Really, the road to hell is paved mostly with bad intentions, stupidity and apathy
Just read an outstanding and frightening article in The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
(h/t Glenn Greenwald)
that REALLY should be stirring about five thousand times or maybe ten million more times outrage than it presently is. Which, alas, is very little.
The article is long, and doesn't lead with the punch lines, but it's really, really really worth reading. It's about the prosecution under the Espionage Act of former NSA employee Thomas Drake. The government's rationale?
Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”
This, for whistleblowing about a DOMESTIC spying program, which includes details from a number of former NSA officials about things that have been going on since early in the Bush Administration and are continuing under Obama:
Drake says that N.S.A. officials who helped the agency obtain FISA warrants were suddenly reassigned, a tipoff that the conventional process was being circumvented. He added, “I was concerned that it was illegal, and none of it was necessary.” In his view, domestic data mining “could have been done legally” if the N.S.A. had maintained privacy protections. “But they didn’t want an accountable system.”
Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective-to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,” he says.
&
Binney (the man who designed the program, with privacy protections that were later removed over his objections), for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need-it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Binneyconsiders himself a conservative, and, as an opponent of big government, he worries that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program is so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.” Whereas wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, data mining is automated, meaning that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, U.S. officials could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he says.
Seriously, why is practically everyone not up in arms and howling in outrage about this? The people who notice and have time to think about it and don't care probably deserve the country and world they wind up with, and I've only got minimal sympathy for them, but they're not everyone, and the rest of us DON'T deserve to live in a police state.
The other parts that should be at least attracting some notice is the extent to which the espionage act is being used to target whistleblowers who complain about waste and constitutional violations (as with Drake, who they investigated for revealing the data-mining program but are now prosecuting only for keeping five documents of arguable classification in his basement, none of which had a damn thing to do with the safety of the military or any agents), even when they only do so by filing complaints to the Inspector General's office (all four filers of one such complaint were so targeted, though ostensibly for other reasons in each case), and that
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks-more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.
This *should* outrage the same people who were outraged when all this started under Bush, though even then far too few people were upset, and many of them far too litle. As an analyst who quit in protest and was later investigated says in the article,
“I feel I’m living in the very country I worked for years to defeat: the Soviet Union. We’re turning into a police state.” Once upon a time, this sort of thing would have caused massive protests verging on riots.
Now?
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
(h/t Glenn Greenwald)
that REALLY should be stirring about five thousand times or maybe ten million more times outrage than it presently is. Which, alas, is very little.
The article is long, and doesn't lead with the punch lines, but it's really, really really worth reading. It's about the prosecution under the Espionage Act of former NSA employee Thomas Drake. The government's rationale?
Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”
This, for whistleblowing about a DOMESTIC spying program, which includes details from a number of former NSA officials about things that have been going on since early in the Bush Administration and are continuing under Obama:
Drake says that N.S.A. officials who helped the agency obtain FISA warrants were suddenly reassigned, a tipoff that the conventional process was being circumvented. He added, “I was concerned that it was illegal, and none of it was necessary.” In his view, domestic data mining “could have been done legally” if the N.S.A. had maintained privacy protections. “But they didn’t want an accountable system.”
Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective-to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,” he says.
&
Binney (the man who designed the program, with privacy protections that were later removed over his objections), for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need-it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Binneyconsiders himself a conservative, and, as an opponent of big government, he worries that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program is so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.” Whereas wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, data mining is automated, meaning that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, U.S. officials could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he says.
Seriously, why is practically everyone not up in arms and howling in outrage about this? The people who notice and have time to think about it and don't care probably deserve the country and world they wind up with, and I've only got minimal sympathy for them, but they're not everyone, and the rest of us DON'T deserve to live in a police state.
The other parts that should be at least attracting some notice is the extent to which the espionage act is being used to target whistleblowers who complain about waste and constitutional violations (as with Drake, who they investigated for revealing the data-mining program but are now prosecuting only for keeping five documents of arguable classification in his basement, none of which had a damn thing to do with the safety of the military or any agents), even when they only do so by filing complaints to the Inspector General's office (all four filers of one such complaint were so targeted, though ostensibly for other reasons in each case), and that
When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks-more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.
This *should* outrage the same people who were outraged when all this started under Bush, though even then far too few people were upset, and many of them far too litle. As an analyst who quit in protest and was later investigated says in the article,
“I feel I’m living in the very country I worked for years to defeat: the Soviet Union. We’re turning into a police state.” Once upon a time, this sort of thing would have caused massive protests verging on riots.
Now?