Famous emoprog Fred Kaplan on the boys and their toys
by digby
Yes, as some of us have been saying for a long time, if you build it, they will use it:
The father of the atomic bomb made this observation in 1951 while testifying before a panel that wound up revoking his security clearance as a result of reports that he’d opposed going ahead with the much more powerful hydrogen bomb. He was explaining to the panel why he’d initially supported the H-bomb project—it was so “technically sweet” that “the moral and ethical and political issues” dropped by the wayside.
Technical sweetness may explain how the National Security Agency put in place the massive surveillance programs that Edward Snowden has revealed in recent weeks.
Consider this. The core mission of the NSA, ever since it was founded in 1952, has been “signals intelligence”—intercepting all manner of communications sent or received by the enemy. The task has been getting more challenging as the means of communication have evolved from radio antennae and the telephone to satellites, fiber optics, cellphones, and the Internet. It has become harder still in the past dozen years, as the enemies to be tracked have expanded to include not only nation-states, but also amorphous, decentralized terrorist groups.
And so, when the NSA’s allies and affiliates in the corporate software world came up with devices that can intercept, sift through, collate, and parse patterns from everything, in near-instantaneous time—well, it was all so “technically sweet,” the natural inclination among those in charge would have been, as Oppenheimer said, to “go ahead and do it.”
Yes, yes and yes. I would say the same logic applies to the drone war as well. And none of this is any more benign than the “technically sweet” temptation to create weapons that could destroy the entire planet. It is obvious to me from what we’ve seen of the Big Kahunas in charge of our surveillance state (like Keith Alexander) that this is exactly what happened.
It’s easy to see the logic by which the NSA managers widened the scope of their surveillance. At first, they focused on tracking traffic patterns. Some phone number in the United States was calling suspicious people or places in, say, Pakistan. It might be useful to find out whose phone number it was. It might then be useful to find out what other people that person has been calling or emailing, and then it might be useful to track their phone calls and email patterns. Before you know it, they’re storing data on millions of people, including a lot of Americans. Then maybe one day, they track someone—a phone number or email address they’d never come across before—engaged in some very suspicious activity. They wish that they’d been tracking this person for some time, so they could go back and see if a pattern exists without having to wait for one to emerge.
Then they learn that they can do this; new technology makes it possible. So they scoop up and store everything from everybody. They even convince themselves that they’re not “collecting” data from American citizens (as that would be illegal); no, they’re just storing it; the collecting doesn’t happen until they actually go retrieve it from the files. (James Clapper, director of national intelligence, actually made this claim.)
And they rationalize that it is necessary to keep the country safe — they are, in the words of Lloyd Blankfein when he explained how Wall Street was saving the world from economic catastrophe, doing God’s work.
A widespread criticism of the intelligence failure on 9/11 was that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the other pertinent agencies had tracked down a lot of facts—a lot of data points—but they didn’t, or couldn’t, “connect the dots.” I’ve never completely bought this notion; a lot of the failure stemmed from routine screw-ups. But let’s stipulate there’s something to it. What if new technology could give the NSA so many dots, a seamless stream of dots, all the data points in the world—the fantasy-come-true of universal surveillance—that nobody would need to connect the dots, because the dots practically connect themselves?
They would need some legal authority for this, so they ask the FISA court—created by Congress in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—to rule on whether this is permissible, and the court complies. Specifically, it rules that they can do this, as long as the material they’re storing is “relevant” to an investigation of terrorism, and the court buys the logic that the agency might need to go fetch data retroactively in such a probe. Therefore, everything is “relevant.”
The catch, as we now know, is that all of this—the ever-expanding surveillance in time and space, the reasoning behind it, and the FISA court ruling that approves it—has evolved at such high levels of secrecy that only a handful of people in Congress (very few people anywhere outside the NSA, and probably not all that many inside) know anything about it. This, it turns out, is what Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, meant when he cryptically said, way back in October 2011, that “there are two Patriot Acts in America”—the one that anybody can read and a “secret interpretation that the executive branch uses” but that nobody on the outside knows about at all. The public Patriot Act allows “bulk” collection of data; the secret interpretation defines “bulk” far more bulkily than anyone could have imagined.
Please read on, especially if you have found yourself wondering exactly how it is this thing unfolded.
Kaplan has some ideas about how to fix it with which you may or may not agree. But the most important thing is that he acknowledges what happened here. The NSA is a runaway agency. And it needs to be reined in.
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