I'm Punting Here, But Edward Snowden Is A Smarter And Better Writer Than I

I'm working on posts related to COVID and our mayor, and on redistricting, but it takes time to post something that's got something in it that everyone hasn't already heard. 

So when I read a Tweet by Edward Snowden - "On banking, bitcoin, and the future of money: a response to a governor of the Federal Reserve, Christopher J. Waller" - and then read the Substack article it was linked to, I knew I had something I could share while I continued working on (at least thinking about) my own posts.  

So, who is Waller?  Snowden tells us:

"Waller, an economist and a last-minute Trump appointee to the Fed, will serve his term until January 2030."

Waller was talking about whether the US government should create its own cryptocurrency in response to Bitcoin and other such currencies.  Snowden points out that China and a few other nations have already done this.  China, because it's a great way to keep track of how individuals are moving money around.  And government controlled cryptocurrency's biggest problem for Snowden, if I understand him, is the surveillance aspect of cryptocurrency.  

I'm impressed with how well Snowden writes.  He gets so much content into relatively few well chosen and organized words.  And he's really smart.  With a wicked understated sense of humor.  I don't understand everything he says, but with the endorsements of heroes like Daniel Ellsberg, I think what Snowden writes is worth paying attention to.  And his writing is just fun to read, even on a highly technical subject I don't know that much about.  But computers and surveillance are two subjects that Snowden is an expert on.  

There's even a history of money

For thousands of years priors to the advent of CBDCs, money—the conceptual unit of account that we represent with the generally physical, tangible objects we call currency—has been chiefly embodied in the form of coins struck from precious metals. The adjective “precious”—referring to the fundamental limit on availability established by what a massive pain in the ass it was to find and dig up the intrinsically scarce commodity out of the ground—was important, because, well, everyone cheats: the buyer in the marketplace shaves down his metal coin and saves up the scraps, the seller in the marketplace weighs the metal coin on dishonest scales, and the minter of the coin, who is usually the regent, or the State, dilutes the preciosity of the coin’s metal with lesser materials, to say nothing of other methods.

At the very least, this is an early warning for me (well others might say rather late) to pay more attention to cryptocurrency and what it might mean for the future of money.  And the ability of governments to monitor how people spend their money.  

So I'm strongly recommending the article.  Here's the link again.  Meanwhile, here are some quotes from the article.  

“Intermediation,” and its opposite “disintermediation,” constitute the heart of the matter, and it’s notable how reliant Waller’s speech is on these terms, whose origins can be found not in capitalist policy but, ironically, in Marxist critique. What they mean is: who or what stands between your money and your intentions for it.

This “crypto”—whose very technology was primarily created in order to correct the centralization that now threatens it—was, generally is, and should be constitutionally unconcerned with who possesses it and uses it for what. To traditional banks, however, not to mention to states with sovereign currencies, this is unacceptable: These upstart crypto-competitors represent an epochal disruption, promising the possibility of storing and moving verifiable value independent of State approval, and so placing their users beyond the reach of Rome. Opposition to such free trade is all-too-often concealed beneath a veneer of paternalistic concern, with the State claiming that in the absence of its own loving intermediation, the market will inevitably devolve into unlawful gambling dens and fleshpots rife with tax fraud, drug deals, and gun-running.  

 

Traditional financial services, of course, being the very face and definition of “intermediation”—services that seek to extract for themselves a piece of our every exchange. 

I think about how credit cards and Amazon make money simply by getting a percent of everything we buy, adding their own tax to everything consumers buy or businesses sell.  

I risk few readers by asserting that the commercial banking sector is not, as Waller avers, the solution, but is in fact the problem—a parasitic and utterly inefficient industry that has preyed upon its customers with an impunity backstopped by regular bail-outs from the Fed, thanks to the dubious fiction that it is “too big too fail.” 

Ultimately, Snowden says he agrees with Waller's conclusion that the US should not create its own crypto currency, but for a different reason.  

"And yet I admit that I still find his remarks compelling—chiefly because I reject his rationale, but concur with his conclusions.

It’s Waller’s opinion, as well as my own, that the United States does not need to develop its own CBDC. Yet while Waller believes that the US doesn’t need a CBDC because of its already robust commercial banking sector, I believe that the US doesn’t need a CBDC despite the banks, whose activities are, to my mind, almost all better and more equitably accomplished these days by the robust, diverse, and sustainable ecosystem of non-State cryptocurrencies (translation: regular crypto). " 

One key point that hasn't gotten into this post yet is surveillance 

I think I'm pushing the ethical limits on the amount I can quote from someone. Really, this is only fraction of what he wrote and I'm hoping that through his quotes I can entice you to click the link to his article.  Consider this post a trailer for his article. 

Time And Space - Looking at the Big Picture And Taking The Long Term View

As I said the other day (actually it was just yesterday) news stories fly by so fast and superficially, that there's hardly time to put all the pieces together.  We get random puzzle pieces, bits of news, then they either disappear or get thrown into a big messy pile.  So no wonder people don't understand much.  Any story that requires remembering sixteen other stories that whizzed past, won't have any more meaning than the headline or talking point used to frame it by whatever news outlet one attends to.


This LA Times opinion piece addresses Time Denial, Most of us are clueless about humanity’s place in the planet's long history. We need to learn 'timefulness'.  The author is Marcia Bjornerud, a professor of geosciences at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Antipathy toward time rooted in the very human combination of vanity and existential dread is perhaps the most forgivable type of chronophobia. But more dangerous forms of time denial pervade our society. Fiscal years and congressional terms enforce a blinkered view of the future. Short-term thinkers are rewarded with bonuses and reelection, while those who dare to take seriously our responsibility to future generations find themselves out of office. Even two years of forethought seem beyond the capacity of legislators these days, when stop-gap spending measures have become the norm. Institutions that do aspire to the long view — state and national parks, public libraries and universities — are increasingly seen as taxpayer burdens. . . 

. . . We lack a sense of temporal proportion — the durations of the great chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of climate instability, the intrinsic time-scales of “natural capital” like groundwater systems.
We are, in effect, time illiterate, and this ignorance of planetary time undermines any claims we may make to modernity. We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as the pre-Copernican view of the universe. We think we’re the center of it all, unable to see either the past or future in proper perspective.

Another LA Times story, by Susanne Rust, tries to be timeful, after this year of horrific California fires,  to look at the history of fires and other catastrophic events in California:

In 1860, a young botanist raised in New York and schooled in Connecticut found himself on the payroll of the newly formed California Division of Mines and Geology. His job: Roam the vast, new state, taking samples and observations of plants and animals.
Over four years journeying across California, William Brewer witnessed torrential rains that turned the Central Valley into a vast, white-capped lake; intolerable heat waves that made the “fats of our meats run away in spontaneous gravy;” violent earthquakes; and fires he described as “great sheets of flame, extending over acres.”
He, like explorers, journalists and settlers before him, wondered whether people could permanently settle in California, said David Igler, a professor of history at UC Irvine.
“People were flabbergasted by what was happening,” said Igler, referring to the droughts, floods and quakes of the mid-1800s. “They wondered whether this was a place where we could even really settle and where agriculture could be maintained.”

She writes about how the Indians who inhabited California lived in small groups that moved around and practiced controlled burns until the Spanish outlawed them.  The Spanish.  They were the landlords of California for a while before the US kicked them out through force and violence.  But that's another historical amnesia when we talk about immigration.   

And I began this morning working my way through another chapter of Seth Abramson's Proof of Collusion.  That's a book that tries to put all the pieces together in the Trump-Russia collusion story.  I've posted about that book already. It's an example of taking years of news stories and organizing them into sensible, in depth, cohesive organization of the facts.   In the chapter today he writes about how Michael Cohen was a school boy friend of Felix Sater, who immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union when he was eight.  

Abramson's book averages about five or six footnotes per page, so even Abramson is only telling us part of the story, but surely a lot more than most of us know despite the non-stop reports interspersed with click-bait and stories about the homeless, immigrants, murders, football players, weekly movie box-office earnings, and other relatively random bits of infotainment.  So I checked footnote 78 from that chapter - a September 2017 article in the Nation on Felix Sater, by Bob Dreyfuss.

"Of all the characters caught up in Russiagate, none come close to Sater for having a decades-long record as a larger-than-life, outside-the-law, spy agency-linked wheeler-dealer from the pages of a John le Carré novel. His past record includes a conviction for lacerating a man’s face with a broken margarita glass in a bar brawl and his involvement in a multimillion-dollar stock fraud and money-laundering scheme. Despite that record, which came before he worked with Trump, Sater spent nearly a decade working with the Trump Organization in search of deals in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But on August 28, Sater made the front pages of the Times and The Washington Post, thanks to leaked copies of e-mails that he sent in late 2015 and early 2016 to Cohen, concerning Sater’s efforts to work with a group of Russian investors to set up a flagship Trump property in the Russian capital.
In language that Cohen himself described to the Times as “colorful,” Sater seemed nearly beside himself as he reported on his work in Moscow on behalf of Trump:

“'Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” wrote Sater. “I will get all of [Vladimir] Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.… I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” Echoing a line that would later become Trump’s own description of why he and Putin might get along, Sater wrote that the Russian leader “only wants to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to deal.'”

Netflix and Prime and HBO should be doing these stories now, when they can make a difference.  These characters and their misbehavior are as colorful and bizarre as anything they have up now.  And learning about who all these people are now would help Congress members and voters understand how outrageous the Republic Congress' lack of integrity is.

All the President's Men - the Watergate tale - came out in June 1974 - not quite two months before Nixon resigned.  The movie didn't come out until 1976.

Proof of Collusion came out November 13, 2018.  But the Trump story is much less focused than the Watergate burglary.  Trump's tentacles go out long into the past.  His crimes and corruptions are myriad.  His ties to Russia, Ukraine, and other nations - through his obsessions with putting up giant phallic buildings with with his name on them - require much more patience and attention from readers and viewers.  And Bernstein and Woodward were better known as the two reporters who had been keeping the story alive.

But you can read Proof of Collusion online. There's an audio book.  Simon and Schuster is offering a free book if you sign up for their email list.  (The link takes you to the Proof of Collusion page.  I didn't follow the link to see if PoC is one of the books available free.)

Yes, long term, comprehensive knowledge packaged so that United States consumers of news can make sense of what is happening - in detail - is severely lacking.  Instead of presenting the United States viewers with the picture of the completed puzzle (like on the box of jigsaw puzzles), or even sections of the puzzle as the pieces get pieced together, we get shown on piece at a time and little or none of how it fits into the larger picture.

The optimistic view of all this would be that technology has been changing so fast we haven't yet figured out how to slow down and get decent journalism for most people.  Newspapers, trying to survive, are fighting for survival and clicks, and that eventually we'll figure this all out.  More pessimistically, that hacking and trolling is taking us down the path to a version of  Orwell's 1984. Just a few decades later than Orwell predicted.

You want more?  An obvious part of the problem of getting the big picture is follow up of stories.  So here's a video that was posted two days ago - a talk by Robert Tibbo, Edward Snowden's attorney in Hong Kong who is also the attorney for the refugees in Hong Kong who hid Snowden while he was there.  It seems the Hong Kong bar association has created trumped up charges against Tibbo and are trying to disbar him.  He tells us that they demand information from him, but the complaint against him is from an anonymous source and they refuse to give him any details.



I'd note that I lived in Hong Kong for a year when the British were still in charge.  While it was nominally a democracy, people didn't have a whole lot of power compared to many democracies.  Today  it is part of China and the special protections Hong Kong people thought they'd gotten before they were handed back by the British, have little meaning.  The fact that the bar association is doing what the government wants it to do is hardly surprising.  China doesn't treat lawyers or anyone opposing them with much respect.  Tibbo's arguments here are based on bar association standards in Western countries.  I didn't hear him citing any Hong Kong rules or laws (though I may have missed it.)  That's not to belittle his situation or his valiant efforts on behalf of his clients.  But it suggests this video is aimed at the West, particularly Canada (his home) whose government is also dragging its feet in accepting this refugees.

Here's a Montreal article about Tibbo.  It gives more background on Tibbo's life and legal career in Hong Kong.  I can't figure out the date, but it seems to be much closer to when Snowden was in Hong Kong.

Edward Snowden On Blockchains/Masha Gessen On An Injustice

Ben Wizner explains why he's making this discussion public:

"Through it all, I’ve found him to be the clearest, most patient, and least condescending explainer of technology I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought that I wished more people — or perhaps different people — could eavesdrop on our conversations. What follows is a very lightly edited transcript of one of our chats. In it, Ed attempts to explain “blockchain” to me, despite my best efforts to cling to my own ignorance."

and this comes almost a the very end of the discussion:

"This is the one interesting thing about blockchains: they might be that one tiny gear that lets us create systems you don’t have to trust. You’ve learned the only thing about blockchains that matters: they’re boring, inefficient, and wasteful, but, if well designed, they’re practically impossible to tamper with. And in a world full of shifty bullshit, being able to prove something is true is a radical development. Maybe it’s the value of your bank account, maybe it’s the provenance of your pair of Nikes, or maybe it’s your for-real-this-time permanent record in the principal’s office, but records are going to transform into chains we can’t easily break, even if they’re open for anyone in the world to look at.
The hype is a world where everything can be tracked and verified. The question is whether it’s going to be voluntary."

You can see how Snowden and his interviewer got there here.



Another example of our  imperfect justice system.  Some of it is 'the system.'  Much of it is people who simply don't care and do their job perfunctorily, without considering how they can make the system work better.  And some people get off on their power, which they can best demonstrate by harming others unnecessarily:

The Injustice of Siwatu Ra’s Imprisonment and the Relentless Logic of Mass Incarceration

"A story can defy belief and appear ordinary at the same time. This is such a story. Siwatu Ra, a twenty-six-year-old woman with no prior criminal record, was sentenced by a Detroit court, in March, to two years in prison on felonious assault and felony firearm charges, after brandishing a gun at another woman during an argument. Ra maintained that she pointed the gun in defense of herself, her mother, and her two-year-old daughter; her gun was unloaded and licensed, and she has a concealed-carry permit in Michigan, which is an open-carry, Stand Your Ground state. Ra was incarcerated as soon as she was sentenced, even though she appealed her conviction, and even though she was nearing her third trimester of pregnancy. Three months later, she gave birth in St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, in Ann Arbor, in the presence of four armed guards. Her son was taken from her two days later."

One can't help wishing that stats were easily available to test my belief that this result (the incarceration) would be less likely to happen at all if this were a white man, instead of a black woman.

The author,  Masha Gessen, has US and Russian citizenships, wrote a biography of Putin, and is just smart - both in intelligence and street smarts.

But I spent a good part of the day at the Kiddie Museum with my three grandkids.  Such activities are necessary for one's mental health in today's world, and because they still need to have a childhood full of fun and new experiences.

Intercept: NSA Spied On Japanese At Captain Cook Hotel During International Whaling Conference In 2007

An April 24, 2017 article in The Intercept covers various instances of surveillance work related to Japan, based on reports they say they got last week from Edward Snowden.  The end of the article is based on the report they link to, which I've copied below.

It reports on how they spied on the Japanese delegation at the 2007 International Whaling Commission meeting in Anchorage.   It has a strangely school-boy prank "look what we did" quality to it.  And 20 miles from an office on Elmendorf to the Captain Cook Hotel seems a bit far.  Judge for yourself.

"DYNAMIC PAGE -- HIGHEST POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION IS
TOP SECRET // SI / TK // REL TO USA AUS CAN GBR NZL
(S//SI//REL) Special-Delivery SIGINT: How NSA Got Reports to US Negotiators In Time for Them
To Be of Value
FROM: ooooooooooooNSA Representative to Department of Commerce (S112)
Run Date: 07/13/2007
(S//SI//REL) Imagine that you represent the US at an international forum. You and your allies from other nations are trying to win a key vote, but the opposition camp is lobbying furiously and it's really coming down to the wire. You would dearly love to obtain some SIGINT that lets you know what the other side is up to, wouldn't you? But if the meetings are being held in a remote location, how can NSA get it to you? 

(S//SI//REL) For scenarios like the above, NSA improvises! Recently I was fortunate to serve as the NSA on-the-ground support to just such an international forum - the meeting of the International Whaling Commission. "The International Whaling Commission?" you ask. The IWC recently held its 59th annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, where the 77-member commission voted on several whale conservation measures, which the US government supports. When the meeting ended on 1 June, the anti-whaling camp won, but the outcome was not clear going in. 

(S//SI//REL) Japan again hoped to end the 21-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling, but failing that, lobbied for votes supporting other pro-whaling proposals. New Zealand had the target access, and collected and provided insightful SIGINT that laid out the lobbying efforts of the Japanese and the response of countries whose votes were so coveted. US officials were anxious to receive the latest information during the actual negotiations in Anchorage. But how do you get GCSB* SIGINT to the IWC Chair at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage? 

Japanese

(U) Japanese delegates listen on the opening day of the International Whaling 

Commission meeting in Anchorage, Alaska in this handout photo taken May 28, 2007. (Reuters) 

(S//SI//REL) Everything comes together in the global cryptologic enterprise. We contacted the Alaska Mission Operations Center (AMOC) at Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage and were assured that they could accommodate us, even though we would be showing up at work on the Sunday before Memorial Day and working the holiday. Department of Commerce funded the TDY for a Commerce Intelligence Analyst and me, NSA's External Representative to Commerce. I admit to being skeptical that we would get all AMOC had promised - immediate access to NSANet and MAUI. But it was really true! In no time the airmen on duty had me up and running on NSANet with access to MAUI and a working printer. 

(S//SI//REL) The time difference from New Zealand to Alaska worked in our favor, as the very latest collection was ready for distribution first thing in the morning, before the IWC convened. The AMOC is located about 20 miles from the hotel where the IWC meeting took place. I took a 30-minute cab ride to the AMOC daily at 7:00 a.m. in order to retrieve the latest SIGINT products, which I placed in my locked bag. My Commerce colleague picked me up in her rented vehicle and together we couriered the SIGINT to the hotel. The US delegation had a private conference room with a lock. We arranged to have the room emptied at a specific time and then distributed the material to the fully cleared delegates to read in silence. When everyone finished we couriered the material back to the AMOC and shredded it. 

(S//REL) We knew the delegates valued the material simply because they took time from their very hectic schedules to be there and read it. The pointing and nodding was also a good indicator. Two US delegates from Commerce and two from State read, as well as two New Zealand and one Australian delegate. Was the outcome worth the effort? The Australian, New Zealand, and American delegates would all say "yes." I believe the whales would concur. _______________________________________________________________________

(U) Notes:

*GCSB = New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau"

The lead story in the article also has an Anchorage connection.  It's about how a Japanese spy agency recorded the Russian pilots who shot down the Korean Airline passenger jet that briefly strayed into Russian territory in 1983.  That flight, KAL 107, refueled in Anchorage before it was shot down.

[UPDATE 9:30PM:  I should have added this originally.  From Wikipedia:

"Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (electronic intelligence—abbreviated to ELINT). Signals intelligence is a subset of intelligence collection management."

Looking At Media Past and Future - Ron Rosenbaum and Journalism After Snowden

[NOTE: This post began focused on the folly of not preventing disaster, an idea I've been toying with for a while as I try to make the point that while we will eventually get past Trump, it's going to cost us enormously, and the wounds will never completely go way.  The opening of Rosenbaum's piece seemed a good opportunity to make the point, but as I wrote, the issues of journalism under suppression became a more important focus.  Thus you get this post which goes in two different directions.  Sorry.]

Prevention has been part of American tradition since this country was founded.  

Ben Franklin, arguing for the creation of a fire department in Philadelphia wrote that "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

We have lots of similar maxims, like "Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted" and " A stitch in time saves nine."

Fram oil filters ran a very popular ad where the oil filter dealer says, "You can me pay now" and then the mechanic says, "or pay me later."

Image from Smokey Bear history

Smokey the Bear has been telling people since the 1950s that "Only you can prevent forest fires."

The point of all of them is that preventing a disaster from happening is MUCH less costly than repairing the damage afterwards.

Not preventing Trump's election is going to cost Americans and the world a great deal of suffering and pain, emotional, physical, and financial.

So I was a little disturbed by the opening of this LABook Review piece by Ron Rosenbaum, journalist and author of Explaining Hitler, when he wrote that he'd refused requests to write about Trump, until after Trump won the election.  I understand people's reluctance to use Hitler comparisons and I'm not saying that his words would have prevented Trump from being elected, but he, of all people, knew what had happened in the past.  He explains that he simply did not see Trump at the same level as Hitler.

Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late. At first, he pledged no territorial demands. Then he quietly rolled his tanks into the Rhineland. He had no designs on Czechoslovakia — just the Sudetenland, because so many of its German-born citizens were begging him to help shelter them from persecution. But soon came the absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia. After Czechoslovakia, he’d be satisfied. Europe could return to normal. Lie! 

There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of scale. His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default, seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.

But the article is definitely worth reading.  It mainly chronicles how the Munich Post was the first and main newspaper to expose Hitler's past and plans.   The article is a cry, now, for people to defend the media against attacks from Trump, and the likelihood that Trump will try to shut opposition media down.

His final words about the Munich Post are not reassuring.  But his appeal to the reader is important.

"The Munich Post lost, yes. Soon their office was closed. Some of the journalists ended up in Dachau, some “disappeared.” But they’d won a victory for truth. A victory over normalization. They never stopped fighting the lies, big and small, and left a record of defiance that was heroic and inspirational. They discovered the truth about “endlösung” before most could have even imagined it. The truth is always worth knowing. Support your local journalist." (emphasis added)

A more forward looking view of journalism comes in a new book, Emily Bell and Taylor Owen's (eds) Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State.  Neiman Reports reviewer Clay Shirky says the book argues that the globalization of media means that reporters can get around local suppression by getting their stories into publications outside their national boundaries.  In this quote Shirky is discussing an article in the edited book that Shirky wrote himself:

"The potential for a global news network has existed for a few decades, but its practical implementation is unfolding in ours. This normalization of transnational reporting networks reduces the risk of what engineers call a “single point of failure.” As we saw with Bill Keller’s craven decision not to publish James Risen’s work on the National Security Agency in 2004, neither the importance of a piece of political news nor its existence as a scoop is enough to guarantee that that it will actually see the light of day. The global part is driven by the need for leakers to move their materials outside national jurisdictions. The network part is driven by the advantages of having more than one organization with a stake in publication."

A key message I get from this review of the book is that suppression of the media is much bigger than Trump, and the media is discovering ways around state censorship through the development of international media networks.

Snowden - The Movie

I've avoided posts about Edward Snowden.  Yes, I've mentioned him now and then, but I've held off from writing about him in much detail.  My dissertation was on privacy.  I've studied whistle-blowing.  Daniel Ellsberg is one of my heroes.  I knew I was primed to be supportive of Snowden and wanted to hold off.  (And whether I say something about him or not isn't going to matter in the bigger scheme of things anyway.)

I wanted to know more.  Well, I really wanted to drop by and talk to him for a couple of days and see if he was the guy I wanted him to be or not.

I've watched some of his tapes and I've pretty much settled, for the time being, on the Snowden the whistleblower side.  He's the good guy who believed in the ideals of his country and was willing to risk his freedom, even his life, to keep his country honest.  That's the narrative that fits most comfortably with what I've seen and heard about Snowden.


So we went to the 12:50 pm showing of Oliver Stone's Snowden today.  I did read a New York Times review when I was checking last night about when the movie played here.  After seeing the movie I'd concur with the reviewer.

This may be the movie that Oliver Stone has been practicing for.  It's restrained and straightforward.  It goes back and forth between the 'right now' and flashbacks.  The 'right now' starts with his arrival in Hong Kong.  The film is totally consistent with my sense of who Snowden is and why he did what he did.

The surprises for me were:

• how conservative he was politically and personally
• how he voiced concerns to others he worked with and for while he was an employee or contractor with the various security agencies
• that he suffered from epileptic seizures

So, until others can present a more convincing narrative - along with supportive evidence - I'm more than willing to call on Obama and others to find a way to let Snowden come back to the US honorably.  Don't make this like the Cuba sanctions that go on forever or our marijuana phobia because we can't admit we're wrong.

There are more thoughts, but I need to do other things and this movie is worth seeing.  It's well made and is entertaining.  At the very least, it should further open the discussion how we keep spy agencies accountable.  And how we treat those who call them on it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great in the starring role. And I liked how the real Snowden's image replaces the actor's at the very end.

Why Is John Doe Being Treated So Differently From Snowden, Manning, And Assange?

The Wiki-Leaks source Bradley Manning was condemned as a traitor and convicted to 35 years in prison.

Edward Snowden is stuck in Moscow facing espionage charges if he gets anywhere he could be extradited to the US.

Julian Assange, the head of Wiki-Leaks is still in the Bolivian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, and, he fears, from there to the US.

But when the Panama Papers came out, the media and politicians focused on the contents, not the leaker.  I don't hear cries for him to be in prison.

There are differences, to be sure.  Manning and Snowden exposed US secrets.  Manning as an employee of the US and Snowden working for a US contractor.  Yet Snowden's leaks have led to worldwide outrage about US data collection and changes in the law to provide more protections.  The Wiki-Leaks have proven embarrassing, but despite early claims about risking the lives of US military, I have been unable to find evidence this has happened.


And now we have the Panama Papers.  Leaked by someone who has recently identified himself as John Doe.  Instead of calling for John Doe to be punished, we see headlines like this:

"Obama: Panama Papers leak shines light on 'big global problem'"

and

Panama Papers: US launches crackdown on international tax evasion

OK, I get it that these papers weren't leaked from secret government files, but rather from a private law firm practicing out of Panama.

But economic espionage is a big deal.  From the New York Times:

"The private sector spent $665 million on data loss prevention last year, according to the technology research firm Gartner, with a 15 percent increase expected this year. On the legislative front, Congress strengthened penalties for those convicted under the Economic Espionage Act, raising the maximum fine for individuals convicted to $5 million from $500,000. And in terms of law enforcement, the F.B.I. lists digital crime, including intrusions that result in trade secret theft, as its third priority, just behind terrorism and counterintelligence. The agency reported a 60 percent increase in trade secret investigations from 2009 through 2013."  [emphasis added]

Is Obama ignoring the cyber theft of data from a private company because the information that was stolen was important for the public good?  After all, that's the argument that Wiki-Leaks and Edward Snowden make.  They didn't do to help a foreign country.  They didn't do it for money.  They did it because they thought something terribly wrong was going on.

Just like John Doe did with the Panama Papers.

Or is it because the Wiki-Leaks and Snowden leak were embarrassing to the President - both because security was so bad and because the information leaked was embarrassing and revealed that the American public was being lied to as well as being spied on massively?

But the Panama Papers are different because they help to support a point that Obama has been making about American companies avoiding taxes through off shore tax havens?

I keep mentioning John Doe.  I was looking at Panama Papers yesterday and discovered that the person who leaked them has posted very recently his reasons for doing that and for taking the name John Doe.  Here are some excerpts from "John Doe's Manifesto."

He begins by identifying his critical issue:  world wide income inequality.  And even though people are talking about it, it hasn't really been adequately dealt with and there are many questions.

"The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. . . 

Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known."

He's pleased that the Panama Papers seem to have now started a serious debate on the topic.

He introduces himself.

"For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. 

Now, some have claimed the CIA is behind this leak.  If true that would help explain why this was so handy for Obama to use in his speech on off-shore tax havens.   Is John Doe's manifesto released now intended by the real leaker to counter those rumors?  Or is it the CIA's way of denying the rumors?  There's nothing in the manifesto that suggests how John Doe knew about all this and had access to it all.  He does point out, by way of justifying this fuzziness about his identity,  that there are a lot of people who would like to see the leaker dead and I don't doubt that.

My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described. 

[For those who do not speak German - most people, I'd guess -  Süddeutsche Zeitung means, literally, South German Newspaper.]

He goes on to say that he's hoping that a lot of prosecutions will result from these revelations.  (There were some resignations by people like the Prime Minister of Iceland and the head of a Chilean anti-corruption agency when the leak was first made public.)

The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment. 

In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able. "

Besides prosecution of wrongdoers, he wants immunity for whistleblowers.

"Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents. 

In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers."

He wants campaign reform in the US. 

"It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait."

Then he lists all the players he think have failed.

Governments have failed (and he cites a number of examples including:

"Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network at the United States Treasury, just announced her resignation to work instead for HSBC, one of the most notorious banks on the planet (not coincidentally headquartered in London). And so the familiar swish of America’s revolving door echoes amidst deafening global silence from thousands of yet-to-be-discovered ultimate beneficial owners who are likely praying that her replacement is equally spineless.

Banks, financial regulators and tax authorities have failed. . .

Hopelessly backward and inefficient courts have failed. . ."

The media have failed.

"The sad truth is that among the most prominent and capable media organizations in the world there was not a single one interested in reporting on the story [Panama Papers.] Even Wikileaks didn’t answer its tip line repeatedly. 

But most of all, the legal profession has failed. . ."

We live in interesting times.   There's a lot of interesting stuff on the Panama Papers website and the graphics are outstanding too.   The size of this leak dwarfs previous leaks.  The website has graphics comparing it to Snowden's and Wiki-Leaks. [UPDATE May 8, 2016: I wish though, that they'd put publication dates on their stories.]

I'd just note that the move to computers and then to the internet has made private conversations and messages that the socially, politically, and economically prominent have used to hide their shady dealings available in a way they could never have imagined.  And hackers are following Eastern martial arts philosophies that teach how to use one's opponent's strength against him.

A. Fog Of Politics B. Privacy And Security

A.  Fog of Politics

As I get ready to head out to the Democratic caucus in Anchorage this morning, the world outside is shrouded in fog.

OK, I apologize, Part B will live up to its name much better than Part A.








B.  Privacy and Security

Image from The Intercept

There was a live panel discussion on Privacy and Security last night in Arizona that was also online.  It's definitely worth watching.  Noam Chomsky, Edward Snowden, and Glen Greenwald.  If you know who those people are, you know this is worth watching.  If you don't know who they are, you should at least look them up.   Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, was the moderator.

Here's the link:  https://theintercept.com/a-conversation-about-privacy/

The discussion ranged from definitions of privacy and security to the tension between them.  They talked about the top secret and other designations and how no one has identified anyone who has been killed because of Snowden's leaks, or even the Wikileaks.  How most of the things labeled top secret are for the security of the government officials, not for the security of the public.  It's a very thoughtful and rational discussion.  Everyone should watch this, and contrast it to some of the shrill and thoughtless rhetoric of the political debates.

It's long.  You can watch it in two sittings or just listen to it while you're doing mindless household tasks.

One topic that came up was how individuals can secure their own lives and this morning on Twitter,  Martin Shelton has linked to his own guide on how to do this - Securing Your Digital Life Like a Normal Person

More on the caucus when I get back tonight.

Writing Honestly About The Death Of A Famous Person

Antonin Scalia has died.  When someone dies who has, in your view of the world, been a force that has made rich people richer, poor people poorer, and inflicted unnecessary suffering on many human beings, how does one respond? 

Edward Snowden retweeted a Glenn Greenwald article about how people should react when Margaret Thatcher died a couple of years ago - conservatives saying to be respectful of the family yet predicting things like,

"Former Tory MP Louise Mensch, with no apparent sense of irony, invoked precepts of propriety to announce: Pygmies of the left so predictably embarrassing yourselves, know this: not a one of your leaders will ever be globally mourned like her."

He points out that while the conservatives wanted liberals to be respectful and not criticize Thatcher immediately following her death, they didn't follow the same rules themselves.

"Tellingly, few people have trouble understanding the need for balanced commentary when the political leaders disliked by the west pass away. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez:

 'To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.'"

Greenwald also points out a political, and what I'd call a 'ways of knowing' reason, not to hold off on the problematic aspects of someone's life - it biases the public record and people's emotional record of the person who died.

"[T]hose who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms."

Hagiography is on my long list of favorite words and I'm always surprised at how few people know what it means.  Most people at least recognize that the Greek 'graph' has to do with writing (biography, autograph, telegraph) but not hagio which is holy.  Technically, hagiography is the writing of the lives of saints.  but it's also taken on the meaning that Wikipedia describes:

"the term hagiography is often used as a pejorative reference to biographies and histories whose authors are perceived to be uncritical or reverential to their subject."

But I think the problem is not all that difficult.  The key is to write a factual account of someone's life that includes both the positive and the negative.  Very few public figures are simplistically good or evil.  We have the charming fools and we have the arrogant, but effective figures, and many other variations of meshed characteristics.  

David G. Savage seems to have walked the tightrope in his overview of Scalia's life, highlighting the complexity of his subject.

Recognizing that he and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were close friends, gives me pause about my general sense of Scalia voiced above.  I think his basic ideology is wrong, but he was a bright man, so I need to think through this and check up a bit on both originalism and the decisions he supported.  I'm pretty sure I'm right, but he knew he was.  Maybe that's my advantage over him.

Why Did The Japanese Bomb Pearl Harbor? Has Anything Changed?

The China Mirage tells the story of how missionaries serving in China and wealthy descendants of opium traders (like both the Roosevelt presidents) believed in the Christianization and Americanization of China and were easy prey for the Soong sisters who were married to Chiang Kai-Shek, Sun Yat Sun, and the richest man in China, banker H.H. Kung.  Their Chinese father had gone to college in the US in the late 1800s and became a Methodist.  And saw how much money Christians were sending to China and decided to take advantage.  All three sisters had gone to Wesleyan college in Georgia and spoke excellent American English.  Their brother TV Soong, graduated from Harvard and played an important role negotiating with top American leaders, including President Franklin Roosevelt.


Author James Bradley makes the argument that the Soong family took advantage of Americans' desire to believe that China was ready to become Americanized and Christian.  They helped form, with a number of prominent Americans, including the son of American missionaries in China, Henry Luce, the owner of Time  and Life magazines, The China Lobby.  Bradley tells us Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Mayling were on Time's cover more than any other people on the planet, including being Man of the Year in 1937. The Lobby painted this greatly misleading picture of China for politicians and the American public.

This false image of China played well and led, according to author Bradley, to disastrous results in China and Southeast Asia.  By aligning with the Soongs and Chiang Kai-Shek, Americans failed to see the rise of Mao in China and speeded up World War II's spread  into the Pacific. The US gave money and weapons to the Soong-Chiang alliance to fight the Japanese who had invaded Manchuria, but Chiang was more interested in fighting Mao and Ailing, the oldest sister, was more interested in filling her husband's bank.

There are lots of examples in the book of Americans dealing with the Soong-Chiangs - Americans who spoke no Chinese and had no background in Chinese history or present.  They'd go to China for a week on tour led by the Soongs, and come back with reports of their great army and how some military help would keep the Japanese at bay.  Bradley even says that the Soongs staged war zones and suggests that the Japanese soldiers they showed them in the binoculars were really Chinese actors.  The results almost always that the Soong's, with their perfect American English, good looks, and charming ways, successfully sell their highly misleading story of China and China's affinity to the US.

Overlooked was Mao's growing power and bond with Chinese peasants who made up most of the population, the loyalty and enthusiasm of Mao's army, or the incompetence of Chiang's army, and Chiang's interest in fighting Mao rather than the Japanese.  And not known to most, was that many of those Americans - missionaries, diplomats, businessmen - who lobbied for the Soongs, were also on their payroll.

Here's the plan one of their American educated Chinese employees offered to gain US support:

"1.  Recruit American missionaries, arm them with evidence of Japanese atrocities, and have them return to the U.S. to give testimony and speeches. (Tong emphasized that the American target audience would not know that the paid missionaries were acting as agents for the Soong-Chiang syndicate.  Tong wrote that he would 'search for international friends who understand the realities and politics of the Chinese war of resistance and have them speak for us, with Chiinese never coming to the fore.')
2.  Hire Frank Price (Mayling's favorite missionary) to lead the missionary campaign.
3.  Recruit American newsmen and authors to write favorable articles and books."

Besides lobbying for money and arms, they were lobbying to stop the US from selling oil and steel and other materials to Japan, which Japan used to invade and bomb China.  People at the State Department feared an embargo would prod Japan to retaliate.  At the very least, Japan would head south to take over the oil in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).  Having read other accounts of this battle in FDR's administration, I'm surprised that Bradley never (well, I still have another hundred pages to go, but I'm 3/4 into the book) mentions another argument - the money that US oil companies were making and and how that was helping an economy still recovering from the Great Depression.

Probably, you can see where I'm going with all this.  We know this is still going on today.  Who did the Bush administration rely on for advice on invading Iraq?  Which Afghans and Syrians have been advising our government on Afghanistan and Syria?  To what extent have Western educated natives of those countries been able to have undue credibility because their knowledge of English and of the US was so superior to our knowledge of their countries?  And how misleading were their assessments of how the war was going and how was their own personal wealth affected?

There were Americans who understood what was going on in China.  The US embassy's military attaché in China, in 1936, Colonel Joseph Stilwell, for example,

"observed Chiang's dragooned 'scarecrow' soldiers:  many were less than four and a half feet tall, under fourteen years of age, and barefoot.  Stilwell wrote in his diary, 'The wildest stretch of the imagination could not imagine the rabble in action except running away.'

Forty pages later,

[Colonel Stilwell] wrote:  'No evidence of planned defense against further Japanese encroachment.  No troop increase or even thought of it.  No drilling or maneuvering.  Stilwell also observed Mao's warriors, about whom he noted, 'Good organization, good tactics.  They do not want the cities.  Content to rough it in the country.  Poorly armed and equipped, yet scare the Government to death.'"

Then there's the secret army that FDR sends to China (led by the man who will be Stilwell's biggest nemesis later when Stilwell's in command of the US military in China.)

"Roosevelt was now running an off-the-books secret executive airforce through Ailing's front companies.  Claire Chennault was a private contractor - a mercenary - being paid by the China Lobby.  Roosevelt was sheep-dipping:  taking U.S. personnel, cleansing them with the fiction of their resignations, and then sending them off as secret mercenaries.  Today, many mistakenly believe that Chennault's mission was an American invention controlled by the U.S. military, but when he returned to Asia, Chennault reported back to Washington not through American military channels but privately, through his boss, T.V. Soong."

Bradley argues that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because Dean Acheson managed to block oil shipments in August 1941 without Roosevelt knowing.  This, plus the mercenary air force in China, and the movement of US navy ships to Hawaii, sent signals to Japan that led the Japanese to do what neither the Japanese nor the Americans wanted - start a war between the two nations.  While our history books paint the Pearl Harbor attack as a dastardly, the US was already supplying China with bombers and pilots - offensive weapons that could be used to attack Japan.

Disturbing that not much has changed.  Even though we have better access to information about what our leaders are doing, there is still much we don't know.  And Edward Snowden is still in Russia because they don't want us to know.  Democracies are in a quandary.  There's a need for voters to be able to assess what their leaders are doing, yet you don't want your enemies to know as well.  But better understanding of the Soongs well funded and massive campaign at the time, might have helped people ask for a more accurate assessment.  It will be very interesting to hear what Obama and others have to say in 20 years about who was doing what to influence our foreign policy in his administration.

I'm a little skeptical of Bradley.  I think he too may be overly sold on his own thesis.  Despite the power of the China Lobby, FDR's leadership style has his subordinates constantly in competition.  Instead of groupthink, there seemed to have been epic battles over policy, with FDR getting to hear a wide range of views.  Though the groupthink link above gives the failure to anticipate the bombing of Pearl Harbor as an example.  The book makes it clear that Secretary of State Hull was vehemently opposed to the oil embargo in fear of prodding the Japanese into a Pacific war, but I don't think bombing Hawaii was what they had in mind.  This may not have been so much groupthink as failure to understand what the Japanese were thinking.  There's an interesting passage in the book where Secretary of State Hull negotiates with the Japanese ambassador, a former naval admiral whose English was poor.  They didn't use an interpreter and the book's account has the ambassador not understanding Hull's warning and sending back to Japan a totally incorrect interpretation of Hull's message.

While we are warned that history repeats itself, it's also true that picking the wrong examples from history leads to bad assessments.  The domino theory was a key argument to get into Vietnam after Eastern Europeans fell into the Soviet sphere in 1946.  But was it the right one?  Would the Southeast Asian countries have fallen one-by-one to Communist leaders had we not gone to war in Vietnam?  That's still debated, but in part, we supported authoritarian pro-Western leaders (at least those who portrayed themselves that way as did the Soongs) over the nationalist, anti-colonial leaders, like Ho Chi Minh, who found support from the Soviets when we rejected them.

Life is endlessly complicated and seeing through the complications to the real issues is too.  Probably why a candidate like Trump appeals to a sizable minority - he makes it all simple.  He tells them what they want to believe, just as the Soongs did.

[Update Jan 31, 2016:  I should have mentioned that a 2012 post goes through Doris Kearns Goodwin's description  (in No Ordinary Time) of the lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Bradley's book cites Goodwin's book, and there's nothing that's inconsistent, but the two emphasize different details.]

Do You Put Your Kids' Pictures Up On Facebook? Should You?

Meeting My Granddaughter

On this blog, my policy is to not post pictures of family without permission or if I do, I try to alter the image.



Partly because I'm naturally an introvert.

Partly because my son, at a certain age, began objecting to having his picture taken, let alone shared.  It was a matter of respecting his wishes, even when I thought he was being a bit extreme.  But he did allow his grandmothers to take pictures, so I could see that he did recognize other people's needs.

Partly because my dissertation was on the concept of privacy.  My findings were that privacy was not so much a psychological need as it was an issue of power.  The power to a) prevent intrusions into your space and
b) control access to and distribution of your personal information.
Given that I saw a world where technology was making it more and more difficult, even impossible, to have control of your personal information, the next best option was that everyone's power to access information be equal throughout society so that everyone, being equally vulnerable, would have the same incentive to respect others' privacy.

That world is becoming more and more real.  No one is immune from cell phone video cameras - including people in positions of authority such as police, politicians, celebrities, teachers, CEO's.   Romney's 47% speech helped change the election when it showed up online.  Annonymous and Edward Snowden have put some of the most powerful and privileged figures of the world on notice that their information is also accessible.

So, with all this background, I've refrained from putting up pictures of family members without permission unless they are adequately altered so they are pretty much unidentifiable.

Part of me says that the new world we're in is making this sort of caution obsolete.  By exposing themselves - like women who began publicly saying they didn't want to live under the tyranny of being judged by how well they cleaned toilet bowls and coiffed their hair, or gays who came out of the closet - they removed the threat of someone else exposing them and gained a level of freedom to be themselves they hadn't had.

But part of me knows that if this exposure is uneven and unequal, these things can come back to haunt you.  But when it comes to my family members, I can't make that decision for them.

Your Kid On Youtube?

And one of my family members sent me a thank you for that yesterday along with this NYTimes article about a woman who put her son's picture on her Facebook page against his wishes - and her followup research and decision on that.

It was a great picture and one I wanted to share with my friends online.

My son, however, was opposed to the idea. “You’re not going to put that on Facebook, are you?” he demanded, flashing me the look my husband and I had long ago named his “dark and stormy.”

Yes, I told him: “You are my child, and I’m proud of you.”

“But it’s my picture,” he said. “And I don’t want it on your Facebook page.”

Read the rest of the article to hear what various so called experts had to say about it.  

Why The Senator Who Opposed Torture, As President Says "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

In Obama's talk this morning he used the euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques."   What he means is torture.  This post speculates on why he uses that term.  I don't come up with a final answer (as if anyone ever does), but I wanted to think this one through a bit and maybe some people will be reminded not to be distracted by euphemisms. 

In an interview with Time magazine, Ralph Keyes, the author of  Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, said people use euphemisms:

 "to deflect us — and maybe even themselves — about what they're doing. .  .

David Lloyd George — he was Prime Minister of Britain during World War I — once said that if we ever spoke plainly and clearly about what was going on on the battlefields, the public would demand that we bring an end to war."

The euphemism is bad enough, but at the CIA it's been shortened to EITs. 


Am I exaggerating about this being torture?

From ABC News in 2005:

"The CIA sources described a list of six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" instituted in mid-March 2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use the techniques:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."

 But is that torture?   Remember, these are just the things they talked about openly. 

One of the CIA agents quoted in the story uses the word 'torture':

"It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough," said former CIA officer Bob Baer." 

Judge for yourself with this example: 

"According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals"

The piece goes on to say the prisoner actually had no knowledge of what the interrogators wanted but made things up

  "because he was terrified of further harsh treatment"

An NBC investigative report on the movie Zero Dark Thirty which put American torture of terrorist suspects on the big screen for all to see, reports:

Working with Mitchell Jessen & Associates, the CIA soon developed a menu of 20 enhanced techniques – a list that was ultimately whittled down to 10, mainly because some of proposed techniques were considered too harsh even for terrorists.
“Not everything they proposed was part of the final menu,” said a former senior intelligence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity. “They came up with some stuff people didn’t like and were not approved. … There were legal tests. … Does it shock the conscience?  Does it lead to deep long-lasting injuries?”

I guess the question is whose conscience?  An average citizen or a psychopath?

But let's stop beating around the bush.  Here's what the UN Convention Against Torture, Part I, Article 1 says:  

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. 

There's no doubt that by international standards, "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" are torture.  


Why does Obama use this term?

It's depressing that the senator and presidential candidate who opposed  torture, now as president not only condones it, but he hides behind the euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." 

I assume that his many security advisers have convinced him that certain activities are necessary, or at least have given him enough doubt that he hasn't outright banned torture.  And he's also been told, I'm sure, that he can't use the word torture or he will make the US and perhaps himself, vulnerable to international sanctions and perhaps

The US is a signatory to the UN Law Against Torture, but has a long list of official 'reservations.'  Perhaps we can call them quibbles about the meaning of 'torture.'  Thus, using Enhanced Interrogation Techniques is a way of saying that we are not using torture.  From the United Nations Treaty Collection:

       II. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following understandings, which shall apply to the obligations of the United States under this Convention:
       (1) (a) That with reference to article 1, the United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.
       (b) That the United States understands that the definition of torture in article 1 is intended to apply only to acts directed against persons in the offender's custody or physical control.
       (c) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the United States understands that `sanctions' includes judicially-imposed sanctions and other enforcement actions authorized by United States law or by judicial interpretation of such law. Nonetheless, the United States understands that a State Party could not through its domestic sanctions defeat the object and purpose of the Convention to prohibit torture.
       (d) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the United States understands that the term `acquiescence' requires that the public official, prior to the activity constituting torture, have awareness of such activity and thereafter breach his legal responsibility to intervene to prevent such activity.
       (e) That with reference to article 1 of the Convention, the Unites States understands that noncompliance with applicable legal procedural standards does not per se constitute torture.
       (2) That the United States understands the phrase, `where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture,' as used in article 3 of the Convention, to mean `if it is more likely than not that he would be tortured.'
       (3) That it is the understanding of the United States that article 14 requires a State Party to provide a private right of action for damages only for acts of torture committed in territory under the jurisdiction of that State Party.
       (4) That the United States understands that international law does not prohibit the death penalty, and does not consider this Convention to restrict or prohibit the United States from applying the death penalty consistent with the Fifth, Eighth and/or Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, including any constitutional period of confinement prior to the imposition of the death penalty.
       (5) That the United States understands that this Convention shall be implemented by the United States Government to the extent that it exercises legislative and judicial jurisdiction over the matters covered by the Convention and otherwise by the state and local governments. Accordingly, in implementing articles 10-14 and 16, the United States Government shall take measures appropriate to the Federal system to the end that the competent authorities of the constituent units of the United States of America may take appropriate measures for the fulfilment of the Convention.
       III. The Senate's advice and consent is subject to the following declarations:
       (1) That the United States declares that the provisions of articles 1 through 16 of the Convention are not self-executing.

I can't imagine that the US Congress would put up with external inquiries into US torture.  They simply would refuse to comply and start withdrawing support for international organizations that tried to enforce sanctions against the US.  The US is still powerful enough to do that. 

But it would be embarrassing and it would officially lower the status of the US world wide.  I'd note that most members of Congress seem to dismiss the opinions of people who oppose what they believe.

For more on this topic, the ACLU has a number of links.

Here's also a CATO Institute comment on torture. 

[This post is evidence of my blogging addiction.  I have other things to do today, but the President's euphemism wouldn't let go of me until I wrote this.  A (bigger?) issue that will have to wait til later is the unspoken acknowledgement that what Snowden did was important.   It's not as proofed and checked as most posts.  I'll check on it again when I get my to do list done.  Your help in fisxing things is appreciated.]

If Biogenesis Had a Contract With NSA - Headlines Would Be About Stolen Data, Not Baseball Players' Drug Use - Obama Responds

The information which led to the suspension of a dozen major league baseball players this week, was stolen from the company.  A disgruntled client/employee/investor took boxes of data and released the information to the press.

From the Anchorage Daily News:

"Porter Fischer, a former employee of the now-infamous Biogenesis clinic in Miami, told ESPN's "Outside the Lines" that there are at least a dozen more athletes across numerous professional sports leagues that have yet to be exposed.
Fischer turned the Biogenesis clinic investigation into a national scandal when he turned boxes of documents over to the Miami New Times last year."

But the reaction of the nation led by the media is in stark contrast to the reaction to the whistle blowers who released information to the world, at great personal risk, because they thought the public needed to be aware of what was being done by the government.  I'm not necessarily endorsing the actions of the whistle-blowers, but I'm sympathetic to their motivation.

Propublica has a timeline of people prosecuted under the Espionage Act.   Here are the key people on it:

• 1971: Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo indicted
• 1985: Samuel Morison convicted
• January 2006: Lawrence Franklin convicted
• May 2010: Shamai Leibowitz convicted
• August 2010: Stephen Kim indicted
• December 2010: Jeffrey Sterling indicted
• Jun. 2011: Case against Thomas Drake dropped
• October 2012: John Kiriakou convicted
• June 14, 2013: Edward Snowden Charged  
• July 30, 2013: Bradley Manning Convicted 

John Kiriakou, one of the men on the list, recently wrote:

"President Obama has been unprecedented in his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute those whose whistleblowing he wants to curtail. The purpose of an Espionage Act prosecution, however, is not to punish a person for spying for the enemy, selling secrets for personal gain, or trying to undermine our way of life. It is to ruin the whistleblower personally, professionally and financially. It is meant to send a message to anybody else considering speaking truth to power: challenge us and we will destroy you.

Only ten people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under Barack Obama."

 
The leaks of classified documents by people working for government raises many questions, about the leakers and about the government and its reaction to the leakers. However, there is a great difference between whistle blowers and spies.

Spies sell information to foreign governments for profit, because they are being blackmailed, because of ideology, or a combination of more than one of these.  A report on the motivation of spies on this US Department of Agriculture site by By Dr. Mike Gelles Naval Criminal Investigative Service says that most spies have personal issues that the organization should be looking for.  But this report is about spies, not about whistle blowers. 

True whistle blowers believe that the government is doing something that is in serious violation of the law and poses a danger to the public if the information is not released.  They can be right or wrong about this.  And its possible that the information they release causes some danger as well as needed information.  This has some similarity to when a dangerous prisoner is released because the technical rules of justice were violated.  We balance two different important values.

Reporters prosecuted for espionage raise even greater issues.  John Kiriakou writes:

Two of my espionage charges were the result of a conversation I had with a New York Times reporter about torture. I gave him no classified information – only the business card of a former CIA colleague who had never been undercover. The other espionage charge was for giving the same unclassified business card to a reporter for ABC News. All three espionage charges were eventually dropped.

People in power have always tried to keep information from the public.  Some of it is legitimately withheld - the Freedom of Information Act outlines the kinds of information that is exempted from release.  But often, information that the people should know is hidden by those exemptions.

The film  Dirty Wars  which we saw Monday night is one more account of the serious abuse of secrecy in the federal government.  The film raises many questions, I don't have time to pursue now.

Knowledge of what our government is doing is critical to citizens of a democracy making good choices when they vote.   One can't help wonder how much the government is hiding simply because it is embarrassing.  The Municipality of Anchorage, for example, when it settles with someone who has sued the Municipality, includes language which requires the person to not disclose the details of the settlement.  When asked by the media (if they are paying attention at all) about the settlement, the Muni officials say the conditions of the settlement prevent them from saying anything.  Even though this is a condition they insist on and require.  Basically, this is to keep the public from knowing what the Muni did wrong and how much they paid to make it go away.

And yesterday I read that the encrypted email service David Snowden used has shut down:

"The statement posted online by Lavabit owner Ladar Levison hinted that the Dallas-based company had been forbidden from revealing what was going on."

The release of millions of classified documents by Bradley Manning and David Snowden raises huge questions about [the culpability of the government's handling of this sort of data such as:]

• how these folks had access to all this information
• how they  could download and store this information without detection, without the computer programs alerting officials to what was happening
• why private contractors are doing this work 
• how contracting out this work sets up an interest group with motivation to lobby Congress to increase the amount of secrecy and spying

[The government has pushed the danger of terrorism, it seems, in part to keep the focus off questions on their lax security procedures.]

The amount of media attention on these issues has been tiny.

Yet, when Porter Fisher walks off with Biogenesis files and makes them public, the attention is on the drug use of the subjects of the files, not on the breach of the confidentiality of their medical records or on the theft of the files.

How we handle whistleblowers, whether government employees, private contractors, or the journalists who publish the information the leak, is a problem which may be evolving into the biggest danger to democracy in the US today as the NSA, FBI, CIA, the White House and their many corporate contractors, ruthlessly work to silence anyone who dares to reveal their actions.  


Obama came on the radio as I'm finishing this, responding to some of these issues.  Does that means he's monitoring my computer and reading my posts before I even publish them?  I'm sure they don't even know this blog exists.  Here are the four points Obama made:

1. Reforms to Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act
2. Oversight  over the FISA Court - they only hear one side of the issue, they can have adversarial procedures with civil liberty groups expressing their concerns act  in the courts
3. We can be more transparent - instructed inteeligence agency to be as transparent as possible and a website of intelligency agencies to be more transparent and explain what it's doing
4. High level group of outside experts to review and recommend - interim report in 60 days and final report by the end of the year

Now he's answering questions.  You can listen live here.