Ben Wittes and Robert Chesney explain why it’s a mistake to conflate the recent leaks about PRISM and Verizon:
At a high-level of abstraction, it does make some sense to lump these stories together. They both concern the tension between privacy and the need to collect intelligence in the context of evolving technologies—and the leaks, of course, came from the same source. But at another level, conflating these two stories is a big mistake. They are by no means of equal weight and importance when it comes to informing the public about the government’s data-collection and monitoring powers. The Post story actually tells us little we did not already know—other than operational details that may prove of considerable use to those seeking to avoid NSA surveillance. By contrast, the Guardian story reveals a genuinely surprising and significant government legal position—albeit one apparently accepted by the FISA Court and congressional oversight leaders for a number of years—with important implications for the future of big data in government collection, surveillance, and intelligence authorities. …
These fleeting glimpses into the shadow worlds of counterterrorism, counterespionage, and counterproliferation are not always a bad thing. Sometimes, they prompt needed debate; even the White House has said that the president “welcomes the discussion of the trade-off between security and civil liberties” that the Verizon disclosure will produce. Some secret activities may be especially unwise or even illegal, so the proper amount of leaking in a healthy democracy is surely not zero. But it is equally true that, in some cases, exposure of classified information achieves little, while risking much. Snowden’s disclosures so far offer vivid examples of both the good and the bad of national security oversight by individual acts of civil disobedience.
Ambers provides an extremely thorough, acronymn-filled explainer on the NSA program:
What makes PRISM interesting to us is that it seems to be the ONLY system that the NSA uses to collect/analyze non-telephonic non-analog data stored on American servers but updated and controlled and “owned” by users overseas. It is a domestic collection platform USED for foreign intelligence collection. It is of course hard to view a Facebook account in isolation and not incidentally come into contact with an account that is owned by an American. I assume that a bunch of us have Pakistani Facebook friends.
If the NSA is collecting on that account, and I were to initiate a Facebook chat, the NSA would suck up my chat. Supposedly, the PRISM system would flag this as an incidental overcollect and delete it from the analyst’s workspace. Because the internet is a really complicated series of tubes, though, this doesn’t always happen. And so the analyst must sometimes “physically” segregate the U.S. person’s data.
What happens if I, in America, tell my Pakistani friend via Facebook chat that I am going to bomb a bridge? We don’t know precisely what happens when, in the course of a foreign intelligence intercept, a U.S. person creates evidence of their complicity with terrorism. The analyst must be able to distinguish between relevant and non-relevant communication. If the analyst catches my threat, then he or she will immediately initiate a procedure that sends the information to the FBI, which begins its own investigation of me. The NSA does not continue to collect on me. The FBI does — and probably uses the NSA tip as probable cause to obtain a FISA order to start collecting data using a PRISM-type tool of its own.
Great to have a simple empirical explanation – and it reaffirms my view that this is not unconstitutional at all.
Many bloggers have noted how foolish the NSA leaker was for choosing to hide out in Hong Kong, but:
[T]here is at least one reason it could be incredibly shrewd: Hong Kong’s asylum system is currently stuck in a state of limbo that could allow Snowden to exploit a loophole and buy some valuable time.
Simon Young, director of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong, told GlobalPost that a decision delivered by Hong Kong’s High Court in March of this year required the government to create a new procedure for reviewing asylum applications. Until the government does this, he said, asylum seekers are allowed to stay in Hong Kong indefinitely. “We’re still waiting to hear from government how they are going to implement this decision,” said Young. “Until that’s the case, you can’t return anyone until the law’s in place.” In other words, should Snowden apply for asylum, then even if the US made a valid extradition request and Hong Kong was willing to comply he could not be deported until the government figured out a new way to review asylum cases — a potentially lengthy process.
And on what grounds would get asylum? This seems a stretch to me. Meanwhile, Trey Menefee maintains that Fallows mischaracterized China’s control over Hong Kong:
He seems to fundamentally misunderstand and/or misrepresent the nature of “one country, two systems.” Or he does understand, but skips ahead three steps without articulating his meaning. The principle and reality of “one country, two systems” is that all of the critiques Fallows makes of freedom in China simply don’t apply to Hong Kong because we have a separate system. China’s spying on citizens and government control of media stops at the Shenzhen border – and is exactly where Hong Kong is legally and politically separate from “China.” Fallows knows this but is – very strangely – critiquing the mainland Chinese system as if that’s the political and legal system that Snowden fled to.
Worse, one gets the impression reading what he wrote that he’s saying that, at any moment, Beijing’s Standing Committee can snap their fingers and make facets (or the entirety?) of Hong Kong’s domestic system of freedoms disappear. That two systems become one. There’s really no evidence of anything like that ever having happened at any large scale* – though Hong Kong people are, perhaps correctly, fearful of this prospect and are on a constant guard against intrusions.
Where Fallows might be correct, but is being unhelpfully inarticulate, is that Beijing can snap its fingers and make or change policy on some issues. Specifically, Hong Kong stops being “two systems” and becomes “one country” in relation to foreign policy. If China goes to war with a country, Hong Kong goes to war with them too. So while Hong Kong does have relatively autonomous relations with the outside world, those relations can change “in a pinch” if they conflict with Beijing’s foreign policy.
And that’s the correct framing of an almost certain Snowden extradition request by the US government: it’s going to be a complex Hong Kong-China foreign policy issue, not an issue of freedom in Hong Kong.
Okay, I really don’t understand. Mike Bloomberg wants to regulate smoking and guns and soft drinks and you rail about how “the man just despises freedom.” Yet when the NSA is revealed to be invading communications records on a massive scale and says “trust us, we’re not actually listening to the content,” you’re content to stand by and yawn. Answer me this: Which is the more basic, existential threat to individual liberty: the right to smoke cancer sticks and buy a Big Gulp whenever and wherever, or the right to have some semblance of privacy when communicating with other people? A quick skim of the Constitution makes it pretty clear which of those would have attracted the interest of its authors.
More interesting to me than the much-publicized phone-metadata aspect of PRISM is the way it allows the NSA virtually unlimited access to anything you have done on the Internet. Gizmodo’s explanation of the program is terrifying:
When the NSA monitors phone records, it reportedly only collects the metadata therein. That includes to and from whom the calls were made, where the calls came from, and other generalized info. Importantly, as far as we know, the actual content of the calls was off-limits.
By contrast, PRISM apparently allows full access not just to the fact that an email or chat was sent, but also the contents of those emails and chats. According to the Washington Post’s source, they can “literally watch you as you type.” They could be doing it right now.
In any context other than this, a backdoor into your computer that allowed someone else to view this kind of data would be considered a computer virus, and the person doing it would most likely be a hacker interested in stealing your identity. The government regularly sends people to lengthy prison sentences for doing that. In the wake of the IRS scandal, which we are told was the work of a few rogue government employees, who’s to say that a few “overzealous” NSA employees aren’t reading things they’re not supposed to read?
Yes, today they tell us the content isn’t being viewed, but the key factor is that it CAN be viewed. At any time. And we wouldn’t know.
It seems foolhardy that we are supposed to just let that possibility sit out there and pray we don’t end up with another Nixon Administration willing to turn the nation’s intelligence apparatus against its own citizens for political gain.
I voted for President Obama, and I worked for his campaign. I had hoped that he would reverse the Bush Administration’s record on pushing the envelope towards much more government intrusion into private communications. I had hoped President Obama would realize that the government declaring its own citizens to be legitimate targets of incredibly broad surveillance power is one of the hallmarks of a banana republic. To see the president not only defend these programs, but viciously assail the people who have brought it out into the open for a little disinfecting sunlight, makes me incredibly sad. “Openness and transparency” has become a cover for the administration that is completely okay with giving itself the power to literally read my email with not the slightest fig leaf of due process of law.
If you still think Mike Bloomberg is the biggest threat to freedom around, you need help.
As I understand it – and one of the good things about the leak is that it helps us understand all this better – the feds would have to go to a FISA court to pursue any specific content of an email. Another reader:
Handing over custody of this information BEFORE anyone is suspected of being up to no good? How could you possibly believe it’s not been abused, Andrew? Wake up! Based on our history, we should assume there is a 100% chance some lackey with access to this database had some fun and made a map of some famous person’s whereabouts for no reason other than that he could. Then he found out some leading man in Hollywood frequents a gay club and chuckled. Of course he only told his fellow co-workers who also have clearance, so no harm no foul right? This is what happens in bureaucracies. And by definition the opportunity for abuse holds doubly so for a secret program.
So we leave this kind of information to private entities alone? As long as you’re clear about what you’re doing and will not complain about the government next time a Tsarnaev sets off a bomb, fine. Another lays out other scenarios:
The NSA data that was collected is basically a discrimination and blackmail nuclear bomb waiting to go off. With it you could determine if a closeted gay politician secretly called a gay lover or visited a gay porn website. You could determine if a judge or politician was having an affair by scrutinizing their credit card purchases and phone calls (with GPS coordinates). You could determine if a rival businessman was talking with competitors, giving you a business advantage. You could blackmail government employees in a way that makes the Valerie Plame affair look like child’s play. And you could track political enemies and determine the composition and funding of all opposing PACs. The DOJ could mine data to start criminal investigations even though people were under no suspicion of a crime.
The data is all there, which is why the NSA wanted it for terrorism first. Will it stop there? News reports indicate that it is being shared with the UK. But since there is now the infrastructure in most major technology companies to spy on their users, could this data somehow make its way to organized crime or China? If so, then the entire US political system could be blackmailed (the nuclear bomb that I mentioned).
This is not a joke. You need to take this seriously and ignore the half-assed responses by Obama.
Another sends the above video:
I’ve been reading your blog since 2003. This is the first email I have ever felt I needed to send to you. When you broke off from the Daily Beast and added a subscription service I joined on day one. But I believe your friendship with President Obama is clouding your judgment on the NSA whistleblower case.
You have yet to point out how disingenuous it is of the president to come forward after the fact to say he now welcomes this debate on privacy. Yet hasn’t his administration has done everything in its power to keep this information from the public? His prosecution of more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined is a pretty clear indication he doesn’t want transparency or accountability within the national security state. That in and of itself is a pretty damning story.
At the very least you could write about how this is a campaign promise broken by the president. The leak of NSA documents detailing an all encompassing database that organically builds profiles on every individual foreign and domestic is a fascinating story regardless of what side you come down on. I suspect you keep saying you are “not surprised” and “underwhelmed” so that you can ignore this story as much as possible as it develops. I really hope I am wrong.
The size and scope of the security state should be of real concern. This is not the first topic I have disagreed with you on but I will say it is the first time I have ever seen you handle something disingenuously. Never would you have given Bush so much rope.
Edward Snowden just threw his life away so that this information could be made public. It deserves a fair hearing. I think Obama 2007 would agree. And that to me is what it comes down to, Obama ran on transparency and on limiting these powers. That he changed his mind once he got into office isn’t the problem. The problem is that he kept that change of heart from the public. He violated our trust whem he continued to promote his administration as one championing transparency, accountability and the rule of law.
I did give Bush the same amount of rope – although obviously these technologies have accelerated and intensified since then. And I do believe that this program should be debated. But no, I don’t think it’s somehow a grotesque betrayal that a president actually has to weigh the balance between national security and non-surveillance and is not always completely on the side of non-surveillance. Sometimes you begin to think that the critics have no idea what it is to take charge of and shift a massive security bureaucracy toward a calmer, saner place after the over-reach after 9/11. I think I have some idea. You can’t just wipe the slate clean. It takes time. Some programs endure; others rightly wither. And of all the things Obama inherited from Bush in the national security infrastructure, analyzing haystacks for needles seems to me one of the least objectionable.
But as I said, I can live without it. I just think those who want it gone need to address the potential trade-off in security it might entail – and argue that it’s worth it.
Conor Friedersdorf posts this chart, and shifts the debate to what seems to me more productive ground. The great opportunity of this moment is to start a debate about how we tackle terrorism as 9/11 gets more distant in the rear-side mirror, as we absorb the fact that the last decade has been far more terror-free than the decade before 9/11, when many of us thought we were living in an elysian fin de siecle. Now may be the moment, in other words, to examine the entire premise of Imaginationland.
Conor argues that “Americans would never welcome a secret surveillance state to reduce diabetes deaths, or gun deaths, or drunk driving deaths by 3,000 per year.” Barro hopes the NSA story will increase pushback against the post-9/11 mindset:
We don’t think about other social ills this way. Nobody says we should have a goal of zero heart disease deaths or zero auto accident deaths, because that would be nuts. We balance the objective of saving lives against other considerations, like cost and individual rights and the fact that bacon is delicious. We should apply this cost-benefit approach to terrorism too. This approach would allow us to say that the phone records dragnet can be a bad idea even if it saves lives. But the big resistance to that analysis doesn’t come from Congress; it comes from the American public.
And the trouble is: you wouldn’t know that from Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian or the NYT editorial board, would you? And yet this is the core issue. Without public support, this war cannot be unwound. Matt Steinglass compares the War on Terror to the Vietnam War:
[C]onventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that’s not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy. The chief threat it poses is not to the lives of American citizens but to the direction of American policy and the electoral prospects of American politicians. A major strike in America by a jihadist terrorist group in 2012 would have done little damage to America, but it could have posed a serious problem for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It’s no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack.
If this contretemps prompts an actual discussion about whether we now need any sort of serious counter-terrorism policy (and anything serious would include searching huge databases for patterns), great. So lets have that debate. Are we now safe enough to end these programs? Are we finally saying we’d be fine with a terror attack that could have been foiled earlier because we prefer that only private businesses collect this kind of Big Data? Are we prepared to back a president who puts liberty before security – especially in the wake of a mass casualty event?
I think Conor has put his finger on the core issue here.
The trouble is that the only way to find out empirically whether the threat is massively over-stated is to reveal intelligence that perforce has to be secret. There is a genuine trap here. But it could be one in which the administration offers some serious answers. Instead of being entirely reactive, the president should make the case for the necessity of this system, and give us the actual trade-offs involved. I’m for transparency in most things; but I’m not so utopian as to believe that our society can function without some government – and personal and corporate – secrecy.
So instead of polarizing on this, lets debate it. Is Jihadist terrorism an overblown threat? If it is, unwind the apparatus slowly. If it isn’t, is this program better or worse than the practical alternatives? If we are not to occupy foreign countries (dumb) or torture prisoners (dumb and evil) or take out Jihadists by drones (increasingly counter-productive), isn’t mass data gathering about as anodyne a remedy for this ill as you can find?
Fallows isn’t the only one to wonder why Snowden sought refuge in Hong Kong (the young contractor explains his choice above):
Hong Kong is not a sovereign country. It is part of China — a country that by the libertarian standards Edward Snowden says he cares about is worse, not better, than the United States. China has even more surveillance of its citizens (it has gone very far toward ensuring that it knows the real identity of everyone using the internet); its press is thoroughly government-controlled; it has no legal theory of protection for free speech; and it doesn’t even have national elections. Hong Kong lives a time-limited separate existence, under the “one country, two systems” principle, but in a pinch, it is part of China.
I don’t know all the choices Snowden had about his place of refuge. Maybe he thought this was his only real option. But if Snowden thinks, as some of his comments seem to suggest, that he has found a bastion of freer speech, then he is ill-informed; and if he knowingly chose to make his case from China he is playing a more complicated game.
I have to say that Snowden’s apparent dumbness in picking Hong Kong surprised me. Does he not have access to the web? Did he really believe he’d be safe there? Alex Seitz-Wald studies Snowden’s present options:
There are plenty of other countries that have arguably better records on freedom of speech than Hong Kong, and some that might resist extradition. Iceland, which has been favorable to Wikileaks, comes to mind and, indeed, a member of country’s parliament who worked closely with Jullian Assange has already offered assistance to Snowden. But the country’s ambassador in Bejing told the South China Morning Post that under law, a person has to be in Iceland to apply for asylum.
Snowden told The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that he does not plan to defect to mainlind China, but that would be an obvious option. The PRC has no extradition treaty with the U.S. and his cryptographic and intelligence knowledge could be hugely valuable to Beijing in its ongoing cyberwar with the U.S. Hong Kong is just a short ferry ride from the mainland and it would probably be easier for Snowden to slip out via boat than through the international airport.
Osnos doubts the Chinese authorities will leave him alone:
It is doubtful that Beijing sees a net advantage in holding on to Snowden as a bargaining chip. Neither side likes exogenous ingredients in complex diplomacy. When the persecuted blind laywer Chen Guangcheng sought refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, in 2012, it caused nearly as much agitation among American officials as did it among their Chinese counterparts. Xi Jinping has just returned to Beijing from a summit with President Obama, in which both sides sought to downplay differences and emphasize an attempt to accommodate each other’s interests, up to a point. Beijing spends much of its time trying to persuade other governments to send back former or current government officials who have fled abroad.
Without my making any judgment on the virtues of Snowden’s actions, the U.S. government perceives him in much the same light that the Chinese government perceives its cadres who flee abroad in order to publicize wrongdoing or to escape debts or prosecution for corruption. The Chinese state media frequently describes diplomatic efforts to “pave the way for the return of hundreds of government officials wanted for graft” and it has crowed about gaining greater coöperation from the United States.
Josh Marshall spotlights a TPM reader based in Hong Kong who agrees:
There is no political upside for Beijing in allowing Snowden to stay here. They would see him as an incitement to human rights defenders and whistleblowers, a foreign troublemaker who would prompt awkward questions from Chinese citizens about their own heavy domestic surveillance. Barring a scenario in which Snowden escapes Hong Kong and somehow makes his way to, say, Ecuador, I expect the Communist Party will allow the extradition court case to run its course through the Hong Kong legal system and declare that it demonstrated once more the matchlessly smooth workings of ‘one country-two systems’. Diplomatically it can win some brownie points with the Americans.
Research suggests that the feeling of taking joy in someone else’s misfortune appears in children as young as four:
[Researcher] Katrin Schulz and her colleagues presented simple picture stories to 100 children aged four to eight years (52 girls). The stories involved a child performing a good or bad deed – such as a girl climbing a tree to collect plums for her little brother, or climbing the tree so as to throw plums at her little brother – and then experiencing a misfortune, in this case falling from the tree and hurting herself.
The kids of all ages showed evidence of schadenfreude, suggesting their emotional response to another person’s distress was influenced by their moral judgements about that person. That is, they were more likely to say they were pleased and that it was funny if the story character experienced a misfortune while engaging in a bad deed. They were also less likely to say they’d help a bad character. These effects were strongest for the children aged over 7. And it was only for this age group that intensity of schadenfreude mediated the link between a character’s good or bad moral behaviour and the participants’ willingness to help.
If you prefer your children sweet and kind, you can take solace in the fact that while they did find schadenfreude in these kids, the levels were far lower than you might see in adults.
Update from a reader with a great little story:
When my twin sons were eight months old, one could crawl and the other could not. Both were on the floor with a number of toys surrounding them. My crawler (Milo) was playing with a rattle; his brother (John) watched him closely.
Milo dropped the rattle within reaching distance of John and scooted to a corner of the room to get a new toy. John picked up the rattle, examined it, and then began shaking it. Upon hearing the sound, Milo whipped his head around, then turned his whole body, raced over to John, and ripped the rattle out of his hand.
As John looked on both helplessly and indignantly (but, interestingly, he did not cry), Milo began shaking the rattle vigorously. Milo shook it so hard that almost immediately he whacked himself in the head and burst into tears, dropping the rattle. To John, it was as if the skies had opened up and a choir of angels had begun to sing. I have never seen a look of joy as ultimately pure as the look on John’s face as his brother cried. He didn’t even remember the rattle was there. It was in easy reaching distance. He just grinned a giant grin as he enjoyed the show of his brother wailing.
So I believe I can categorically state, at least for some children, they feel schadenfreude as young as 8 months. Do they know what it is? Probably not. (Then again, they don’t understand that you shouldn’t eat your own poop.) However, I think it’s a safe bet that it is ingrained in us from a very early age.
John Brownlee traces the ubiquitous @ symbol from its obscure beginnings:
Ever since the 1500s, and for hundreds of years after, the only people who used @ were bookkeepers, who used it as a shorthand to show how much they were selling or buying goods for: for example, “3 bottles of wine @ $10 each.”
Since these bookkeepers used @ to deal with money, a certain degree of whimsical fondness for the character developed over time.
In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”; the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.
Even with such cute names to recommend it, though, @ languished in obscurity for three and a half centuries, only ending up on a new invention called the typewriter when salesmen realized that accountants and bookkeepers were buying them in droves. In 1971, however, a keyboard with a vestigial @ symbol inherited from its typewriter ancestors found itself hooked up to an ARPANET terminal manned by Ray Tomlinson, who was working on a little program he’d come up with in his goofing-off time to send messages from computer to computer. Tomlinson ended up using the @ symbol as the fulcrum of the lever that ultimately ended up lifting the world into the digital age: email.
Previous Dish on the origins of Internet symbols here.
(Image: Evidence of the usage of @ to signify French “à” (meaning “at”) from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish lower court and magistrate, via Wikimedia Commons)
Scott L. Montgomery, author of Does Science Need a Global Language?, believes that English has become the mother tongue of science. In an interview, he argues that a global tongue makes scientific communication more efficient and also “opens up the potential for participation in the scientific enterprise to the greater span of humanity”:
Q: You argue that English should be “fully integrated into the science curriculum.” What would that entail?
A: It would entail treating English as a core subject of scientific training for non-native speakers. It would also mean unburdening English of any necessary association with a specific country or set of countries, so it could be handled as a normal and necessary skill, like mathematics. This is already done in a number of countries, like the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, and Switzerland. All of these have succeeded in teaching their scientists to use English and to publish at the international level. What their success shows, however, is that a significant amount of investment has to be made here — good teacher training, student motivation, adequate classroom facilities, good instructional content, are needed. There is no way all of this can be done overnight, especially in developing nations, where resources are lacking. It took Finland over two-and-a-half decades to put everything in place. But if scientific work is to become truly global, something like this has to happen. Otherwise, in many countries, scientists will only ever emerge from the rich elite — something we all hope the world has largely left behind.
Montgomery considers the potential disadvantages for native speakers:
Q: Why do you say that “the real casualty from the global spread of English may well be the native speaker himself”?
A: Because the rest of the scientific world will be multilingual and will have access to scientific material in at least two — but often three or more — languages. The native speaker, feeling encouraged to resist the learning of other tongues (everyone wants to learn his language, after all), will be without this capability. Put differently, the rest of the world will have access to everything s/he does, but s/he will have access to little or nothing beyond the edges of his own tongue.
Mark Vanhoenacker argues that philosophy’s profile could use some raising, especially considering how thought experiments are so well-suited to our times:
Thought experiments (TXes TM, we’ll brand them) are the perfect philosophical consumer product for our age. The high they produce—a gratifying puzzlement, a perfectly framed issue, an “A-ha!” moment of insight into you and your society’s intuitions and contradictions—is quick and addictive. TXes are accessible and democratic, often by design. They strip out extraneous details and walk the user straight to the heart of a complicated issue. They’re much more democratic than science: By definition they don’t require a lab, special equipment, or any pesky numeracy skills. They’re easily remembered and shared (many fit into 140 characters). They’re fun on your own but wouldn’t be out of place at those dinner parties, either.
So how should we reintroduce philosophy to the masses?
Philosophy needs a slogan.
If I say “The Other White Meat,” “The Fabric of Our Lives,” or “Good to the Last Drop,” you know just what I’m eating, wearing, or brewing. When I lived in the United Kingdom, I was fond of the “Nobody Forgets a Good Teacher” campaign. “Philosophy matters” isn’t a bad slogan. Or “Philosophy? That’s a Good Question.” … Once philosophy has a logo and a slogan, it needs a campaign. One option would be to put some controversial thought experiments onto posters. E.g., using [a] gun control TX:
What’s the difference between supporting gun control and taking the gun out of the hand of a gun owner at the very moment he or she comes face-to-face with a home intruder?
Philosophy. The best answers come from the best questions.
The Dish 
