted. And how much can we rely on assurances from Washington that this is a misunderstanding? Probably not at all.

Another commentary in Die Welt by Uwe Schmitt, Die Supermacht ist in kleinmütige Paranoia gestürzt 24.10.2013, notes than its espionage, the US under the Obama Administration "hardly seems to differentiate between friend and foe" ("die zwischen Freund und Feind kaum Unterschiede zu machen scheint"). Schmitt writes, "Die paranoide Überwachung von jedem und allem wird peinlich für die Vereinigten Staaten, sie schädigt Ruf und Geschäfte" ("The paranoid surveillance of one and all is becoming embarrassing for the United States; it's damaging its reputation and businesses"). And he notes that the experience of the East German Stasi (secret police) is a reminder that massive spying doesn't necessarily lead to better knowledge.

Which is another way of saying that when spy agencies collect indiscriminate piles of information, it makes it more difficult to sort out relevant information for actual criminal investigations. And he notes that the problems with the Obamacare rollout also raises a question about whether the US government is as super-efficient in its computer operations as the NSA would have us all believe it is.

Schmitt speculates plausibly - though without citing particular polling data - that the post-Bush charm that Europeans found in Obama has been replaced by a perception of him "as a wolf in sheep's clothing: conciliatory, always laughing, intelligent, leading with high morality in his mouth, hard as steel like a Cold Warrior" ("als Wolf im Schafspelz: Konziliant, stets lächelnd, intelligent, die hohe Moral im Munde führend, stahlhart wie ein Kalter Krieger").

James Ball reports for The Guardian in NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders after US official handed over contacts 11/24/2013:

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its "customer" departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.

The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA.

He also notes:

The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, this week backed proposals that could require US tech companies to seek permission before handing over EU citizens' data to US intelligence agencies, while the European parliament voted in favour of suspending a transatlantic bank data sharing agreement after Der Spiegel revealed the agency was monitoring the international bank transfer system Swift.

Tags: angela merkel, nsa spying, tafta, trans-atlantic free trade agreement

So today the feds are *against* "illegal and fraudulent means to steal sensitive information online"?

Cybercrime is considered cutting-edge these days. As various writers noted in the wake of Aaron Swartz' suicide, likely one of the reasons the feds were pursuing him so aggressively over the MIT hacking case was that it is seen as a career-builder for federal prosecutors to successfully go after cybercrime. And, of course, "cyberwar" is also a hot topic nowadays, too.

Large banks have been relying heavily on computers since the 1950s, so cybercrime isn't something brand new. But as computers get better, platforms multiply and more and more people rely on them, potential opportunities for mischief and worse have increased exponentially.

Federal indictments came down today against against six people accused of major theft via cybercrime, as By E. Scott Reckard reports in Russian hackers charged in biggest cybercrime spree yet, feds say Los Angeles Times 07/25/2013. This quote from his story really sticks out.

"This type of crime is the cutting edge," Paul J. Fishman, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said ijn [sic] a news release. "These types of frauds increase the costs of doing business for every American consumer, every day."

Mythili Raman, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's criminal division, said: "Today's indictment will no doubt serve as a serious warning to those who would utilize illegal and fraudulent means to steal sensitive information online." [my emphasis]

The Obama Administration argues that the massive NSA surveillance is legal. But they've also blocked it from meaningful judicial review.

The government does need to be protecting us against significant fraud. It does not need to be sweeping up mind-boggling amounts of information in hopes they'll come up with some magical algorithm that will dig something useful out of the data.

And it makes statements like this sound like a joke. They had enough evidence to get an indictment. But the federal government isn't even trying to protect the rights of individual citizens from NSA excesses. And the massive amounts of data they are collecting will inevitably be used for various illegitimate purposes: political, public and private. They're amassing huge amounts of data that could be immensely valuable to a lot of people and businesses. There will be more breaches, and not all of them whistleblowers concerned about exposing wrongdoing. Some of them will be getting the information for wrongdoing not unlike the type these indictments are about.

Tags: domestic spying, obama administration, nsa spying

US vs. Europe vs. Latin America Over Edward Snowden

The Edward Snowden case acquired an extra touch of melodrama the last couple of days as Anna Chapman, the Russian spy expelled from the US in 2010 ...

... supposedly proposed to him via Twitter ...

... then followed up with this message to the NSA:

Die Welt seemed to accept that as her real Twitter account, Ex-Spionin fragt: "Snowden, willst Du mich heiraten?" 04.07.13.

Yes, Edward Snowden, this could be you (well, maybe!)

Honey trap? Publicity stunt by Chapman? A great opportunity for Snowden? I mean, shoot, if you have to spend the rest of your life at the Moscow Airport, you can see why he might want some company!

Then again, this DPA story "Chapman" liebt "Snowden": Twitter-Romanze amüsiert Moskau Salzburger Nachrichten 05.07.2013 was more cautious on whether it is really her Twitter account.

The Chapman story is entertaining. Especially with The Americans on hiatus for the summer. Speaking of which, Chapman and her fellow spies busted in 2010 were the inspiration for the series: Olivia B. Waxman - Q&A: The CIA Officer Behind the New Spy Drama The Americans Time 01/30/2013

But the diplomatic flaps that the Snowden affair and what seems to be hamhanded handling of it by the Obama Administration are more series that Anna Chapman publicity stunts. The revelations of NSA spying on the EU nations has caused some upset. And it seems to be more than just leaders doing the required posturing for domestic political reasons to show they maintain some national pride. Stephen Walt writes in News Flash: States Spy on Each Other Foreign Policy 07/03/2013:

The National Security Agency has done us all a service by reminding the world that international politics is still a) inherently competitive and b) primarily conducted by nation-states. I refer, of course, to the recent revelations that in addition to spying on U.S. citizens, the National Security Agency (NSA) has also been spying on America's European allies. You know: our closest strategic partners!

But he also notes that there may be some substantive consequences to this:

Which is not to say this aspect of the Snowden affair won't have significant consequences. Exposure of the NSA's efforts is bound to complicate efforts to negotiate a transatlantic trade and investment agreement [TTIP], an initiative that faced plenty of obstacles already. It is also going to give ammunition to all those people who are worried about the globalization of information and who would like to see governments do more to protect privacy and limit both corporate and governmental data-collection. And that makes me wonder whether we are now at the high-water mark of loosely regulated global connectivity, and that all these revelations will eventually lead both democracies and authoritarian societies to place much stricter limits on how information flows between societies (and individuals).

If so, then you should probably enjoy the Wild West of Internet freedom while you can, before the firewalls go up.

As I've said before, I won't be crying if EU upset over the spying disrupts the progress of the TTIP negotiations, because it's already looking to be a bad deal for most people in the countries affected. And speaking of which, I see indications that the real upset by EU government was over the extent of what is still called "industrial espionage." In other words, the EU One Percent is especially worried that the NSA is tapping into private trade and proprietary information and passing it on to American corporations. But that's not to minimize fears on the part of the majority that the US is tapping into their private conversations with no good reason. Spain's former Foreign Minister Ana Palacio from the conservative party (PP) also highlights the connection between uproar over NSA spying in Europe with the TTIP negotiations (The Snowden Effect Project Syndicate 07/04/2013):

... Europeans have raised serious questions about US intelligence practices. These range from the lack of professionalism implied by allowing contractors to conduct such sensitive work to America's hands-off approach toward certain allies, like the United Kingdom and New Zealand, while relegating many of its other allies – including most of the European Union – to surveillance-worthy status.

The bitter irony is that, at this suddenly inauspicious moment, Europe and the US are launching their most significant joint project since the creation of NATO – a transatlantic free-trade agreement. For the sake of its success, is it really too much to ask of the US that it play its part internationally with a bit more skill and professionalism, and that it treat its partners with respect?

Andrea Böhm argues in Purer Selbstverrat Zeit Online 05.07.2013 that the famous "soft power" of the US comes not just from the cultural industry ("Hollywood") and technological innovation ("Silicon Valley") but also from the country's continuing struggle to realize its own ideals. Joschka Fischer, for instance, the former Green Party leader and former German Foreign Minister, admire the democratic self-renewal that the US has repeatedly displayed in our history. But, Böhm notes, that struggle to realize democratic ideals looks like it is tapped out at the moment. "Amerika hat derzeit nicht die Kraft zu Selbstkorrektur. Die muss jetzt anders entstehen." ("At this time, America doesn't have the power for self-correction. It must comes from somewhere else now.") The NSA surveillance revelations have highlighted the similarities between the Obama and Cheney-Bush Administrations on extreme domestic spying practices.

And Böhm rightly points to the key problem in that regard of the state of Permanent War, of which the War on Terrorism has become a continuation of the Cold War. "Er [Obama] kann das amerikanische Militär von den Kriegsschauplätzen in Afghanistan und im Irak abziehen, nicht aber sein Land aus dem geistigen Kriegszustand lösen – und vielleicht will er es auch gar nicht." ("He [Obama] can pull the American military out of the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not release his country out of the mental state of war - and maybe he also just doesn't want to.")

That attitude helps explain how the diplomatic hostilities over Snowden have spread to South America with the retaining of Bolivian President Evo Morales plane in Vienna this week for over 13 hours because France, Italy, Portugal and Spain withdrew overflight rights after his plane departed from Moscow. The Real News reports in Bolivians Indignant at European Treatment of President Morales 07/04/2013:

The Young Turks also report on the story in Why Is Obama Bullying the President of Bolivia? 07/04/2013:

Martín Granovsky in Lo que hay detrás Página/12 05.07.2013 notes that although the formal complaints are being directed against the European countries that played games with overflight, the main actor in this drama is clearly the United States. Bolivia is protesting, apparently with good reason, that withdrawing the overflight rights was a serious violation of diplomatic protocol and international law. They even used the word "kidnapped," to describe Evo's stopover in Vienna.

But Bolivia doesn't seem to be complaining about Austria's conduct. Austrian President Heinz Fischer posted this photo of him greeting Evo at the airport ("Boliviens Präsident Evo Morales kann Heimreise fortsetzen": Statement von Bundespräsident Heinz Fischer 03.07.2013):

Bolivian Presisdent Evo Morales and Austrian President Heinz Fischer

Less obviously plausible is Bolivia's argument that Evo's life was endangered by the overflight problem. I suppose this argument is based on the pilot's message, heard in The Young Turks report, that they had to land because their were running out of fuel.

The South American alliance UNASUR have issued a formal protest against France, Italy, Portugal and Spain in solidarity with Bolivia, Declaración de la UNASUR frente al agravio sufrido por el Presidente Evo Morales 04.07.2013, calling their action a continuation of "colonial practices." (Technically, the declaration in the name of "Las Jefas y Jefes de Estado y de Gobierno de países de la Unión de Naciones Sudamericanas (UNASUR), reunidos en Cochabamba" (the chiefs of state and government of countries of the Union of South American Nations {UNASUR} meeting in Cochabamba", Bolivia under the auspices of UNASUR. This Reuters headline spins it as South American leftist leaders rally for Bolivia in Snowden saga 07/05/2013. The actual "chiefs of state and government" were Evo Morales himself, Argentina's Cristina Fernández, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, Peru's Rafael Correa, Uruguay's José Mujica and Surinam's Dési Boutarese. As Reuters reports:

At the end of the summit ... a statement was issued demanding answers from France, Portugal, Italy and Spain. The United States was not mentioned in the statement.

"Europe broke all the rules of the game," Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said shortly after arriving at the Cochabamba airport. "We're here to tell President Evo Morales that he can count on us. Whoever picks a fight with Bolivia, picks a fight with Venezuela."

Maduro said an unnamed European government minister had told Venezuela that the CIA, the U.S. spy agency, was behind the incident.

"We are not colonies any more," Uruguayan President Jose Mujica said. "We deserve respect, and when one of our governments is insulted we feel the insult throughout Latin America." ...

Noticeably absent from the Cochabamba gathering was the president of regional heavyweight Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who sent her international affairs adviser and a deputy foreign minister to the meeting.

The presidents and foreign ministers of Chile, Peru and Colombia, which have good relations with the United States, also stayed away. In a written statement, Colombia's foreign ministry called on Bolivia and the European governments involved to find a diplomatic solution.

Bolivia and Venezuela were also irked at receiving provisional arrest requests for Snowden from Washington, a move Bolivia called "illegal and unfounded".

The UNASUR statement (or UNASUR Six?), aka, Declaration of Cochabamba, called the overflight denials violations of international law and says that Evo was "virtually taken hostage" ("convirtiéndolo virtualmente en un rehén").

In this kind of diplomatic situation, it's important to keep in mind that politically operative assumptions are not the same as journalistically or legally documented facts. So far as I'm aware as of this writing, Washington has not admitted to pushing France, Italy, Portugal or Spain to withdraw overflight rights from Evo's plane. But it's a very plausible assumption, almost an inevitable one. Cenk Uygur in The Young Turks report does a decent job of framing that. He also addresses the uncertainty as to whether the plane was actually searched while it was on the ground in Vienna. Marcy Wheeler writes in Europe again stuck saying, "They told us they were sure" Emptywheel 07/05/2013:

In point of fact, it’s not yet clear Snowden wasn't on the plane. While Austrian authorities checked the passports of the known passengers on the plane, they apparently did not conduct a thorough search. And 3 Spaniards who showed up to conduct a search were denied entry (though Morales did stop in the Canary Islands, which would have provided another opportunity to conduct a search on Spanish territory, but by that point Morales was already making a literal international incident about his treatment).

Granovsky quotes Argentine human rights attorney Leandro Despouy, one of the authors of the 2009 UN special report that charged prisoners were being tortured in the Guantánamo gulag station, points out that some of the countries denying overflight rights to Evo's plane did grant overflight to American planes they knew to be carrying prisoners kidnapped by the United States.

Diana Cariboni and Jared Metzker comment on the Latin American angle to the story in Snowden Is No Trifling Matter IPS News 07/04/2013:

Morales' aircraft was rerouted and forced to land in Austria, where it was stuck on the tarmac for 14 hours. The governments implicated in the incident brandished technical explanations, and after hours of heated negotiations, the presidential jet was allowed to take off again.

While it was grounded, the plane and its passengers were apparently subjected to some kind of inspection, the scope of which is not yet clear. But afterwards, Austria's foreign minister, Michael Spindelegger, stated that there were only Bolivian citizens in the aircraft.

The incident violates international law, because aircraft carrying national leaders have diplomatic immunity. Bolivian diplomats complained at the United Nations that Morales had been "kidnapped" during the time he was grounded in Austria. And the indignation spread to other South American governments.

They also report on the diplomatic pressures the US is bringing against offers of asylum to Snowden. The highly unusual action against Evo Morales is part of this pressure:

Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, said "It seems either the U.S. had something to do (with the decision to deny the airspace) or it was done out of a sense of solidarity with the U.S.

It is possible they made the decision alone based on a recognition of how serious this issue is to the U.S."

Shifter said that normally such a drastic step would indicate a state of war. He described it as "An extreme overreaction ... Whatever one thinks about Snowden or Morales, it seems like this was disrespectful of international law."

He also said the incident "looks terrible in political terms.“It was out of proportion. It reflects a patronising, paternalistic mindset that stronger countries can bully weaker ones."

But he disagreed with Younger that it would facilitate a Latin American refuge for Snowden. "What this ultimately underscores is how seriously the U.S. regards this case," he said.

"It may be tempting to take Snowden in in order to needle the U.S., but the consequences of that will have to be taken into consideration. The U.S., for all its weaknesses, is still the U.S.," he said. [my emphasis]

Tags: anna chapman, argentina, bolivia, cristina fernández, domestic spying, edward snowden, evo morales, obama administration, nsa spying, transatlantic trade and investment partnership, ttip

More surveillance stories

Here a couple of quick takes on the US dragnet surveillance story.

Greg Miller, Misinformation on classified NSA programs includes statements by senior U.S. officials Washington Post 06/30/2013; see commentary by Digby, Whose interests are the secrets serving? Hullabaloo 07/01/2013, Miller's article addresses one point of interpretation in the early Glenn Greenwald reporting on Edward Snowden's revelations, "News accounts of the NSA programs have also contained inaccuracies, in some cases because of the source materials. Classified NSA slides that were published by The Post indicated that the NSA was able to tap directly into the servers of Google, Microsoft, Apple and other technology companies. The companies denied that they allowed direct access to their equipment, although they did not dispute that they cooperated with the NSA."

Rick Perlstein made much of that distinction in his dispute with Greenwald over the story. See Glenn Greenwald's 'Epic Botch'? The Nation 06/13/2013 and subsequent posts in Rick's Nation blog. Perlstein relies heavily in his criticism on the arguments of Karl Fogel, which he elaborates in Epic botch of the PRISM story Rants.org 06/11/2013 and further posts on that blog.

But it has always sounded to me like a distinction without much of a difference.

Ludwig Greven, Merkel muss den USA jetzt drohen Zeit Online 01.07.2013 applauds the idea of the EU threatening the US over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to get them to back off the current level of, uh, friendly espionage they the Obama Administration conducting against our EU and NATO (supposed) friends and partners.

Barrett Brown holds forth on The cyber-intelligence complex and its useful idiots Guardian 07/01/2013:

Summing up the position of those who worry less over secret government powers than they do over the whistleblowers who reveal such things, we have New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who argues that we can trust small cadres of unaccountable spies with broad powers over our communications. We must all wish Friedman luck with this prediction. Other proclamations of his – including that Vladimir Putin would bring transparency and liberal democracy to Russia, and that the Chinese regime would not seek to limit its citizens' free access to the internet – have not aged especially well.

An unkind person might dismiss Friedman as the incompetent harbinger of a dying republic. Being polite, I will merely suggest that Friedman's faith in government is as misplaced as faith in the just and benevolent God that we know not to exist – Friedman having been the winner of several of the world's most-coveted Pulitzer Prizes.

Tags: barack obama, domestic spying, edward snowden, obama administration, nsa spying, transatlantic trade and investment partnership, ttip

European concern over US massive surveillance

EU cries foul over US spying Euronews 07/01/2013:

This reports includes an interview with historian Jacques Rupnik, who makes what we might call a Marcusian point:

It is taking place with the active participation of all the great achievements of the last 15-20 years. Google, internet, Twitter... all of them have participated. All the things that we consider formidable advances in horizontal communication have proven to be means of enhancing control from above. This is, I think, food for thought for those who reflect about new media and democratisation.

No technology is inherently liberating. Unless it controlled by a society that is free and protects people's freedom, it can and will be used as an instrument of domination.

Even in societies that in recognize and practice democratic freedom, massive surveillance can be used to seriously undermine free institutions.

Since I'm making a reference to Herbert Marcuse here, it's worth noting that during the Second World War, he worked with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor organization to the CIA. It certainly couldn't be said that he opposed all government surveillance in all circumstances!

And, yes, his perspective on technology and society was being formed by himself and others of the Frankfurt School well before that time. It was one important focus they took from existential philosophy.

Tags: herbert marcuse, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, nsa spying

Democracy and the rule of law really are in trouble in the US

I mean, we knew that already. But every week now seems to bring new evidences of what we all guessed, that the Cheney-Bush administration has been up to even worse things that what we know. This administration will be a cornucopia for conspiracy theorists for decades to come.

For analysis of some of the latest revelations see Can You Even Imagine How Bad it Must Have Been? by Marty Lederman Balkinization blog 05/16/07. Lederman is writing about the illegal warrantless spying program that became so drastic in it's criminality that even former Attorney General and committed foe of democratic liberties John Ashcroft didn't want to sign off on it.

That's kind of like trying to imagine something was to cruel for Dick Cheney to approve.

Lederman emphasizes just how outrageous whatever the spying program was doing must have been for Ashcroft to oppose it in such an apparently emphatic matter.

Tags: bush administration, illegal spying, nsa spying