The latest leak from former-NSA-contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, published by The New York Times on Tuesday, revealed that the National Security Agency has been using old-school technology to spy on offline computers.
The article contains the link to The New York Times first story.
In the James Bond flick “Skyfall” — I wish it had been “Quantum of Solace” for effect here — the attack on the “green and pleasant land” is remarked as “coming from the shadows” and much by way of extraordinary Internet accessing technologies. It appears in the real political state-of-affairs that the ability to disrupt or invade computer networks is coming not from the shadows so much as the sun itself: America’s great zoom zoom high-tech military-industrial complex.
One greets this information with perhaps mixed feelings: I’m glad the leadership in the field is on my side! Wait a minute: what is the leadership in the field doing on my side?
🙂
We all know the Cynic’s Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules”.
Let the grin disappear from the face as one contemplates the wealth and attendant powers now associated with China (host today of the world’s largest bank, to which we Americans are doubtlessly deeply indebted), master investor, principal, and skimmer Ayatollah Khamenei, and the focused and shrewd player V. Putin with the greatest potential pirate’s lair ever — if that’s what he wants, who knows? — going up in Marbella, a fine location just east of Gibraltar and north of whatever comes by sea from north Africa.
And down to the essence as regards “Truth! Justice! And the American Way!“: our world is or has become a startlingly and overwhelmingly amoral place, and the only morality in great common force would seem to be the conscience and power of money — and you know what that’s like.
😦
Perhaps it’s that world in which America’s and NATO’s defense and intelligence systems struggle.
We of the west and of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian intellectual inheritance believe we know the difference between right and wrong and strive to hew to what is right while our enemies in junta and mobs and murderous roving bands have loosed themselves from all of that.
I believe we have the right belief.
Still, the breadth and potency of so many natural political enemies seems to me astounding and daunting.
The prompt: ” . . . what $52 billion in “intelligence” does not buy: the ability to deny men such as the Tsarnaev brothers their platform for an attack.”
______
T.,
I’m starting to think these attacks are wanted to provide the engineering mindset with an end-point to process-based analysis. To analyze a path toward a crime, one might want to have the crime at hand for reverse engineering. Some things we catch up with, so one may not be able to shop up and store, say, 500 pounds of fertilizer without a clear and verifiable purpose associated with it, and other things, especially having to do with the life of the mind, afford deeper complexity (requiring large outlays for computer-based data capture and linguistic and pattern analysis).
Another facet: our military repeatedly purchases the last war.
If the last war was WWII, we want greater and more ships, aircraft, tanks, and conventional weapons defense and delivery systems: we’re buying for the same war, only larger.
In the post-Vietnam era, so one may imagine, investment in LIC, intelligence, public information channels, comes more to the forefront of concern — and we reduce the quantity of ships in the Navy while maintaining, somewhat, preparedness for a scenario still akin to conventional global war.
It’s not one or the other, of course, but a broad war fighting spectrum that nonetheless responds to the latest insult or exigency.
As you have noted, the posture remains reactive, “following the snake”.
Our intelligence industry may operate similarly as a bureaucracy posed against similar enemy state-based bureaucracies: it’s better prepared for analyzing the Khamenei regime’s plans and possibly tracking into Hezbollah global than it is with dealing with nutty non-state actors who build bombs on their kitchen tables without taking direct orders from on high.
In the past, when the fighting has either involved or wound down to anarchists and bandits, it’s very small and the casualties turn up limited and small too. However, armies of one or two armed with advanced small arms and improvised devices have a level of potency far in excess of what they would have in earlier days. Moreover, the economic, political, and social value of the victims of their evil has risen similarly: the low-educated, low-wage worker with or without family has been matched or overshadowed in incidence by highly-educated and skilled multitasking and wealth producing men and women with complex integration with family and society. Consider the value (cultural, economic, social) of the Tsarnaev brothers, college students with a malicious bent, in light of those they killed or maimed. One may NOW (instead of yesterday) expect our intelligence industry to tackle the problem of who may be building a bomb in the kitchen.
In that Bledsoe, Hassan, and the Tsarnaevs sent up caution flags bright enough for warning and watching and then got through suggests some pattern of watch-and-wait (until somebody dies at their hands).
As noted years ago, this brings up the subject of whether Americans should have to contend with detentions without charge.
* * *
Goading a greater power into overreaction seems a well-enough established ploy in politics and war. It’s played against Israel every day with rocket launches from Gaza and attempts to perpetrate a terrorist acts from the west bank. It could play here as well with increased tempo in lone-gunman attacks. While we may wait for that stimulus to appear, one may only suppose our $52 billion annual spy budget pays some attention to the intellectual path taken by Muslim garage punks toward their appearance as marathon bombers.
When should the Feds have intervened and on what basis or evidence?
I wonder if deteriorating relations with Russia played into the Boston Marathon bombing. Putin and the new oligarchs have been handed a gift with global Islamic terrorism because they can do their thing in the background while promoting and cooperating within the anti-Jihad framework.
______
And while making it look like the United States is the party falling down.
The topic would not be in correspondence if Carl Bledsoe, Nidal Malik Hasan, and the Tsarnaev brothers hadn’t been somewhere on the domestic and international security radars prior to committing their crimes. Each was a suspected quantity or an officially tracked one known to one intelligence organization or another or to military personnel. Failure to signal or act — silence and watching — enabled them.
Obama said that “the pressure we put on al Qaeda and other networks that are well financed and more sophisticated” has pushed potential terrorists to the margins, where they are forced to plot smaller-level attacks that are tougher to track.
In defense of multiple Administrations in Washington, D.C., one might suggest that empirical approaches to any emergent threat scenario wants for a multidimensional approach — examination of the political, psychological, linguistic, social, and behavioral predicates.
It may not be too much to look into patterns in consumer purchases (potential procurement receipts) in the search for predictive data.
However, as suggested by the shared correspondence, the discovery of such a relationship may correspond only to the last thing that happened, not the next thing that’s Out There.
I generally maintain that rough observable behavior — like the purchase of a large quantity of fertilizer by other than a trusted farmer — is far easier to track than individual thought and, when shared, cabal and conspiracy, which best armor is always privacy guarded by silence.
From the blog earlier today: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/01/08/fns-nsa-senior-executives-memo-to-obama/ Our empirical and engineering mentalities in government may want to view terrorists as free radicals attaching themselves to distinctly bad ideas, “radical Islam” the most active, and then, probably because there’s a lot of in-house and contractor money in high tech R&D, they want massive computing to filter the humans likely to be the “bombs on two legs” (thanks, I think, to Alex Braverman for first using that term in a piece of fiction. Maybe not. I’m ageing).
The problem is the poison needs examination in concert with what may be known about language, perception, attitude, and behavior, a complex area for study. As far as I’m concerned, mention of, say, the Banu Qurayza or Aafia Sidiqui and quiet listening to how they’re spoken about should suffice for litmus as to who has repudiated facets of Islam, in behavior, even if not articulated specifically (e.g., as regards the validity of Surah 9:29, for example) and who really believe in the eventual imposition of dhimmi status and taxes and the conversion or slaughter of infidels.
What the American government wants is in part the universalism known to Jewry: if an idea about mankind is to work in theory, to be validated and integrated with knowledge, it has to work universally. Is there a relationship between marathon bombers and abortion clinic bombers — and the Unibomber or, perhaps, Charles Manson? I think there is and have placed “malignant narcissism”, a characteristic in personality, at the base. Of course, what that does is form a Janus between the dictator and a kind of revolutionary counterpoised, e.g., Assad : AQ-types in the Syrian revolution; and from Egypt, Mobarak : Muslim Brotherhood. Different talk — same walk.
The Boston Globe ran a wrap-up on the Tsarnaev Brothers today: Boston Marathon bombings could provide insight into other killings – Opinion – The Boston Globe – 1/8/2014. Posted to my status bar, it brought the complaint that Americans and the American domestic security establishment just don’t get it: ” . . . because we are too stupid to understand that terrorists really mean to kill us and only because they hate us.”
I should think contempt inseparable from an unchecked narcissism, and hate and its related butchery inseparable from the compound formed around here of “civilizational narcissism” (Haider Mobarak’s pet) and “malignant narcissism”, both of which have been addressed repeatedly on this blog.
Regard the reference to the NSA, can and will “the terrorist” signal be found and distilled from language by capable computers? Part of the answer is as above at least as regards the pools of candidates: slip some litmus into the conversation and see what colors come up in relation to it.
If the sifting is passive, watch for characteristic signal signatures like “crusader west” in traffic.
If we accept that the democratic free speech concept specifically protects discomforting political speech, including hate speech, which is what we do in the U.S., then separating the mouths with the bad attitudes from those who will operationalize their ideas becomes a little more challenging, the packaging of the sociopathic content being contained in many aspects of expression not signaled by exploiting a specific rhetoric rendered recognizable through its repeated phrases.
* * *
A good listener, imho (and just because I think so), applies analog and metaphor to what he hears as he hears it. In essence, the listening is turned toward implication, which in turn requires imagination and a nimble mind for the poetry — i.e., the internal established and potential relationships threaded into the metonymy of the language of interest.
Empathy helps.
Manufacturing a computer that “listens” to language and queries as rapidly as data arrives is just about speed and parsing; getting to an appliance that “listens well” and, in a sense, listens ahead of the speaker’s thoughts, well, for that, you have to hire somebody like me.
🙂
In fact, call me “a piece of work” in that regard, and I’ll take it as a compliment.
The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Unless and until better informed, I’m inclined to regard the source of this pass-along, Consortium News, as a struggling but credible and well grounded organization steeped in investigative journalism in Washington, D.C.
* * *
The world was new in 2006 when I began reading the English-language editions of foreign newspapers.
Back then, I wanted to excoriate Greenpeace for failing to address clean-up of the littoral along the Somali coast. 🙂 Little did I know what lay in store by way of becoming caught in the whirlpool of conflict-related news that funnels down to the Islamic Small Wars.
The next stop: Pakistan, where I lingered awhile, virtually.
On the tour in which intellectual adventure and life collide, and another powerful magnet from which no Jew can or should escape: Israel, still virtually, and the middle east conflict.
These days, the majors have caught up with bloggers and news aggregation in general, but along the way some things may have failed to become a part of the the common knowledge base of the field of foreign correspondents who, after all, report the news generally more than analyze events along specialized lines. Language and political psychology will remain a strong part of the interest here, would that I too could fund scholarship in the area, and, more recently, “political spychology” has become of interest as our “digital communicating” lends itself to computer-driven collection and analysis projects — see, for example, the Defense Advances Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) program description for “Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT)”.
Technology may help us leave worlds behind, and we call that progress, but it may also bring us to worlds in which we may not wish to live and caution — and reportage — may be warranted in areas that may pit engineering prowess and vision against the humanity of humanity and the values we assign to the experience of a preferred natural humanity.
For the romantic, “electronic data processing” has been a nightmare from the first spinning magnetic paint disks and shuffling 80-column card deck (and fondly I recall being among the last to run such a database through a Univac at the University of Maryland); however, Rousseau’s “noble savage” hasn’t borne out well in reality: there’s nothing noble about throwing bakers into their own ovens as appears to have happened in Syria last month.
This blog may see fewer than 5,000 hits annually (as it does, so far), but it’s reach remains pretty good (it got look-sees from more than 100 nations in 2013), and it would seem there’s room on the margins of the news business for responsible reportage about wonky subjects and second looks at topics combed over by Big Media.
* * *
I’ve listed Consortium News in the blog roll and may be watching it a bit.
The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people’s digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
Perhaps that’s because, and this for all the blood and treasure spent since then, it is still yesterday and yesterday remains captive to yesterday’s drives, experiences, and transmitted inter-generational cultural programming.
One of the most complicated and intrigue-filled scandals in recent decades, the Iran-contra affair dominated the news for many months. It consisted of three interconnected parts: The Reagan administration sold arms to Iran, a country desperate for materiel during its lengthy war with Iraq; in exchange for the arms, Iran was to use its influence to help gain the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon; and the arms were purchased at high prices, with the excess profits diverted to fund the Reagan-favored “contras” fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Strangely, the page on my Chrome browser looks like garbage until copied down (fair use – one paragraph) to ASCII text.
* * *
The event in the year 1358 was a counterattack. Our courageous and religious youth attacked the U.S. embassy and discovered the truth and identity of this embassy, which was the Den of Espionage, and presented this fact to people throughout the world.
In those days, our youth called the U.S. embassy the “Den of Espionage”. Today, after the passage of 30-plus years since that day, the name of U.S. embassies in countries which have the closest relationship with America – that is to say, European countries – has become the den of espionage. This means that our youth are 30 years ahead of the rest of the world. This event was related to America as well. These three events were related, in different ways, to the government of the United States of America and its relations with Iran. Therefore, the 13th of Aban – which is tomorrow – was named “Day of Fighting Against Arrogance”.
He believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory. He used hissimple lifestyle and behaviour to criticise the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt society. He declared himself a cosmopolitan. There are many tales about him doggingAntisthenes‘ footsteps and becoming his faithful hound.[3] Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and slept in a large ceramic jar[4] in the marketplace. He became notorious for his philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He embarrassed Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaged his lectures. Diogenes was also responsible for publicly mocking Alexander the Great.
The investigations were effectively halted when President George H. W. Bush (Reagan’s vice president) pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger before his trial began.[2]
The scandal began as an operation to free the seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by a group with Iranian ties connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the U.S. hostages. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.[2][3] Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[4][5]
While President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause,[6] the evidence is disputed as to whether he authorized the diversion of the money raised by the Iranian arms sales to the Contras.
Certainly from journalism’s second row seat to history, I ask what can be known or with confidence inferred by sifting and revisiting news — and what may be imagined in the widening gaps between surface coverage of many elements and their untapped depths.
In Pakistan, which information environment practically guarantees no one can know much of anything with confidence, one expects the floating of wild conspiracy theories, the kind that turn events upside-down and deliver them on a plate labeled “CIA-Mossad”.
In the open societies, Great Britain and the United States foremost, one expects such behavior to be minimized rather than encouraged, and yet we’re scratching our heads over growing “black budgets” and many things happening seemingly off the page as well as “off the hook”.
Of course, I’m reading spy novels, so perhaps that enthusiasm has begun to contaminate my appreciation of RT, CNN, Al Jazeera, Time . . . .
I ask questions about many things that can’t be seen.
One cannot “see” psychology and political psychology — no sign ever hangs over a politician announcing that he may be “DICTATORIAL”, “DISINGENUOUS”, or “DISSIMULATING”, and yet memory serves for recalling milestones and other moments, puzzling moments, sometimes, and fitting them back together.
Then such signs start to emerge from out of the fog, we start to test them again.
How could Ronald Reagan, for example, a show business alumnus, fumble so badly on the Lebanese hostage crisis as to not be aware of Oliver North’s behind-the-scenes machinations to cut a deal somewhere inside the Iran-Soviet-South American political line?
The fair good Republican story begs credibility.
The Lebanese hostage drama was not third-page lead and flip to the back of the “A section” stuff: it was front page all the way, and the President, the Republicans’ most beloved, seems nonetheless to have dropped the reins.
* * *
At ABC News, where I worked at the time, one of our camera crews had been granted access to the Oval Office the previous night. We had video of Carter, looking grim and exhausted in a cardigan, consulting with his aides until, quite literally, it was time to dress for the inauguration of his successor. Those images and live shots of desperate diplomacy, followed by the stately run-up to the transfer of power in Washington, played on one side of the screen. The preparations for departure from Mehrabad played on the other.
The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians’ message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America’s sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.
“The Iranians” are still stage-managing “down to the last minute” the dramas in which they star themselves. That is part of the “malignant narcissism”, a part of control, a part of the guaranty of continuing “narcissistic supply” from one’s ever awed (and battered and intimidated) subjugated others.
* * *
The original reason for the hostage-taking seems to have been “as insurance against retaliation by the U.S., Syria, or any other force” against Hezbollah, which is thought responsible for the killing of 241 Americans and 58 Frenchmen[7] in the Marine barracks and embassy bombings in Beirut.[8] Other reasons for the kidnappings or the prolonged holding of hostages are thought to be “primarily based on Iranian foreign policy calculations and interests” particularly the extraction of “political, military and financial concessions from the Western world”,[9] the hostage takers being strong allies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Reagan’s [STET] made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. Obama’s arrogance by appointing 32 leftist czars and constantly bypassing congress is impeachable. Eric Holder is probably the MOST incompetent and arrogant DOJ head to ever hold the job. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?
Presidents are politicians and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie, but even using that low standard, the Obama’s have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry, and they display an animus for civility.
The divide between what an American President may know and what the American public may be allowed to know in the way of day-to-day foreign relations and states of affairs seems to widen with the growth and the heightened presence of the “Islamic Small Wars” and the concomitant development of an immense intelligence bureaucracy laden with missions the public doesn’t need to know about – or shouldn’t — until afterward, perhaps, and denoted affirming as regards American patriotism.
The acknowledged and most galling of the world’s dictatorships and still feudal societies don’t have this issue: they know what they’re about, and their subjects do as well, and that’s a sad state wherever it’s found; the states navigating between open democracy and paternalist nationalism or resurgent absolutism do have this issue, for certainly Moscow’s internal opposition has been tracking what has been and continues to be taken from them since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Long opposite in stance, the United States may no longer be immune itself to cultivating suspicion throughout its constituency.
I neither condemn, demonize, nor patronize President Obama and have long noted, not alone, the need in even informal open source research to separate surface from what may be gathered and sifted as regards separate items of interest and their management.
Lo and behold, for example, where Obama has been roundly accused of abandoning Israel, throwing it “under the bus” (so I read too often), Israel holds sway over the critical cockpit avionics of the F-35 program, has developed with U.S. support long-distance refueling capability, and has access to “bunker busting” (tunneling-exploding) bombs. Even though it appears contentious and stressed, I believe the American-Israeli relationship close, rather than not, and laudable given the general stakes involved for democracy, the fruits of The Enlightenment, and the general well being — measurable by indicators of improved qualities in living — of others worldwide.
Nonetheless, the American body politic may be slipping collectively into the land of innuendo, far right and left, and have less and less insight — or energy for developing insight — into the White House’s essential American rationality (or rejection of it).
Cock-a-doodle-do about Reagan or Obama, align with the Tea Party or the New Old Now Old, Lost, and Far Out Left, the policy axis may not align with either filter.
On the surface, for example, the Obama Administration has decried the “military coup” in Egypt (that would be Obama, the secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ever clever “Manchurian Candidate” out to get “America, the Prise”) but the Egyptian military, Israel, and the United States would seem on some same kind of page as regards Iran, Hamas, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
While the political cant went that-a-way –> . . . the politicians, their armed forces, their wealthy benefactors and partners — do add “large swaths of their constituencies” — hold some central constructs together out of the light.
One might say of highest-level privileged conversations, whether taking place in “open societies” or decidedly closed or closing ones, that they are all taking place somewhere “in the shadows”.
* * *
WASHINGTON — When Shiite Muslim terrorists hijacked a TWA jet and took 39 Americans hostage in Beirut four years ago, then-President Ronald Reagan’s public stance was clear: There would be no negotiations with terrorists.
But in private, the U.S. position was quite different. Reagan quietly encouraged Israel to make a deal with the terrorists, to exchange Israeli-held detainees for American hostages–and that is how the TWA captives were released, as the first step in a massive swap of prisoners across Israel’s northern border.
Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore bank accounts in Cyprus and Switzerland: the cables unpick a dysfunctional political system in which bribery alone totals an estimated $300 billion a year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of government and organized crime.
Among the most striking allegations contained in the cables, which were leaked to the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks, are:
• Russian spies use senior mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking.
• Law enforcement agencies such as the police, spy agencies and the prosecutor’s office operate a de facto protection racket for criminal networks.
• Rampant bribery acts like a parallel tax system for the personal enrichment of police, officials and the KGB’s successor, the federal security service (FSB).
Snowden’s father, Lon, also expressed his gratitude to Russian President Vladimir Putin for protecting his son from the legal consequences of having violated his NSA confidentiality obligations.
*
Human Rights Watch analysts also took note of the irony of the Kremlin coming to the defense of a self-styled champion of privacy and free speech rights.
“He cannot but be aware of the unprecedented crackdown on human rights that the government has unleashed in the past 15 months,” Rachel Denber, the rights group’s expert on Russia and other former Soviet states told the Associated Press by email.
Throw away God; give up on one humanist ideology or another: what’s left?
Money.
Are governments businesses?
Who do they serve?
Among those served, what are they serving?
* * *
In the capitalist democracies, most expect private businesses to keep proprietary the business processes, relationships, and technologies that enable their sales, investment strategies, and accumulations of wealth distributed back to stakeholders or to the public in the form of consumer spending. As regards governments, they may be expected to keep secret fundamental military and security edges involving security intelligence and operations. These days, whether with billions networked through criminal pacts or blacked out for “black ops” budgets, governments, known criminal or not, would seem to be transitioning into deeply feudal empires — not of, for, or by The People but of, for, and by Some (Very Enriched) People.
______
Spanish police arrested four people Friday suspected of laundering large sums of money from Russian criminal gangs as part of a network they said may be linked to Semion Mogilevich, one of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives.
The arrests took place in the Mediterranean coastal town of Lloret de Mar near Barcelona, which has a large Russian community and is popular with tourists from the country, police said in a statement.
The four are suspected of tax fraud, document falsification and money laundering.
MOTHERBOARD: Let’s start with public perception. People believe the Taliban is fueling the drug trade in Afghanistan. To what extent is this true, and why is it so widely believed?
The Taliban are players in the Afghan drug trade, but minor ones in relative terms. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to look at the value of the annual drug trade within Afghanistan, which is about $3 billion. The Taliban capture only about 5 to 10 percent of those profits. The bulk of the profits is appropriated by other groups, such as traffickers, government and police officers, as well as warlords.
Web searched first-page reference to data on the Taliban’s narcotics trafficking seems to trail off for 2013, but relayed at the bottom of this post, there’s combat footage from early 2013 posted just six days ago.
No pun intended here either: the impression as regards the latest admixtures of crime and politics is getting rich.
According to American national intelligence watcher Tim Shorrock (reference: Spies for Hire), the annual bill for U.S. security-oriented intelligence efforts approximates $52 billion, not that the distribution is known. The social integration of the state’s population with its defense and security sectors may suffice for trust — are we going to trust our neighbors or not? — but the informational dark space created by the development of a large population of government-employed or contracted secrets keepers may not bode well for democracy.
Who is getting that intelligence budget?
On what basis?
To what end?
Shorrock’s sturdy journalism illuminates many paths in the national security intelligence complex, but as seems true today in Russia, the public may be told that it’s being served, but given the enormity of the spooky business and its continuing growth in its institutional aspect, public also has room – more cause – to suspect otherwise.
This is not to impugn the American intelligence community: by and large, we still trust our neighbors.
With help from books like Spies for Hire, the privileges known to the free press and more affirmed than not (so far as I know — and infringements by government gets play in the press pretty damned quick), and the web, it’s not that hard getting a glimpse of the cobbling developed to counter the narcotics trade, the terrorism business, and other contributors to international crime.
Still, the more a government privileges a class with secrets-keeping powers, the more paranoia it may inspire in those who are not of it.
* * *
But, without naming names, Medvedev said Russia should be careful about freeing people convicted of crimes like hooliganism – the charge in the Pussy Riot case – and theft, which was the indictment against Khodorkovsky.
“Our people really are not much inclined, for example, to conduct acts of amnesty for individuals involved in violent crimes, for individuals who committed crimes against society, including hooliganism,” Medvedev said in a TV interview.
In political Russia, it appears deflection has become a high art.
The Khodorkovsky case has become legend and no realist expects more from the Kremlin then in its realpolitik the continued expression of absolute power that has dogged the matter from before the arrest stage and forward.
I’ve chided Pussy Riot (no, children, we do not take bawdy shows into churches without a big, friendly invitation) but most watchers feel the Kremlin’s punishment back-to-the-gulag! vulgarity bespeaks itself of criminal callousness.
In Medvedev’s above cited statement, the infantilizing of the Russian people by way of a paternalist stance should be as clear to neutral onlookers as the heightened projections of criminality. “Pussy Riot” may indeed be a vulgar noun, but the girls are not the evil ones; as for Khodorkovsky, he appears to have leaned westward with Yukos and in the direction of integrity (gasp!).
Since the late 1990s, Khodorkovsky had taken steps to transform Yukos along the lines of western business models. These steps included the introduction of corporate transparency, the adoption of western accounting standards, the hiring of western management, the creation of an independent board of directors with a corporate governance subcommittee, corporate growth through mergers and acquisitions, and increased western investments. These actions had marked Khodorkovsky as an outspoken leader who was pro-western and challenged the non-transparent means by which government and business operated in the Russian energy sector. These practices, along with the possibility of Yukos selling a major stake to Exxon Mobil or Chevron, deeply unsettled the Kremlin.
With Russia as with Syria as with, not so oddly, Islamic Jihad in large part, one may expect the patina of legitimate cause to wear away before the eyes of a widening and more profoundly comprehending global public. Even so obvious, so visible, however, one wonders about the better options available to that same public.
One may note that Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has survived decades in power without a shred of statewide legitimacy left intact, but the crowds of those patronized, the money involved (for himself and those to whom he distributes spoils) has proven sufficient to lead him into his 90s with probably a fairly good night’s sleep.
This broad and unprecedented alliance, united to demand more transparency and accountability around the NSA’s access to our personal data, stood behind me as I delivered my testimony. But do you know who didn’t have my back? Who hasn’t stepped up to support surveillance transparency, much less surveillance reform? Who, despite—or because of—being as deeply involved as anyone can be in the NSA’s dragnet, has had nothing to say other than “no comment”?
The crisis — triggered by reports that Australian spies tried to tap the phones of the Indonesian president, his wife and ministers — has pushed ties between Jakarta and Canberra to their lowest level since Australia sent troops to restore order in East Timor in 1999.
Jakarta has recalled its ambassador from Canberra and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Wednesday ordered cooperation suspended in several areas, including on people-smuggling, military exercises and sharing intelligence.
It is one thing for former politicians such as Alexander Downer to turn on the ”left-wing” Guardian for ”shamelessly dribbl[ing] out this material to maximise the pain and embarrassment to the Western alliance”.
It is another for journalists, particularly ones who are vociferous champions of a free press, to fall into line.
ECHELON – “ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched” (Federation of American Scientists).
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