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. 

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."

How's Uncle Adolf? Surveillance Then And Now

'It was Rudolf Diels who first conveyed to Martha the unfunny reality of Germany's emerging culture of surveillance.  One day he invited her to his office and with evident pride showed her an array of equipment used for recording telephone conversations.  He led her to believe that eavesdropping apparatus had indeed been installed in the chancery of the U.S. embassy and in her home."

Martha, an attractive 20 something, is the daughter of the US Ambassador to Germany, appointed by FDR in 1933.  She has a lot of suitors from all different political shadings, including Diels, head of the Gestapo.

"Prevailing wisdom held that Nazi agents hid their microphones in telephones to pick up conversations in the surrounding rooms.  Late one night, Diels seemed to confirm this.  Martha and he had gone dancing.  Afterward, upon arrival at her house, Diels accompanied her upstairs to the library for a drink.  He was uneasy and wanted to talk.  Martha grabbed a large pillow, then walked across the room toward her father's desk.  Diels, perplexed, asked what she was doing.  She told him she planned to put the pillow over the telephone.  Diels nodded slowly, she recalled, and 'a sinister smile crossed his lips.'"** 

Author Erik Larson, in his non-fiction In The Garden Of The Beasts,  goes on to talk about the insidious effects of a government listening in to its people's phones.  And we can extend that to emails and video cameras all over I'm sure.

"She told her father about it the next day.  The news surprised him.  Though he accepted the fact of intercepted mail, tapped telephones and telegraph lines, and the likelihood of eavesdropping at the chancery, he never would have imagined a government so brazen as to place microphones in a diplomat's private residence.  .  .

"As time passed the Dodds found themselves confronting an amorphous anxiety that infiltrated their days and gradually altered the way they led their lives.  The change came about slowly, arriving like a pale mist that slipped into every crevice.  It was something everyone who lived in Berlin seemed to experience.  You began to think differently about whom you met for lunch and for that matter what café or restaurant you chose, because rumors circulated about which establishments were favorite targets of Gestapo agents - the bar at the Adlon, for example.  You lingered at street corners a beat or two longer to see if the faces you saw at the last corner had now turned up at this one.  In the most casual of circumstances you spoke carefully and paid attention to those around you in a way you never had before.  Berliners came to practice what became known as "the German glance" - der deutsche Blick - a quick look in all directions when encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street.  .  .

"After vacations and weekends away, the family's return was always darkened by the likelihood that in their absence new devices had been installed, old ones refreshed. 'There is no way on earth one can describe in the coldness of words on paper what this espionage can do to the human being,' Martha wrote.  It suppressed routine discourse - 'the family's conferences and freedom of speech and action were so circumscribed we lost even the faintest resemblance to a normal American family.  Whenever we wanted to talk we had to look around corners and behind doors, watch for the telephone and speak in whispers."  The strain of all this took a toll on Martha's mother.  'As time went on, and the horror increased,' Martha wrote, 'her courtesy and graciousness towards the Nazi officials she was forced to meet, entertain, and sit beside, became so intense a burden she could scarcely bear it.'" [pp, 224-226]

 The book's kept my close attention.  There's lots that's applicable today.  While we're still a distance from experiencing the fear described here, it's a slow process as security agencies slowly access more personal information about people.  And then when an administration willing to exploit it comes into office, any one who disagrees with the leaders has to be concerned.

Larson cites a joke that was common:

"One man telephones another and in the course of their conversation happens to ask, 'How is Uncle Adolf?'  Soon afterward the secret police appear at his door and insist that he prove that he really does have an Uncle Adolf and that the question was not in fact a coded reference to Hitler."

This sort of thing does happen in the US today if you are involved with Muslim organizations.  The ACLU's Blog of Rights has the story of a twenty year old American born Muslim working for a Muslim charity.  Here's a part of the story:

In March 2012, a man named Shamiur Rahman messaged me on Facebook. I didn't know at the time that he was working as a police informant. Rahman told me he was trying to become a better practicing Muslim, and that he wanted to get involved with FSNYC. He asked me whether there were "any events or anything" he could attend soon. We had several friends in common, and I was happy to help him in his quest for religious self-improvement, so I introduced him to my friends in FSNYC. He started to attend all our meetings and became a part of my circle of friends. On several occasions, I invited him to my family's house, where he met my parents and ate with our family. Once, he spent the night in my family's home.
Rahman would ask everyone he met for their phone number, often within minutes of meeting them. He also often tried to take photos with or of people he met through me.
The next month, two friends separately told me that they had heard that NYPD informants had infiltrated FSNYC. I was advised to step down to avoid being targeted, but I decided not to step down because I knew that I had not done anything wrong. Still, I stopped publicizing FSNYC's activities and following up on many matters regarding the organization.
When I told other FSNYC members about the NYPD informant, one board member decided to be less active in the organization, and several members told me that they would stop their activities with our group largely because of their fear of being spied on by police informants. In June 2012, FSNYC stopped functioning. [for the whole story click here.]

 Perhaps there's extra poignancy for me.  My father had three or four older aunts who ran a boarding house in Berlin.  They and my father's half brother, also in Berlin, were all eventually taken to concentration camps.  I have letters from them downstairs that my father had kept, from before they disappeared. 

But Janet Maslin, the NY Times reviewer of In the Garden of Beasts  also found it compelling.  It's non-fiction based on diaries kept by Ambassador Dodd (an unlikely appointment, he was a history professor in Chicago, but had done his undergraduate work in Leipzig, Germany years before), Martha's papers and books, and hundreds of other sources.

**Of course, there are other interpretations possible here.  Larson cites Martha's book here for this, and she's interpreting his smile as sinister.  Perhaps he was pleased to encourage her belief that he was tapping this phone.  We always have to be careful not to turn possibilities we encounter into facts.  

Image in Images Out - Google's New Reverse Image Search

I noticed today Google was offering me the ability to do an image search,  not by using words, but actually putting the image into the search window. (Did this start a while ago and I just missed it? See more below on this.)

click to make it clearer

I tried it. First I dragged in a picture I'd recently put up on my blog and it found it. It wasn't instant, but maybe 15 or 20 seconds. (A 2.7 MB image took over 4 minutes)

Then I tried an image of a painting of a lotus I'd taken, but not posted.. It found nothing, but gave me what it called "visually similar images."

You can judge for yourselves how 'similar' these are. I need some visual artists to tell me why Google found these others similar.  To me, color is clearly important.  Then the shape - Google seems to see two circles, and how space is taken up in the image.


There are a lot of potential consequences of this ability - whether they are positive or negative depends on whether you are the beneficiary or victim.

1.  You see someone on the street and you take their picture.  Then you could look them up on the web.

Well, this is still in the future.  They don't seem to be doing face recognition yet as you can see below.

It's basically faces that are approximately the same size and have a similar color background.  The original has a full head of hair and a beard, but the pictures include smooth shaven and bald folks and even two women and a baby.   The baby might have been chosen because the background is so similar. 


2.   If someone wanted to see if others were using his copyrighted image, this might help find it.
At this point, this seems like a good use.  It appears the closer the picture is to the original the more likely it is to show up.  Of course if they only used a part of the picture, it probably won't show up because it would change the shape/form and basic colors.  [See more below.]

3.  If you wanted to identify a bird or a flower, this could be a good tool, but so far it isn't.  When I tried a close up of a  round pink flower, it gave me other round pinkish flower closeups, but it clearly wasn't paying any more attention to the flower details than it was paying attention to the facial details above.  They were totally different flowers - again, it was all about the color and shape in relation to the size of the image.

I'm sure this will be refined, and as it is, it will start to change the conditions of privacy even further than Facebook and other internet applications already have.

When you click on "Learn More" you get a page which tells you which browsers are compatible with this:

• Chrome
• Firefox 3.0+
• Internet Explorer 8+
• Safari 5.0+

It also says that the pictures you put into search then become part of their library.  I think I'll be sparing about what I put in.

• Preview image: see a small version of the image that you searched with. (Note that if you return to that results page after a certain time, you may not see this image anymore.)
• Best guess: if our system can find a text description for your image, you'll see it appear as a link to further search results. You might also see a few top web results for that text query. To change your search, edit or add to the best guess by typing in the search bar.
• Visually similar images: see a set of images that are close matches to the image that you searched with. Click the link to see additional images that are similar.
• Pages that include matching images: see web pages that show your image on their site
• Other searches related to this image: if our system finds more than one "best guess" description, you'll see them as links at the bottom of the page. Click one to see full search results for that query.

"Google's use of user-submitted images and URLs

When you use Search by Image, any images that you upload and any URLs that you submit will be stored by Google and treated in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Google uses those images and URLs solely to provide and improve our products and services."

This is below, where the more is.

I decided I better google to see if it's been there a while and I just missed it.  First I found this (notice 2009) and I couldn't believe I'd been so unaware - until I read it all.

Similar Images graduates from Google Labs

10/27/2009 03:34:00 PM

Today, we're happy to announce that Similar Images is graduating from Google Labs and becoming a permanent feature in Google Images. You can try it out by clicking on "Find similar images" below the most popular images in our search results. For example, if you search for jaguar, you can use the "Find similar images" link to find more pictures of the car or the animal.

Same words - ' similar images' - but for text searches.  So that's totally different.

It appears the video they use to promote this when you click learn more, was on  Youtube June 13, so I am a bit behind here.

Searchnewz has a June 15 report saying this feature, which was originally available on something called TinEye and called 'reverse image search' was appreciated by photographers looking for copyright infringement.  It was available on Chrome then, so that might be why I hadn't seen it earlier.  [I've added 'reverse' to my title now.]

Pundit Kitchen did a search like my face search above on June 15 and found Google couldn't distinguish between Obama and Bush.

A July 15 article at addons suggest this was only available on Firefox as an addon, so perhaps it's just recently become a standard Firefox feature.

Technicallydigital has a post touting it as an addon for Mozilla-Firefox on September 19.  I'm feeling better about just noticing it on Firefox today, but I'm guessing it's been up a few days.

The Ethics and Rules of Surveillance

I started this post almost a month ago, but it didn’t feel right, so I’ve left it simmering. I picked it up about two weeks ago. I think I’ve finally got a way to talk about this, and why this undercover stuff feels wrong, but seems logically justified.

Private Life Values in Conflict with Public Life Values

When human society began changing from premodern to modern (as social scientists label these things,) we changed from societies in which family loyalty, group loyalty, fealty were the most important measure of a person. The modern world - the world in which scientific rationality replaced traditional authority - made merit the main measure of a person, and logic and rationality the path to truth and justice.

The point is that today we live in world with two major systems of rules. (Yes I know there are more than two, but for this situation, bear with me and accept two.) In our private lives, loyalty to family (and close friends and associates) is one of the most important standards. We accept parents standing up for their children even when the children did something terrible. We think that is normal and natural. In our public lives, rationality and merit are supposed to be the standard. The United States is a country based on the rule of law, not the rule of men. Everyone is supposed to be equal before the law.

But we can’t shut down our private value system when we go to work everyday. We make friendships with people at work and our relationships with them are both professional and personal. So these two value systems overlap in our lives. We have laws against nepotism because we recognize that it would be hard to use objective, rule of law, standards when a family member is involved. We have conflict of interest laws and require people recuse themselves when these two systems overlap.

As much as we like to believe in this separation, except for androids like Data, the separation doesn’t really exist. For most people when emotion and reason are in conflict, emotion wins. Professors Jules Lobel and George Loewenstein write,

Intense emotions can undermine a person's capacity for rational decision-making, even when the individual is aware of the need to make careful decisions.

Rule of Law versus Personal Loyalty

Where’s all this headed? Patience, I’m almost there. In our public world, we talk nobly about obeying the law, but in our private world we may go over the speed limit, we may pad our charitable contributions in our tax returns, and we may give preferential treatment to good friends when we deal with them professionally. We live with an inherent conflict between the rule of law and the rule of me and my friends.

I think this is hardwired into most of us. We learn about this early on. Telling the teacher about another student who broke a rule, makes us a tattletale. We have lots of other negative terms for being disloyal to the group. Should you ‘rat’ on your friend who cheats on his exam? College honor codes place students in a moral dilemma. Should you ‘betray’ your friend? Blowing the whistle is the positive term for someone who ‘squeals’ on his organization when it hides its illegal actions. A study for the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that

· 79% of respondents said that a law enforcement Code of Silence exists and is fairly common throughout the nation.
· 46% said they would not tell on another officer for having sex on duty.
· 23% said they wouldn’t tell on another cop for regularly smoking marijuana off duty.

I wonder what the response would be for FBI agents.


So when the FBI and the federal prosecutors offer (bribe) witnesses a chance to reduce their sentences if they do undercover work, if they rat on their partners, there is an inherent conflict of the personal and public systems of ethics. The part that I think has bothered me, but I haven’t been able to articulate until now, is that in the court of law, the private value system of loyalty is treated as if it didn’t exist. Only the rule of law matters. Yes, the legal code of the United States as an extension of the US Constitution is the backbone of our democracy. The Constitution is like a legal contract that the people of the United States agree to live by and it is the legal blueprint

... to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...

But the government that is formed based on the rule of law is merely a means to an end that is addressed more specifically in the Declaration of Independence. There we find that "Governments are instituted among Men" to secure "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

For most people I've ever met "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" includes the bonds of loyalty of family and friends. So, yes, the rule of law is important, but the value of loyalty is probably a more basic human characteristic. It is the reason we need the laws. And so when in court, the rule of law is the only important value, and humans are pressured into violating their loyalty to close friends with no acknowledgment that this is also an important value, we naturally feel uncomfortable, even violated and betrayed.


Use of Undercover agents

There's no question that in the Alaska political corruption trials of 2007 the surveillance tapes made all the difference with the juries and the public.

• Hearing a politician say in his own words he knew what was happening
• Listening to another politician slurring his four letter words and joking about getting a job from the drunk lobbyist
  FBI tape of Pete Kott 01 uploaded by AKRaven
  
  
• Seeing the money handed over from the lobbyist’s pocket to the politician's, followed by profuse thanks and promises to help in any way (the hand off is toward the end of the tape, first he's trying to get help for a $17,000 credit card problem.)
  

Without the tapes, it would be one person's word against another's.


The Pros and Cons of Surveillance Work

There are powerful arguments FOR doing the undercover work but also troubling arguments against.

Reasons For Undercover Surveillance:

• There's no other way to get the information. These are things not meant to be heard by others. There are no written contracts, just people verbally agreeing to break the law, often using code words (prison warden in Barbados for Kott.) Anchorage Daily News editor and reporter Rich Mauer told PBS:
  

  Journalists don't get to tap phones. Journalists don't get to—to place secret cameras. So, the FBI is listening in on conversations that we thought maybe were happening. But lo and behold they really were, and we're getting to—to hear these things.

• The victim often is 'the general public,' not a specific person who can file a complaint. So without the intervention of an investigatory agency with extraordinary powers, no one would be in a position to file a complaint.
  
• Without this sort of evidence, it is difficult for juries to determine where the truth lies. They hear different witnesses, but which one should they believe? Simply because one is a better actor doesn't mean that one is telling the truth.
  
• Hearing it directly from the person's mouth on tape allows the jury to hear the exact intonation - whether it is said in jest or in anger, whether one word is stressed or another. Reading the transcript allows the reader to interpret the words in many different ways. Prosecutor Nick Marsh, in his closing argument in the Kott trial, said that this case had unique evidence, that because of the hours of electronic surveillance
  
• 
  
• you the members of the jury have been able to sit in a ringside seat as they committed the crimes in the indictment.
• Playing the tapes can get the criminal to plead guilty and cooperate with the FBI and prosecutors. This certainly worked for Bill Allen and Rick Smith..
  

Reasons Against Undercover Surveillance

• Entrapment - would these people have committed a crime independent of this? The basis for Tom Anderson's conviction was the cooperating witness' offer to pay Anderson for helping out in ways consistent with Anderson's ideological beliefs.
  
• Motives of the cooperators - To get their own sentences reduced. There is a powerful incentive to paint the picture the prosecutor wants to hear in court, even if it isn't true.
  
• Invasion of privacy
• Surveillance involves listening to personal conversations. The hour or less of actual surveillance tape played at each of the three trials was a tiny fraction of the many hours of actual taping. Much, if not most of what was heard had nothing nothing to do with the investigation
• The FBI has a word - minimization - for deciding what they should not listen to and guidelines for turning off the recording device. At the end of this post I have my notes from court when one of the FBI agents discussed the procedures for surveillance tapes.
  
• The tapes also pick up the conversations of people who have nothing to do with the investigation
• Betrayal of associates - We live with overlapping values systems. As citizens we value the law. As members of families and of groups of friends, we value our loyalty to each other. In these cases, people who described their relationships as "like family" were now required to betray those relationships in order to save their own skin. The easy response is that "they were criminals," "they were breaking the law." But how easy would it be to turn in your child, your best friend? We have powerful social norms against betraying our friends and colleagues.
  

Tentative Conclusion includuing the need for better oversight

Just because some people drive badly when drunk, others shoot people with guns, and still others do a lousy job teaching third grade, doesn’t mean we should ban alcohol, guns, and third grade teachers. FBI surveillance can be abused too. Because some people do these things badly doesn't mean the activity itself is bad. Some things are more prone to abuse than others and thus we have restrictions, special oversight, and other measures to prevent abuse. Yet, FBI (and other) surveillance, by necessity is done in the shadows. Abuse is harder to discover. Therefore, I think it is necessary to design better oversight processes including more representive parties involved. Yes, I understand, the more who know, the harder to protect the investigation. But if they can trust the criminals who wear the wires, they can trust carefully, but representatively chosen monitors of the process.



Power

One other observation. At the trials, I was alarmed by the power of the US Government - represented by the FBI and the US Department of Justice - and the potential to abuse that power. The FBI and DOJ (Department of Justice) generally had, in court, close to a ten to one advantage over the number of defense people. When Kott’s attorney insisted that each tape introduced as evidence be verified by the agent who monitored it, the government had the budget to bring about 18 agents into court - most from outside Alaska. This doesn't count the thousands of hours of spent on the investigations and trial preparation. While the DOJ may complain about limited funding, their campaign chest is much bigger than any of the defendant's, and probably than all of them rolled together - including the $500,000 each that Allen and Smith got for legal defense as part of the sale of VECO.

I was alive when J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI and used it as his own private investigation unit:

The committee staffs report shows that Hoover willingly complied with improper requests from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He gratuitously offered political intelligence to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, but both seemed unimpressed.

While everything I saw in court suggested a high level of integrity and professionalism on the part of the FBI and the DOJ, I have no idea of what went on outside of court. And if the Code of Silence cited above for police is part of the culture of the FBI, it would be hard to know when something did happen.

At this point, I don't have any strong recommendations one way or the other, but I wanted to record my observations based on the trials before I forget this all.

The Rules of Surveillance

Finally, a fair amount came out at the trials about the steps the FBI must go through before, during, and after the wiretaps and the use of the surveillance video recordings. Below are my notes from October 23, 2007 when Prosecutor Joe Bottini was interrogating FBI special agent Steve J. Dunphy, from Cincinnati Ohio about what it takes to get orders for a wire tap or video surveillance and then restrictions they have when taping. These are spell-checked notes that might be considered merely a sketch of what was all said. It gives you the basic outline, but some of the detail is lost.


First they have to get an application, then an order from a judge.

Bottini: All this in secret?
Dunphy: yes,
Bottini: purpose?
Dunphy: if it became known we were listening in it wouldn’t be fruitful
Bottini: Do phone company factor in this?
Dunphy: Yes, they are served with order and they would assist in getting it technically set up.
Bottini: Order cut to the phone company?
Dunphy: Redacted order
Bottini: Ordered not to disclose?
Dunphy: yeah
Bottini: How actually recorded?
Dunphy: When I started reel to reel. Now digitally onto portable hard drive then to other media, cd.
Bottini: Perfect or tech flaws?
Dunphy: You can bet on it [technical flaws]
Bottini: You have served as a monitor. Someone has to actually be listening real time?
Dunphy: yes/
Bottini: Purpose?
Dunphy: If only can record pertinent information, not about going back and listening.
Bottini: Required for minimization?
Dunphy: yes. if conversation not pertinent, personal, not related. the monitor will stop recording and stop listening. Back in a minute or whatever is reasonable to see if it changed.
Bottini: Is there a general rule of thumb on what you described? about how long go down ?
Dunphy: Generally told to go down a minute , but you learn what is appropriate as you go along. A learning curve as you learn the voices of the people. Minimization becomes more efficient as time goes on.
Bottini: Other kinds you can’t listen to?
Dunphy: Privileged, A lawyer. Those would be minimized right away and not turned on. Spouse, priest. Attorney client is the big one.
Bottini: If you are the monitor, is there a process to familiarize your self?
Dunphy: Have to read the affidavit with the case, meeting with one of the Asst US attorneys to brief on the case and minimization requirements
Bottini: Does monitor sit and take notes while calls intercepted?
Dunphy: Yes, record times, parties speaking, brief synopsis..
Bottini: Today’s tech also record date and time? [I think this means the tech for the recordings to be listened to in court that day.]
Dunphy: yes
Bottini: End of 30 day period what happens to original recordings intercepted. Dunphy: Original sealed and given to the court.
Bottini: Other types of electronic surveillance. You know about bug?
Dunphy: Yes, open type mic in a room.
Bottini: Video too?
Dunphy: yes.
Bottini: Authorization the same for intercepting phone conversation?
Dunphy: Yes, application process the same,
Bottini: application to court with affidavit. probably cause, all that?
When sought, G also has to request authorization to install?
Dunphy: Yes, sometimes to get mic into location, need to surreptitiously enter, then have to apply for that authority too.
Bottini: Same process with bug same as with phone, real time monitors?
Dunphy: Yes
Bottini: Same minimization with bug? Dunphy: yes
Same with privileged conversations? Dunphy: yes
Bottini: [Ever?] Just record it all and look later?
Dunphy: No, listen, if not pertinent stop it and on and on we go.
Bottini: Telephone intercept, Monitors real time take notes. Same with bugged monitor?
Dunphy: Yes, A little more because listening and watching, a little more awkward.
Bottini: Interception orders good for 30 days. Possible might not go the whole 30-days?
Dunphy: yes. Bottini: Examples?
Dunphy: Not getting any worthwhile activity, might change phone number, or something happens where you have to take down case, life in jeopardy.
Bottini: Were you asked to come to Alaska to assist?
Dunphy: Yes, March 2006.
Bottini: Specifically asked to do?
Dunphy: Monitor bug in hotel room in Juneau
Suite 604 in Baranof? Yes

Bottini: When installed? Dunphy: Jan
Bottini: Did you familiarize yourself with investigation. Dunphy: Yes, best I could

What did you do? REad the affidavit, with the agents monitoring before us, the agent, etc.
Aware or made aware that wire taps had been authorized? yes
What did you know? Yes Cell phone in SEpt for RS, couple months later November on BA’s cell, home phone.
While served as monitor, what is your day like?
…..
Two months, over time familiar with voices of people in suite.
BA? yes
RS? He lived here, so, obviously
VK? one time - March 30, 2006.
VK here today? Yes he is seated there in the red tie.
Original portable hard drive recorded to is sealed.
But recorded video and audio. yes. when we thought activity ceased, dubbed from hard drive to dvd, and could make multiple dvd’s from that. original sealed.
While monitoring bug, are you able to see and hear what is going on? Yes, within the camera view of the camera.

Ask.com Privacy Eraser

The NY Times today has a story saying that ask.com is adding a privacy eraser to its search engine. You can just click it on with each search.

Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.

So I checked out Ask.com. And there's the privacy eraser button in the corner and when I clicked it I got this window:



(You can click on it to enlarge it.)


But is ask.com good enough to find what you are looking for? I searched for:

what do I know Alaska blog steve

And this blog didn't show up until the second page.

When I did the same with google, What Do I Know? showed up in the first four spots. Of course, this is a blogspot blog closely tied to Google.

Anyway, I'd suggest people start trying ask.com so that the other big browswers realize that people do want privacy options. Even if that means when I check out the hits on my blog, I'll get less information about the visitors from sitemeter.

Here's what ask.com's FAQ's say about what will be erased:

What is search activity data?
Search activity data includes information about the pages you visit on Ask.com, including the terms you search for, the links you click, your IP address, and any user or session identifier. When AskEraser is enabled, Ask.com will delete from our servers all references containing any single element of search activity data; query (what you searched for, clicked on, etc.), IP address (where you searched from), and user/sessions IDs (who you are in relation to previous searches).

Return to Top

Is my search activity deleted immediately?
When AskEraser is enabled, your search activity will be deleted from Ask.com servers within a number of hours. In some instances, it may take a longer period of time for your search activity to be deleted for example when we need to run automated systems to detect and block users or automatic bots that are abusing our site (see Is there any reason Ask.com will stop deleting my search activity?)

If Yahoo had this policy in China, the government there couldn't track down who visited what sites. And this may become more important in the US too.