Tag: Premium

Over the weekend, Barton Gellman reported, based on documents from Snowden, that 90 percent of people whose online communications the NSA intercepts are not the agency’s intended targets. But Gellman also claims that the program has provided more valuable intelligence than Snowden’s fan base would like to acknowledge:

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address. Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Stewart Baker calls the 90 percent statistic in the article’s lede “a phony,” noting that any investigation into a target’s communications will cover the correspondence of many people who are not the target:

Maybe the Post is performing some far more sophisticated calculation, and they didn’t bother to explain it, despite its prominence in the story.  If not, though, the inherent bias in the measure is such that it demands an acknowledgement . (After all, it allows you to say “half of all account holders in the database weren’t the target” if the agency stores a single message sent to the target.) This is something that any halfway sentient editor should have recognized. Which raises this question:  I’ve heard of newspapers chasing stories that are “too good to check.”  Does the Post think that Gellman’s are too good to edit?

Though he also finds the premise dubious, Wittes admits that “the story raises a valid question”:

Is the agency minimizing U.S. identities and communications in all situations in which it should?

The details it provides are inadequate to venture an opinion on that subject. And once again, the story raises a tension that is to some degree inherent in the agency’s project: A valid overseas target who is in communication with people in the United States is, for obvious reasons, of particular interest. He will also, however, by the nature of the activity that gives rise to that interest, be in contact with more U.S. persons than many other people will. And that means that incidental collection affecting U.S. persons will be greater. Minimization is a key protection for U.S. persons, but you don’t want minimization of information that may be of foreign intelligence value. Wherever you draw the line here—or, rather, the many lines—you’re going to pay costs both in privacy and in effectiveness. You’ll retain information that is utterly innocuous and corrosive of people’s privacy and you’ll minimize information that will prove to have value. The question is how much of each harm you are willing to tolerate and when you want to err on which side of the line.

Furthermore, Digby is troubled by the story’s revelation that the NSA “treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers”:

You just don’t know what personal information about innocent citizens you’re going to need until they do something you need it for. (Or maybe, you never know, you need their cooperation on something and having this sort of info make the “persuading” just a little bit easier…) Best to keep as much information stored about everyone as possible. After all, the government may need to target you for something someday and it would be a shame if they didn’t have all of your communications stored in a nice digital file somewhere. Just in case.

Friedersdorf uses the piece to slam the NSA’s defenders:

They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at judging who could be trusted with this sensitive data that a possible traitor could take it all to China and Russia. Yet these same people continue to insist that the NSA is deserving of our trust, that Americans should keep permitting it to collect and store massive amounts of sensitive data on innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect that data. To examine the entirety of their position is to see that it is farcical.

Here’s the reality. The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it’s illegal, there’s no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters. The necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn’t be allowed to collect and store it.

Recent Dish on the NSA’s online surveillance program here.

New research suggests that people prefer getting electric shocks to being alone with their thoughts:

[Researchers] report on 11 experiments. In most, they asked participants to put away any distractions and entertain themselves with their own thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes. Over the first six studies, 58 percent of participants rated the difficulty at or above the midpoint on a scale (“somewhat”), and 42 percent rated their enjoyment below the midpoint. In the seventh study, participants completed the task at home, and 32 percent admitted to cheating by using their phones, listening to music, or doing anything but just sitting there. … Participants rated the task of entertaining themselves with their own thoughts as far less enjoyable and more conducive to mind-wandering than other mellow activities such as reading magazines or doing crossword puzzles.

In the most, ahem, shocking study, subjects were wired up and given the chance to shock themselves during the thinking period if they desired. They’d all had a chance to try out the device to see how painful it was. And yet, even among those who said they would pay money not to feel the shock again, a quarter of the women and two thirds of the men gave themselves a zap when left with their own thoughts. (One outlier pressed the button 190 times in the 15 minutes.) Commenting on the sudden appeal of electricity coursing through one’s body, [researcher Timothy] Wilson said, “I’m still just puzzled by that.”

Tom Stafford resists the interpretation that people simply don’t like thinking:

It’s possible that there is a White Bear Effect here – also known as the ironic process theory. Famously, if you’re told to think of anything except a white bear, you can’t help but think about a white bear. If you imagine the circumstances of these studies, participants were told they had to sit in their chairs and just think. No singing, no exploring, no exercises. Wouldn’t that make you spend your time (unpleasantly) ruminating on what you couldn’t do?

In this context, are the shocks really so surprising? The shocks were very mild. The participants rated them as unpleasant when they were instructed to shock themselves, but we all know that there’s a big difference between having something done to you (or being told to do something) and choosing to do it yourself.

Although many participants chose to shock themselves I wouldn’t say they were avoiding thinking – rather they were thinking about what it would be like to get another shock. One participant shocked himself 190 times. Perhaps he was exploring how he could learn to cope with the discomfort. Curiosity and exploration are all hallmarks of thinking. It is only the very limited internally directed, stimulus-free kind of thinking to which we can apply the conclusion that it isn’t particular enjoyable.

Pondering the strange phenomenon of the super-rich claiming to be a persecuted minority – the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, for example, both “compared populist attacks on the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews” – James Surowiecki looks back to when the one-percent weren’t so obtuse:

A century ago, industrial magnates played a central role in the Progressive movement, working with unions, supporting workmen’s compensation laws and laws against child labor, and often pushing for more government regulation.

This wasn’t altruism; as a classic analysis by the historian James Weinstein showed, the reforms were intended to co-opt public pressure and avert more radical measures. Still, they materially improved the lives of ordinary workers. And they sprang from a pragmatic belief that the robustness of capitalism as a whole depended on wide distribution of the fruits of the system.

Similar attitudes prevailed in the postwar era, as [sociologist Mark] Mizruchi has documented. Corporate leaders formed an organization called the Committee for Economic Development, which played a central role in the forging of postwar consensus politics, accepting strong unions, bigger government, and the rise of the welfare state. … Corporations supported policies that might have been costly in the short term in order to strengthen the system as a whole. The C.E.D. called for tax increases to pay for the Korean War and it supported some of L.B.J.’s Great Society. As Mizruchi put it, “They believed that in order to maintain their privileges, they had to insure that ordinary Americans were having their needs met.”

That all changed beginning in the seventies, when the business community, wrestling with shrinking profits and tougher foreign competition, lurched to the right. Today, there are no centrist business organizations with any real political clout, and the only business lobbies that matter in Washington are those pushing an agenda of lower taxes and less regulation.

Rachel Vorona Cote ended a “brief and sad” marriage to her first husband when she was 25. She reflects on how she got over worrying about a second wedding:

[S]omewhere along the way I learned that relationships don’t gain moral strength simply because they have endured. Relationships are too messy for such clean parallels. So much humiliation and self-loathing comes of treating divorce as the dark underbelly of intimacy. We don’t get one shot at long-term monogamy—if monogamy is even what we want. It occurred to me that, whether or not I wanted to remarry—and in the beginning I was not sure—divorce did not render impossible fifty years of mutual love and couch co-habitation.

By the week of my second wedding, I was stunned by the bigness of love surrounding me.

Part of me had feared that the celebration would feel uncomfortably familiar, but it didn’t and it wasn’t. My family and friends gathered around me, affirming our bond. … And while it is true that I love Paul in a way that I did not love my first husband—and that this affection shaped our wedding day—what is most important here is not comparative. I loved my first husband too, in the best way that I could in that moment, and I loved—still love—so much about our wedding. My wedding to Paul had nothing to do with my first; it was an exquisite day in the life of our own romance. The wedding was ours, and if it is not unconnected to the rest of my life, it still claims singularity—in the little particulars and in its celebration of a romance that can only be lived by Paul and me, together.

Philosophy prof Robert Pasnau relays (NYT) a well-worn story usually told at the expense of his colleagues that goes something like this: Charles II summons a group of philosophers to ask them why a dead fish weighs more than a live one. After offering their creative, speculative answers, the king tells the philosophers that there was no difference between the two – and why didn’t they just weigh the fish? Pasnau rejects the implied criticism of his field:

The essence of philosophy is abstract reasoning – not because the philosopher is too lazy to attempt a more hands-on approach, but because the subjects at issue do not readily submit to it.

If we could simply weigh the fish, we gladly would. In recent centuries, philosophers in fact have discovered how to weigh that allegorical fish, in various fields, and on each occasion a new discipline has been born: physics in the 17th century; chemistry in the 18th; biology in the 19^th and psychology in the 20th. The scientists, short on history but flush with their government grants and Nobel Prizes, cast an eye back on what remains of philosophy and skeptically ask: Why don’t you stop wasting your time and just weigh that fish?

It’s a question philosophers ask themselves all the time, and sometimes they despair.

How Pasnau frames his own defense of his field’s relevance:

[M]uch of what gives philosophy its continuing fascination is its connection with the humanities. To weigh the fish is doubtless desirable, but there is just as much to be learned in understanding where that fish came from, and in telling stories about where it might go.

If even philosophy is dismissed as a waste of time for being insufficiently scientific, where does that leave those other modes of humanistic inquiry? Reading Plato or Chekhov may not stop the planet from warming or cure a disease – or help build more accurate missiles – and it may not point the way toward a new science of ethics or will. Yet what of it? Does such inquiry not have a value of its own? That is of course itself a philosophical question.

Recently we pointed to the debate generated by Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent memoir, Living with a Wild God, about a powerful, mystical experience she had at 18 and how she believes scientists could do a better job of understanding such brushes with the numinous. Reviewing the book, A.C. Grayling expresses disappointment at Ehrenreich’s edging away from the view that “it is the brain, and nothing mysterious outside it, that produces these experiences”:

It is well known and richly recorded that such episodes can be induced by dancing or repetitive whirling, as with the Sufi Dervishes; by starvation, fever, alcohol, hallucinogenic mushrooms, sexual activity, and much besides. Religious people, of course, attribute them to encounters with the divine, and it may well be that experiences caused in these ways lie at the root of humankind’s impulse to create religion. But the fact that empirical science today so well explains the causes and nature of these disturbances of normal neurological function is reason to guard against the supernaturalistic attempts at explanation, which were once the only resource our forebears had.

But alas, as her book approaches its end, Ehrenreich departs from rational ways of understanding her own experiences, and begins to sketch a view to the effect that there is indeed Something — she calls it the Other.

Why he believes such experiences shouldn’t change our view of reality:

No doubt having such experiences powerfully inclines one to project their cause to something outside the mind. We do not tolerate anomaly very well and need to give it a name and an explanation in order to cope. But the merest respect for economy of explanation should be a bulwark against externalizing the source of anomalous experiences before all the more likely explanations are exhausted. We should always remember that the mind is a great player of tricks: one can induce Ehrenreich-type experiences in the lab, or by popping certain kinds of pills, no Other and no Mystery required. It is accordingly a surprise and — let it be confessed — a disappointment to find so doughty a heroine of her causes sliding away from Athens to — well, if not to Jerusalem than to some other Eastern locus of the ineffable, the unnamable, and the smoky.

I repeat: it is a disappointment when a rational person’s thinking about the unusual, the unexpected, the extraordinary, the amazing experiences of transcendence and unity that many of us have at heightened moments of life, suffers a declension into quasi-religious or supernaturalistic vagueness. The human brain is complicated enough to produce all these experiences from its own resources; we need no fairies in the garden to explain how roses bloom.

Friedersdorf relays a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival about the evolution of religion spurred by an audience question about mixing and matching elements of various faith traditions, and even if you can be religious without believing in God. Leon Wieseltier was skeptical of such trends:

“To call oneself a Muslim, a Jew, or a Catholic, what do the continuities have to be?” he asked. “You cannot simply erase the entirety of the religion that preceded you and call yourself a Jew. You can say that there is this tradition that is X,Y, and Z, interpret as you choose, state your reasons. It’s a free country, this is the kind of Jew you want to be. What worries me is that the new forms will be so disconnected from the traditions that something called Judaism will survive but that the tradition in its richness may not. That is my deepest fear about my faith.”

Professor Molly Worthen, another panelist, expressed a related concern. “Call me old fashioned, but yes, I would say, to be a good Catholic you have to believe in God,” she said. “There’s a problem with the hyper-individualization of Millennial religion. The advantage of an institution is that it forces you into conversation with people you might not agree with. It forces you to grapple with a tradition that includes hard ideas. It forces you to have, for at least part of your life, a respect for authority that inculcates the sense that you have something to learn, that you’re not reinventing the wheel, but that millennia have come before you. The structure of institutions, for all their evils, facilitates that. And we may be losing that.”

Wieseltier posited that it’s being lost because Americans are trying to bring to their religious experience the same level of customization that they expect when shopping. “They treat their tradition as consumers–or let’s say, consumers with loyalty to one store.”

Dreher nods:

A Christian friend of the Millennial generation and I were talking recently.

She’s been living on the West Coast, and says that the shift in attitude among her friends, even Christian ones, on the gay marriage issue has been rapid and stark. I don’t want to put words into her mouth — she reads this blog, so she may wish to clarify her thoughts — but as I recall from our conversation, the velocity and ferocity of the shift has left her disoriented. The issue went from something up for discussion to “the conversation is over — and you had better be on the right side” virtually overnight.

One thing that worries and depresses my friend is that there seems to be no basis for a conversation about why we believe what we believe. The assumption now seems to be that your beliefs don’t have to cohere, or even cohere within a religious tradition; it’s expected that you pick and choose your beliefs, so you will be held responsible for affirming those that the Church of What’s Happening Now declares to be bigotry, or outmoded.

I told my friend about how difficult it is to have a meaningful conversation about religion because nobody takes religion seriously, not even most religious people. I used to get into arguments with Catholic friends over Catholic teaching, which I defended (even after I left the Catholic Church). It would drive me nuts because I would build an argument based on official Catholic teaching … and get nowhere. Though identifying as Catholics, these folks felt not the least obligation to yield to the teaching authority of the Catholic institution. They believed that because they were Catholics by birth and baptism, whatever they wanted to believe didn’t make them any less Catholic. It was impossible to have a meaningful discussion with Catholics who didn’t feel bound by the basic teachings of the Catholic Church. No connection to the traditions or the thinking of the Church.

Wieseltier’s right: truth and falsity on these questions really don’t matter to Americans anymore. What matters is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It is the universal solvent of religious tradition in America.