Harry Potter to the white courtesy telephone, please!

As I've said, the real issue with the NSA revelations is not that the government is spying on the whole world (surprise!), but the theory all that spying is based on:

Supporters of the sweeping U.S. surveillance effort say it's needed to build a haystack of information in which to find a needle that will stop a terrorist. In Headley's case, however, it appears the U.S. was handed the needle first — and then deployed surveillance that led to the arrest and prosecution of Headley and other plotters.

Honestly, even one case, if it could be proven to have all the necessary causal links, wouldn't prove the validity of the theory.  The whole idea of this massive data gathering is still just magical thinking:  if we amass enough data and run it through enough algorithms, the computer will do the work for us and, voila!, captured terrorists!

Except, not, for a whole host of easily identifiable reasons.  This flawed premise is the basis of national security policy; at least, a very expensive, very clandestine (or it was, anyway) policy.  And the fact that it hasn't worked yet just means, as usual, that we just haven't tried hard enough; or amassed enough data; or run it all through enough algorithms.

But we never escape the basic issue of epistemology (where is a philosopher when you need one?):  you only find what you are looking for.  Computers only make that process faster; they don't make it magically different.

I've seen this movie....

I agree we shouldn't be involved in Syria.  It's a bit like Rwanda, in that slaughter is happening, it's a humanitarian crisis, and we shouldn't ignore it.  It's a bit like Bosnia; no matter what we do, the result will be a mess.  And it could be like Iraq or Afghanistan, except I don't think we'll get that involved.

So there is not a good answer.  And none of these are good answers, either:

“It was a matter of time — the White House may not have wanted intervention but intervention itself was chasing the administration,” said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East-based analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The White House underestimated the potency of this struggle and its profound implications for the region and its own interests, and then found itself lacking space, strategic clarity and momentum to do anything meaningful.”

 That presumes we ever had space, strategic clarity, and momentum to do anything meaningful.  It's nice to think we did, but that strikes me as the same reasoning leading the NSA to get its hands on all the information in the world; even Faustus didn't understand everything after his deal with Mepistopheles.  And intervention was chasing us? Why?  Because we have a standing army?  Should we, perhaps, start to reconsider that 50 year old commitment?

While an aide said Mr. Obama’s decision was made even before Mr. Clinton’s comments this week endorsing more robust intervention, the president ended up satisfying neither side in the Syrian debate. For those who have pressed the White House to do more, the belated agreement to send small arms after nearly 93,000 deaths seems too little, too late. For those who warn that Syria could become another Iraq or Libya, the latest move comes across as another step down a slippery slope toward a messy outcome.

Clinton wants to rewrite the history of Rwanda.  And the question not being answered here, but being worried about by the critics, is:  what do we do if the regime falls?  Libya is not exactly a Western democracy, nor is it likely to be one anytime soon.  Do we expect Syria to stabilize within six months, and recover all it's refugees, and bring prosperity to the region?

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in Mr. Obama’s State Department, said her onetime boss so clearly wanted to be a domestic president and yet could not remain at a distance from the Syria conflict because it could set the Middle East in flames. Already, she noted, it has helped destabilize Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey and flooded refugees into Jordan.

“I really worry this is going to be remembered as the United States standing by and watching a Middle East war ignite,” said Ms. Slaughter, who will become president of the New America Foundation in Washington in September. “I fear the president thinks he can stand apart. He’s the one who always says with power comes responsibility. That’s his line.”

 Responsibility to whom, though?  The people of Iraq, Lebanon, and Turkey?  Or the people of America, which includes all U.S. soldiers?

But White House aides on Friday again ruled out sending United States troops and dismissed calls for a no-fly zone over Syria, calling it “dramatically more difficult and dangerous and costly” than it had been in Libya in 2011, as Mr. Rhodes put it. And there is little domestic constituency for another American adventure abroad.

 Yup.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said he was “baffled” by Mr. Obama’s decision to become more deeply involved. “What exactly is our objective?” he asked. “It’s not clear to me that every nondemocratic government in the world has to be removed by force.” 

The Syria war is a struggle for power, not democracy, he said. “Is that something we should be engaged in?”

 Again:  yup.  The struggle between Communism and democracy which was the "Cold War" (or was supposed to be) is long over.  The peoples of the world are not struggling to decide to fall under the sphere of influence of the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., and we really don't have a dog in this fight.  Saudi Arabia is a very repressive regime.  Should we be working to destabilize them, or at least support opponents of the kingdom?  Obviously not, but why, then, do we have an interest in Syria?  Because the regime is falling already?  Because people have died?  Because of refugees?  Because our support of rebels in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War worked out so well for peace, stability, and humanitarian interests? 

Oh, good grief!

Trial bait, is all this is:

During an announcement of the signing of the so-called “Merry Christmas Bill,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry and state Senator Robert Nichols (R-Jacksonville) said Thursday that freedom from religion was not included in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“I’m proud we are standing up for religious freedom in our state,” Perry said. “Freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion.”

The new law states that students and school officials have the right to use religious greetings like “Merry Christmas” and display various religious holiday symbols on school grounds.

And here's the thing about it:  the State of Texas is never going to be forced to defend this law in Federal (or even state) court.

Local school districts will have to foot that bill.

In Texas, school districts are independent government entities.  They are controlled by the Legislature and the Texas Education Agency, but they raise their own taxes, elect their own school boards, and are responsible in court for whatever is done in their classrooms.  So, if some school insists a Christmas tree must go up in a classroom, and some parent objects, that school district is going to pay the legal fees to defend that lawsuit in court.

Conversely, if some school district refuses to allow Christmas trees in the classroom, that school district is going to pay the legal fees to defend that position in court, when some parent uses this law to sue the school.

Texas schools are woefully underfunded.  The state system for funding schools is a joke, and like subject to further court challenges as it is neither "efficient" nor, I would argue, compliant with equal protection (the formula for deciding which school district gets how much money is incomprehensible).  So now, in addition to struggling to find funds to pay teachers, they get to look forward to being caught between people who don't want "Christmas" mentioned at all in the classroom, and people who will demand their right not to be free "from" religion.

And do you think anybody is gonna send Rick Perry the bill for this?

Ye shall know the truth, and yet probably know not that you know....

Trying to put recent posts in perspective, I wanted to say something about how telling people what you know won't necessarily make them think the way you think.  This is what Edward Snowden says he feared:  that his NSA revelations wouldn't lead to a reaction against the NSA similar to the one he had, the one that led him to spend a month or two preparing to breach his oath of secrecy.

And then the universe, or God, or happenstance, or just blind simple doo-dah luck, landed this in my lap:

Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order.

These are the conclusions to which my study of John's Gospel has led me, and they are the conclusions that I explore and document in this book "The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic."

That's Shelby Spong at the end of a blog post describing his new book.  He's rather boldly claiming that once you read it, you'll never go back, and in fact you'll be a Spong disciple and with him recreate Christianity in the way Shelby Spong thinks best!

Which, really, ain't gonna happen.

I have no problem with Spong's assertions about the Gospel of John.  I would make more of the importance of the semeia (signs) John's gospel uses.  That gospel calls the miracles not dunamis, as the synoptics do (usually translated as "miracle" but implying an act of power) and refers to them as "signs."

Yeah, kinda like the Mel Gibson movie.

There's a lot of subtlety going on in John's gospel, in other words; and yet it is often used as a club, because "whosoever believeth in him (things always sound more holy and authoritative in the King James' English)," donchaknow?  I mean, those who don't, will perish!  It's right there in black & white, waddyawantmetodoaboudit?

But I digress....

Shelby Spong, despite his claims of spending several years on this, is not a scholar.  He doesn't write for scholars, he doesn't write as a scholar, he doesn't even pretend to be a scholar.  He's a polemicist, really.  So he takes a bit of scholarship and spins a tale with it and comes up with an idea he's sure everyone would agree upon, if they just understood what he understands!

But it doesn't work that way.  It never does.

Scholars don't try to persuade a vast group of others of the truth of their position.  They try to defend it among other scholars; and very narrow ground that can be, too.  But if they imagine that what they know will enlighten and enlist others to their scholarly cause if it is just well enough understood; then they have gone astray from scholarship.

Mind, I have nothing against Biblical scholarship.  I think its incredibly valuable.  But I don't think it's going to change the world anytime soon.  The  very idea that the Gospel of John is not the work of John Zebedee, for example, is probably 150 years old; or older.  Among scholars, that is.  Spong cites it as if he just discovered fire, and is bringing the burning coal back to the cave for the first time.  The people who already know that, in other words, haven't had their paradigm shifted all that much by the knowledge.  Some of them accept it, and move on; some don't even accept it at all.

There's even a story in the Gospel of John about this, oddly enough.  Jesus is not baptized in that gospel, but like the baptisms in the Synoptics, there is a scene meant to show Jesus speaks for God.  Jesus says, "Father, glorify your name!"

Then a voice spoke out of the sky:  "I have glorified it and I'll glorify it further."

The crowd there heard this, and some people remarked that it had thundered, others that an angel had spoken to him.

"That voice did not come for me but for you," Jesus replied.

 So some hear thunder; some hear an angel.  It's not clear anyone heard what was said, or knew who it was, or that any paradigms that day were shifted.

Maybe it's better not to expect them to be; and just to be happily surprised, whenever they are.

Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

Comes now Edward Snowden, who never met a reporter he didn't want to tell his life story (because it's not about him!) to, and tells the Chinese he trusts their system of law more than the system of laws in the U.S.  Because, while it was a great act of conscience on his part to violate his oath of secrecy and breach criminal laws by telling tales out of school (some of which may or may not have any validity), what he doesn't want, is to face any system of justice whatsoever.

“People who think I made a mistake in picking HK as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality."

Which is cute, because he knows he won't face any charges in a court in Hong Kong, as he hasn't violated Chinese law.

All he wants is to get out of jail, free.

Is he a hero?

Martin Luther King believed in this system of laws, and of the people who backed it, even as those laws declared him a second-class citizen.  He suffered the jails of the U.S., and he died on a hotel balcony because he believed that system was fundamentally just, and would finally see justice done.

Medgar Evers believed in this system of laws, and even though his life was constantly threatened and finally taken by a racist madman, he believed the system would change and justice would finally be done.

The Berrigan brothers believed in this system of laws, and went to jail over and over again, trying to make it change.

Even Daniel Ellsberg turned himself in for leaking the Pentagon Papers, and stood trial.

Edward Snowden runs to Hong Kong and declares himself a hunted man, wanted by the CIA and the Triad and Lord knows what other shadowy organization, and throws himself on the mercy of the Chinese because the Americans can't be trusted. He even tries to buy his asylum by telling them what anybody with internet access or a TeeVee already knows or could reasonably expect:  that the U.S. is hacking the Chinese. (and, of course, the Chinese are hacking the U.S.  Is there no one who can be trusted?)

But, more importanly,  Mr. Snowden lives in fear and trembling:

"I will never feel safe," he said. "Things are very difficult for me in all terms, but speaking truth to power is never without risk."

My heart bleeds for you.  No, really, it does.  After all, if China doesn't want him, he can go to Russia:

My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power," he said.

Yeah; the government that was so intimidated by 20 seconds of public behavior by four women, it sent two of them to Siberia.

He's not a hero; he's a putz.

He's a coward.

For my next prediction....

Somewhere on the interwebs is the article which I cannot now find about the NSA revelations (B.S., Before Snowden, IIRC) which ended with a particularly pungent quote about how nothing was likely to change because people would complain on Twitter, but that wasn't the same as voting their suddenly awakened consciences (and besides, all of Congress knows how to handle this:  either declare Snowden a traitor, or be shocked, shocked! to learn the government has a secret program to gather all your electronical traded stuff.  Something the NSA has been doing since it was No Such Agency, and the building in D.C. didn't officially house anything and wasn't really there.  My memory is long, indeed; almost as long as my sentences.  Suck on that, Marcel!).


Yup.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled collection of data.

Helping the fairies

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a charming little tale in the 1950’s that took the premise that a human brain was just a certain number of cells interconnected at enough points that it produced consciousness as a result of the cells and the connections between them. His story imagined this same thing happening when enough telephones around the world were connected to each other, rather like brain cells.  With enough such connections (the phones as "cells," the wires as the connections), a consciousness would "wake up"; and then what?

It wasn’t a prediction of inevitability; it was just a pleasant bit of imagination which, we are now sure, might as well have been a fantasy by Dunsany.

Because intelligence doesn’t work like that.  We aren’t yet sure how it works, but we are quite sure it doesn’t work like that.

In a similar vein, we are assured by those who know that the many programs of the NSA will soon, if they haven’t already, gather up enough data and process that data through powerful enough algorithms that the government will know who the terrorists are and how to stop them, somewhat a la Tom Cruise in “Minority Report,” only without the psychics floating in briny water.  In other words, make enough connections and the system itself will "wake up" and do the work you couldn't do.

And that seems to me to be as ludicrous as Clarke’s “Dial ‘F’ for Frankenstein.”  The only difference between them is that nobody ever spent any money trying to make Clarke’s story so much as a short film; but we are spending billions on this ludicrous and baseless vision.

Already we know that, while the Boston police were looking for suspects in the crowd during the Boston marathon, they had no idea to look for the Tsarnaev brothers, whom it is safe to assume used telephones and the internet and didn’t even try to hide themselves from security cameras on the day of the bombing.  There is an old, old problem of discovery, known to anyone who pursues knowledge by looking for it:  you don’t find what you aren’t looking for.

As I understand the underlying idea of PRISM or Blarney or just using the FISA court to continuously get phone records, that principle is not being considered.  In fact, what is being considered is that the computer, rising above human tendency to error, will “see” with greater insight, and find in data sifted by properly written algorithms, what is “really” there rather than whatever NSA employees or programmers are looking for.

When you put it that way, it sounds almost reasonable, right?  When it doesn’t sound exactly like magical thinking.

The magic of Harry Potter was, for the most part, a simple expression of will.  Learning to express one’s will clearly and accurately, was the purpose of magical education.  Once you had that down, you could turn a cup into an animal, whisk yourself across the globe, or defeat your enemy with a word.  The only possible error was in inexact expression of the will.  Garbage in, garbage out ruled only over those insufficiently trained in how to wave their wands.

GIGO, of course, still rules in computer programming.  “Bugs” in the system still exist, because programming is always an imperfect expression of will, just as engineering or art or science, is.  But the premise of data-mining is that GIGO has no place, because the patterns will make all things clear and will tell us, once and for all, who is menacing and who isn’t.  Basically, it will do the work for us; all we have to do is feed it.

Or, as some people think it used to work, make a sacrifice to the right deities.

Magical thinking.  If we just feed the algorithm the right data, sufficient data, all the data, we will learn, if not the meaning of life, then at least who our enemies are.  Why?  Because the data and the patterns the computer looks for will make all things clear.  It sounds more like the mad dream of James Jesus Angleton, a man so famously paranoid he suspected everyone but himself of being duplicitous, or at least never above suspicion.  He saw patterns everywhere, and was quite sure he knew what they meant.

So does Alex Jones.  Except he thinks he doesn’t need any more data; everything just proves his conspiracy theories, no matter what information it is.

So there’s the formula:  the right algorithm and information equal to not less than the entireworld, will yield:  magic.

If technology won't save us, perhaps magical thinking will.

I am less and less worried about the collection of this data, or about the nature of the person of Edward Snowden; and more and more worried about the idea that all of this makes sense.  We might as well be hoping for Hellboy.

Me? Or your lyin' eyes?

Oh, put a sock in it:

Edward Snowden said that he stepped forward because he came to realize that the US government is engaged in invasions of Americans’ privacy on a vast and unprecedented scale, and was hiding its interpretation of the law from the American people. Given that the NSA is contravening the 4th amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, some Americans consider him a hero.

No, the acts of the NSA do not violate the 4th Amendment.  First, the Verizon order Snowden revealed to the world is a COURT ORDER.  You may not like the FISA court (and I certainly don't) but it's a legally constituted Article III court.  So stop being stupid about how a court order violates the 4th Amendment because you don't like the content of the order.

And then there's the problem of what the 4th Amendment covers, and what it doesn't.  For the 1000th time:

 The key here is a legal principle known as the “third party doctrine,” which says that users don’t have Fourth Amendment rights protecting information they voluntarily turn over to someone else. Courts have said that when you dial a phone number, you are voluntarily providing information to your phone company, which is then free to share it with the government.

This all dates back to a 1979 Supreme Court decision. Police had asked the phone company for information about the numbers dialed from a robbery suspect’s phone. The suspect objected, pointing to a famous 1967 ruling holding that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to record the audio of a phone call. He argued that the same principle ought to apply when the government records information about the numbers a suspect dials.

The Supreme Court rejected this argument. “We doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the court. He pointed out that telephone customers are used to seeing numbers they’ve dialed on their monthly telephone bill.

So, sorry, you have no 4th Amendment protection over the "metadata" or "telephony records" created when you make a phone call.  Get used to it. (and do you have a privacy expectation in e-mails, or anything you put on the internet?  Probably not.  Weren't people telling us a decade or so back that privacy was dead, thanks to internet transactions?  Why are we surprised to find out this is true?)

And honestly, if I never see this line of stupidity masquerading as wisdom and insight again, it'll be too soon:

The governmental class, however, will attempt to destroy Snowden, with well-practiced tools of propaganda, demonization, and distortion, as a way of taking the focus off their own alleged wrong-doing. This is how it is done (although the points are given in the future tense, most have already been trotted out).

 What always follows (the particulars are irrelevant) is a line of allegations all presented as ad hominems which have nothing whatsoever to do with the "facts" of the case because, ad hominems, ya know?  And then the persons making these arguments always claim they have the logical higher ground, because they know the government employees presenting an alternative set of facts are all liars because, well...they're government employees!  I mean, what else do you need to know?  You can't believe them!  They're liars!

And 'round and 'round it goes.

Let me pause to point out that the father of logic, Aristotle, established in his Rhetoric that there are four crucial elements to an argument, and one of those four is ethos, or the character of the speaker.  Nobody takes a speaker's statements apart from his character; it's part of how you evaluate what she or he says.  Are the statements about Snowden's character slanders?  Or relevant to establishing his veracity?  And what do some of the listed complaints do to establish veracity?  Viz:

5. Government spokesmen will assert without evidence that his allegations are simply untrue.

 Yup; and in part that's because the programs under discussion are secret and not to be discussed in public.  We've been doing business this way since Harry Truman set up the NSA and like organizations in the early 1950's.  It may be the government spokesmen are liars.  It may be they are civil servants trying to do their best and follow the law.  It could be both, and a little bit of neither.  Stated as the quote has it, by the way,  this argument is basically the same tactic being used by Darrell Issa and the House GOP to slam the IRS because, frankly, nobody likes the IRS.  So whatever they IRS says is a lie in furtherance of their conspiracy to get Obama re-elected.  Or something.

If, in other words, it's a crap argument, it's a crap argument no matter who is using it.

 7. It will be alleged that the domestic surveillance is legal, even thought that assertion has never been tested in the courts because the US government won’t reveal the victims of its program, so no one is recognized by the courts as having standing to sue. (Everything the Soviet Union did was legal, too, by Soviet law).

 Which, by definition, makes it legal.  Sorry.  Welcome to the limits of the law.  Is it right?, is perhaps what you mean to be asking.  That's not the same question as:  "Is it legal?"  Again, I don't like the FISA court either, but it's a properly constituted Article III court.  If  I want to wander off into constitutional la-la land with the gun nutters and the guys who claim the 19th Amendment was never ratified and the whole Federal government is illegal....well, I don't, thanks.  So don't start picking and choosing which parts of the government you think are legal, and which parts aren't.  The consistent story coming out of the government right now is that these programs are conducted according to the laws.  The argument that can't possibly be true because you understand the 4th Amendment better than the Supreme Court does makes you sound like a 2nd Amendment absolutist about to declare your own individual sovereignty.

And let's put all this talk about Snowden in context:  as the lawyers say, he opened this door.  He told the Guardian to publish his name, and he videotaped an interview in which he discussed his personal life and his reasons for revealing this information.  He put it out there, and his defenders cannot now complain that people are talking about him and his motivations.  In fact, he might be better off because, in the absence of any information, speculation would run amok.  As I said, people will always want to establish the ethos of the speaker before they give credence to the speaker's argument.

This is still basically an issue of which you believe:  the government story, or Snowden's story.  Both, frankly, have about the same amount of credibility behind them, at least at this point.  There is no vast governmental conspiracy propaganda machine.  True, the politicians now denouncing these programs are all shocked, shocked! to learn there is gambling in this establishment.   But by the argument Juan Cole is making, any response from the government except to confirm the most paranoid fears of the most misinformed person on the planet (Alex Jones, come on down!) is to be rejected out of hand.

Let's separate wheat from chaff here; but by all means, recognize some of that wheat is going to be the character and person of Edward Snowden.  And maybe the issue should be this:  with all the government cutbacks under Bush, and all the emphasis on private contractors doing government jobs, maybe the example of Edward Snowden is an object lesson in the failure of that particular public policy.  Especially considering what essentially highly paid private citizens with no real ties to the government they work with (but not for) can do with access to what are, after all, government secrets.

What is the real scandal here?  That the government has access to this data, or that private companies have access to it through their employees?  The first notion doesn't really surprise me; the second, worries me one helluva lot more.

In the Presence of Indifference....

So now the loose talk starts, and Edward Snowden is either a hero or a traitor.

Well, here's the definition of treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

Now, the revelation of PRISM and the FISA order regarding Verizon's records is not, exactly, a revelation:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

That was in 2006.  I don't remember anyone being called a traitor for revealing that information.  I also don't remember too many people being too terribly appalled, either.*

Just this morning NPR interviewed James Bamford, who has written extensively about the NSA.  Is he a traitor?  He discussed the building the NSA is erecting in Utah, simply to store the massive amount of data it is collecting.   Bamford points out we can store a terabyte in a very small space, yet the NSA building will cover 1.5 million square feet.  And it is, by the way, "Top Secret."

Kinda the way James Bond is a "secret agent."

So why isn't James Bamford's interview this morning an act of treason?  Seriously.  He didn't reveal the PRISM program, but he did tell us what I've known for decades: that NSA is collecting electronic communications information, and has been doing so since it was established.  If it is giving comfort to our enemies in time of war to reveal that, then the number of traitors at large in the country is almost uncountable.  There was, after all, a time when the NSA's existence wasn't even acknowledged; when it truly was a "secret" agency.  At what point to discussions about it's practices become treasonous?

Edward Snowden clearly violated national security law.  He clearly revealed information that could lead to his criminal prosecution, perhaps even his conviction and imprisonment.  But treason?

By the way, if we take Edward Snowden at his word, he was making $200,000 a year working for a private contractor as, essentially, a government employee.**  An income that affords him enough money to flee to Hong Kong and hide out there.  Had he actually been a government employee, he probably couldn't afford the luxury of flight in quite the same way.  And he might well have been better vetted for the position he found himself in, and been less of a security risk.

Ironic, no?

Oh, and just because I've been meaning to say it, on the subject of privacy and e-mails.  I was informed, years ago now, never to put a student's grade in an e-mail.  I was made to understand this was because of Federal privacy laws.  The problem with e-mail is that anyone can read it.  The recipient, anyone with access to that in-box, anyone who gets it forwarded to them, etc.  Not the same thing as a personal letter which, presumably will be opened by the recipient and not just anybody at the point of delivery.  There is, you see, a reasonable expectation of privacy in personal mail that allows us to send confidential information that, yes, anyone could see (parents of college students are often surprised that their children are adults as far as the college is concerned, and so not entitled to information like grades.  At least, not entitled to it from the schools.)  But, by implication (if nothing else) there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in an e-mail.

This whole debate still comes down to expectations; and whether or not you trust the government to follow the laws it has; or should have.

*just to be tediously clear, in 2006 Qwest refused to cooperate with the NSA "because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants."  That's what the FISA court has been providing since that time, on a 90 day basis:  warrants for the search of the records.  It is, IOW, perfectly legal.  Should it be?  Aye, there's the rub. 

**or maybe he didn't:  

 Booz Allen can confirm that Edward Snowden, 29, was an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii. Snowden, who had a salary at the rate of $122,000, was terminated June 10, 2013 for violations of the firm’s code of ethics and firm policy.

 Which again calls into question Snowden's credibility; and we are back to who we believe in this story; and why.

The Dangling Conversation

Here's the interesting thing:

How much access to information did Edward Snowden have?  And how much did he think he had access to?

We're trapped in the world of "He said, She said."  In the world of intelligence gathering, in other words.

In a few more days the narrative is going to harden into rigid form, and we may likely not remember how fluid the stories were back when information was coming out and all of it was getting through.  The Narrative will act as a filter, deciding what information applies, and what doesn't.  The information will still be there; but most of it will be ignored.

The Narrative will decide what information is relevant.

This isn't nefarious, or evil, or malignant.  It's just the way we "do" the news.  A common narrative will be agreed upon, and all the information that supports that narrative will be reported.  If it doesn't support the narrative, or immediately indicate a new and more compelling narrative (which means the information carries a lot of detail and structure with it), new information will be discarded and the Narrative will either continue on, picking up more and more pieces of detail; or it will head for the elephant's graveyard, never to be heard from again.

Remember the oil spill in Arkansas, all that shale oil spilling everywhere?  It didn't work its way into the narrative of the Keystone pipeline, even though it proved Keystone was not going to be unique, or the first to carry that sludge from the North.  It challenged the Keystone narrative, in point of fact; and so it disappeared.  Damned inconvenient to note that if Keystone was defeated, older pipelines would just bring that stuff down anyway.

Besides, who cares what happens in Arkansas?  It's not New York City or El "A" or Philadelphia, so fuggedaboutit!

This is the power of the Narrative.

Back to my subject:  the real issue here is not that Snowden leaked this information (though that's not a small point), but that he had access to it.  A guy who would ordinarily be considered in the probationary period of any company has Top Secret clearance to access NSA data?  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?  Who's running this clown show?

Edward Snowden was originally reported as a "career intelligence officer."  Uh, no:  "he turned out to be a twenty-nine year-old who was essentially a contracted IT guy for the agency without a background in national security policy."  Which is much better, isn't it?

 While leaker Edward Snowden says that he was a spy for almost his whole adult life, his background suggest he wasn’t an agent so much as systems admin or engineer for most of it. He reportedly attended a Maryland community college to get enough credits for a high school diploma and was studying computing, but never completed the course work and later received a GED. He then enlisted in the Army in 2003 and become a security guard at a covert NSA facility at the University of Maryland. From there he leveraged his computer skills to get a job doing IT security with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), leaving in 2009 to become a private contractor serving at a variety of NSA locations — That’s the role where he became “hardened” as he watched President Obama advance “the very policies” he thought would be reined in. 

 Which explains why Charlie Pierce detected more than a whiff of pulp fiction about Mr. Snowden's interview in the Guardian.

And here, I think, is where the narrative should go:  right back, if you will, to the original weakness of 9/11:

Some of Snowden’s claims seem far fetched — like that he personally had “the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President” — but as one of the guys doing internal network security for the agency, Snowden did likely have a fairly far-reaching ability to access documents and chatter flowing through the system. IT security folks need to have a certain level of authority to dig down and look at what’s happening in order to investigate possible security breaches and determine their sources, although there should be an auditing system in place to determine how often someone is looking at things they have no reason to be accessing.

Two points, and then back to 9/11:  first, Snowden is filling in the blanks in his ignorance because, while he has access to information, he has no understanding of it.  Back to the world of spycraft as portrayed by John Le Carre or "Six Days of the Condor:"  drudge work, in other words, piecing together disparate bits of information, never quite sure that what you have is reliable, that your sources can be trusted, that your interpretation is sound.  Snowden sounds more like the guy reading a murder mystery who thinks he's figured it all out by the second page, when he doesn't stop for a moment to consider he doesn't know what he doesn't know.

And that puts us back in the middle:  the government has denied this program is what Snowden and Greenwald say it is, or that PRISM does what WaPo (and Snowden) said it does.  Who is telling the truth?  Is it possible Snowden knew far less than he thought he did, and surmised a great deal about which he was wrong?  Is it possible the government is lying, is scurrying like bugs when the rock is turned over, trying to restore order after chaos has revealed far too much?

Yes.  Yes.

Snowden's credibility is subject to question.  His conclusions should be subjected to scrutiny.  To the extent he has no data to support his conclusion, they should be called into doubt.  And while the issue here should not be to shoot the messenger and ignore the message, the question of whether the message bears any relationship to reality needs to be scrutinized.  The NSA may have very good reasons to lie; but that doesn't mean Snowden is telling the truth. It may be the truth as he knows it; but what does he know?

Aye, there's the rub.

So there are two points:  Snowden's knowledge, and Snowden's credibility.  And still the real issue is with the government: what is someone like Snowden doing with enough security clearance (supposedly "Top Secret," but honestly I'm beginning to wonder) to reveal things like this, especially after only 2 months at the job?  I've known people who worked military intelligence, who took great pride in keeping secrets, in not telling their wife and children what they were doing.  If we are going to give people security clearance, they need to be people like that; not people like Edward Snowden.

Which brings us back to 9/11.  Wendell Berry pointed out, after the towers fell, that we were the victims of our own technology, and our own faith in technology.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homeland and our lives. 

 From In the Presence of Fear, Three Essays for a Changed World, The Orion Society, Great Barrington, MA, 2001, p. 3.

Well, we may have done it again:

  However, the larger takeaway here is that as all sectors of our society have become more reliant on computer networks, system admins and IT professionals at large generally have much broader access to the information been carried across those networks than even the people directly responsible for the content flowing through the system. It’s certainly scary that the NSA wasn’t more careful about their custodial and auditing systems. But at its heart it looks like the reason the NSA documents are coming out now is the same reason you don’t want to look at porn at work: Your IT team sees all.

Maybe that's why Edward Snowden had a "Top Secret" clearance with no almost no employment history at all.  Maybe we found the Achilles heel in our entire security structure, and maybe the real story here is that we aren't as secure as we imagine we are.

Trust me.....

All electronic systems create records.  My computer keeps track of my keystrokes, so it can restore what I've just deleted.  Internet providers keep records; Google tracks my searches, reads my e-mail (so I'm told); websites keep track of how often I visit; credit card companies have records of my purchases; and so on and so on and so on.

The only question is:  who has access to this information?  There is no question the information will exist, will be created and stored, will be available.  Apparently it's available to enough people to populate a large city (which should be, but probably won't be, the true scandal).

And then it comes down to a question of trust:  do you trust Google, Verizon, Amazon, et al.?  Do you trust the government, and it's army of contractors?  Let's put that in perspective a moment:

The number of people holding security clearance is equal to about 1.6 percent of the population of the country.

So, quite literally, an army.  How many of those people have access to your personal electronic information?  Apparently even people with only three months employment (whatever happened to probationary periods?) can see this stuff.  And do you trust them all?

Well, you have to, don't you?  The government is now telling us there are rules and restrictions in place about this information and how it is used and who looks at it.  How do we know? We just have to trust them, don't we?  And if we don't?

Disconnect from the internet; cancel your cell-phone. Unplug your landline.  Buy a fountain pen and a ream of paper.  Invest in envelopes.

What other choice do you have?  The electronic records will always be created; and you will always have to trust that someone somewhere is following whatever law is supposed to govern the access to and use of those records.   Do you?  Can you?

What choice do you have?

Snowden's secret

I was going to try to be insightful about this NSA mess, especially now that Snowden's secret is out (he is meat, but he's meat in Hong Kong, where he has a reasonable expectation of staying at liberty; unless China decides they'd rather turn him over to the U.S. than keep him around.)  I was going to do that, but I couldn't get away from the blatherskiting on this subject that seems to abound.

Snowden sez:

 I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

I guess he means the Panopticon. If this is the Panopticon; which it isn't.

I just cleared 400+ e-mails out of my work account.  My wife gets that many at her office in a week (I get very few, by comparison).  Frankly, if the NSA wants to look at them, or the e-mails from my friends, or the ones that some family members forward to me, have at it.  If they have time to read every one of them, they don't have time to get up to any other kind of mischief.

Let's be clear, here.  J. Edgar Hoover used to spy on people directly.  People were followed, recording devices were planted in rooms, surveillance was carried out.  Did you ever see "The Conversation"?  The technology was flint shards and stone knives by comparison with modern equipment, but you could be convinced that nothing you did in public or private couldn't be known by someone determined to know it.

How determined is the NSA to know what I'm up to?  Seriously.

I have a friend who attended some social justice rallies in the '70s.  He told me later he was quite sure the FBI had a file on him because of it.  He was proud of it.

Panopticon?  Why don't I think so?  I know I'm supposed to think so; but I can't bring myself to do it.

And those references to Foucault?  Don't get me started on how many ways that is so completely a misreading of Foucault's thought that it's not funny.  Suffice to say Michel Foucault is not a latter-day French George Orwell.   Foucault is far more complex in his thought and interesting in his insight than that.

You see, I'm still hung on this question of privacy.  First, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et al., have as much if not more information on me than NSA does.  Same goes for Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile, et al.  Is this not a gross invasion of my privacy?  Every online vendor knows what I've bought.  My bank knows when I've accessed my records on line.  They don't know how often I look at a printout of my statements, but they do know how long, when, and from where, I look on-line.  Have I given up my privacy to them, or should I be able to demand they not keep such records?

And despite the readers at TPM,  I really don't see how I have a privacy interest in records kept by a third party when I make use of their equipment.  I've never signed a contract with them that says such records will not be kept about how I use their system.  Honestly, if I don't want someone to read what I write as I write it, I'll buy a typewriter; or better yet, get some ink for my fountain pens.

Yes, I do have fountain pens.  Yes, I'm that old.

And on the subject of that TPM reader:*

The power of these indexed, searchable and pre-mined databases is so far beyond a few earnest police searching through payphone call sheets that the analogy only serves to highlight just what is so novel and dangerous about the new system. For instance, anyone with access to it could become an instant Hoover, able to blackmail millions of Americans. But even apart from misuse — which Simon is right, we have no record of, if only because even the program itself was hidden from us before last week — the magnitude of this surveillance goes beyond what anyone in Baltimore in the 80s could have imagined.

Which would be scary, indeed, if we didn't already live in world where there are security cameras that can place us in public streets and buildings (the Boston Bombers, anyone?; or just red light cameras; I drive under them every day, and either they don't work, or they record everything; how am I to know?), and all know from movies that police can trace telephone calls, and how many of us aren't aware that the convenience of the GPS in our phones means anyone with access to the records/equipment can tell where we are, even if we aren't on our phones?

We make these trade-offs, in other words; and we make most of them in the name of convenience, and don't bat an eye that Google or Verizon might know where we are at any moment of the day or night.  And now the NSA does, too.  But does it?  The TPM reader says:

  Simon asks, “how many agents do you think the FBI has? How many computer-runs do you think the NSA can do?” This reveals his unfamiliarity with how modern computing works.

 Does the computer read the data and decipher it, a la Skynet?  Or must it still be read by a human operator, a person who decides you are, or are not, interesting?  The convenience that keeps you in touch from anywhere on the globe means you can be found anywhere on the globe.  Don't like that?  Cancel your cellphone contract, because even if new laws are passed, somebody is always going to have that information.

As for the "whistleblower", pardon me if I think he's a putz.   "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things," he tells the Guardian; from, not his home in Hawaii, but from Hong Kong, where he might expect protection from the Chinese.  Daniel Ellsberg?  This guy isn't even Kim Philby.  He wants a clean conscience and a clean get away, and doesn't want to admit he broke any laws.  He's not a man with a conscience; he's a 29 year old yutz full of his own self-importance.

It'd be funny if it weren't so ridiculous.   But it will be worth it if we don't have to see any more silly analyses based on misreading Foucault and making silly comparisons to Bentham's Panopticon.  Especially since in the very same section (Justice) of the same website we get a story of a Federal judge who's inappropriate e-mail can now be read by one and all.  Because it's on the intertoobs, where everybody goes for the latest gossip.  And besides, if you're worried about your on-line privacy:  fuggedaboutit.  I mean, seriously:  you're more likely to have someone break your password than for the NSA to start following you around a la "Enemy of the State."

I mean, after Will Smith's last movie, nobody wants to know what he's doing next, amirite?

*I also think David Simon's post on the subject is far more intelligent than either of the negative responses TPM posted from its readers.

R U Saved?

Just noted in passing:

Nearly 35 years after conservatives launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, a new divide is emerging — this time over the teachings of 16th-century Reformer John Calvin — that threatens to upend the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

When Southern Baptist delegates gather for their annual meeting next week (June 11-12) in Houston, they’ll be presented with a report, “Truth, Trust, and Testimony in a Time of Tension,” that focuses on the growing popularity of Calvinism among Southern Baptist pastors and seminaries.

At stake are fundamental beliefs on who can be “saved,” the need for evangelism, and whether Baptists will retread familiar battlefields on the proper roles of men and women.

Calvinism, which is traditionally the domain of Reformed churches like Presbyterians, differs from traditional Baptist theology in key aspects, particularly on the question of salvation. The report concludes that those aspects, while important, should not divide Baptists.
....

About 30 percent of Southern Baptist pastors consider their churches Calvinist, according to a poll last year by SBC-affiliated LifeWay Research, but a much larger number — 60 percent — are concerned “about the impact of Calvinism in our convention.”

Calvinism is already shaping the next generation of Southern Baptist pastors through the influence of R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the SBC’s flagship seminary in Louisville, Ky., and popular charismatic speakers like Minneapolis author John Piper and Seattle’s Mark Driscoll.

Ascol embraces one of the aspects of Calvinism that makes traditional Baptists deeply uncomfortable: the idea that Jesus died on the cross only for humans whom God had elected to save, and not for everyone.

Calvinists call this the doctrine of “predestination” — the idea that a person’s salvation already has been determined. More traditional Baptists say if Jesus died only for the elect, then Baptists’ trademark evangelism becomes pointless.

Eighty percent of SBC pastors disagreed with the idea that only the elect will be saved, according to last year’s LifeWay poll, and two-thirds disagreed with the idea that salvation and damnation have already been determined.

“It is obvious that we all cannot be right,” Ascol wrote on his blog. “At least one of us is wrong. It may be that we both are wrong. … In other words, our differences are real. But they are differences within the family.”

Had I thought they'd understand me back in high school, I could have legitimately asked those Baptists who asked me if I was saved how they knew they were.*

Part of the doctrine of the elect is that you don't know if you are one.  And honestly, the proper theological stance is to consider that you could both be wrong.

And no, despite my childhood, I'm not a fan of Calvinism.  Unless you mean combined with Hobbes.

ADDING:  the distinction here is between those who are "saved," and those who are really saved.

And that was, IMHO, never meant to be the point of the exercise, at all.  Reminds me of the congregation which split over whether or not to buy new carpet for the sanctuary (a true story).

*esprit d'escalier, and yes, real life really is just like high school.

And then we bring back Liquid Paper....

I'll admit it, I'm a little fuzzy on the whole "privacy" issue.

I didn't know about PRISM when I wrote my post about the NSA looking at "telephony metadata" from Verizon (and, it turns out, we can pretty much assume the government has the same order issued against all the other phone companies.  Anybody else remember "The President's Analyst"?  We always knew it would come to this.), but as I said:  does anybody really have an expectation of privacy in their e-mails?

I know anything I put into an e-mail can be forwarded to anyone else with a single mouse click, which is why I'm very careful about what I put into an e-mail.  How many times have I received e-mails where someone hit "Reply All," telling me things I not only didn't want to know, but probably shouldn't know.  Try doing that with a telephone conversation, or a personal letter.

The problem here is, as I said, less that:  "There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world."  The problem here is that we let that apparatus be legally built.  (Greenwald bravely told Lawrence O'Donnell that Sen. Diane Feinstein, who wants the leaks of this court order and of PRISM investigated, could come and get him.  Bravely, because he's somewhere in England [actually he usually resides in Brazil.  I made an assumption based on the newspaper he writes for, but I leave the original error because, at the moment at least, Greenwald is in Hong Kong, and, purportedly, "out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction."].  He knows that, at most, he would go to jail for contempt of court for not revealing his source, and Diane Feinstein is not a prosecuting attorney who is going to force him to testify before a judge.  Greenwald isn't at personal risk here, for all his bravado.  His sources, however, have Bradly Manning as their future.  Greenwald is a punk.)

Since I've wandered off into the subject of Greenwald, note the comparisons he wants to make about this:

The times in American history when political power was constrained was when they went too far and the system backlashed and imposed limits. That's what happened in the mid-1970s when the excesses of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon became so extreme that the legitimacy of the political system depended upon it imposing restraints on itself. And that's what is happening now as the government continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism, and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy, all in the dark. The more they overreact to measures of accountability and transparency - the more they so flagrantly abuse their power of secrecy and investigations and prosecutions - the more quickly that backlash will arrive.

There ought to be a corollary to Godwin's Law that, when you can't go to Hitler, you go to Nixon.  Let us recall history, which Mr. Greenwald probably didn't live through (I'm quite sure I'm older than him by a decade or two).  What Nixon did was both secret and illegal.  He didn't have FISA or the PATRIOT ACT to fall back on; nor did J. Edgar Hoover, who ran his own clandestine spying program pretty much on the basis of being able to blackmail any politician (and probably a few judges) in D.C.  I don't feel completely comforted by the explanation of James Clapper that this is all legal and approved, because that isn't exactly full disclosure.  But it is at least within a legal framework; and therein lies the problem.

I would rather that terrorism be treated like a crime, not a national security issue.  But unless you haven't been paying attention, the Congress has made it clear since at least 9/11 that it doesn't want to treat any terrorist like a criminal.  They won't shut down Gitmo; they forced Obama to back down on prosecutions in New York City; Republicans still excoriate him as "soft" on terrorism because he wants to put any suspected terrorist on trial at all.  And every member of Congress since 9/11/2001 has been elected to office, and none of them perceive their jobs to depend on treating terrorism in any other way.

The problems here, in other words, are profound:  and Mr. Greenwald is anything but a profound thinker.  The Congress has been quite comfortable with this program, as evidenced by the statements coming out of the Senate and House yesterday.  No one was scrambling for the exits or trying to run away from this one, unlike the IRS scandal which really isn't a scandal and touches no one, or Benghazi Benghazi BENGHAZI!  Indeed, the American public seems to be pretty blase about this:  as O'Donnell told Greenwald, everyone O'Donnell spoke to shrugged and said "I figured the phone company was compiling that data anyway."

And so we're back to that linchpin of Constitutional analysis, the reasonable expectation of privacy.

I expect privacy in my mail (unless I send a postcard); that's what envelopes are for.  And lest we forget, the "Unabomber" was so successful (sadly) because he didn't use electronic communications.  He was so off the grid it was his manifesto that finally tripped him up, and that only because his brother recognized the ideas in it.

Anyway, my reasonable expectation of privacy in my letters is that the recipient won't pass it on to ten other people; unless it's a chain letter, of course (does anybody do those anymore?).  My reasonable expectation in a phone call is that no one is listening to the conversation, or can listen to it, except the person on the other end.  But when I make a phone call, or send an e-mail, or post anything at all on the internet; am I supposed to be surprised the government might be looking at it?  Am I really surprised that the whole world could be looking at it (ahem!), in a world where videos go "viral" and an e-mail can circumnavigate the world faster than a lie can outrace the truth?  The person who leaked the news of PRISM to the Washington Post said: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”  Well, you want a connected world, you get a connected world.  You don't want them to watch as you type, then print a letter.  Better yet, drag out the old typewriter.  Wendell Berry would approve.

Maybe we should restrict this; but the fact is, we haven't.  This isn't Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover because we now have laws which allow the government to collect this kind of information.  Should we have such laws?  That's a valid conversation, a debate I would happily engage (no, is my answer.  I don't like FISA and I don't like the PATRIOT ACT (which is its name; the title is an acronym, not an informal nym)).  According to Sen. Mark Udall:

“As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans.”

This strikes me as the real problem.  Whether we will change it or not, is the question. 

But how do I really feel?

Is our children learning?

The tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma was a mile wide.  The next tornado (now the most recent) was two miles wide. In response to this literally unprecedented set of events, the Oklahoma legislature has decided to create a non-profit group to raise money to buy safe rooms and shelters for Oklahoma public schools.

I suppose the next logical step is to return to the days of private provision of fire protection services and private upkeep of streets.  You know, the kind of thing William Blake wrote about at the end of the 18th century:

I wander thro' each charter'd street.
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.


In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear


How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls


But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

What Blake was describing, and criticizing,  there was a society more concerned with the privileges of power than with the obligations of society.  Chartered streets were private concerns.  You could literally be forced off of them if your presence was not appreciated by the owners.  The 18th century Oklahoma, apparently, wants to return to.

 Because, why should the government protect the children it requires get an education in the first place?  Why not make it possible for private interests to show their concern?  And if this doesn't raise enough money by the next tornado season, well, they tried, right?

My sympathies were with the people of Oklahoma when the tornado hit Moore.  The lack of shelters didn't strike me as the problem others thought it was, mostly because I didn't think it fair or wise to critique such a lack in the very face of the disaster.  It struck me as rather like blaming the victims.

But now, when the state legislature of Oklahoma won't mandate even the least sensible protection for public schools?  When they can't be bothered to mandate anything more than buildings that will stand up and not catch fire on a hot day?  Why not just turn over traffic lights and road construction entirely to private concerns, and let them raise the money necessary for such things?

 Emergency officials have estimated it costs between $600,000 to $1 million to outfit a school with a classroom-sized safe room. Oklahoma has more than 1,600 public schools.

Lorry nose, we can't expect the state to raise that kind of money and spend it.  Isn't it intrusion enough that they require students to get an education?

And the fund starts off with $500,000, and another $500,000 in matching funds for donations.  1/2 of one school down, 1599 1/2 to go.

Speaking of privacy and privilege....

Actually, at this point, it's worthwhile for Messrs. Pierce and Fung to understand that "journalists" are not a special protected class under the First Amendment.  They aren't even defined (as medical doctors or lawyers are, or even barbers) under law:

"Who is a journalist is a question we need to ask ourselves," he said. "Is any blogger out there saying anything—do they deserve First Amendment protection? These are the issues of our times."

The verbal slipup aside (of course bloggers are covered under the Bill of Rights!), Graham's riffing on constitutional law exposes one of the age-old tensions between journalism as a product and journalism as an activity. What Graham really meant to ask was whether bloggers deserve the specific protections of the First Amendment that are granted to the press.

It's not a "verbal slipup" because Mr. Graham knows enough law (even though he's a JAG, the blogger said derisively) to know "journalists" have no special privileges under the First Amendment.  None.  Zip.  Zero.  No more than the average citizen has.

Like Mr. Pierce (although with not 1/1000th of the audience), I am a "blogger."  I don't make any money at it, but then Constitutional privilege doesn't depend on a paycheck to be activated.  Can the government suppress my writings, suspend my ability to publish, preempt my right to write?

No, no more than they can stop the New York Times.  Google, of course, might pull my plug; that's a different story.

But the "press" doesn't enjoy any special privileges, despite the fact the First Amendment specifically references the "press."  Journalists can go to jail for violating laws, for refusing to divulge sources, for committing crimes in the course of pursuing whatever they think is "journalism as an activity."  What the government is constrained from doing is barring publication of whatever a publisher, be it the NYT or a blogger on a website, has to publish.  You might still go to jail for having that information (that's what Julian Assange is so afraid of), but they can't legally prevent it from being published.

Where this notion comes from that journalists have a special privilege befuddles me as much as the idea that gun nuts have special rights to possess firearms.  If journalists were as privileged as they thought they were, they wouldn't need a shield law.  If the gun nuts were as privileged as they think they, they wouldn't need the NRA as lobbyists, they'd need them as lawyers.

After all, I don't need any enabling legislation to enjoy my right to free speech, peaceably assemble, worship as I please, be secure in my papers and possessions, enjoy a jury trial if I need one, or not be forced to testify against myself.  If journalism as an activity is specially protected just as my 4th and 5th amendment rights are, why is a shield law ever a concern?

Gene Hackman was right!

Well, not Gene Hackman the person, but Gene Hackman the actor, portraying the former NSA agent living in a compound (you can't really call it a house) that is "off the grid," because the NSA has the ability to find, in real time and almost immediately, any telephone it wants to find, based on what is being said on that telephone at the time it is in use.

This story isn't quite that bad, but you'd almost think it was.  What the NSA is doing is collecting phone records and "data mining" those records for information that might tip them off to, say, the next Boston bombers.  Is this a gross violation of privacy?  Or simply a search for a needle in a haystack?

Seriously, what are the odds the government is going to find my phone records (I don't use Verizon, but maybe my calls show up on these records anyway?  I must admit I have no idea how the phone system works anymore, or who collects what data on which phone calls) interesting enough to look at who I call (actually, I hardly call anyone.  I'm not so much a Luddite as that I really don't like telephones very much.  My friends will tell you I hardly ever call them.  Sometimes I think I should save myself the expense of telephones....)  Odds shouldn't enter into it, but I'm wondering what right to privacy I expect in my use of a telephone?  I have a right to privacy in what I say, but in whom I speak to?  If I want to keep that private, I'll limit myself to old-fashioned snail mail.

Undoubtedly the NSA could get a court order to search my mail, but that would require a very specific order and a huge implementation of manpower, just to look at whom my letters were addressed to.  Granted the unofficial Administration response to this court order is not encouraging:

The administration official said, "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls."

But does another order allow that?  This is the question that disturbs.

In the Gene Hackman movie, the NSA was listening to phone calls in real time, although "listening" is almost a metaphor:  computers were "listening" to phone calls and doing speech recognition which is, so far as I know, still far beyond the ability of computers to accomplish.  Based on the words any NSA official was looking for, the phone could be located in time for the NSA to dispatch officers to the scene of the phone call almost before the call was finished.  Great stuff for a suspense film; completely ridiculous in reality.

So this issue raises 4th amendment issues, but the question is still the question faced by the AP in its outrage (now apparently subsumed by the James Rosen case):  what right to privacy do I have in phone records I don't generate and don't maintain?

So far as I know, the only record of my letter to someone, is the letter itself.  USPS doesn't generate a separate record of who I mailed what to.  Indeed, UPS is more likely to do that, so I can track delivery either to the destination, or from the shipper.  The convenience of electronic communications is also the danger:  records that are generated automatically by others by my use of their systems, are not records I have any control over.

On the one hand, I want to be shocked, outraged, and appalled.  On the other, I want to know just what "privacy" means.  The very convenience of modern communications technology is what makes this "data mining" both possible, and convenient.  If I never used a phone (except to speak to family, which is about all I do) and confined my long distance communications to letters (which I don't, anymore.  Then again, I barely e-mail, either), it would take a massive effort by the government to find out what I was up to.

I think I'm still entitled to an expectation of privacy in what I say to whom, by whatever medium (unless I publish it for public consumption, as on this blog); but I don't see how I'm entitled to privacy in the records generated by my paying to use a more convenient and rapid system.

And then, of course, there's the fact that e-mails are so easily repeatable (making the privacy interest in them somewhat dubious.  Haven't we all learned not to put into an e-mail something you wouldn't want to see on a billboard?).  Modern communications are not just convenient for me, you see.

This doesn't make me like the PATRIOT ACT, under which auspices this is supposedly authorized, anymore than I did before.  But I'm not sure I don't have some responsibility to realize that what is convenient for me, is convenient for government, too.  Also.  As well.

Anyway.....*

*Stuart Taylor just pointed out (on Diane Rehm's show) that Congress amended FISA in 2008 (?) precisely to allow this kind of court order to be issued.  So, more as less as Charlie Pierce said, the fault is with us; not with creepy Cheneyesque government officials, or even a gross overreach by this President, or a bizarre misinterpretation by the courts.    We gave the government the tools to do this; why are we surprised that they are doing it? 

Adding:  or, as someone who wrote into TPM put it:

 I’ve worked for AT&T for close to 15 years now, spending most of my time in the network engineering side of the house. Call records on our network can be pulled for many, many months in the past. Getting these call records is probably one of the first things they did in the investigation so they probably weren’t part of this later NSA request.

Whenever something like this comes to light, the collective freak-out seems after the fact. Law enforcement already has access to every telecommunications switch through the CALEA program and the DCSNet. These things are real, I know for a fact that no new telecommunications switch is turned on until these things are in place and working.

“Privacy” is a thing of the past as far as electronic communications go - the only “protection” we have is the sheer volume of stuff flying around, but every year that protection gets less and less as computers get better at sifting through everything (and they’re really already “good enough” they just don’t have the horsepower to keep up in real time).