A Very Strange Story

A short while back, some Democrats joined with Republicans in the Senate to pass a bill that essentially legalizes warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. This really pissed off the liberal blogosphere, and with good reason. At the time, lots of bloggers were really confused as to why the Dems would do something so obviously stupid.

Well, the New York Times has a story out this morning that purports to explain it....except that it doesn't, not really:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

You would think that I would have excerpted the part where the reporter explains why the number of intercepted communications had dropped so much, since surely that would be important, right? I mean, the obvious reason for the decrease would be a variety of court cases and laws that "hindered" the national intelligence apparatus from doig their job.

I didn't excerpt that paragraph because I couldn't find it. It's not in the story. I mean, there is this:

A ruling a month or two later — the judge who made it and its exact timing are not clear — restricted the government’s ability to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications passing through telecommunication “switches” on American soil.

The security agency was newly required to seek warrants to monitor at least some of those phone calls and e-mail messages. As a result, the ability to intercept foreign-based communications “kept getting ratcheted down,” said a senior intelligence official who insisted on anonymity because the account involved classified material. “ We were to a point where we were not effectively operating.”

Mr. McConnell, lead negotiator for the administration in lobbying for the bill, said in an interview that the court’s restrictions had made his job much more difficult.

“It was crazy, because I’m sitting here signing out warrants on known Al Qaeda operatives that are killing Americans, doing foreign communications,” he said. “And the only reason I’m signing that warrant is because it touches the U.S. communications infrastructure. That’s what we fixed.”

But that's just bullshit. There's no reason a warrant is unnecessary there. McConnell does a good job normalizing the idea that warrants are unnecessary, but I'm not buying. It is not, in fact, crazy to sign warrants that deal with Al-Qaeda. It was, until fairly recently, standard procedure, and it worked. Warrants did not cause September 11, which is what McConnell is very subtly implying here.

For that matter, it's not like anyone was asking that this information be made public anyway - all that the lawsuits did was require that the Bush Administration go through an existing secret court, the FISA court, which hardly ever turned down warrant applications anyway.

In fact, for many people, cutting down the number of intercepted communications is in and of itself a good thing, since trust for McConnell, Gonzales, and the like is pretty low. Let me make that clearer: Many people, myself included, have so little trust for them that we consider limiting their power more important than intercepting communications willy-nilly.

While the NYT does ask McConnell and Co. why communications were down, it doesn't actually examine the answer he gave. That's just bad reporting - but it's par for the course these days.

The Authoritarian Impulse, 21st Century Style

I've heard for some time that the UK has been overzealous with the surveillance, and despite the number of CCTV cameras that were around, I think I just wrote off most folks as being paranoid.

I'm sorry to say that I was wrong.

What drives the folks in the UK government to think these are good ideas? I'm not talking about Tony Blair or Gordon Brown or the rest of the ministers - I'm just going to assume they are insane from here on out. Insane, or maybe sociopaths. Instead, I'm talking about all the policy folks that have to participate in the planning of such a program. I'm talking about the folks who have to maintain the system and organize the logistics. I'm talking about the folks who have to serve the machinery, not the other way around.

While I suspect the real reasons are pretty complex, I'm annoyed enough right now to ask if they're all soulless. Or, even worse, if the UK government/education system is so insane as to socialize people into thinking this is OK.

I'll also add, though I wish I didn't have to, the point that this will never create a good society. I'm a firm believer that the means determine the ends, and creating a police state and calling it a democracy does not make a democracy. I mean, seriously - does anyone buy that? (Don't answer that; my blood pressure is already high enough for today.) Honestly, this is the sort of thinking (and I use the term loosely) that people use with their pets; I think it's called 'behavior modification' or something - the idea being that pets receive positive or negative reinforcement based on their actions. It blows my mind that the UK government, or someone in a position of power, thinks that this is the best way to deal with human beings. I don't even think it's that great for pets - ask my partner.

An example from the article, chosen for its cultural value and ability to slay satire in a single blow:

On Monday, police in the county of Merseyside unveiled Britain’s most dramatic surveillance contrivance to date: a CCTV camera that flies. Propelled by helicopter-style rotors and directed either by remote control or pre-programmed flight plans, the nearly silent two-foot drone can be outfitted with thermal-powered cameras and loudspeakers. Assistant Chief Constable Simon Byrne explained the primary purpose of the device as “to support our anti-social taskforce in gathering all-important evidence to put offenders before the courts.”

I almost fell out of my chair when I read that. It reminds me of the James Cameron TV series Dark Angel that aired around the turn of the century. In it, the authorities used devices called 'hoverdrones' that flew around Seattle and observed people in realtime (and in one episode, they were outfitted with guns and used to assassinate paroled criminals). The above quote could have been pulled straight from the TV show; it's that identical. The future is now, folks, and I'm a little hesitant to use the word 'utopia'.

In the long run, of course, massive surveillance does not do a damn thing to solve the underlying problems that the surveillance is supposed to solve. They won't solve crime, violent crime, or terrorism, simply because they do nothing to undermine or remove the desires or motivations people have to commit crimes in the first place.

On the other hand, if you believe that human nature is inherently flawed or evil, then you might be tempted to see this as your best bet, or even as necessary. I hold out more hope than that, and in my better moments I feel compassion for people whose view of the world is so dim.