Technofascists v. the normies

Erudite Partner's latest article from TomDispatch opens with a vignette:

Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.

But before I could make the call, my phone rang.

“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.

“Mary! I was just about to call you.”

“But you did call me,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”

It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. ...

I remember this episode well. Our household was a part of organizing a lot of demonstrations against Ronald Reagan's Central American wars. The SFPD could have simply asked us what were the plans. Or they could have attended some of the interminable organizing coalition meetings; actually, I'm sure they did that ...

I walked over this on a San Francisco street

Anyway, that crude surveillance seems quaint these days. Authorities have gotten far more sophisticated and they've found some frightening allies -- or are these overlords? Today E.P. asks "How Will Your Data Be Deployed In an Age of Dark Enlightenment?"

It's pretty scary stuff full of tech billionaires and pseudo-intellectual elite fantasies come to life. How do we reject these lost, desiccated aspiring techno-gods? The same way that people of good will always have: by loving one another and supporting each other in our messy humanity. Read Erudite Parther's latest.

Watchers

Not sure this is a disguised camera, but it might be.

I think about this when wandering about Walking San Francisco. Home surveillance cameras like Amazon's Ring are certainly picking up my perambulations around city neighborhoods. Who is that person with the camera (on the street I am often not accurately identified by gender) who goes by looking at houses intently? I take seriously the concerns of privacy advocates.

The cameras, they say, intrude on other people’s privacy by recording motion detected up to 30 feet away. The rights of passersby such as dog walkers, mail carriers, and children playing across the street are being violated without their consent, said Mike Katz-Lacabe, a member of Oakland Privacy, a coalition of people who are concerned about privacy and surveillance.

“Personally, I don’t want to live in a surveillance dystopia where my neighbors are essentially spying on me on behalf of my local law enforcement,” he said. ...

[Evan] Greer, [director of Fight for the Future,] said ... “I think it’s very Silicon Valley to assume we can either have a world with package theft, or we can live in a totalitarian surveillance state — but you can’t do both,” she said. “Given the choice, I’d rather live in a world with a little bit of package theft and a little less fascism.”

San Francisco Chronicle

Now I'm not bothering anyone or even approaching any doors. I might photograph your door as I walk by, if you've painted it in interesting colors or hung something novel off it. San Franciscans do the darndest things to express their individuality in their house exteriors, even in neighborhoods where the underlying architecture is mundane.

Other examinations of the proliferation of private-residence, cloud-enabled security cameras raise other concerns. Apparently Amazon's video cache of Ring observations has been hacked. And just having the cameras has trained their owners to be voyeurs.

The Washington Post surveyed more than 50 owners of in-home and outdoor camera systems across the United States about how the recording devices had reshaped their daily lives. Most of those who responded to online solicitations about their camera use said they had bought the cameras to check on package deliveries and their pets, and many talked glowingly about what they got in return: security, entertainment, peace of mind. Some said they worried about hackers, snoops or spies.

But in the unscientific survey, most people also replied that they were fine with intimate new levels of surveillance — as long as they were the ones who got to watch. ...

Matthew Guariglia, an analyst for the online-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, [commented:] “Who hasn’t looked out and watched other people through their peephole? There’s a kind of morbid fascination to it,” he said. “The problem is when it’s not just you behind a peephole but a camera that’s on at all times, saving to a cloud you don’t control.”

We're losing privacy most everywhere and we don't usually even think of it. We all carry underlying, mostly unconscious, daily fears; we wish we were protected. And you just know that the downsides of all this surveillance will be felt most heavily where they always are, where people are least empowered to talk back to the watchers -- in poor communities and in communities of color.

Secret government terrorist watchlist is unconstitutional

The legal system is sl-o-o-w, as Congress' attempt to get testimony from Trumpites is demonstrating.

Hundreds of government intrusions on civil liberties deriving from the U.S. "war on terror" have been litigated for nearly two decades. Just yesterday a Federal judge issued a sweeping ruling which ought to knock down one of the pillars of the panicked post-9/11 surveillance state.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — The government's watchlist of more than 1 million people identified as "known or suspected terrorists" violates the constitutional rights of those placed on it, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga grants summary judgment to nearly two dozen Muslim U.S. citizens who had challenged the watchlist with the help of a Muslim civil-rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

... Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, called the ruling a victory. He said he will be asking the judge to severely curtail how the government compiles and uses its list.
"Innocent people should be beyond the reach of the watchlist system," Abbas said. "We think that's what the Constitution requires."

Abbas said that while there has been significant litigation over the no-fly list, which forced the government to improve the process for people seeking to clear their name from the list, he said Trenga's ruling is the first to broadly attack the government's use of the watchlist. Trenga also wrote in his 31-page ruling that the case "presents unsettled issues."

Ultimately, Trenga ruled that the travel difficulties faced by plaintiffs — who say they were handcuffed at border crossings and frequently subjected to invasive secondary searches at airports — are significant, and that they have a right to due process when their constitutional rights are infringed.

He also said the concerns about erroneous placement on the list are legitimate.

Associated Press

CAIR's executive director Nihad Awad claims the watchlist has become "effectively a Muslim registry..." In addition to over a million foreigners who may or may not exist, the government concedes that there were 4600 U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who have not been charged with any crime, who had no recourse after being secretly included in the watchlist. The list has been shared throughout the government, with local law enforcement, and sometimes with private companies.

This decision should be the end of this -- but the government never gives up easily.

Mathematical values

As with so many things, writing about Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neill feels a different, less hopeful, project since the November election.

O'Neill is a math scientist, a former financial markets quant, who took her unease to Occupy Wall Street. In this book she explicates what she calls the "the dark side of Big Data." What she calls "WMD" are the algorithms that have so much impact, whether we know it or not, on how we live. Separate chapters delve into how US News generated simple and rather stupid scores that higher education institutions game for prestige and cash, how courts use unscientific predictions of possible recidivism rates to decide criminal sentences, how companies sort job applicants mathematically and then monitor the work they do once they are hired, how credit and insurance decisions are governed by algorithmic ratings, and how politicians use data to influence voters. Over the last fifteen years, the sophistication of all these systems has increased so much as to almost exclude any human judgement in their day-to-day operations. Your life and mine is hedged in by mathematical models from which there is little, if any, appeal.

And yet, this is not a Luddite book, a tract denouncing the systems that give us so much we want and perhaps need, as well as dehumanizing and controlling us. She knows that going backward is impossible. Given the choice between Facebook and no internet, streaming entertainment and network television, Amazon's universe of consumer choices and the department store at the mall, we know what human beings will choose. She insists that, with WMDs,

... the heart of the problem is almost always the objective. Change that objective from leeching off people to helping them, and a WMD is disarmed -- and can even become a force for good.

O'Neill is terribly clear why, structurally as well as because of bad intentions, it is hard to embed humane objectives within algorithms.

... human beings learn and adapt, we change, and so do our processes. Automated systems, by contrast, stay stuck in time until engineers dive in to change them. If a Big Data college application model had established itself in the early 1960s, we still wouldn't have many women going to college. ...

Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that's something only human can provide. We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead. Sometimes that will mean putting fairness ahead of profit. ...

What does she think can be done? She harks back to state and federal regulation from the early 20th century forward that, partially, guaranteed health and safety of goods and services, despite costing corporations some of their bottom line. (We know the corporations often responded by offshoring their worse goods and practices, but that's the next phase.) She calls on math scientists to develop their own ethical code for their creations. And, ultimately, she looks to law to inject values into applied mathematics -- and insists this could happen. Algorithms should be subject to human auditing of their ethical implications. She reports hopeful initiatives.

Movements toward auditing algorithms are already afoot. At Princeton, for example, researchers have launched the Web Transparency and Accountability Project. ... Academic support for these initiatives is crucial. ... If you consider mathematical models as the engines of the digital economy -- and in many ways they are -- these auditors are opening the hood and showing us how they work.

... Finally, models that have a significant impact on our lives ... should be open and available to the public. Ideally we could navigate them at the level of an app on our phones. ... The technology already exists. It's only the will we're lacking.

Unhappily, that will seems likely to stay lacking under the GOPer/Trump regime. These folks are more likely to love them some data that enables them to identify, track and hurt those they consider their enemies or just beneath their concern.

But I'm still with O'Neill on the basic thrust of this book. We don't win more justice by going backwards. We have to figure out how to control our tools as we go forward.

O'Neill blogs are MathBabe, and even a mathematical illiterate like myself can almost take it in.

Mysterious exclusion unraveled: she's married!

In a couple of days, it will be eleven years since Stanford PhD and distinguished Malaysian affordable housing architect Rahinah Ibrahim was arrested at SFO, told she was on the TSA no-fly list, and then excluded from visiting the United States. Since 2008, she's won a court order for disclosure of why she's barred, experienced lengthy government stalling, been forced by her visa denial to testify from abroad on videotape, been the beneficiary of a secret ruling, finally been told that her listing came because an FBI agent checked the wrong box, and then, once more, denied a visa because of "terrorist activities.

The determined investigative journalist Raymond Bonner has tried to untangle the complete, shameful, saga for ProPublica. Bonner is the reporter who first uncovered the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1982. He's used to getting to the bottom of cover-ups. For this article, he wrangled the first extensive interview with Ibrahim about her long case.

And it turns out, this story is also about the inability of U.S. authorities to separate the activities of an accomplished woman who follows her faith by wearing the hijab from their doubts about her husband!

[Judge William] Alsup provided a hint to the answer in three sentences, easy to overlook in his 38-page opinion, and carefully crafted so as not to reveal any classified information. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, there are nine grounds for denying a person a visa. “Some of them go beyond whether the applicant herself poses a national security threat,” Alsup wrote. The judge did not list the nine grounds. But the immigration law is a public document. Eight of the categories apply to the applicant. One does not. The ninth basis for turning down a visa application is if the person “is the spouse” of a foreigner who has engaged in any terrorist-related activity in the preceding five years.

Thus, the basis for Ibrahim’s place on the watch lists would appear to be something the law purportedly abhors — guilt by association, or in this case, by marriage.

The U.S. government's suspicions of Ibrahim's husband Mustafa Kamal seem flimsy indeed.

While his wife was at Stanford, Kamal undertook several humanitarian missions to Mindanao, the predominately Muslim province in the Philippines. A civil war had been simmering there for nearly two decades, waged by Muslims seeking independence from, or at least greater autonomy in, the overwhelmingly Catholic country. The war had created more than 200,000 refugees. When Kamal visited for five days in 2003, providing food for widows and orphans, building wells and schools, restoring mosques, the province had become a front in the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism; CIA and FBI agents were all over the place. ...

Former FBI and CIA agents who were working in that area at the time told me that Kamal, by his mere presence in Mindanao doing humanitarian work, would have come to the attention of American intelligence.

There may be another reason Ibrahim ended up on the no-fly list. “Maybe they got the wrong wife,” said an American official who has followed the case closely.

As allowed in Islam, Kamal has two additional wives. It is not something Ibrahim or her husband try to hide. He lists his wives, and posts photos of the families on Facebook. Altogether, Kamal has 13 children. They often gather at Ibrahim’s house on holidays. “We are one big family,” she told me.

Kamal’s third wife, Kurais Abdullah Karim, a Filipina, could also be a cause of Ibrahim’s problems. A lecturer at the International University of Malaysia, Karim, is from Mindanao and is, as Kamal put it, a “humanitarian activist.” In addition to having her own blog, about fashion, and posting regularly on Instagram, she is an unabashed supporter of the Muslim liberation movement in Mindanao. ... (In 2014, the Philippine Government and the secessionist Muslims signed a peace treaty ending more than four decades of civil war.)

Kamal said he has never had any involvement with Jemaah Islamiyah, or any other terrorist organization. Malaysian intelligence and security agencies keep close tabs on Malaysians who go to Mindanao, American and European intelligence officials told me, but they do not have a file on Kamal or Ibrahim. If they did, she would not be allowed to be a professor, let alone dean, at the government university, current and former Malaysian officials said, a conclusion shared by American officials who have worked in Malaysia.

... The State Department still considers her ineligible under the terrorism category, and she will have to apply again for a waiver should she seek to come to the United States.

I find Ibrahim's persistence in seeking truth and redress through all this quite inspiring. Perhaps that sort of grit is what it takes for a girl from a rural village to become an internationally recognized architect.

Guns and the no-fly list

On Sunday night the Prez suggested that

"Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security."

I have to admit that I momentarily enjoyed the politics behind the suggestion. When Republicans are pissing in their pants at the idea of admitting desperate escapees from the Syrian war and ISIS, they refuse to vote to prevent people designated as dangerous from acquiring guns? That's low.

But hey, I was once told I was on the no fly list which was always a crock. Certainly I was never any danger to aviation or much of anything else. And much as the spooks like to tout their "success" at preventing terrorism, people who actually know something about security have long thought watch lists were mere "theater."

So I don't mind that that Jamelle Bouie has reminded anyone inclined to enjoy the Prez's thrust against gun lovers' hypocrisy that we're putting ourselves on the wrong side of rights we normally care about.

... civil libertarians—and liberals, at least during the Bush administration—think [the terrorist watch list] is constitutionally dubious. They’re right. “The list contains the names of people who the government thinks are a threat to civil aviation—terrorists,” writes University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner for Slate. “These people are denied passage. … Yet the government does not have proof that these people have committed crimes nor, since it can’t see into the future, that they will commit crimes.” If you’re on these lists, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent, with no due process and little recourse.

The list is conceptually flawed, and using it to deny gun ownership is wrong on its face. Add racial and religious profiling to the mix—the people on the list, including Americans, are disproportionately Arab or from Muslim countries—and you have an anti-gun measure with deep disparate impact.

He's right; my politically convenient pleasure is wrong. Schadenfreude at Republican discomfiture is no excuse.

National id squawking

Okay, so we know Mr. Bad Hair can't go too far for some of our fellow citizens. He's our representative asshole. He's good at the part.

So I don't pay much attention to most of his squawks. But this one momentarily caught my attention.

Trump said he didn't believe the shooter's sister, Saira Khan, when she said she couldn't fathom how her brother Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik could've committed the mass shooting. "I probably don't believe the sister," Trump said. "I would go after a lot of people and find out whether or not they knew. ..."

Of course he doesn't believe Ms.Khan. She's apparently not an asshole. In fact, she's said one of the more wise things anyone has said about the San Bernardino massacre. From an interview at the New York Times:

... the sisters said they were baffled by what had happened. Their brother had seemed happy with his wife and 6-month-old baby, they said. Asked if she felt shame, Ms. Farook said: “I am not ashamed to be Muslim. I am not ashamed to be American either, and I am not ashamed to be Pakistani either. I think shame is for people who feel guilty about something.”

“We’re trying to be helpful with the investigation,” Ms. Farook said. “People want answers and we do as well.”

This part bears repeating: "... shame is for people who feel guilty about something." There's no shame in being who we are. Shame accrues for what we do. As far as anyone knows, Syed Farouk's sisters didn't do anything they should not have. They are among his victims. Kudos to the Times for the interview.***And yes, we're all more than a little baffled. Whether our spooks can ever discern what was going on with the San Bernardino couple will be a great test of whether the NSA's universal internet dragnet is worthwhile. I'm not counting on it in.***In another article, the Times buried what should be the lede in all discussions of terrorism.

... the massacre may presage a bitter new reality. “It’ll gradually dawn on people,” said Bruce Jones, a former United Nations official and the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, “that we’ll be living for a long time with the possibility of low-level attacks that can never be predicted and can rarely be prevented.”

Nobody likes this, but adults will get used to it. They can't destroy our country; we can only do that to ourselves.

Obama talking sense

This post may disturb some of my leftish friends, but I'm thanking my stars in the aftermath of Paris that we have a President who is seven years in office. He never has to face a misinformed, xenophobic, and easily frightened electorate again. He has learned that U.S. power has many limits. And he still shows some instinct to avoid "dumb" wars. Obama was goaded into telling the press a lot of truths Monday at the G20 summit in Turkey.

“What I do not do is take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough or make me look tough.”

... he said large numbers of American troops on the ground would repeat what he sees as the mistake of the Iraq invasion of 2003 and would not help solve the terrorism problem around the globe.

“That would be a mistake, not because our military could not march into Mosul or Raqqa or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL, but because we would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before,” Mr. Obama said. Victory over terrorist groups, he said, requires local populations to push back “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.”

... he said he would not be pressured into “posing” as a tough president by doing things that will not make the situation better to satisfy his critics.

“Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said. “Because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough.”

... “The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism; they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife,” Mr. Obama said. He added: “We do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.”

Without naming him, Mr. Obama singled out a comment by former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, one of the Republicans seeking to succeed him, for suggesting the United States focus special attention on Christian refugees. “That’s shameful,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not American. It’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

New York Times

Now we've seen him back off a lot of other relatively sane things he said before. Maybe he'll crumble and plunge us into more ground war this time too. He did that in Afghanistan. Not only will the Republican clown show howl for his head, but the C.I.A. is already trying to use Daesh atrocities to justify more and better spying. Will he give them their latest wish list? Can he keep his grip on reality?

In truth, the U.S. practice, as opposed to promises, of providing refuge to escapees from Syria stinks -- less than 2000 admitted since the civil war broke out.

And the Syria policy -- a preposterous attempt to defeat two sides of a civil war at once -- is not likely to succeed.

But people in the United States who know better than to respond to Daesh crimes with more atrocities need to be making our voices heard. For the moment, that means having this deeply flawed President's back. He certainly can't stay his course if left out on a limb among the hostile mob.

The torture regime endures

If Jeb Bush's flirtation with torture upsets you, blame Barack Obama. The Prez is a very careful guy; he picks his fights. Sometimes that serves him and the rest of us well: Obamacare and the Iran nuke development moratorium are big wins.

But very obviously, from his first days in office, Obama discovered that restoring the rule of law in relation to a national security agenda would cost him big time. If the CIA's backing, filling, stalling and obstructing of Congressional oversight means anything, it means that the agency knew full well that John Yoo's phony-baloney torture memos wouldn't protect its agents. Torture is a crime under both U.S. and international law. So they've fought disclosure every step of the way. So have all the other spook agencies, even larger institutions than the CIA, operating out of the War (Defense) Department and other secret hideaways.

These agencies not only want to conceal what they did (do? -- how can we know if they are allowed to hide behind "security"?). They want to keep us focused on whether torture "worked." That's a non-question. Torture is a crime and crimes should be prosecuted. Period.

But Obama ducked that fight. He needed the spooks to try to prevent a terror attack that could undermine his tenure. So he caved. If Jeb were elected President, all he'd have to do is give a nod to the spooks -- Barack Obama's administration has made the laws in this area meaningless.

And having ducked the fight, Guantanamo remains still open. Obama's Justice Department recently has gone to court to prevent compassionate release of an inmate on hunger strike who is down to 75 pounds and has been cleared for over half a decade. The National Religious Coalition against Torture has a letter writing campaign. If we don't like being a torture state, we have to keep protesting these things.

Yes, Erudite Partner has just written a book about these issues. She expects a spring release.

No Fly list sputters along

For awhile, because we'd been told we were on it, I wrote a lot about the U.S. government's No Fly list -- and the various other watch lists that popped up after 9/11. Last year I wrote up a good book on the history of terrorist watch lists. It seems governments instinctively restrict travel when they can get away with it.

These days, I fly unimpeded.

But lots of people -- mostly Muslim people it seems -- remain stuck in No Fly hell, not entirely predictably or rationally.

The latest case I've run across is that of Mourad Benchellali. Benchellali was released from Guantanamo in 2004. A French citizen, he was sold to the U.S. by Pakistanis after he escaped Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2001. By his own account, as related by the British human rights activist Andy Worthington, he was a dumb 19 year who blundered into a mess.

His father was a radical imam who had tried (and failed) to fight in Bosnia, his brother Menad had tried (and failed) to fight in Chechnya, and his brother, his father and even his mother had all spent time in French prisons, but he insisted that he went to Afghanistan for “an adventure” and as a way of enhancing his status, hoping that he would be “viewed differently” in his neighbourhood, and that his reputation might “match” that of his brother. He admitted that his sense of adventure was “misguided and mistimed,” and blamed his brother for encouraging him to go, and for arranging for him to attend a training camp. “For two months, I was there,” he wrote after his release, “trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.”

The U.S released him to his home country in 2004, where he was tried, convicted of associating with terrorists, and given credit for time served in Guantanamo. A complex appeal process actually got the charges dropped, and re-raised, and dropped again. In 2008 Worthington reports that he explained further in an interview to McClatchy Newspapers:

It was June 2001, and I thought I’d take a vacation, be back in time for classes in September. Later, the papers would say I was a desperate outsider [in France], trapped looking in on an uncaring nation. But that’s not true. I was happy. I was getting an education. I had a job. I had a fiancee. I just thought I wanted a bit of adventure.

So what has he been doing since he returned to France beside writing a book alleging he was tortured by the U.S. in Kandahar and Guantanamo? He's been traveling about, using his own experience as an example to discourage young people tempted by the Islamic State's recruitment pitches. He's a counter-jihadi recruiter! He has flown in Europe with no trouble.

But when invited to speak at a conference on peace and radicalization in Montreal, he was prevented from attending by the U.S. No Fly list.

No, he wasn't coming to this country. But the U.S. makes any airline passing through U.S. airspace submit a passenger list. He was refused boarding in Lyon. At least he was told the U.S. list prevented him from keeping his appointment; too often people are just kept in the dark about what prevents them from flying.

I can't help wondering -- is Benchellali's continued inclusion on the list inefficiency on the part of list keepers who never remove anyone? Or do they really think this speaker against terrorist recruitment is a danger? Or is it because his story puts the U.S. in a bad light? We are not allowed to know, of course. National security theater in action ...

Wayback machine: no wonder total surveillance has a bad rep

Erudite Partner is researching the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of captured Nazis in preparation for her new book. She passes along this tidbit from the testimony, not exactly on point for her subject, but of contemporary interest. Apparently whatever technical means might currently be available, government snooping is a constant.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: You took over a special intelligence organization in 1933 which was devoted to monitoring the telephone conversations of public officials and others inside and outside of Germany, did you not?

GOERING: I have explained that I had erected a technical apparatus which, as you said, monitored the conversations of important foreigners to and from foreign countries -- telegrams and wireless communications which were transmitted not only from Germany to foreign countries, but also from one foreign country to the other through the ether, and which were intercepted. It also monitored telephone conversations within Germany of: (1) all important foreigners; (2) important firms, at times; and (3) persons who for any reason of a political or police nature were to be watched. 

In order to prevent any abuse on the part of the police, this department had to obtain my personal permission when it was to listen to telephone conversations. Despite this there could, of course, be uncontrolled tapping of wires at the same time, just as that is technically possible everywhere today.

Trial Transcript

The people who create these systems most always think they are the best judges of whether the systems are being used properly and lawfully.

Robert H. Jackson was a Justice of the Supreme Court who took on the additional job of chief United States prosecutor at Nuremberg.

Herman Goering was one of Hitler's earliest confederates, later the head of the German Air Force during World War II, the leading appropriator of European art seized from Jews and conquered peoples, and the most senior Nazi surviving the war. Jackson called him "half militarist, half gangster." At Nuremberg he was sentenced to death, but cheated the hang man by taking poison.

Wayback machine: State of War

Fair warning: this blog may begin to feel like a Wayback Machine this summer. Why? Because Erudite Partner (aka Rebecca Gordon) has a contract for another book. Skyhorse Publishing has decided she's a "fearless author" and has her writing a work to be called American Nuremberg in their new investigative series.

Tony Lyons, president of Skyhorse Publishing, and David Talbot, the founder of Salon, announced a partnership today to launch Hot Books, a new Skyhorse book imprint that will publish investigative books on controversial issues. Skyhorse will be joining with Salon to create a co-branded digital platform for Hot Books.

Hot Books will seek to ignite national debate on the most urgent problems facing the country, filling the investigative gap left by newspapers and magazines as they cut their budgets for in-depth reporting. ...

Ambitious, but no doubt we need more investigation.

Rebecca's new topic is an "indictment of the U.S. officials who should stand trial for post-9/11 ... crimes." ***

The Wayback aspect of this is that I'm assisting by looking into some of the excellent reporting written in the decade after 9/11. This feels plenty relevant, with Jeb Bush stumbling over whether he'd have supported invading Iraq in 2003 "knowing what we know now." I call "bullshit!" It was completely possible, with a modicum of information about Iraq, to know then that the Iraq adventure was FUBAR from the start.

It was also possible to know -- not perhaps in detail, but certainly in outline -- that our spooks and our various military units were perpetrating horrors on captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, and various other dubious locations well before Seymour Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in 2004. The major media were still cowed and cowardly, but a lot of the terrible facts seeped out.

One of the good journalists in that awful time was the New York Times' James Risen. His 2006 book, State of War royally pissed off the CIA; they didn't give up trying to force him to reveal his sources under threat of jail until this year! That was probably over disclosures of dumb dirty tricks on Iran, but Risen also blew the whistle on NSA surveillance of all of us everywhere despite the qualms of his employers. He also described the outline of the CIA torture program almost a decade before the Senate torture report.

As many of us were at the time, Risen was clearly trying to fathom why particular U.S. leaders responded to 9/11 by adopting so many illegal and clumsy stratagems. In addition to the particular culpability of individuals within the Bush crew, he also indicts the structure and apparatus of the lumbering imperial colossus:

The absence of effective management has been the defining characteristic of the Bush administration's foreign policy and has allowed radical decisions to take effect rapidly with minimal review.

The ease with which the Bush administration has been able to overcome bureaucratic resistance throughout the government has revealed weaknesses of both the military's officer corps and the nation's intelligence community.

Though several "security" fiefdoms have been built and defended since those days, it is not clear that our political leaders are either smarter or more committed to moral conduct than was the Bush crew in 2001. Nothing structural has been put in place to prevent continuation or revival of the worst abuses. No prosecutions -- "looking forward, not backward" -- means there's no institutional impediment to doing this all again -- and more.

Know hope

Who knew the most inspiring figure of the early '00s would be, not the skinny guy with the African name, but the skinny nerd?

At the turning of the millennium, few imagined that citizens of developed democracies would soon be required to defend the concept of an open society against their own leaders.

Yet the balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason. With each court victory, with every change in the law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear. As a society, we rediscover that the value of a right is not in what it hides, but in what it protects.

Edward Snowden, New York Times, June 5, 2015

The crazy continues

Last February, after years of litigation, the U.S government was ordered by a federal judge to remove all references to Malaysian architecture professor Rahinah Ibrahim from its mushrooming "terrorist" databases. He concluded that secret testimony showed that back in 2005 an FBI agent had "checked the wrong box" on a form.

But, as reported by Robert Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle, our secret spook masters won't let go. On Monday, they denied her a visa to visit the U.S. for "terrorist activities."

The case of a former Stanford graduate student barred from returning to the United States since 2005 has taken another twist with a U.S. consulate's decision this week to deny her a visa because of "terrorist activities" - after the government told a federal judge that she posed no threat to national security.

... [U.S. District Judge William Alsup] ordered the government to purge all references of the listing from its records and to allow Ibrahim to reapply for a visa. But he said he could not order officials to issue the travel documents, because that decision was up to the government.

On Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers submitted declarations from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies attesting that they had deleted Ibrahim's watch-list placement from their files.

However, they also submitted a State Department declaration disclosing that she had been denied a visa Monday in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur under a law that bars those involved in "terrorist activities" from traveling to the United States.

The tenacity of this woman who has fought their Kafkaesque system for nearly a decade must scare the spooks badly.

The judge's decision can be read here. Too bad it apparently has no force.

Just do it

Follow the link to find out how.
UPDATE: collective success!

Why we must not just trust the NSA with metadata

Or the local police department either!

KIEV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian government used telephone technology to pinpoint the locations of cellphones in use near clashes between riot police officers and protesters early on Tuesday, illustrating that techniques that can be used to target commercial information can serve law enforcement as well.

People near the fighting between riot police and protesters received a text message shortly after midnight saying “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

The phrasing echoed language in a new law making participation in a protest deemed violent a crime punishable by imprisonment.

New York Times

Sure, we're not living with the level of popular disturbance that Ukraine is -- but the rest of the article makes clear that the thugs seem as likely to be the authorities as the protesters.

Uncovering and leashing the watchers, then and now

In Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, Jeffrey Kahn, a law professor at SMU, tackles three tasks: narrating the history of US government controls on the people's travel, explicating the post 9/11 maze of "no fly" controls, and suggesting a more freedom-friendly legal regime than what frightened politicians and ever aggrandizing spook bureaucracies have wrought.

Looking back at US government watch lists, he has brought to light the regime of Mrs. Shipley. Her obscure office in the State Department decided which US citizens might be issued passports largely without any outside scrutiny from the 1930s through the 50s. Passports in that era were a novelty that only became essential for travel after World War I era controls somehow leached into the ensuing uneasy European "peace." Once the very idea of regulating individual's travel had emerged amid wartime fears, a government office took upon itself to decide which citizens might harm US interests by going abroad freely. Remembered victims include playwright Arthur Miller and the Communist singer Paul Robeson who were both denied passports, but there were thousands who found themselves so restricted, mostly anonymously.

Ruth Shipley was not a politician or even a political appointee. She was a civil servant who rose from the ranks of World War I era file clerks to become a force in Washington whom presidents praised and to whom senators paid obeisance. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called her "a wonderful ogre," which he intended as a great compliment. …Mrs. Shipley controlled travel by issuing, or not, what became a license for their travel: a passport. It was her job to decide who could go where, for how long, and under what conditions. On the day she retired, Mrs. Shipley's office had amassed files on twelve million people. …

As the anti-Communist paranoia of the 1950s receded, a series of legal decisions curtailed the arbitrary power of Mrs. Shipley's office; several of these were written by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who

in 1959, was obliged to write to Deputy Undersecretary of State Robert Murphy seeking his "personal consideration and if necessary to discuss with Secretary [of State] Herter and President Eisenhower" the Department's decision not to validate his passport for travel to China.

Kahn describes the contemporary watch list system -- the Terrorist Screening Center, the Terrorist Screening Database, and their offshoots -- as less personal and even less penetrable than Mrs. Shipley's regime. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, officials charged with "security," felt exposed as failures and were determined never to let any danger slip past them again. All their incentives encouraged them to expand controls like a cancer.

After the information-sharing mistakes revealed by 9/11, there was considerable zeal to err on the side of overinclusion. Even as late as 2005, Justice Department auditors reported that the then-director of the TSC, Donna Bucella, told them that "to err on the side of caution, individuals with any degree of a terrorism nexus were included" on the consolidated watch list so long as minimum identifying data were available. … in late 2009, the Terrorist Screening Database contained the names of approximately 400,000 people.

The mushrooming lists quickly left the narrow regime of preventing threats to commercial flights and became an instrument of more general coercion. The various security agencies have taken advantage of their ability to prevent travel in order to bring pressure on, mostly Muslim, citizens they wished to investigate or recruit as spies among their communities. (I've chronicled the case of Air Force vet Saadiq Long and his is by no means the only such instance.)

Kahn concludes:

[The] shift from corporeal form to digital avatar accomplished a neat trick, even if those who created the new system did not realize just who they had regenerated. There is no single Mrs. Shipley anymore. Her power was certainly not transferred to the singular discretion of the Director of the Terrorist Screening Center. But Mrs. Shipley's spirit did not entirely disappear. It has been diffused into the databases and computers of scores of analysts working in a systematic, multilevel process.

This makes decision making appear scientific, rigorous, and technologically sophisticated. Data points are parsed and assessed at different stages according to set criteria by dedicated professionals in the "watchlistiing community." The involvement of multiple agencIes with a stake in the results would seem to prevent any single person from amassing the power Mrs. Shipley did. What could be more objective and dispassionate?

… The new system makes it much harder to identify just who is responsible for the final decision to ground a citizen. …Officials in both eras have emphasized the careful vetting and professional judgment used in their departments. But the answer boils down to the same two words: trust us.

Ah yes: "trust us" -- there's President Obama's mantra in response to Edward Snowden's documentation of the NSA's vacuuming collection of our lives; we'll give you cosmetic reforms, we'll study it, but trust us. If the history is to believed, trust in authorities is a mistake unless those authorities are also forced to explain and verify, even when they don't want to.

Kahn goes on to propose that an unrestricted right to travel without government permission should be considered a basic entitlement of citizenship in a democratic state, subject to the strictest scrutiny before officials can use their power to infringe on it. I don't know whether his legal arguments have any future. The Ibrahim case is the latest instance in a string of court decisions that seem to point to a judicial willingness to put some limits on the spooks -- and to the courts' inability to get much more of a grip on the bureaucracy than individuals enjoy.

Questioning the Panoticon

Revelations via Edward Snowden about the NSA's practice of vacuuming up every smidgen of data about everyone from the internet continue to inspire efforts to envision the contours of our Panopticon society. The Panopticon was a design for an institution, a prison, imagined by the 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Such an edifice would allow a central observer to see all the inmates at all times, if that observer chose to look at any particular one. Guess we've wandered inside such a thing, at least those of us who inhabit the web.

Steven Levy has long chronicled the development of the tech industry. In the 80s he introduced a general audience to the existence of "hackers"; more recently he offered a journalistic window into Google. This month he has published an intriguing article in Wired titled How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet. The whole is worth reading. Here are some bits of Levy's well-sourced story.

Some companies seemed perfectly comfortable turning over information about their customer bases to the NSA. …Technology companies are another matter. It’s almost a cliché when tech CEOs claim that without the trust of their users, they would have no business. They depend on customers’ willingness to share information….

“At first we were in an arms race with sophisticated criminals,” says Eric Grosse, Google’s head of security. “Then we found ourselves in an arms race with certain nation-state actors [with a reputation for cyberattacks]. And now we’re in an arms race with the best nation-state actors.” Primarily, the US government....

... For years, companies from espionage-happy countries like China have been spurned by overseas buyers who didn’t trust their products. Now it’s America’s turn. …

Levy is a gentle observer, both of the tech companies who are his homies (and his bread and butter) and of the spooks who we've learned infest the same turf. He finds them very similar -- certain that they work from good purposes and uncomprehending that outsiders might question their reach or motives. Both kinds come across as a terrible mix of innocent and dangerous. Perhaps the NSA revelations have killed off any lingering generalized innocence about digital technology being inherently a force for freedom. ***Thomas E. Ricks has been a military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The US war machine is his subject and at least some of its members respect his reporting. So when he writes a blog post titled The more I listen to American intelligence officials, the more I edge toward Snowden, he's not some radical blowing smoke.

I've been really ambivalent about Edward Snowden, especially since he landed in Russia. … Yet I have been struck that everyone under the age of 30 I've asked thinks he's a hero.

… It is possible that Snowden did the right thing but in the wrong way. Indeed, he may have helped the United States but committed a crime in doing so. Yet that begs the question: What would have been the right way? Especially given the reckless disregard for the law shown by American national security officials over the last decade, he was right to be wary of going the civil disobedience route. We've seen the killing of American citizens held to be "enemy combatants," and intelligence officials certainly talk about Snowden as an enemy who has inflicted severe damage on their operations. Add two and two and you get a secret execution warrant for one Edward Snowden. Is that speculative? Absolutely. Ridiculous? Not if you have been paying attention to the erosion of boundaries (between civilian and military, war and peace, public and private, and most especially the militarization of intelligence operations).

… until there is more accountability for the crimes committed by U.S. intelligence officials over the last 10 years, I am not inclined to let secret policemen and spies be the moral arbiters of our society or the interpreters of our constitutional rights -- in fact, I think the burden is on them, not on me.

Again, the whole is worth reading.

When people who have been at home inside the circles of the great start asking real questions, be they reporters or tech executives, there may be room for those of us who have always been outside to move the colossus a smidgen. I hope so.

New Years musings: on getting them wrong

'Tis the season to think about my own errors of the last year and what I might do to avoid making similar ones in the future.

Edward Snowden: When Snowden's NSA revelations, first burst on the scene. I was suspicious of the guy. Obviously I was interested in his material -- had expected its existence but was thrilled to see it emerge -- but his picture and his story put me on alert for a phony. So did his apparent political innocence in thinking he could find protection in Hong Kong and later getting stuck in Russia.

Was Snowden some kind of annoying libertarian techie? So it seemed. I don't look to that kind for political wisdom. It didn't initially give me a good impression of Snowden that he seemed hooked up with Glenn Greenwald. I was an enthusiastic reader of Greenwald from the beginnings of his civil liberties-oriented blogging career, but I soured on him when he seemed to take every political disagreement as an occasion for all out war on everyone who disagreed with him.

But I now think I was being bigoted about Snowden (giving him a bad rap for being a young white guy) and probably also about Greenwald. The releases seem to have been done well, responsibly, and effectively. Like a lot of folks, I've come to be very grateful to both men. Now even the New York Times is urging the US government to ease up on Snowden and a former State Department official concurs.

Pope Francis: I didn't pay much attention to his election, except to note that he'd vocally opposed legalization of gay marriage in his native Argentina (didn't succeed in that intervention, by the way.) I was open to charges that he'd sided with the murderous military in their Dirty War against the country's leftists and youth in the 1970s and '80s. Wasn't supporting fascists what princes of the church do?

But in practice, he is apparently the last thing I expected from a Pope: a Christian. His emphasis on inclusion, humility and care for the poor are the fruits the Gospel might lead us to expect from the followers of Jesus, but so seldom what we (those followers) offer the world, especially by way of our institutions.

James Carroll's thoughtful New Yorker profile offered a clue to what motivates the Pope's humble approach to his absurd position. The future pontiff was a mere 36 years old when he assumed responsibility for and authority over Jesuits in Argentina just as the crimes of the junta were taking off. His own early mentor, a woman named Esther de Careaga, was one of many kidnapped and dumped from a helicopter into the ocean. In the face of authoritarian horrors, priests were divided about standing with their poor flocks or trying to keep their heads down. The current pope admits

“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative.”

At least two Jesuits were taken by the military and tortured, though they survived. The Dirty War had tens of thousands of victims who did not.

According to Carroll, drawing on interviews with Jesuits and the pope's own statements:

The years of the Dirty War form the general ground of the Pope’s striking self-criticism: his experience, one Jesuit told me, was “searing.” After leaving office as Provincial, [the future pope] was rector of a Jesuit seminary for a time, then worked on a dissertation for a degree in theology. He was sent to a Jesuit house of studies in Córdoba, Argentina, as spiritual director, yet these were wilderness years for him. He told [Jesuit journalist Antonio] Spadaro that in Córdoba he “lived a time of great interior crisis.” In an earlier interview, he had confided, “I had to learn from my errors along the way because, to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors. Errors and sins.” He told Spadaro bluntly, “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech.”

This Pope acts in ways that make me want to believe that he wants to exemplify the possibility of our turning away (repentance) from past wrong acts. None of us who have not faced threats to our personal survival and responsibility for the survival of others under murderous tyranny can lightly make judgments -- though we naturally will.

Maybe we can learn something from this pope. What a pleasant surprise!

I still suspect the Roman Catholic ship of state will founder on the iceberg of treating women as fully equal humans. But meanwhile, I'll enjoy knowing Pope Francis is increasing the sum total of good in a fractured world.

Her "day in court" (she's barred) is Kafkaesque

Lately I've been writing rather cavalierly about the abusive treatment our post 9/11 Heimat Security regime inflicts on people in the process of trying to fly.

But thanks to Nell writing in the comments, I'm now following more closely Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim's ongoing challenge to her no-fly list status through the excellent series of accounts at Papers Please! (Should you follow this link and find that Dr. Ibrahim's story is no longer the lead item, just enter "Ibrahim" in the search box in the right column.)

Ibrahim is not some no-count, anonymous foreign Muslim. According to the Associated Press' trial coverage, she's

... 48, lives in Malaysia with her husband and four children and is dean of the architecture and engineering school at the University of Malaysia.

She was apparently added to the no-fly list when a graduate student at Stanford over ten years ago

The current trial is beyond Kafkaeque. Ibrahim can only testify on videotape. The U.S. government barred Ibrahim's U.S. citizen daughter from flying in from Malaysia to testify by putting the daughter on a no-fly list. This intervention was revealed by the Malaysian airline, then the U.S. spooks implausibly denied their actions. More here. Lawyers for Ibrahim were subjected to a clearance process under an order from the trial judge and thus allowed to learn what the government says is Ibrahim's watch list status -- but they are barred from telling their client.

The theory about what caused Ibrahim to be barred from flying that is presented in her legal briefs is that 1) linguistically-challenged Feds confused the similar names of a Malaysian academic association with an Islamic terrorist outfit and 2) the FBI wanted to recruit her to spy on Muslim mosques while she was grad student in California, but she stiffed them, so they stuck her on a barring list and still refuse to admit they screwed up.

The AP summarizes

"Once you're in the system it's almost impossible to get out," Ibrahim's lawyer Elizabeth Pipkin told the judge Monday during opening statements at the trial. Pipkin said Ibrahim landed on the no-fly list through inadequate training of list administrators and their bias regarding religious and national origin.

I find that totally plausible. We always refused to speculate on why the government once apparently briefly listed a couple of San Francisco peace activists. But it always seemed likely that our awkward detention was the product of a "round up the usual suspects" impulse after 9/11. Having made the initial mistake, the government was willing to devote huge resources to avoiding any kind of scrutiny, as much to avoid embarrassing itself as to maintain any legitimate "state secrets."

The judge in Dr. Ibrahim's case seems frustrated and appalled by the government's evasions of ordinary legal procedures. (Our judge, Charles Breyer, the brother of the Supreme Court judge, acted equally critical of the Feds. Experienced federal court judges don't like to be handed lies and gobbledegook.) Let's hope he forces this story into the open. He'll take a lot of shit if he does, but under our current surveillance state regime, only occasional courage on the part of fortuitously placed individuals seems to impede the rush to pervasive tyranny.

Meanwhile, testimony in this trial taught me that I better get hold of a copy of Jeffrey Kahn's book,Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, to keep up on these issues. More to come.