Are YOU a Snowden supporter? Then YOU are BETRAYING your COUNTRY by helping Putin.

At any other time this nonsense wouldn't get out the gate. But fear and uncertainty in official Washington and London about the revelations in Glenn Greenwald's forthcoming book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State (release date April 29), is emboldening the kind of people who like to whip up a lynch mob.
  
What started out as a straightforward insinuation that Ed Snowden is a Russian spy has in recent days been worked into a fantastic embroidery on the Ukraine-Russia situation that targets Snowden's supporters as much as Snowden.

One of the embroiderers is House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers. Yet topping even his insinuations, which he voiced most recently on Meet the Press this Sunday, are ones fielded by John R. Schindler and Joshua Foust. These two Americans, with connections in the U.S. intelligence community, were among the earliest critics of Snowden to publicly accuse him of being involved with Russia's intelligence apparatus.
    
Now, however, Snowden is not simply involved, he's the mastermind behind Washington's failure to anticipate Russia's actions in Crimea.  At any other time the insinuation would be laughable, but there's nothing funny about the lynch mob mentality.  Guilt is determined according to a logic that can't be challenged because it's a logic that can only be perceived by special sight. Truth is no defense against that logic.  Facts are of no consequence. Reason is bound and gagged and dragged to the nearest tree.
 
So it would be useless to point out to Foust and Schindler that according to their logic the Boston Marathon Bombers and al Qaeda gang that brought down the World Trade Center had a miraculous ability to evade the National Security Agency's All Seeing Eye.

It would also be useless to mention that even Snowden critic Geoffrey R. Stone, after he served on the President's independent panel to investigate NSA, reported that there was no evidence the NSA had ever stopped as much as one terrorist plot. 
 
Nonetheless, the special sight possessed by Foust and Schindler tells them that Russia's government must have had help from Ed Snowden -- or gotten hold of his NSA files -- because it eluded the All Seeing Eye in its moves in Crimea. 

SINCE WHEN has the government of the United States of America NOT been caught flat-footed by events in parts of the world it understands not at all?  Reference Benghazi and the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt for two recent examples of how well the All Seeing Eye works. There was General al-Sisi snapping at the Washington Post: You Americans betrayed us. If Sisi only knew: Washington was still trying to fathom what was happening after the putsch was over and done with.

Gee, maybe Egypt's generals got help from Snowden in surprising Washington. 

All right, Pundita, you've made your point; give it a rest.  I can only hope that the release of Greenwald's book will tamp down the worst of the situation so everyone living in fear of what's in the book can finally see where the ax has fallen.  Then maybe the lynch mob types will crawl back under their rock.

Here's a March 24 article at the Business Insider that details the special sight of Schindler and Foust:   Russia's New Ability To Evade NSA Surveillance Is Either A Crazy Coincidence Or Something Much Worse.

The link posted above about Mike Rogers is to a March 24 post by Kevin Gosztola at Firedoglake. He patiently dismantles Rogers' latest insinuations.

The insinuations are remarkably similar to those penned by a British citizen named Edward Lucas, who spent many years as a foreign 'correspondent' in the Soviet Union, and who's involved with a European policy think tank here in Washington.  See The Silliest Snowden Theory Yet at Mother Jones (February 28) for a sendup of Lucas' effort to connect nonexistent dots.

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A very brief reply to Lawfare's very brief reply to Glenn Greenwald

"Greenwald may regard as jingoistic the distinction the [U.S.] law makes between [information] collection against U.S. persons and collection overseas, but it is the law [to allow the latter]. And I would challenge him to find a single example of a country that applies the same privacy rules to espionage in foreign adversary countries as it does to its own people -- other than countries whose privacy rules are not to have any."
-- Benjamin Wittes; Lawfare; March 23

1.  Since when was every country other than 4 British Commonwealth ones a "foreign adversary" of the United States of America?

2. Since when did U.S. law find no difference between intelligence gathering and clandestine warfare?
 
(The NSA documents published by the New York Times and Der Spiegel about U.S. hacking operations against Huawei mention that if the U.S. President orders, NSA can launch offensive operations against the company; that is, cyberwar.)

Back to the law books, Mr Wittes. 

See Wittes' March 23 post A Very Brief Reply to Glenn Greenwald for more details on Greenwald's argument and Wittes' reply.  By the way Lawfare is an American blog about national security law and policy but Benjamin Wittes is not simply a blogger.  He is "editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books and a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law."

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Is it practical for governments to attempt to ban cyberwarfare?

Lawfare's Matthew Waxman's recent discussion focused on the need for governments to work out international norms for their deployment of weaponized cyber tactics. (See previous Pundita post.)  But would it be practical or even possible to instead work directly for an international ban on cyberwarfare?
 
Yes, said the Glittering Eye's Dave Schuler. Written in the wake of published revelations about the unintended consequences of the Stuxnet virus, Dave's arguments still hold up and are the most cogent I've read on the topic.  His arguments have taken on even greater urgency since the "Snowden files" started to be released to the public.
 
Here I'm going to skip quotes about the Stuxnet virus that Dave used to preface his discussion and go straight to his discussion:

Why Cyberwarfare Should Be Banned
by Dave Schuler
November 10, 2012
The Glittering Eye

We should get behind an international accord to ban cyberwarfare that has some teeth behind it and insist that we, our allies, clients, and trading partners sign it and abide by it. The reason is simple. Weapons like the Stuxnet virus are more like chemical or bacteriological weapons than they are like guns, warplanes, or aircraft carriers. Once they’ve been released, the deployer has little control over where they go and what they infect. We just have too much to lose.

But there’s another reason, too. States have enormous resources. Over the period of the last 30 years malware in various forms has gone from being an occasional nuisance to a deadly threat that costs the world economy hundreds of billions of dollars in prevention tools, maintenance and administration, downtime, bandwidth costs, storage costs, data loss, etc. That’s what’s been accomplished by individuals working, basically, in their basements.

When a computer virus is released into “the wild”, it becomes visible to anyone who comes across it who has the knowledge and ability to investigate it. It can be reverse engineered, replicated, and even enhanced. Putting the enormous resources of states behind the development of such things, releasing them into the wild, and making the results of all of that R&D available to the hacker world is beyond irresponsible. It’s dangerous. And, as I said before, we just have too much to lose.

To a remark in the GE comment section that a ban wouldn't be enforceable, Dave replied:

So are bans on chemical and bacteriological weapons. We have them anyway. Similar to other law, such bans have a number of purposes. They serve as a warning. They may deter someone from deploying such weapons. They are a statement of intent.

And, if as I believe we shouldn’t be using them anyway, we might as well get an international agreement banning their use into place.

See the GE comment section for more discussion of Dave's arguments and his replies.

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Incoming NSA Director Understands Cyberwar Deterrence Value of Ed Snowden's Revelations

"The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret."
-- Dr Strangelove to the Russian Ambassador

"Admiral Rogers also suggests in his written answers that the Snowden disclosures might inadvertently contribute to American deterrence of cyber-attacks by revealing U.S. defensive and retaliatory capabilities in this area.  In fact, his brief allusion to international norms comes in his answer to a question about how to strengthen deterrence."
-- Matthew Waxman

My profound thanks to Matthew Waxman at Lawfare for reporting on this development and for his analysis. Given the critical nature of the discussion I'm reposting the entire analysis here, but without the links.  See the post at the Lawfare site for links to Waxman's earlier discussions on the downsides of keeping cyberwar capabilities secret, links to Admiral Rogers' written answers, Harold Koh's discussion, etc.:
 
Snowden Disclosures and Norms of Cyber-AttacksBy Matthew Waxman
Thursday, March 20, 2014 at 11:00 AM

Secrecy -- of the sort that typically shrouds cyber-defense and cyber-attack capabilities and doctrine -- complicates the development of international norms.  Secrecy makes it difficult to engage in sustained diplomacy about rules.  Officials can talk about them at high levels of generality, but can’t get very specific, and it’s therefore hard to reach agreement.  Secrecy makes it difficult to verify commitments or demonstrate compliance.  Perceived distance between mere words and true actions may be large amid high degrees of secrecy.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve argued that intense secrecy around states’ cyber-capabilities will slow the development and clarification of international law governing cyber-attacks or responses to them.  I’ve also argued that because the United States “occupies a position of advantage on offensive cyber capabilities, it should seize the opportunity to lay out a set of rules for itself and others.”
 
Notwithstanding some important statements on this topic, such as then-State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh’s remarks on applicability of self-defense rules and law of armed conflict to cyber-attacks, to do this the United States would need to resist its usual tendency to over-value secrecy at the expense of shaping international norms.

I was therefore struck by one of the written answers provided by NSA Director-nominee Admiral Michael Rogers to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"I believe the recent disclosures of a large portion of our intelligence and military operational history may provide us with opportunity to engage both the American public and our international partners in discussion of the balance of offense and defense, the nature of cyber warfare, norms of accepted and unacceptable behavior in cyberspace, and so forth."

This seems to refer to the Snowden disclosures, but it’s not clear what he has in mind with regard to norms.
The U.S. government talks a lot about norms as part of its overall cyber strategy, but with few exceptions (like the Koh remarks) it hasn’t been forthcoming about what norms it wants to advance.  Maybe this is because it prefers to work this very quietly through private diplomacy, but I suspect that it’s at least partly because the U.S. government hasn’t yet decided what rules it wants with regard to; for example, penetrating other states’ networks or distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate targets.

The Snowden disclosures could prompt more open and specific international legal discussion about offensive and defensive cyber practices, and it could prompt the U.S. government to clarify its legal positions or decide which ones are worth defending vigorously.  This has occurred to some extent with respect to revealed surveillance of individuals and the public (at home and abroad), but we don’t yet know much about what might yet be revealed about cyber-attacks.

It’s especially interesting that Admiral Rogers talks about Snowden revelations and their impact on norm development in positive, optimistic terms, because the general mood so far has been that the disclosures are damaging to American efforts on cyber norms. 

For example, disclosures of major U.S. internet surveillance programs, including penetration of the internet backbone, undermines the credibility of American commitment to protecting an open, global web.  Disclosures of U.S. government spying on foreign companies like Brazil’s Petrobras has clouded American efforts to distinguish “legitimate” espionage from illegitimate commercial espionage.  But Rogers talks about all this as an “opportunity” to advance the U.S. agenda on norms.  He may be right, but it will require a concerted, proactive campaign rather than scrambling to respond to specific leaks.

As a related aside, secrecy of capabilities complicates deterrence (see Dr. Strangelove).  Admiral Rogers also suggests in his written answers that the Snowden disclosures might inadvertently contribute to American deterrence of cyber-attacks by revealing U.S. defensive and retaliatory capabilities in this area.  In fact, his brief allusion to international norms comes in his answer to a question about how to strengthen deterrence.
[END]
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The Two Forces

Two major formative forces in the United States:  the earliest one, which arose from the nomadic 'native' American hunting tribes, then Puritan immigrants and pioneer - homesteaders.  The other force arose from waves of immigrants from agrarian European societies ruled for centuries by monarchs and marked by peasant uprisings.

(It can argued there's a third force in the American southwest, a confluence of Spanish culture and Mayan/Incan ones, but these are surprisingly similar in that they too were in the agrarian - monarchist - peasant model.)
 
The earliest force created the Do It Yourself mindset.  The later one created the Looking for Mr Good King mindset.

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Ripped from the pages of the Ed Snowden Dossier: The Nazification of American Liberalism

Somewhere in a Remote, Wild Place

Why there? Because these stories always happen in such places. And there must have been a trusty Native bearer -- why, because there's always a trusty Native bearer in the story; in this case probably a graduate student or untenured professor who after the requisite number of prostrations said something like, 'Effendi, not a good idea to bungee jump from this height without a bungee cord.  Especially not a good idea when heathen Trotskyists challenge you to jump into their lands.'

Any such advice would have been wise to follow. But to call him a Brown Shirt -- he of all people!  Did he not have Liberal credentials piled high over a span of decades?  Did not readers at Huffington Post, the New York Times and Washington Post seek his guidance on the way a Liberal should think about legal matters?  And had he not already distinguished himself as a critic of the NSA? 

He'd made a simple, straightforward point: you couldn't let private citizens play vigilante and turn the public forum into a kangaroo court to put a government agency on trial. The point held even if any of the NSA surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden turned out to be illegal. So to make a mountain of this molehill -- the American Trotskyists were never tightly wrapped to begin with. The calendar was always 1932.  A Stalinist lurked under every bed in America and a Nazi in every closet, ready to spring on the clueless American voter.

And it wasn't as if he'd be landing in the jungles of Borneo. What were they going to do?  Put on war paint and shoot copies of Das Kapital at him?  Besides, he was from Chicago and in Chicago there are rules.  First rule: Never back down from a fight.

And so on June 19, 2013, Geoffrey R. Stone, constitutional law scholar, Dean Emeritus and Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, broke into a run, yelled "Geronimo!" and jumped into the land of the heathen Trotskyists. 
 
Earlier

On June 14, 2013, from a bunker at the World Socialist Web Site, American Trotskyists David North and Eric London launched a fusillade at the American Liberal establishment. They took special aim at arguments that Liberal commentators on legal matters, attorney Jeffrey Toobin and law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, had put forward in the attempt to discredit Edward Snowden's rationale for making classified documents public. 

Toobin, however, was a mere pundit who held forth at CNN and The New Yorker.  North and London saved their heavy ordnance for Professor Stone and the narrative he constructed on June 10 -- the day after Snowden had been introduced to the public -- to help the politically liberal Huffington Post's readers understand Snowden's actions.  He expanded on the narrative during a June 12 debate at Democracy Now!

The gist was that Snowden, in acting on his own against the legally elected and appointed government of the United States, was nothing more than a criminal who'd defied the will of the American people. 

North and London's response was almost completely free of Trotskyist cant if you don't count the last part about the rich and privileged; they were addressing the widest possible audience.

In plain language they charged that Stone's narrative conflated the principles upholding the American republic with its governing apparatus.
 
For good measure they fired off quotes from a history of the Nazi regime to get across that the narrative was evocative of the regime's concept of justice and rationale for punishing German civil servants whose actions contradicted the Führer's wishes. 

And they cited earlier statements by Stone to back their claim that in condemning Snowden's actions he'd reversed his position:

Just a decade ago, in 2004, Professor Stone wrote a book entitled Perilous Times: Free Speech in War Time from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terror. This work provided a historical account of wartime attacks on democratic rights by American governments. Discussing his book in a television interview, Stone reviewed the impact of the 1798 Sedition Act and warned:

“One of the important lessons is that if American citizens want to have the freedoms that are guaranteed to them, they cannot sit back passively and allow elected officials and judges to protect their rights for them. It’s very important for the American people to recognize that if they want their freedoms -- want their liberties -- they have to take responsibility for preserving them in these times.” The interview can be viewed here.

Professor Stone is singing a very different tune today. Precisely because Snowden did not “sit back passively” but instead took responsibility for the defense of democratic rights, Stone declares that he “is most certainly a criminal who deserves serious punishment.”

The essence of Stone’s argument is that Snowden, having accepted government employment, forfeited all right, let alone responsibility, to expose illegal actions by the government. The argument is based on authoritarian premises that are not fundamentally different from those that prevailed in Nazi Germany.

As German historian Ingo Müller wrote in Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, the Nazi Supreme Court “defined the ‘legal nature’ of the civil service as ‘loyalty, obedience, and conscientious performance of duty’ and had referred to civil servants as ‘the political troops of the Führer in the area of administration.’” [p. 83]

Stone advances a concept of employee discipline that closely resembles the Nazi ethos. In a passage that exposes Stone’s repudiation of essential democratic principles, he writes:

“But what if the employee decides, in his own wisdom, that some classified information doesn't need to be classified or that it would be good for the public to know the classified information? Should the employee be allowed to make that judgment? Merely to state the question is to answer it. There is no reason on earth why an individual government employee should have the authority, on his own say so, to override the judgment of the elected representatives of the American people and to decide for the nation that classified information should be disclosed to friends and enemies alike. Such an act is a complete usurpation of the rule of law."

This is an astonishing declaration! “No reason on earth?" In other words, an employee of the state must keep his mouth shut and refrain from exposing criminal activity no matter how injurious it may be to the rights of the American people. “No reason on earth!"  What if a civil servant uncovers a secret memorandum authorizing the assassination of a citizen? Or plans for the mass incarceration of political dissidents?
[...]
Drawing his tirade to a conclusion, Stone declaims that Ed Snowden had no right to decide that he knew “better than anyone else in government how best to serve the national interest.”

Once again, Stone advances an argument that conforms entirely with the legal principles of the Third Reich, which insisted on the subordination of the individual to the Führer.

Müller recounts the official denunciation by the Nazi court of a civil servant who counterposed his individual sentiments to the will of the state. In words that are in spirit eerily similar to those of Stone, the fascist authorities denounced the hapless civil servant for holding “notions about his freedom, according to the crassest form of the liberalist view … Freedom to him means the authority to refuse to carry out all duties not explicitly prescribed by the law, as he himself sees fit.” [p. 84]
[...]

Eric London sent Stone a copy of their response, which WSWS had titled in understated manner, Liberal advocates of a police state turn savagely against Edward Snowden, with an invitation to respond at WSWS.  

Stone had to know that David North wasn't any old Trotskyist and WSWS wasn't any old socialist publication.  Decades ago in the United States the Democratic Party and Liberal media had politely herded the Trotskyists onto a reservation where they could yammer about the true socialist doctrine without embarrassing the Party. While the reservation had no set geographic location its borders were a total blackout in the American mainstream media.
 
But since the financial crash younger Liberals had been traipsing to the reservation, seeking counsel and solace from Trotskyist chiefs.  Even Glenn Greenwald started showing up at the sweat lodge.

North was a chief.  A hardened veteran of the long, world-spanning cold war between Stalinists and Trotskyists, he was the author of a number of books on socialism, and according to Wikipedia, "the principal political and theoretical leader of the International Committee of the Fourth International during the organization's split with the Workers Revolutionary Party."  He was also the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, the publication arm of the ICFI.  The internet era had come to the reservation. WSWS was the most widely read socialist website in the world. 
         
For all these reasons the North-London writing hadn't languished in the backwaters of Google's search engine. It had been on the front page of Google News for many hours.  

In short, Stone knew he'd been called out before a large audience. Again, caution would have been the better part of wisdom under the circumstance.
      
Back in the Remote, Wild Land

Geoffrey Stone refused to modify his position.  After a dismissive greeting to Eric London ("Thanks for sharing.") and an admonishment that grownups must not see things in black and white ("What you seem not to understand is that situations are different and not everything is or should be on one side of the line or the other."), he reiterated his June 10 lecture to Huffpo readers.  As to the accusation that he'd reversed himself, which were North and London gonna believe, him or their lying ears?:

Everything I’ve said about Snowden is perfectly consistent with everything I’ve ever said on this subject.

Although I think we need a healthy distrust of our public officials, I also oppose the arrogance of a single, unelected individual who takes it upon himself, with no lawful authority or justification, to disclose properly classified information to persons unauthorized to receive it just because HE thinks the information shouldn’t be classified.

The plain and simple fact is that Snowden betrayed the rule of law and the trust of the American people when he decided, without any legal authority, to disregard the judgments of the executive branch, the Congress and the judiciary in a way that put the security of the nation at risk. Even if what he did has beneficial consequences, he had no legal or moral right to do it. He is a criminal

Professor Stone's jump landed him in one piece. He looked around.  North and London were nowhere in sight.  Probably hiding in a cave on the rez.  He waved up to the Native bearer, who suddenly covered his eyes.

Then he noticed an odd trembling in the ground under his feet and a strange sound: thoom. thoom.  The sound was coming from the direction of what looked like an opening to a large cave. It was a sound not unlike the sound in Jurassic Park after the green Jell-O starts quivering.
 
The sound got closer. THOOM. And closer. THOOM.

Happily for Professor Stone what emerged from the cave was not a Tyrannosaurus Rex but it was the legal correspondent for the World Socialist Web Site.

Meet Tom Carter

Published by WSWS on July 8 under the title, A Letter from Geoffrey R. Stone, Liberal Advocate of a Police State, Tom Carter's response was a five-part analysis of Stone's June 19 letter.  As with North and Carter he was sparing in his use of the Trotskyist cudgel.  He launched by addressing Stone's concept of the rule of law:

[...]
Despite being written by an American law professor, Professor Stone’s letter consists of conceptions that are utterly alien to the democratic legal tradition of the United States.

Reiterating his previous statements, Professor Stone announces that it is contrary to the “rule of law” for a “single, unelected individual” to take it upon himself “to disclose properly classified information to persons unauthorized to receive it.” In the context of Snowden's revelations, this formulation inverts the “rule of law,” turning it upside down and transforming it into its opposite.

For Professor Stone, the “rule of law” becomes the duty of unquestioning obedience to superiors.

This is not what the “rule of law” means. As Thomas Paine wrote in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense (1776), “in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

The “rule of law” means that the acts of every person, up to and including the highest public official, are beneath the law. The Constitution provides that even the “President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States” may be impeached for violating the law. This is the essence of the phrase, “a government of laws not of men.”

In other words, the “rule of law” means that public officials who engage in illegal conduct run the risk of having their behavior exposed, their orders disregarded, and their official powers terminated.

If a citizen is ordered by a public official to participate in illegal conduct, then the “rule of law” does not mean that citizen should obey the order without question. On the contrary, the “rule of law” means that going along with the illegal conduct of one’s superiors, even when ordered to do so, may itself be illegal.

In American history, this principle found perhaps its fullest expression in the arguments of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, which took place from November 1945 to October 1946.

The Nazi defendants famously asserted that they were merely “following orders,” and that they did not have any legal or moral right to question the orders they were given or to refuse to carry them out. Rejecting these arguments with contempt, Justice Jackson declared that modern civilization “cannot tolerate so vast an area of legal irresponsibility.”

Nuremberg Principle IV reads, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility. .. provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Professor Stone’s phrases such as “no lawful authority” and “properly classified information” simply beg the question. Can a criminal conspiracy to violate the fundamental rights of hundreds of millions of innocent people be “properly” classified, or “lawfully” kept secret?

Professor Stone’s letter does not actually address the substance of Snowden’s revelations. Nor could it. Edward Snowden brought to light what is perhaps the most spectacular breakdown of the “rule of law” in American history. The pervasive illegal spying on Americans revealed by Snowden makes the criminal conduct of figures such as Richard Nixon seem petty and trivial by comparison.
[...]
The words Justice Jackson used to describe the hypocritical posturing of the Nuremberg defendants applies in full force to Snowden’s persecutors. These men, Jackson declared, “are surprised that there is any such thing as law. These defendants did not rely on any law at all. Their program ignored and defied all law. ... International Law, natural law, German law, any law at all, was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do.”

Then, drawing on a variety of American historical incidents, Tom Carter continued to demonstrate that Snowden not only had a right but also a duty as an American to reveal secret government actions that were given a veneer of legality only by abrogating principles on which the U.S. republic stood.

Last Whistlestop

By the time he wound up the civics lesson nothing was left of the Liberal position that Stone represented except rubble.  The only comparable analogy in American history is the televised dynamiting on April 17, 1972 at 3:32 PM of the second building in the Pruitt-Ingo public housing complex. As the completely unlivable structure collapsed into rubble it brought down with it the modernist era in architecture and social engineering

But this isn't a discussion about bad urban planning. David North and Eric London had set the charges and Tom Carter had pushed the plunger on an era in the United States when political Liberalism was considered the bulwark against tyranny. 

Trouble is, they'd managed the demolition only when the train of U.S. government was hurtling toward a depot where the calendar on the wall read 1932.

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How Ed Snowden and his, er, agents are revitalizing American institutions on the front line of guarding the U.S. republic against becoming a tyranny

"What was Edward Snowden supposed to do, call up the Senate Intelligence Committee and say, 'Hi, I'm a 29-year-old contractor who works in Hawaii, and I'm calling to report to you about the programs that you have approved in secret?' "

It was the NSA Inspector General who referred to them last month as "agents."  These being the fast-growing number of journalists, newspaper editors, attorneys, legislators and IT professionals who've joined Ed Snowden in working to halt a police state in its tracks.
    
The following excerpts are from the must-read interview of Ed Snowden's ACLU legal advisor, Ben Wizner, Director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. The interview was conducted by Michael Winship, Senior Writer at Moyers & Company.  I am not a Bill Moyers fan but my hat's off to his organization for the interview and the great questions Winship posed.  However, I've taken the passages from Truth-Out's posting of the interview, which is where I learned about it.
  
The interview covers several topics; here I'm highlighting only Wizner's summary of how Snowden's mission is already revitalizing journalism, the justice system, and the U.S. legislative branch of government and even impacting the executive branch. Emphasis throughout is mine.

I was greatly struck by Wizner's repeated phrase, "Snowden was watching ... " While Snowden's said his intention wasn't to change government -- that this was for the American people to do -- it seems that in the years running up to the leaks he initiated, he was trying to isolate everything that specifically made up the mechanics of the burgeoning police state and asking himself how to dismantle the wiring diagram, so to speak.

Again, the following are only excerpts from what I consider a very important revelatory discussion.

Our Chat With Edward Snowden's Legal Counsel
Wednesday, 12 March 2014 10:44
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company

[...]
[JUDICIAL BRANCH]

Winship: How would you characterize what [Snowden] has revealed?

Wizner: Well, maybe the best way to answer that question is to remember what President Obama said in the first week after the revelations began to appear on front pages. He said Americans shouldn't be too worried about these disclosures because all three branches of government had blessed the programs and activities that were being disclosed.

That was a true statement. That was also exactly the problem. And it's worth looking at what those same three branches of government have done since Edward Snowden's disclosures, since the public was brought into this conversation.

So let's look at the courts. Now, it's true that a court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved, in secret, some of these programs. It's a court that hears only from the government, does not have the benefit of adversarial briefing, didn't get to hear what our objections would have been. It's also a court that was set up to give warrants, not to write opinions on whether surveillance programs in general were lawful.

And when we tried to bring challenges to these programs in open federal courts, we got as far as the Supreme Court, but every court turned us away without even considering the legality of the programs. The government said, "These plaintiffs have no right to be in court. They can't show that they were subjected to these surveillance programs, and therefore they don't have standing. And they're not allowed to use the discovery process to learn that, because that would be a state secret."

The result being that no one has the right to go into federal court to challenge the legality of these programs.
Edward Snowden was watching this. In our very first conversation, one of his first questions to me was, "Have these documents that have been published so far given you standing to go back in court?"

To him, the idea that a court would not answer the question, "Is this program legal? Is it constitutional?" but instead would contort itself in order to not answer that question seemed like a failure of oversight, and he was right.

What's happened since his disclosures? We have now taken some of these documents, gone back into federal courts, where our standing is really much harder to question. Two federal judges have now considered, for example, the constitutionality of the government's collection of all telephone metadata. They've come so far to different conclusions on the legal question, but both said that the plaintiffs have standing to be in court. So one thing that he's done is he's reinvigorated judicial oversight.

[LEGISLATIVE BRANCH]

Now, what about Congress? To me, the signal moment in Congress is [Senator] Ron Wyden asking [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper, "Is there any kind of information that you collect on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" And Clapper says, "No, sir, not wittingly."

We like to call this Clapper lying to Congress, and it's certainly that. But it would be much more accurate to say that Clapper was lying to the American people, because Senator Wyden knew that the answer was false. [Wyden] didn't, he felt like he couldn't, correct the answer. No one else on the committee corrected the answer. Clapper didn't correct the answer, no one on his staff, no one in the Administration.

So what we had was a lie being told to Congress and no one in any branch coming forward to say that a lie had been committed. And Snowden was watching that, too.

And what's happened in Congress since the public disclosures? The issue has come out of the intelligence communities and into the full Congress. There is historic bipartisan legislation that would end bulk collection of American's data, that would create an adversarial process in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

This is the kind of legislation that would've been absolutely unthinkable before Snowden.

The direction has been one-way since the late 1970s. The Deep State has more authority, not less. The opposite is going to happen now. Now, whether it's something that seems more cosmetic or something that really is historic, well, that's really up to the people to decide. We will see. But there's been an earthquake in the congressional oversight of these programs, and that's because of Snowden.

[EXECUTIVE BRANCH]

And even the executive branch, which said, "Nothing to see here" — you know, the president appointed his own review board, that included former very high ranking intelligence community officials and other close friends of his. I think it's fair to say that the civil society organizations expected a whitewash. But that's not what we got.

The conclusions were — more politely stated — that the NSA had essentially gotten out of control, that it allowed its technological capabilities to drive its practices, rather than having its practices constrained by laws and values, and even wisdom. And there were dozens and dozens of recommendations that went not only to giving Americans greater protections, but also people abroad. And you heard the president in January, in his big speech about the NSA, say — first time for any president, I think — that we need to be concerned about the privacy rights of people outside the US who are not protected by the Constitution.

So all three branches of government are now doing the oversight that the Constitution wants them to do, that they were not doing before Edward Snowden. To me, that is his most significant contribution.

[JOURNALISM]

Winship: And you feel that the route he took, via journalists, was the one and only way he could go?

Wizner: I guess at times I wonder what people mean when they say he should have gone through a traditional route rather than going through journalists. Sometimes, the kinds of people who we call [officially sanctioned] whistleblowers ... are people who uncover unquestionably illegal conduct that's been hidden away and they just need to bring it to the attention of an overseer, call up an inspector general, call up a member of Congress and say, "Look what I found," and then the system will take care of itself.

But sometimes, someone comes upon a system of global dragnet surveillance that the oversight system deems perfectly legal. This is not something that Congress was unaware of. This is not something that courts were unaware of, at least the courts that were set up to review these practices.

What was Edward Snowden supposed to do, call up the Senate Intelligence Committee and say, "Hi, I'm a 29-year-old contractor who works in Hawaii, and I'm calling to report to you about the programs that you have approved in secret?"

This was a very, very different kind of situation. There was no one to report to who had not been part of the system of approval. And even those who were in the Congress who shared Snowden's view about the propriety and maybe legality of this were unwilling to talk.

Senator Wyden was on the floor of the Senate with his hair on fire, saying, "If the American people knew what I knew, they would be angry and they would be shocked."

Well, that turned out to be true, but we didn't learn it from Senator Wyden. We learned it from Edward Snowden.

And one more point about what he did. You know, the number of documents that Edward Snowden has made available to the public is zero. What he did is give information to journalists, with the instruction that they and their editors, in consultation, where necessary, with government officials, decide what was in the public interest to publish, and to withhold information that would be harmful to publish.

He wanted to create a protocol that would correct for his own biases. He was someone who had spent the last almost ten years in the intelligence community. He didn't think that his own judgments — and he has very strong judgments about what should or should not be public — were adequate to this moment and wanted to make sure that the institutions that had the experience in doing this. And these are our newspapers, who have long experience competing with the government over access and control of secret information, that being the way that the information got published.

And many people have not noticed this.

In an interview that Snowden gave with TIME magazine when he was runner-up to the Pope for Person of the Year, he said he hasn't always agreed with the public interest determinations of the journalists, but that that's precisely why he needed to do it this way.

He didn't want and didn't think that he should have the responsibility to decide which of these documents should be public. He wanted to appeal to the traditions, the institutions, the expertise of the media in helping to make those important judgments.

That's what we want whistleblowers to do. We don't want them to unilaterally substitute their judgment for everybody else's. We want them to go through these institutions that funnel and that channel that [information] and have longer experience in making these kinds of decisions.

Winship: And yet, Keith Alexander, the outgoing head of the NSA, made a speech at Georgetown a few days ago in which he said that journalists don't have the proper ability to analyze these materials, and he said that Snowden's leaks had caused "grave, significant and irreversible damage to our nation."

Wizner: Those words are the classic weasel words of the Deep State. That sentence could have been lifted from the United States government's brief to the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case, where they said if the Court allowed The New York Times and Washington Post and others to publish the papers they would be responsible for "grave and irreversible damage to the national security." It's exactly the same kind of language.

You know, I wonder if General Alexander really believes that our democracy would be stronger and better off if journalists deferred in every case to the expertise and interests of the executive branch in deciding what to publish. I mean if you look just back at the last few years and consider what the public would not have known on that model [gives examples from the Bush 2 administration] ...

All of this stuff was classified. Not just classified; it was classified at the highest level. These were the secrets that the government said were most critical to keep. But what kind of democracy would we be if the public had never learned of this information?

I'm also not saying that journalists alone should decide what the public sees. I mean the government's voice in this debate is an important one. It's a back and forth. It's always been a back and forth.

I don't believe a single story based on Snowden documents has yet been published without consultation with the government, without giving the government an opportunity to strenuously object and to point out things that might cause harm in their view. And that's why I don't think there's been any credible evidence at all of real harm to national security from these leaks.
[...]
END EXCERPTS FROM INTERVIEW

File under Famous Last Words: For Washington "the age of easy hypocrisy is over"

October  30; DW (Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster): For US, 'the age of easy hypocrisy is over' 

In the age of WikiLeaks and revelations by the likes of Edward Snowden, the US can no longer get away with hypocrisy as a strategic tool on the world stage, [American] political scientist Henry Farrell tells DW [...]

January 17; Reuters: Obama bans spying on leaders of U.S. allies

February 23; DW:  Report: NSA spying on Merkel aides after Obama said U.S. wouldn't spy on Merkel anymore

[...]
US intelligence switched to spying on senior German officials after last year's order from President Barack Obama to stop eavesdropping on Merkel, the Bild am Sonntag (BamS) newspaper said on Sunday.

"We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly," said a source described by BamS as a high-ranking employee of the National Security Agency (NSA). [...]

I guess it didn't occur to the White House that even though Ed Snowden is safely boxed in, in Russia, where he's under orders from President Vladimir Putin not to leak new damaging information about the U.S. government, that new leaks can come from anywhere now, even the upper echelon at NSA.  This was one of Henry Farrell's points to DW, and also in a paper he co-authored for Foreign Affairs magazine on the same theme.  From the DW interview (see the DW site for link to the paper) :

DW: What's your advice to the US, given their self-imposed objective of being a global liberal role model?

Farrell: The age of easy hypocrisy is over. The US could go in one of two directions. It could bring its rhetoric in line with its behavior. So, rather than pretending to adhere to various broad liberal norms, the US could, when it's in its interest, abrogate these norms. But that would be problematic, as the US has created a liberal order, in which it's going to have a much tougher time of it, if other states start behaving in the same way, then many of the principles the US has come up with, which make life easier for the US, are going to be far more difficult to deliver on.

DW: What's the alternative?

Farrell: The alternative is for the US to change its behavior to bring it more in line with the commitments and the norms that it formally declares. It's going to be more difficult, but it's the better option long-term. It allows the US to maintain the kind of broad consensus the US has been able to work with quite successfully in the past.
[...]

That NSA continued to spy on Merkel by monitoring the phones of officials she speaks with, even after the U.S. President declared spying on her wouldn't continue, suggests the U.S. government still has a way to go before it understands it needs to change its behavior.

I'll concede that Farrell might have called it right in that hypocrisy on an official level is no longer quite as easy as it was in the pre-Snowden era.  The question is the price that Americans are having to pay in the attempt to keep their government halfway honest. Farrell observes that "the whistleblowers are acting like the small boy [from the story The Emperor's new clothes] who points out the emperor's nakedness when no one else dared speak up."  I'm sorry but I don't recall that small boy facing charges of treason and espionage for daring to speak out.  Edward Snowden has had to risk his freedom and even his life to do the job that the U.S. Congress should have done.  How many Americans can reasonably be expected to do that?

This isn't a criticism of Henry Farrell's entire analysis; I think he makes some good points in other parts of the interview.  But he's dreaming if he thinks that whistleblowers and watchdog organizations such as the ACLU are enough manpower to keep a government that shows no inclination toward honesty on the right side of the law not to mention the Constitution.

The watchdogs are so stretched that I'm now in the position where I have to thank Al-Jazeera America for filing a FOIA to get hold of an NSA propaganda talking points memorandum. "Sound Bites That Resonate," which NSA cooked up in the attempt to persuade the American public that a surveillance police state is in its best interests.
 
What next?  Do we have to press every American adult into volunteering five hours a day to file FOIAs?  Or should we just reverse the surveillance state?  Instead of surveilling the public, install CCTVs in every U.S. government office and home of every official, and every golf course and restaurant where officials congregate? 

However, that would leave the problem of who's going to monitor the CCTV tapes on a daily basis.  There are only so many people in the United States.  And they have things to do other than watch their government. The whole point of a representative government is that the people don't have to do everything themselves.  But if it turns out that this is the case it's time to rethink our type of government.
.

Your tax money at work: U.S., British spies in cahoots to collect and store

The latest revelation from the Snowden Files.  Man, when he said "Truth is coming," nobody had any idea at the time how much and what kind of truth he was talking about. Imagine the tax money that's been sunk into just this one project to secretly violate privacy of individual citizens and with no justification.
 
Think of what it means.  Hundreds of millions of hardworking people are making it possible for bottom feeders in government to earn a good living -- with good health benefits, vacation pay, and generous pension -- courtesy of the tax collection system.

I've linked to the Salon report on the situation even though it leans heavily on a Guardian report for the source document. But I like the phrase in the Salon report, "totalized surveillance."  First time I've come across it:

Civil liberties defenders have also stressed that the Optic Nerve program constitutes a profound violation of privacy and reflects the troubling state of totalized surveillance constitutive of our time.

“This is a truly shocking revelation that underscores the importance of the debate on privacy now taking place and the reforms being considered,” said Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “In a world in which there is no technological barrier to pervasive surveillance, the scope of the government’s surveillance activities must be decided by the public, not secretive spy agencies interpreting secret legal authorities. This report also raises troubling questions about the NSA’s complicity in what is a massive and unprecedented violation of privacy. We need to know more about what the NSA knew, and what role it played.”

Um, is NSA IG George Ellard calling the NSA Director a "wacko bureaucrat?"

On Tuesday  the NSA Inspector General, in a spirited defense of his office's record of handling complaints by NSA employees, got his tongue tangled in the bungee cord.  This was during the course of his heated argument that Ed Snowden should have come to him with his complaints rather than stealing highly classified government property to make his points: 

“The losses…were not the result of some wacko bureaucrat wanting to classify everything and anything.”

All right; let's untangle this.  By "losses" Dr George Ellard meant that Snowden's theft had been a catastrophic blow to U.S. national security. By "result" Ellard meant his idea of Snowden's rationale for the theft, which he dismissed as a baseless fear; i.e., a "wacko bureaucrat wanting to classify everything and anything.”
 
But the whole reason Snowden had to risk his freedom and even his life to steal a mountain of government property was because not even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have believed him without proof that under the direction of Gen. Keith B. Alexander the National Security Agency was in the process of collecting and storing every single human utterance in the entire world that was digitized. 

George Ellard wouldn't have believed him, either, because Ellard doesn't have the security clearances to have seen what Snowden saw during the course of his work at NSA.  As I pointed out in the Genie post, only the topmost echelon at NSA had the big picture -- exact knowledge of how much and what kind of data was being collected by NSA. 

The rest, to include the White House, Congress and Pentagon, even with top security clearances only had a vague understanding that Alexander had run away with the metadata concept of intelligence gathering.  This is because a complete understanding would have meant falling down the rabbit hole and facing the Red Queen.  What started out as a great idea that Alexander had developed and applied in a battlespace -- Iraq -- had snowballed, if you'll pardon the expression, into an idée fixe in which he redesignated the battlespace as "everywhere."  He set out to collect and store every and any utterance made via digital communications. And because this was being done in the name of national defense, "classified" was stamped on everything and anything that was collected and stored!

The result was the mother of all Catch-22 rules: Because everything is secret there are no secrets but you will be jailed for telling no secrets. Ergo, Snowden's complaints, if he'd taken them to the IG,  would have been thrown out on the grounds that they were ipso facto mooted or dispo fatso prima facie, whichever applied. 

Put another way: within less than a decade the system of classifying information as secret was made obsolete by the metadata approach to intelligence gathering, as implemented by the NSA under Alexander's direction.  It was no longer possible to distinguish between secret and non-secret when even the most mundane and superfluous data had to be classified as secret merely by the act of storing it for possible future retrieval.
  
Instead of confronting the dilemma, the Congress, White House and U.S. military command kicked the can down the road.  But because nature abhors a vacuum Keith Alexander kept the National Security Agency busy filling up the boundless.
.

Tale of NSA Department, Ed Snowden, the Magic Lamp and the Stovepipe

The NSA Department and the Magic Lamp

Set aside the techno-babble and the tale of the purloined password.(1)  Edward Snowden got access to top secret levels of surveillance at NSA through the most simple, nontechnical means imaginable, and all he got all the help he needed from one of human nature's most famous weaknesses.  Here's how it happened, as told to Forbes data privacy columnist Andy Greenberg by a colleague of Snowden's at NSA, whose name for understandable reasons had to be withheld for publication. If you're already familiar with the account, which was published December 16 under the title An NSA Co-Worker Remembers The Real Edward Snowden: "A Genius Among Geniuses," bear with me while I quote certain passages; I'm going to analyze them in a way I'm pretty sure hasn't been done before.

[...]
"Before coming to NSA Hawaii, Snowden had impressed NSA officials by developing a backup system that the agency had widely implemented in its codebreaking operations.

He also frequently reported security vulnerabilities in NSA software. Many of the bugs were never patched.[2] 

Snowden had been brought to Hawaii as a cybersecurity expert working for Dell’s services division but due to a problem with the contract was reassigned to become an administrator for the Microsoft intranet management system known as Sharepoint.

Impressed with his technical abilities, Snowden’s managers decided that he was the most qualified candidate to build a new web front-end for one of its projects, despite his contractor status. As his coworker tells it, he was given full administrator privileges, with virtually unlimited access to NSA data.

“Big mistake in hindsight,” says Snowden’s former colleague. “But if you had a guy who could do things nobody else could, and the only problem was that his badge was green [contractor] instead of blue [employee], what would you do?”
[...]

So those who've claimed that Snowden didn't have the "authorities" or technical ability to access certain NSA files were misinformed or dissembling.  Yes he did have the authorities, and there was no need for him to figure out how to break into any security level at NSA.  Snowden's managers simply handed him the keys to the kingdom.

This means there was no need for Snowden to work out subterfuges to access the files -- a point the colleague emphasized in another part in the account.

Here one can be forgiven for asking if his superiors were crazy to give that much power to a contractor (technically, a subcontractor). The answer in this particular case is that they didn't quite see him as a contractor.  They thought they'd stumbled across a magic lamp with a genie inside.  In a way, they had:

“That kid was a genius among geniuses,” says the NSA staffer. “NSA is full of smart people, but anybody who sat in a meeting with Ed will tell you he was in a class of his own …I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The colleague also said that Snowden kept a copy of the U.S. Constitution on his desk at NSA to reference when he argued about the legality of certain NSA surveillance methods, and it seems he argued frequently.  Didn't Snowden's superiors find this troubling?  So the genie blew off steam on occasion. Genies do such things.

Snowden also wore at work a hoodie with a logo that was a clear criticism of the agency's surveillance methods. Well, genies are known to dress strangely.
   
And while the colleague's account doesn't mention this, according to Snowden he did everything but rent a marching band to alert his superiors and coworkers at NSA to the kind of surveillance programs he was finding after he'd been given access to the most top secret files, and to explicitly state that he was deeply troubled by his findings.(3)  There is much in the public record to suggest his claim is true.

Even his postings over a period of years at Ars Technica website clearly indicate that this is someone who doesn't believe in stewing in silence. Once he got access to certain files it would have been completely in character for Snowden to show his superiors at NSA what he was finding and fume, 'Look at this! This is illegal!'

But of course matters of law are seen differently by a being whose home is a lamp.
 
While they didn't put it quite that way, that was how his superiors blinded themselves to the fact that Ed Snowden had "security risk" stamped all over him.  They'd become experts on genie behavior, you understand.
  
Translation: Snowden's superiors had stumbled across a brilliant "kid" who was going to help them pull off a special project, one that would put a feather in the cap of at least one department at the Hawaii branch office.

So at the bottom of the heist of the century is an ageless story, told in countless fables, fairy tales, myths and legends, of acquisitiveness overpowering caution.
 
Does this mean the supervisors in question shouldn't faulted for being human?  Actually every employee manual should provide instructions on what to do if you find a mysterious lamp in the parking garage.  Take it to a homeless shelter or a destitute widow; under no circumstances bring it into the office and say let's see what happens if we shake it.

If it wasn't in the manual, then technically the NSA human resources department is to blame for the whole thing. However, there was something else at work in addition to a magic lamp, something that would raise an eyebrow among those who constantly scan the horizon for Signs and Portents -- these types the least likely to read Forbes, this writer being an exception. Go over the NSA employee's account with a fine comb and you will note an astounding run of accidental incidents, convergences of events and coincidences,  a run that couldn't be replicated in a million years.

Here I'm reminded of a saying at NSA:  "In God we trust. All others we surveil."

Ah, but the question is whether God trusts NSA.

From that viewpoint, and considering the incredible and one might even say mysterious run of luck at Edward Snowden's back, I don't think his supervisors at the NSA Hawaii branch office should continue to beat themselves up for being fools.  There are times when the play's the thing and the best the players can do is avoid bumping into the stage sets.  If what happened at the Hawaii branch was one of those times, then Snowden was himself pointed to his chalk marks on the stage.
    
This said, and before I leave the topic of magic lamps, I think I can add to the lore on genies that the NSA Hawaii branch collected.  There are, according to the Quran, good genies and bad genies -- or jinn or djinn, as they're called in Arabic. But all the lore about genies, which predates the religion of the Mohammedans and even the Old Testament, agrees that they are very powerful. How, then, did genies get associated with a humble household lamp?  Why not a symbol of great worldly or supernatural power?
 
The answer is lost in the mists of prehistory, and Wikipedia is silent on the question. But we can always fall back on the little gray cells in the attempt to solve a mystery.  I'd guess genies are associated with a lamp because they are bringers of light.
 
The debate about whether Edward Snowden is a hero or traitor obscures the fact that his theft of NSA files was designed as a teaching mission.  Glenn Greenwald told Buzzfeed that the NSA files Snowden gave him were organized to an astonishing degree -- "almost scary."  Greenwald had been expecting to receive the kind of mess that Bradley Manning dumped on Wikileaks, which in turn dumped the mess on newspaper reporters, which after a passing attempt at organizing the huge of cache of files, dumped the hideous tangle of data on the public.
 
That is just why the incident blew over so quickly; the only people who could understand the implications of the massive dump of leaked files were hackers, and others who were very knowledgeable about highly technical IT matters. The public continued to remain in the dark.
 
It is actually Julian Assange, not Snowden, who sounded the alarm, as you can learn from the Wikipedia article about him. As early as 1998 he discovered patents that NSA was taking out, patents that spelled doom for human freedom.  Yet for all his technical skill with computers and intellectual brilliance, Assange couldn't communicate the implications of his discovery to the general public. Many others in the IT field also tried and failed. It would require the gifts of a teacher, an extraordinary teacher, one who could break down highly abstract concepts in such a way that all adults could understand, no matter what their level of knowledge about computer matters.

Snowden is just that teacher.  The way in which he presented the data was carefully designed to illustrate specific principles. And the stepwise sequence of leaks he arranged was in the manner of course work. This was so the journalists he chose to publish the NSA documents, and the general public, could absorb and understand the very complicated issues informing the technical aspects of NSA surveillance.
 
This doesn't mean he didn't copy data that could be very destructive to U.S. national security if released to the public.  The current estimate of defense officials is that the NSA data he copied only represent about 10 percent of the files at other defense agencies that he at least viewed if not copied. I wouldn't be surprised if he worked a kind of nuclear option into all the files he copied in case his teaching mission was cut short by his assassination or arrest. But his intent is clearly not to destroy; everything he's done is to bring light to where the darkness of great ignorance exists. In this he's been successful, and on a world scale.

And so when all is said and done, the NSA Hawaii branch office's blinkered belief in genies might be vindicated.  Maybe in the original meaning of the term Ed Snowden is indeed a genie, a real genie, a specially gifted teacher.

The NSA Department and the Stovepipe

Snowden maintains that his alerts and complaints were ignored by his superiors at NSA. Yet he also claims that the reactions of NSA employees he spoke to about his discoveries ranged from "greatly concerned" to "appalled" that NSA had very greatly exceeded its mandate.(3)

How could that be?  How could NSA employees be unaware of the extent of their own organization's surveillance?

The answer is that it's perfectly possible; indeed, it's standard practice in a large bureaucracy set up along military lines (or quasi-military lines) for only the top echelon to be aware in any detail of how the organization's many pieces fit together.
 
All such bureaucracies depend on something termed "stovepiping" of information gathered from within the organization; this in order to control knowledge of the big picture from within the organization.  From Wikipedia's discussion of a stovepipe organization:

A stovepipe organization is one where the structure of the organisation largely or entirely restricts the flow of information within the organisation to up-down through lines of control but inhibits or prevents cross organisational communication.

Another way to describe stovepiping is to say that it's an internalized form of guerrilla cell organization, where each cell is unaware of the activity of the other cells in the organization.  So it's very likely that the majority of NSA's employees were as surprised as the public about the big picture that Snowden's revelations painted.(4)

Stovepiping has many critics, as the Wikipedia article explains, and it contributes to the oligarchic aspect of bureaucratic organizations that Robert Michels decried in his dictum "Who says organization says oligarchy."  (See the Pundita post, The Devil and Departmentalization.)

The defenders of stovepiping argue that it's necessary for command and control in an organization, such as the military, which must keep many secrets. This argument goes out the window in an era when a bureaucracy such as NSA is opened up to hordes of outsiders.

From Ross Slutsky's The NSA’s Contractor Problem (VOA News blog, August 16, 2013):

[...]
In his book on the NSA, The Shadow Factory, intelligence journalist James Bamford claims that the size and scale of the NSA workforce exploded after 9/11.  “With the billions pouring in, [then-NSA director Michael Hayden] launched the largest recruiting drive in the agency’s history,” writes Bamford. “By 2008, 40 percent of the NSA’s workforce had been hired since 2001.” 
[...]
“At the same time Hayden was building his empire within Fort Meade, he was also creating a shadow NSA: of the $60 billion going to the intelligence community, most of it -- about $42 billion, an enormous 70 percent -- was going to outside contractors,” says Bamford.

James Bamford is not the only one to have made such claims about the size of the temp workforce in the U.S. intelligence community.  Angela Canterbury, Director of Public Policy, Project On Government Oversight, noted last year that there are "millions of contractors inside the nation's intelligence agencies," although to be precise she was also referring to subcontractors; i.e., employees of contracting firms.

And it's not only the IC that's overwhelmed by this tide of temp workers; the contracting firms, the ones that do high volume business with the U.S. government, haven't been able to keep up with vetting all the temps they employ.

Despite this, Congress and U.S. government and its advisers  -- and the intelligence agencies -- are playing ostrich.  I hesitated to quote from this November 7 Reuters report because its headliner claim (Exclusive: Snowden persuaded other NSA workers to give up passwords - sources) was disputed, not only by Ed Snowden but also by the NSA staffer who spoke to Andy Greenberg; indeed, a major reason the staffer risked being fired for speaking out was to dispute the claim.  However, there's much of interest in the report, especially this jaw dropper:

"In the classified world, there is a sharp distinction between insiders and outsiders. If you've been cleared and especially if you've been polygraphed, you're an insider and you are presumed to be trustworthy," said Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists. "What agencies are having a hard time grappling with is the insider threat, the idea that the guy in the next cubicle may not be reliable," he added.

With all respect to security experts at the federation they need to pay more attention to the present era.  Who has time to polygraph hordes of temps if nobody even has time to do adequate background checks?

There is no more 'insider outsider' distinction in U.S. government.  Yet there are enough people in government who want to believe there's still an "inside" that they go to lengths to keep up the pretense.
 
The situation provides a sound basis for the dispute that hactivists such as Julian Assange have with overweening attempts at secrecy in government.  The reasoning informing the attempts is outdated; it doesn't account for the fact that the rationale for cells, for stovepiping, collapses when the organization controlling the cells becomes a makeshift superhighway for outsiders.

Moreover, attempts to monitor traffic on the superhighway have led to over-classification of information as "secret" and to draconian nondisclosure agreements -- both of which discourage and also quash complaints from the people best positioned to warn about trouble in their department.

The outcome is that while the superhighway transports "inside" information about the organization to the "outside," stovepiping keeps many of employees in the dark about what's happening in their own organization!

1)  From the account provided to Andy Greenberg:

As further evidence that Snowden didn’t hijack his colleagues’ accounts for his leak, the NSA staffer points to an occasion when Snowden was given a manager’s password so that he could cover for him while he was on vacation. Even then, investigators found no evidence Snowden had misused that staffer’s privileges, and the source says nothing he could have uniquely accessed from the account has shown up in news reports.

The manager and the unnamed employee mentioned in the tale of the purloined password -- the February 10 NSA memo to a congressional oversight committee --  are the same person. As to how I can be sure of this, because if NSA could have scared up two employees who'd shared their password with Snowden, there would have been two sacrificial goats to haul to Capitol Hill, not one.

2) Security was so lax at NSA that it wouldn't be surprising if the agency had been hit repeatedly by industrial spies and even spies for foreign defense agencies. Snowden himself warned NSA that it was rife with security lapses that weren't being addressed, as the NSA staffer's account indicates.  As to the claim that security was tighter at NSA headquarters:  After Bradley Manning stole a huge cache of files the U.S. military instituted the "two-man rule" to ward against the unauthorized removal of computer files. Snowden claims that he recommended in 2009 that NSA institute the same rule, which is that two system administrators must be present when one accesses certain sensitive information. What's in the public record about Snowden's security warnings tends to support his claim. In any case NSA, its headquarters as well as branch offices, didn't even take this simple, nontechnical security measure until after Snowden struck.

3) From Wikipedia's article on Edward Snowden (see the webpage for links to the source notes): 

Using 'internal channels of dissent', Snowden said that he told multiple employees and two supervisors about his concerns. An NSA spokesperson responded, saying they had "not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden's contention that he brought these matters to anyone's attention".(81)  Snowden elaborated in January 2014, saying "[I] made tremendous efforts to report these programs to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the proper clearance who would listen. The reactions of those I told about the scale of the constitutional violations ranged from deeply concerned to appalled, but no one was willing to risk their jobs, families, and possibly even freedom to go to through what [NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake] did." (79)

4)  Stovepiping might have been the key factor in Edward Snowden receiving an invisibility cloak from the next 'department' he worked for at NSA (Threat Operation Center, also at the Hawaii branch), after he switched employers from Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton.  While it's unlikely that a discussion of genie behavior would have figured in his performance review after he completed the special project, a free exchange of information about Snowden between the first and second departments would have raised a red flag for his new supervisors. No flag was raised:

"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked," Snowden told the South China Morning Post, adding that this was exactly why he'd accepted it. He was one of around 1,000 NSA "sysadmins" allowed to look at many parts of this system. (Other users with top-secret clearance weren't allowed to see all classified files.) He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a "ghost user", able to haunt the agency's hallowed places.

This meant it wasn't possible for investigators to track which files he accessed or copied after he received the invisibility cloak!  This in turn means the outdated security software at the Hawaii branch wasn't the only factor in limiting the investigations.  It seems the only way the FBI and other investigators could hope to get an idea of what files he accessed while he wore the invisibility cloak was by reading the newspapers.

Report: "Staggering" levels of government corruption in EU countries

I'm posting a few excerpts from the following BBC report not to criticize European Union leaders but to remind that this is the era for countries to be tending their own fences. 
In 2005 Hurricane Katrina blew the lid off corruption in government administrations scattered in states throughout the U.S., including the state of Louisiana.  My stab at black humor at the time was that I was found under my desk, breathing into a paper bag and screaming, "Louisiana is a third world country and its foreign policy is run out of Quebec!") 
 
That was before the lid blew off what was happening in Michigan and specifically Detroit.

BBC, 3 February 2014:

The EU's Home Affairs Commissioner has warned of staggering levels of corruption in member countries.

Presenting the first EU-wide anti-corruption report, Cecilia Malmstrom said the problem eroded trust in democratic institutions and provided a breeding ground for organised crime.

She said the true cost of corruption was at least 120bn euros (£99bn) annually.

The BBC's Chris Morris reports. [...]

The Devil and Departmentalization

One day God and the Devil were debating each other when they spied a man discover a bit of truth.  They exulted in one voice, "Score for my side!"  God snapped, "How do you figure the point goes to you?"  "Because," replied the Devil smoothly, "I'm going to help him organize his discovery."

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The Operation Was a Success But

The old joke about the Devil and organization harks to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, formulated in 1911 by a German sociologist named Robert Michels.  Simply stated the Iron Law is: "Who says organization says oligarchy."
 
The Iron Law has influenced generations of political thinkers and is considered the perennial bugaboo of large organizations, including government ones and dominant political parties. Oligarchy is seen as an inevitable byproduct of humans organizing themselves, with the few exceptions representing a unique set of circumstances. No type of government, even the most liberal democratic one, is considered immune from the operation of the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

I had cause to question the Iron Law after I read passages in Arvind Kejriwal's 2011 e-book Swaraj (Self Rule), available for free in PDF in both Hindi and English. The passages outline how, starting in the 1860s, the British Raj used a process of departmentalization to gain control of an ancient system of self-government in India's villages:

Earlier the villagers ran the establishment for irrigation, which the British started to control through an irrigation department.

The villagers earlier had the education establishment under their control.  Now the British formed an education department.

All areas of life and living were soon controlled by the British through one or other government department. ...

The passages illustrate that without a shot fired, and with no need for secret police and forced labor camps, it's possible through a process of departmentalization to rob a people of their ability to govern their affairs. 

Yet Kejriwal was wrong when he assumed the British Empire's departmentalization effort was specific to India. Once the British government's civil service went into high gear, starting in the mid-1850s, it did to its own populace what it later did to Indian villagers!  

However, departmentalizing villages in the homeland would be one thing. But because there are so many villages in India that only God has ever known exactly how many there are, the question would be the extent to which the British Empire had extended itself in India as the 19th Century drew to a close. At least as early as the 1890s it was clear the empire was greatly overextended. Another question, perhaps an unanswered one, would be the extent to which the civil service applied its departmentalization effort to lands the British controlled other than the homeland and India.     

What is known for certain is that Her Majesty's Civil Service survived with flying colors the collapse of the British Empire. An odd fact when one stops to think about it. Was this a case where the operation was a success but the patient died?  Had the British Empire departmentalized itself out of existence? 

With that thought in mind I decided to investigate whether the Iron Law of Oligarchy is as iron as it's cracked up to be.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

Wikipedia's article on representative democracy, which the majority of the world's nations have adopted in one form or another, cites the criticism that this type of government inevitably devolves into a particracy or oligarchy because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy -- a particracy being "a de facto form of government where one or more political parties dominate the political process, rather than citizens and/or individual politicians."  (Wikipedia)

As to the Iron Law itself, it was first presented in Robert Michels' 1911 magnum opus, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy: 

Any large organization, Michels pointed out, has to create a bureaucracy in order to maintain its efficiency as it becomes larger. Many decisions have to be made daily that cannot be made by large numbers of disorganized people. 

For the organization to function effectively, centralization has to occur and power will end up in the hands of a few. Those few -- the oligarchy -- will use all means necessary to preserve and further increase their power. ... [Wikipedia]

Bureaumania

I found weak links in Michels' chain of reasoning.

1.  Michels over-applied the concept of bureaucracy, as have all those who apply the concept to the operational structure of any large organization.  Bureaucracy is specific to a government (or quasi-governmental organization such as the World Bank).  It literally means a rule of bureaus or 'desks' (or departments, as they're more commonly called today). 

The term was coined in the mid-1700s by Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay, a French economist and government official, as a sarcastic commentary on the craze in the French government for setting up bureaus to handle the burgeoning specialties represented by modern government administration. He also called the craze "bureaumania." 

The joke was on the economist, if John Stuart Mill was correct; he argued that bureaucracy is a type of government distinct from other types, including representative democracy, and that the most successful monarchies were actually bureaucracies.  If Mill is correct this could explain why no matter how different their politics and economic views, governments that administer through a bureaucracy tend to develop the same or remarkably similar problems. The most consistent feature of the problems isn't oligarchy. It's department heads acting with the zeal of a duke defending his dukedom to protect their department's turf and expand their budget allocations.

2. Even by the time he died, in 1936, Michels couldn't have imagined the number of specializations that would arise in the post-World War II era and reflect in the creation of a dizzying number of departments in government.

3.  Nor could he have imagined how the concept of the rule of law, when over-applied,  works out in practice over time in a representative democracy.  Once people are elected to legislate and are paid to do so -- once it's their job -- they can't be expected to play badminton when they convene.  They will write as much legislation as they possibly can, which must be administered by one or more departments in government. This generally leads to the creation of a new department(s) or expansion of existing ones.

The Iron Law of Departmentalization

If Michels could have imagined unchecked specialization in government and legislation, I venture he would have noticed that galloping departmentalization is the result, and all that goes with it:

1.  Pretty soon the myriad departments are fiercely protecting their mandates and budget allocations.

2.  This puts them in conflict with myriad other departments doing the same.

3.  This leads to departments working at cross-purposes and the weaponization of information; i.e., 'information capture' or extreme compartmentalization of information. (What has also been called stovepiping or silo-ing of information.) When this happens the people at the top and even those in key departments might have no knowledge of vital information held by other department(s). 

4.  The volume of data generated by a large number of departments means that key information can easily be overlooked by decision makers. And when combined with compartmentalization of specializations across numerous departments, key information can be misunderstood or not even recognized as key by decision makers.   

The upshot isn't oligarchy, which presumes a reasonably united front among a few people; it's chaos.

(This might have been the Devil's plan all along).

Thusly, when the number of departments in a government reaches the magic number, the juggernaut of departmentalization crushes everything in its path, including the Iron Law of Oligarchy. 

Now what is the magic number?  From my back of the envelope calculations it's the number at which everyone gives up trying to make an accurate count of the number of departments.
 
(Departments would include agencies, commissions, services, etc., as well as departments within a department no matter how they're named; e.g., division, section, etc.)
 
From all this I'd say there's an Iron Law of Departmentalization, which simply stated is that chaos cancels out oligarchy when departments proliferate like rabbits.

Here American readers might want to know whether the U.S. government has reached the magic number yet. From these two articles about bureaucracy in the U.S. government, the answer is yes. 

Grand Illusion

But how could generations of political thinkers have overlooked the Iron Law of Departmentalization?  To put the question another way, how can a government administration continue functioning if it's in chaos?  The answer is that it can't, not without factors that offset or mitigate chaos in the decision-making processes.  Here are three factors that apply to the USA:

1.  The introduction of 'czars' to government administration.  In the USA a czar is appointed by the U.S. President and answerable only to the President, so he can override chaos at the Cabinet level of departments and lower on the bureaucratic food chain. 
  
2.  A de facto plutocracy.  While the rich can be in disagreement with each other on many issues, they're staunchly united around the goal of remaining rich. This gives their decisions as a bloc great coherence.  And as a bloc the rich have the power to greatly influence many types of government decisions. This helps mask chaos at the operational level of government.    
 
3.  This factor would only apply to a few governments in history.  It's when a nation or empire's currency is the dominant one used in international trade.  This currency hegemony allows a government a virtually unlimited line of credit -- or the ability to kite checks, in a manner of speaking, without penalty. This allows the government to evade the full consequences for bad decisions, including those arising from chaos at the government's operational level. 

From the post-World War II period onward, the U.S. dollar's status as the world's major reserve currency has in effect provided the U.S. government with an unlimited line of credit.  This has repeatedly let administrations off the hook when chaos at the operational level has led to consequences that would destabilize if not crash any other government.
 
Yet the most problematical aspect of a government relying on its currency for bailouts is that this shields decision-makers in the government from the full consequences of any bad decisions.  This interferes with the famous feedback loop by which humans increase their intelligence, which is also known as learning from mistakes.  One doesn't have to learn from mistakes if there's always a safety net with a soft cushion underneath.  In government this translates to people not being fired or demoted even for catastrophically bad decisions.
  
The Devil is in the Detail

So if the Devil does not actually reside in the human tendency to get organized, where does he reside when it comes to government?
  
One of Michels' professors was the German sociologist Max Weber, whose prolific writings on bureaucracy helped establish public administration as a field of study distinct from political science. Weber believed that bureaucracy was the only efficient means for modern governments to organize themselves, but he was very wary of bureaucratic administration. He saw it as trapping individuality in an "iron cage" of rules-based or 'by the book' decision making.

I've not made a study of Weber's works so I don't want to short his research and conclusions.  But from what I know of his writings I don't think he paid much attention to nonprofessional government.  I'd say it was the same for Robert Michels.  Weber was analyzing paid professional government administration.  In fact, he wasn't so much studying government administration as the career of government administration. 
Weber's neglect of nonprofessional systems of government, if it was neglect, would be understandable.  Even if he'd wanted to study examples of nonprofessional government he was limited by his era's sketchy histories of governments that predated written historical records.  

As for the early American experience with governing, which was in the do it yourself mode -- while Weber surely had some knowledge of that, the American experience couldn't be applied to Europe, where his attention was focused.  Weber, as with Michels and many other European political thinkers of the day, was trying to find ways to democratize government administration in a region of the world that for thousands of years had only known one form or another of authoritarian rule and professional government administration.

This said, those millennia are a drop in the bucket next to the ages when government was a do it yourself affair.  For most of humanity's history governing wasn't a profession. It was an unpaid activity -- and a costly activity in some respects, in that people had to take time away from the means by which they supported themselves to participate in governing. (I think it's just because of this cost that decisions in nonprofessional governing are oriented to solving a problem rather than making a career out of it.)

Nonprofessional governing does generate organizations and also hierarchies, but to say that an oligarchy inevitably derives from these is to distort the concept of oligarchy.

To boil it down, there is no such thing as a volunteer bureaucrat.  Those who swear by the Iron Law of Oligarchy are overlooking this detail.

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Edward Snowden and the Fellowship of the Light vs Tyranny

Today in a speech President Barack Obama took first steps to smash the web of deceit that has characterized the surveillance state gone berserk. The stark warning, only implied in his words, is that freedom is very costly. A good man, a good citizen, had to become a fugitive and be prepared to live the rest of his life like a hunted animal in order to throw light on horrific actions by the state. Those few who rose to help him at the beginning had to face the same prospect.

The greatest irony is that many wanted to put Edward Snowden on trial.  It was always they who were on trial.

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