The detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s husband has led to much hand wringing. He was forced to give up the passwords to his phone and his computer, was threatened with jail, and was only allowed to have a lawyer if he chose one of the police’s list. He was not, of course, allowed to be silent. This is the law, nothing illegal was done.
But of more interest to me is an article by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian. He details the threats made by the government if he did not destroy or hand over the files, including the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement. The most telling graph is this one:
The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like “when”.
We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint.
It’s not just digital in the sense of online. Again the endgame is this: recognition software linked to cameras, drones, even spy satellites. Facial recognition, gait recognition, IR signatures and more. This stuff is pretty reliable. You will be tracked 24/7. You will go nowhere without it being possible to know where you have gone. You will do nothing online without it being tracked. The hysteria over online bullying will be used to make online anonymity (as limited as it already is), straight up illegal.
Everything you do will be tracked. Audio is being added to many cameras now, as well, so they won’t just see what you do, they will hear it. Fools will dismiss this as paranoia, it is simply fact, this is the end game, this is where the surveillance web leads, when you add the telecom revolution on top of this. This is more intrusive than what Orwell had in Big Brother, because they didn’t record, if someone wasn’t listening at the time, you were ok.
I have long said that I will know people are serious about change when it is a public ethic that a surveillance camera is evil, and the moment one is put up, it is destroyed. If you want to stop this short of that, you will need draconian laws.
1) No audio surveillance. Period.
2) The government cannot use surveillance to follow, watch or listen to anyone without a court warrant. That court warrant expires in X years (probably 3), and once it expires, the person is given all records gained. Furthermore there can be no blanket court orders, every one must be individual.
3) No public cameras. If you need a place watched, hire someone to do it. We have an unemployment problem anyway.
4) Private surveillance cameras in private places only, no transmission of those records off-site, no linking of those records to anything else (the standard practice in many stores is to photograph you as you pay and link that to your credit card) and all records are destroyed after 24 hours. This applies not just to customers, but to employees, who should have rights as well. As a business the results of their work are your business, the second by second record of how they do the job is rarely your business and if it is, hire a supervisor.
5) A right to privacy. The current laws assume that if you are in a public place you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Those laws were not made with blanket surveillance and the telecom revolution in mind. To put it in vulgar terms, regular photography is ok, but you cannot be stalked. Someone cannot follow you around, photographing you, whether in person or remotely, without your permission, the above mentioned court-order or perhaps, reasonable suspicion you are about to commit a crime. I”m leery of the last, simply because of the abuse of such clauses we’ve seen from the police. (ie. good laws cannot protect bad people, see Machiavelli.)
All of the above laws must be backed up with criminal sentences, not fines, or they will not be obeyed.
As I have said repeatedly, individuals have the right to know what their government is doing, and government has no right to know what citizens are doing except under very prescribed circumstances.
If you want some form of surveillance, the only good form would be making sure that every police officer has a camera on them at all times. Even that I have doubts about, since sometimes it actually is best to let someone off with a warning.
A working society requires people to have discretion and use it. No set of laws works in all circumstances. But as with children, if they won’t use their discretion, if they won’t behave properly, then draconian laws are necessary. It is clear that our lords and masters think they have a right to track us 24/7. That can’t be allowed, and what will happen if it occurs (and it’s close) is far worse than a few criminals getting away because there wasn’t a camera nearby.
I’ve decided, after some prompting, to put together an anthology of my writings. Unfortunately they’re scattered over multiple blogs and some of those blogs don’t exist any more. I had assumed this would be relatively easy, using the Wayback machine, but they seem to have made some changes.
Going to a later bopnews front page works fine. However, what no longer works is the drop down author box, which goes to Wayback machine’s own “bopnews” site. It would probably be possible to find most articles by going through the archive day by day, but I’d really rather not.
Suggestions and/or solutions?
Sorry folks, but the amount of registration spam is out of control and one of the things slowing down the blog. I’m going to purge everyone who doesn’t have at least editor level access tomorrow, and you’ll have to re-register with the new captcha system. Sorry about this, it’s not elegant, but I’m hoping it makes the site run faster, and cuts down on my admin overhead.
On edit: to clarify, this shouldn’t effect people who an email subscription, just people who log in at the website proper, usually to comment. That’s very few people compared to the overall audience.
There have been more killings in Egypt today of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Of particular note is the death of Asmaa al-Beltagi, daughter of a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader, Dr. Mohammed al-Beltagi (h/t MFI). Martial law has been declared, the streets are being cleared, and military governors are being appointed.
A cynical man might say that clearly Egypt’s military and deep state want a civil war.
More to the point, the deep state—the Mubarak era civil servants, the military, police, the businesspeople in bed with them, and the judiciary, must now not lose power for the forseeable future.
It has been noticed that, miraculously, post coup, power problems, for example disappeared. The belief of many (and I agree) is that the deep state sabotaged Mursi. When the coup occurred, the government started working properly again. The regime claims that Mursi was incompetent, but basic logistical matters like power distribution rarely fix themselves overnight unless they weren’t really broken in the first place.
What Mursi did not do, despite sacking some high level apparatchniks, was purge the state of Mubarak era supporters who were in any position to sabotage his new government. Any new, actually democratic government, will likely learn that lesson, and if they take power, they will purge, purge, purge, as was done in Turkey, even if it requires being unjust and unfair, they will decide they cannot risk allowing Mubarak supporters to continue in any positions of power.
Having played their hand, having sabotaged Mursi, and having engaged in a coup, the military and its supporters are all-in.
Mursi did what he could, but I expect he feared a backlash if he purged the deep state. He also, in my opinion, overreached in the constitution. He tried to turn a temporary win, an electoral victory, into a constitution which locked down Egypt along the lines the Muslim Brotherhood wanted, and would keep it locked in that state even if secular forces won an election outright in the future. That enraged a lot of people, and made them more willing to be cat’s paws of the military and the deep state.
Egypt has another fundamental problem. It cannot feed itself. Any government which takes power in Egypt, it truly wants to pursue the policies which will make it prosperous, must have a plan which will allow Egypt to feed itself, and which during the transition period allows it to buy food in a non hard currency.
some fiddle music:
Newspapers don’t make much money any more (though in the 90s they made returns in the teens regularly.) What they do still have, though, is influence and power. Even though newspapers don’t have the reach television does, they determine the stories of the day—they control the news cycle more than any other part of the media. More than that, newspapers are intelligence bureaus. Rupert Murdoch, no fool, would spend hours on the phone with beat reporters, picking their brains.
Power leads to money. Amazon is under what Bezos must consider attack (as in making Amazon pay sales taxes), and he needs influence, power and intelligence in DC. The Washington Post, at 250 million, is an absolute steal, even if it loses money every day.
This is the sort of post that makes people mad, but in light of what’s happening in Egypt it’s necessary to talk about bin Laden.
Most people who hate bin Laden have never read read his writings. They’re quite extensive, and they’ll reward your time in reading them. (Obligatory bin Laden is a bad man, just like George Bush Jr. disclaimer.) Bin Laden was very smart, and and he understood America very well, and had a good take on the world system. He was not stupid, he was not a coward (he lead troops from the front line against the Soviets), and he was very effective at accomplishing many of his goals. Along with George Bush Jr, who was his greatest ally and enemy, he was was one of the first great men of the 21st century. Great men, of course, do not need to be good men. Hitler and Churchill and Gandhi were all great men, they weren’t all good men.
Let’s start in relation to Egypt. A lot of people in Egypt and elsewhere see the Egyptian coup (it was a coup, don’t tell me otherwise) as being US backed. Add to this the fact that they see the defeat of the Muslim brotherhood in the past as being aided by the US, they believe that Egypt is ruled by its current oligarchy (an extension of the Mubarak era oligarchy, and again, don’t even try and lie and say otherwise), because of the US.
What bin Laden said was that despotic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere are backed by America in specific, and the West in general. That backing is powerful. In Islam there is an idea that you should deal with your local tyrant, your local problems, first, and not worry about the far enemy. Bin Laden believed that, in the current circumstance, you could not do that. Revolution at home was close to impossible because of the far enemy, because of the United States. Even if you did, by some miracle succeed, as long as the US was the global hegemon, your success would be undermined and destroyed by the US by crippling your economy, escalating, if necessary, to economic sanctions backed by force. If you don’t believe this, see what was done to Iraq in the 90s and what is being done to Iran today. A lot of children and adults are dying and suffering because of these sanctions.
Bin Laden’s argument, then, was that the US had to be defeated. That the evils being done by local regimes (such as the extensive use of torture and routine rape in Egypt under Mubarak) could not be ended by simply fighting the local regime, but that the far regime, the US, must be defeated.
This is a pragmatic argument, and it is an ethical argument. When Madeline Albright said that half a million dead Iraqi children from US sanctions was “worth it”, bin Laden’s response was to ask if the lives of Muslim children were not equal to those of Christian children. Rhetorically, he asked, “is our blood not red too?”
Whatever you think of bin Laden, this is a powerful ethical statement.
What this leads to is that the US is responsible both for the suffering it causes directly, and the suffering it causes indirectly, by keeping monstrous regimes in power, or, in many cases, helping create them.
This critique is not just a critique from an Islamic perspective, it strikes to the heart of the West’s ostensible ethics, to the equality of all humans, to the right of self-determination, and even to the western theoretical preference for democracy. Democracy is a powerful idea, but bin Laden (and others) have observed that the West only believes in elections when the right people win. This was best on display when Hamas, in Palestine, won elections the US had insisted occur (over Israeli objections) and the US then backed a Fatah coup to make sure that Hamas did not take power. (Hamas later kicked Fatah out of Gaza, leading to the current divided rule of Palestine.) It doesn’t take a genius to see that this applies to the current Egyptian situation. Whatever one thinks of Morsi’s government, it was elected in what seem to have been fair elections.
So, if you play the West’s rules, if you win fair and square in elections, and the West doesn’t like who came to power, they will help undo the results of the elections. If you try and get rid of a regime you don’t like through violence, the West will support the regime, making it unlikely you will win, and if you do win despite all that, they will undermine or destroy your regime through economic sanctions. All that failing, as in Iraq, they may well invade.
The problem with this critique is that it is, substantially, accurate. Hate bin Laden or not, this is a model of the world which has predictive and analytical utility. It explains the past, it predicts the future, and it does both well. The fact that bin Laden’s critique is fairly similar to various left-wing critiques is not accidental. It is not because bin Laden and the left are fellow travellers (Islamists are strongly opposed to genuine leftists), it is because any set of model that track reality fairly well will tend to look alike. Of course, that they look the same is used to discredit people by association. “You agree with bin Laden” they say, and shut down discussion of how the world actually works.
The power of bin Laden’s critique is its accuracy, the elements of it which are true. What bin Laden added (though I’m sure others have as well), was one main thing: the directive to attack the US.
Bin Laden was, in certain respects, born of the Afghan war against the USSR. Those of you who are young tend to view what happened to the USSR as inevitable. Creaky, economically broken, it was going down. Nothing is so inevitable as what has already happened. You’re not wrong, the USSR had real internal problems it couldn’t fix, but you’re not quite right, either. Absent Afghanistan, the USSR might have toddled on for a lot longer. Decades, perhaps.
Looked at from the outside, even in the 90s (heck, even in the 80s, with some prescience), the US does not look healthy. It looks economically sick, with stagnation of wages even in the 90s, a gutting of real productivity, soaring inequality, and political sclerosis leading to the creation of an elite detached from the actual economy, but instead playing financial games which do not track real economic power. It looks, like the USSR did, like a society which, with a push, could collapse.
Bin Laden set out to give the US that push.
Let’s go back to the USSR. The Soviet military was not a joke. It was large, powerful, had good equipment (especially compared to Afghan tribesmen). Even the post Soviet Russian military is no joke (take a look at what they did to Georgia, recently.) The USSR was POWER.
And in Afghanistan, the USSR was worn down. All that power died in the grave of Empires. And soon thereafter, the USSR ceased to be.
Bin Laden was there. He saw it. He participated in it as a fighter.
He looked at the West, and the US in specific and believed that the US was ripe for something similar. As with the USSR the US in the 90s had a very scary reputation. Remember how decisively Saddam was defeated in the first Gulf War. The US looked undefeatable. And, in certain respects it was, and still is.
But bin Laden saw, accurately, the US weakness. He believed that while the US was good at open field warfare, American troops were nothing special at the sort of guerrilla warfare that had occurred in Afghanistan. He believed that if they could be brought into Afghanistan, and kept there, instead of coming in and leaving quickly, they could be defeated. He believed that the legend of American invincibility, as with that of the Red Army, could be shattered.
9/11 was about getting the US to overreact. About getting it into Afghanistan. It succeeded in doing that, but bin Laden must have known some despair, because at first, Afghanistan wasn’t proving to be much of a graveyard at all. The majority of Afghans hadn’t liked the Taliban, didn’t mind them being blown over, and were willing to give the US and the West, a chance.
Then Bush stepped in, used 9/11 as the de-facto pretext, and invaded Iraq. And in Iraq, much of what bin Laden wanted to have happen in Afghanistan happened, with the bonus that Hussein (whom, as a secular Arabist, bin Laden was an enemy of) was gotten rid of too. Win/win. And meanwhile, in Afghanistan, coalition forces managed to alienate the Afghan population and ensure the return of the Taliban, while destabilizing Pakistan in addition. Bonus!
(Bush was able to rewrite the unwritten US constitution, however, and his victory in changing the nature of America has been confirmed by the fact that Obama has institutionalized almost all essential Bush policies and extended many of them.)
Now one can say that bin Laden lost (not because he was killed, that’s irrelevant and people who think it matters much are fools), because the US is still around, still powerful, and hasn’t collapsed.
But it isn’t over yet. The cost of the Iraq war, of 9/11, was huge, both in financial terms and in the changes wrought to the American psyche, unwritten constitution and society. Those lost years, and they were lost, should have been used to transition the US economy. Instead the money that should have done that was used to fund the Iraq war, and to keep money flowing a housing bubble was not just allowed, but encouraged, both by the Fed and by actively turning a blind eye to illegal activity.
The US economy has never recovered. Five to six years out, the absolute number of jobs hasn’t recovered, the actual standard of living for most people is dropping, income and wealth inequality is worse, and unsustainable spending is occurring without any plan to create an economy which can pay for it. Political sclerosis is worse, not better, the economic plan is to frack, frack, frack (which won’t work in the long run) and the US and the West are doubling down on a surveillance state and continuing to erode freedoms, which not only has much larger economic effects than most people realize, but weakens Western ideological power.
So bin Laden hasn’t lost yet. The reaction to 9/11 may yet be seen to be the precipitating event that made it essentially impossible for the US to reverse its decline, and made that decline far faster and far worse.
We started with Egypt, so let’s bring it back there. If you’re an Egyptian who believes (accurately) that there was a coup which overthrew a democratically elected government, and that the US was complicit at best, and actively involved at worst (John Kerry constantly insisting there was no coup is not in America’s interests here), then the basic critique still resonates. Even if you don’t want bin Laden’s end goal of a new Islamic caliphate, if you want independence, if you want to be able to defeat your local tyrants, well, the US is your enemy, the far enemy whose existence makes defeating the near enemies impossible. It is not a country you feel you can make peace with, a devil you can ignore because it is far away, but a country whose ability to intervene in your country must be somehow destroyed.
This basic analysis of the situation remains extremely powerful and convincing.
Bin Laden was the first great man of the 21st century. George Bush Jr. was the second (Obama is important, but is a secondary figure to Bush.)
And as long as bin Laden’s insights seem to explain the world, someone is likely to act on them.
May God, should he or she exist, aid us. We’re going to need it.
(Oh, and part of the opportunity cost of the Iraq war may well be hundreds of millions of deaths from climate change. You’re welcome.)
Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return—and so the wheel turns.
1) In absolute terms there are still less jobs than before the recession. In absolute terms. As a percentage of the population, it will not recover in 10 years, which is what I said the moment that Obama announced his stimulus plan. This is the worst recovery, in absolute and relative terms, in post-war history.
2) The stock market has risen about 150% from its lows.
These results reflect, exactly, the priorities of your President, your Central Bank, and your Congress.
I’ve stayed out of the Manning and Snowden imbroglio because most of what needs to be said is being said by other people.
However there is one issue that is not being made clear enough, but which under-girds all the arguments about their acts: the role of government.
Think of there as being two main ways to view government:
1) Government exists to rule over the people. The people may have some say in who their rulers are, but once those rulers exist, they make the rules and the people obey. Government in this view is an independent entity to whom subjects owe their obedience. Government knows best, and we should do what government tells us to.
2) Government is an instrument acting on behalf of the people. Its position is similar to being a trustee—it is a relationship in which the public gives the government certain powers and resources, and expects the government to act on behalf of the people. Government, in this view, is a solution to the collective action problem. How do we act together for the benefit of everyone?
If we are ruled by government, we do not have a defacto right to know what government is doing. Government knows best, we don’t have all the information, and we should go about our lives, obeying the laws and those who are in positions of power over us.
Imagine that you have a trustee, whom you have given money and the right to make rules to, in order that they might take care of certain of your affairs. In order to be sure that they are taking care of your affairs, and not their own, or someone else’s who once the money and power is in their hands, is bribing or browbeating them, you must know what actions they are taking.
Transparency, in a democratic system, is predicated on the idea that citizens are the ultimate repository of legitimacy and that citizens have a responsibility and a right to know what is being done on their behalf. Citizens cannot execute their responsibilities, including voting, volunteering, running for office and supporting primary candidates, if they do not know what government is actually doing.
Thus, in a democracy, the government must be transparent on virtually everything. Short of actual military secrets, of which there are startlingly few (major deployments are obvious, and often announced), and very specific details like the actual identity of spies, plus personal information not relevant to job performance of government employees, there is almost nothing the government does which should not be available to the public.
Government works for the population. It is the servant of the people. You cannot supervise your employee, you cannot discipline or fire or even properly reward your employee, if you do not know what your employee is doing with your money and the power you have given your employee.
It is now necessary to talk about the relation of citizens to the government. The government works for citizens, citizens do not work for the government. It is not a symmetrical relationship. Because government works for the people, the people have the right to know what the government does. Because the people, with the exception of some officials, do not exist to serve the needs of the government, the government does not have a right to know what the people are doing. Transparency is required by the government, so that its masters, the people, can supervise it. Again, transparency is not required of the people, except in very specific ways (for example, how much money they made) because they are not in a trustee relationship with the government: it is not their duty to act on behalf of the government.
Every time someone says, “well, if Snowden/Assange/Greenwald/Welsh/ believes in transparency, they should release on their personal emails”, it is a misunderstanding of the relationship between government and the people. Individuals do not owe government transparency, government owes people transparency because government works for people and has power and money only because it is granted that power by the People.
Now, you can use this argument in support of spying on all the people. The argument is as follows: “the people have given us the responsibility to protect them, and we believe the only way to protect them is to know everything they do online and as much of what they do offline as possible. They have given us that grant of authority, and we are using it.”
I am willing to admit that the people could give their government that grant of authority. However, to do so they would have to know that that is what was being done and most people did not know that pre-Snowden. There would also have to be an election in which “spy on everyone” was the main issue, and there was a party to vote for which was against it. And, prima-facie, one would expect to at least see polls which showed that citizens wanted to be spied on all the time.
I believe that if such a grant was made, effective democracy would still end (if it hasn’t in many Western countries already). Once people know they are being spied on 24/7 they change how they behave, and those who have access to that information can easily manipulate them, both overtly through blackmail and covertly by knowing what makes them tick (the exact contents of everything you search online, every email you send, every text you send and every phone call you make, plus in many cities the possibility of a fair bit of tracking of where you go physically each day). Information, in this case, is power. Once they know how you tick, it’s not hard to figure out how to present information and incentives in such a way that you do what they want.
In this case government becomes the master, the people the servants. To give full, free democratic consent for a surveillance society, is to sign the death warrant to the type of democracy which is “for the people, by the people”. Something may remain, it may have elections, it may be called democracy and have all the forms, but it will not be democracy in the essentials. There are other ways to lose effective democracy, like allowing money to buy the system, of course, and in some countries it appears that has occurred, but the surveillance state is additive (or perhaps multiplicative.)
In the Gilded Age, it was widely recognized that the “Trusts” (that Ages equivalent of our great megacorporations) controlled government. Eventually Americans were able to undo that. But conditions were different then, there was no surveillance society, and there was still a very vibrant culture of civic association.
If we believe that government serves the people, then we must be way of any government that either doesn’t wish to tell the people what it is doing on their behalf, or which believes it has a right to know everything its people do.
The final argument is the safety argument, the “we need a surveillance society to be safe from bad men.” I don’t believe this argument, and others have dealt with it, so for the time being, I will simply end with words from Benjamin Franklin:
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
And though Franklin didn’t say it, I agree that those who who believe that those give up liberty for safety will lose both liberty and safety—and deserve neither.
