The Dish

Several readers express their distrust of the government:

There is a key distinction that has not been raised. As some readers have mentioned, we give up personal data to Internet companies. This is the trade-off we all make for using the Internet. While some companies are able to track and profile your usage, you can somewhat control your tracking preferences.

The government, on the other hand, apparently has access to not only your Internet usage (or metadata) but also other metadata (e.g. phone calls), and the ability to tie it all together – more so than any private company. The government also has the power to investigate, subpoena records, arrest, interrogate and generally make someone’s life pretty miserable. Which is fine by me if there is a high degree of confidence that the government pursues only bad guys.

Without getting into a discussion of slippery slopes and what may happen if low-level bureaucrats start playing with readily available data, my main concerns are regarding:

1) the standard that must be met before a specific individual is targeted and 2) the recourse available to a person who is incorrectly targeted. On #1 it’s not clear how much rigor is applied by FISA judges, and on #2 who knows what one can do.

James Fallows has a series of recent posts about private pilots being harassed because they apparently fit some profile.  And I’m sure you’ve heard (and perhaps even written) of people who have mistakenly been put on the TSA’s do-not-fly list, and have no way of getting off the list.

For me the real issue is about transparency, and knowing the rules. There’s obviously a trade-off between privacy and security imperatives – this is a discussion we should be having in the country. I’m not sure our elected representatives are having it on our behalf. Or if they are, they can’t tell us what they’ve discussed because it’s all secret.

Another is on the same page:

Of course I trust corporations more than my government. Corporations cannot have me followed. Corporations cannot arrest me. Corporations cannot send an armed SWAT team into my home. The US government can do all that. And the US government has an ugly history of doing that. It’s been a few decades since COINTELPRO was shut down, but it seems entirely likely that the FBI would do it again if they could. We should not risk the FBI using PRISM to monitor dissidents by labeling their surveillance targets as terrorists the way they did with occupy protestors. We should not risk police forces like those in New York and Chicago getting access to a system like PRISM for monitoring the local mosques or plot against future Fred Hamptons. Our government has a long history of abusing its powers.

To prevent abuse of PRISM, we need to shut it down now, before it falls into the hands of a government likely to use it for very bad acts. There will be future Lyndon Johnsons and Richard Nixons. We should not make it easier for them to abuse those who elect them.

Another:

The consequences of my information being in the hands of a corporation aren’t that severe. More likely than not, the primary effect on me is that I’m going to be served with targeted marketing. At the very, very worst, some of this data might have some conceivable impact on my credit score. As such, my concerns over the abuse of that data is fairly mild.

If the government misuses my data, however, the consequences could be dire. If I end up as a false positive on an NSA terrorist watch list, my life is now under suspicion and I have very little recourse to address that suspicion. Even if the only consequence is that I end up on a no-fly list, my life can experience serious disruptions and inconveniences. And, of course, we have no way of knowing what the NSA is actually doing with that information, so a certain degree of legitimate paranoia seems warranted.

Another:

With the NSA spying, you cannot opt-out.  You can’t even know you are being targeted, and prior to Snowden’s decision, you can’t even know that a program exists that could target your supposedly secure communications and purchases!  I think most would agree with me that you cannot declare opt-in situations to be the equivalent opt-out.  They simply are not, and American citizens should realize that they are trading away a great deal of their freedoms for precious little security under this program.

After absorbing the myriad discussions about whether the modern woman can have it all, Richard Dorment flips the question:

According to a study released in March by the Pew Research Center, household setups like ours are increasingly the norm: 60 percent of two-parent homes with kids under the age of eighteen are made up of dual-earning couples (i.e., two working parents). On any given week in such a home, women put in more time than men doing housework (sixteen hours to nine) and more time with child care (twelve to seven). These statistics provoke outrage among the “fair share” crowd, and there is a sense, even among the most privileged women, that they are getting a raw deal. …

But the complete picture reveals a more complex and equitable reality. Men in dual-income couples work outside the home eleven more hours a week than their working wives or partners do (forty-two to thirty-one), and when you look at the total weekly workload, including paid work outside the home and unpaid work inside the home, men and women are putting in roughly the same number of hours: fifty-eight hours for men and fifty-nine for women.

How you view those numbers depends in large part on your definition of work, but it’s not quite as easy as saying men aren’t pulling their weight around the house. (Spending eleven fewer hours at home and with the kids doesn’t mean working dads are freeloaders any more than spending eleven fewer hours at work makes working moms slackers.) These are practical accommodations that reflect real-time conditions on the ground, and rather than castigate men, one might consider whether those extra hours on the job provide the financial cover the family needs so that women can spend more time with the kids.

He notes a shift in the attitude that men have toward their “home-work balance” over the past 50 years:

“In 1977,” [researcher Ellen Galinsky] says, “there was a Department of Labor study that asked people, ‘How much interference do you feel between your work and your family life?’ and men’s work-family conflict was a lot lower than women’s.” She saw the numbers begin to shift in the late 1990s, and “by 2008, 60 percent of fathers in dual-earning couples were experiencing some or a lot of conflict compared to about 47 percent of women. I would go into meetings with business leaders and report the fact that men’s work-family conflict was higher than women’s, and people in the room — who were so used to being worried about women’s advancement — couldn’t believe it.” What they couldn’t believe was decades of conventional wisdom — men secure and confident in the workplace, women somewhat less so — crumbling away as more and more fathers began to invest more of their time and energy into their home lives.

In a review of the new film Hannah Arendt, Michelle Dean appraises the subject’s friendship with Mary McCarthy:

McCarthy, played by Janet McTeer, is blowsily silly — and though she could be wicked and subversively funny, McCarthy was far from silly. Nearly every exchange between the two women is about men and love. It is symptomatic of a trend, I think. We are in a moment of unprecedented popular interest in the matter of female friendship, and this has been greeted as a triumph for feminism. But what we get, for all that, is rather flat portraiture: women giggling about crushes before finding real fulfillment in heterosexual romance and the grail of marriage. It’s a shame, because many women hunger for models of intellectual self-confidence, and female friendships can be rich soil for them.

McCarthy and Arendt’s “love affair” — as their friends described it — was a union of ferocious minds, but it was hardly unusual. Women talk about ideas among themselves all the time. It would be nice if the culture could catch up. To give just a sample of the subjects McCarthy and Arendt talked and wrote to each other about: George Eliot, Cartesianism, Eldridge Cleaver, Kant, G. Gordon Liddy, and Sartre. Both women were members of the Partisan Review crowd, who spent much of their time talking about Stalin and Trotsky.

This also requires a better cultural appreciation of the virtue of friendship. A powerful friendship can be as intense as a love-affair and more stable over time. The notion that women cannot and do not have the finest forms of friendship, spanning a whole range of thought and ideas and experiences, is so absurd it’s amazing it survives. But then we live in a world of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Sometimes, it seems we may be going backward.

After an extensive review of Obama’s speeches to black audiences over the years, TNC spells out his disappointment:

When Barack Obama makes a moral appeal, he is not performing a Sista Souljah tactic. He is speaking sincere beliefs that run deep in his community. I happen to think those beliefs elide some difficult truths about the nature of power. In the case of the president, I think they elide the fact that there are actual policy steps he could be taking and isn’t. I think yesterday’s post on marijuana busts really brings this home. You will not find me among those arguing for deadbeat dads. But putting away the X-Box will not change those incredible arrest numbers. Policy will. As it stands, the president is on the wrong side of that policy. …

My disappointment with how Obama addresses black people originates in the fact that I believe he, quite literally, knows better and could do better. It is not enough to point out that crowds of black people cheer him on. Greatness demands that you not just make people cheer, that you not just grant them “Oh my people” catharsis, but that you make them think. This is about legacy. This is about asking whether “First Black President” will simply be an accidental honorific.

In a later post, he describes his own approach when speaking at predominantly black schools:

What I generally try to do is avoid messages about “hard work” and “homework,” not because I think those things are unimportant, but because I think they put the cart before the horse. The two words I try to use with them are “excitement” and “entrepreneurial.” I try to get them to think of education not as something that pleases their teachers, but as a ticket out into a world so grand and stunning that it defies their imagination. My belief is that, if I can get them to understand the “why?” of education, then the effort and hard work and long study hours will come after. I don’t know how true that is in practice, but given that I am asked to speak from my own experience, that is the lesson I have drawn.

(Video: Obama speaking to the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago’s South Side on Father’s Day, 2008. Full transcript here.)

Tom Ricks sees the actions of Edward Snowden more in line with the Pentagon Papers than Wikileaks:

I opposed what Manning did. I thought his actions were reckless. He did a data dump, making secret information public without knowing what it was or what he was really doing. I remember mentioning, for example, an Ethiopian journalist who wound up in the hot seat because of the WikiLeaks release. Manning’s act was that of a goofball anarchist.

Snowden’s, by contrast, seems to have been one of civil disobedience. That is, he seems to have known exactly what he was doing. Snowden does seem to have some elements of Manning, a mixed-up kid, but on balance seems to me to be more of an Ellsberg — that is, a disillusioned insider who was appalled by what he saw and made a choice to disclose the existence of certain government programs.

Civil disobedience has a cost though:

[D]o I think Snowden should go to jail? Yes, I think he should expect to. Martin Luther King, Jr. did too, when he consciously broke the law in protest. Breaking the law to make a point and then doing some time in consequence fit well within the American tradition. That said, knowing what I know now, I would hope it would be just a few months on a prison farm.

A reader chimes in:

When you “Money Quoted” Jeff Toobin taking Mr. Snowden down a few notches, one aspect of his quote was really nothing but unproven hyperbole, clearly intend to add a touch of smear. Toobin wrote: “The question, of course, is whether the government can function when all of its employees (and contractors) can take it upon themselves to sabotage the programs they don’t like. That’s what Snowden has done.”

Sabotage? Actually no, that’s not what he’s done.

While I’m not going to defend him or everything he’s done, I’m equally not going to go along with smearing him for what he plainly has not done. There is no concrete, definitive evidence that he has sabotaged the NSA’s programs. He simply exposed their existence. I’m sorry but the mere exposure of the programs’ existence is not equal to sabotage (no matter how much the secrecy freaks in the government security-intelligence-complex might cry otherwise).

Let’s be clear: sabotage would have been if he’d done something like inserting a computer virus into the NSA’s systems that shut the whole thing down, or destroyed their collected data, or the like. Exposure of the mere existence of the programs is not in and of itself sabotage. In fact, since this exposure late last week, the NSA has presumably been continuing to actively vacuum up all the same ongoing telephone call data, Facebook posts, Google search data, emails, and the rest without missing a beat … and, I’m sure, are still doing so as I type this. Exposed? Yes. Sabotaged? I don’t quite think so.

A wider debate is brewing. Ed Kilgore kicks it off with an examination of the widening gulf between those labeling Snowden a traitor and others calling him a hero:

While the wind’s blowing pretty hard against Snowden in Washington, he continues to receive widespread tribute as a hero—which is, as you might know, a bit different from being a traitor—among civil libertarians at both ends of the political spectrum. Ron Paul publicly thanked both Snowden and his top journalistic conduit, Glenn Greenwald, for “exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”

This is the polarized terrain on which the president will eventually have to take some sort of stand, recognizing that his past direct and indirect statements defending the kind of activities Snowden exposed, and harshly criticizing leakers, limit his freedom of action, even if he’s inclined to separate himself from the treason-shouters.

Dan Amira notes that the question is gaining steam online and calls it “a bullshit choice”:

[T]here’s also plenty of room for nuance between those two poles. You could say, for example, that Snowden did the wrong thing but with the best of intentions. If Snowden’s goal was to hurt America, there were better ways to do it. He could have sold his secrets to the Chinese. Snowden gave them to reporters. And, if you take his words at face value, his motivation is protecting America’s core values, not opening the country up to terrorism.

Or: Snowden kick-started an important debate, one that we couldn’t have had without him, but some of the information he leaked will make the country less safe. Hero? Eh, not quite. Traitor? Hardly.

Or: Snowden is a true patriot, but it was so mean what he did to his girlfriend.