Michael Maiello's picture

    Obama's Eyes and Ears

    By Michael Maiello on Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:39pm | Politics

    Back in the 2008 primaries (ah, those days that no progressive blogger out for anything other than a fight really misses) I though it was a big deal that Senator Obama didn't support people's right to bring class action civil suits against telephone carriers who broke privacy laws in order to share information with security agencies.

    Now, the truth is, laws are muddy.  Something illegal under the Telecom Act of 1986 might be totally legal under FISA, as amended.  But, I hoped that the threat of civil lawsuits would at last compel the telecommunications companies to fight the occasional FISA warrant or two.  I thought the threat of civil suits would at least have some effect.  I also thought that it was a mistake to immunize the telecoms, thus giving them a huge PR victory and allowing them to claim that, whether you think it's right or wrong, they are just patriots working with their government.

    Well, Chris Dodd agreed with me and where is he now?  He's head of the Motion Picture Association of America.  Dodd, the temporary champion of privacy would probably turn your entire Internet search history dating back to 1996 over to the BI if he thought he could nail you for BitTorrenting Problem Child 3.

    Obama, meanwhile... I admit, I used his telecom cave-in as an excuse to try to score rhetorical points over at TPM.  I always believed that Obama would use discretion with the powers afforded to the executive branch.  Well, now he's allowed the NSA to gather telephony metadata (call details) on every Verizon customer in the country, on a daily basis, and in secret.  Also, nobody will tell us for what purpose.

    What do we do with this?  How do we react?  I'll tell you what I think is the rational response: assume that the government will always have the ability to access, if it wants to, who you called, when you called, your location when you called, the location of the person you called and the duration of your call.  Assume that if Verizon was forced to do this, so was every other major cell phone and landline provider in the country.  What do I make of it?  I am not sure, at all.  For the most part, it's hard to get outraged because knowing I called my sister two weeks ago and stayed on the line long enough to leave a voicemail is probably not going to give you much power or leverage over me.  I think.

    I guess the important thing to know is that there will be no general outrage about this because, as a threat, it's pretty abstract.   "So, you know I called my bank last week.  You got me. Needed to order checks."

    And then, it's Obama.  He's our guy, even if he's not your favorite lefty celebrity.  We are loathe to help the other side when we know darned well that the other side will do exactly this.  My choice in the last election, sadly, was to be disappointed in Obama fort doing this now or not surprised at all that Romney was doing it.  When the major parties, and the general population, have conceded so much in the privacy debate it's just tough to be one of those people who sees a story like this as a major scandal.

    Then there's Bradley Manning, who doesn't seem to have any mainstream lefty support.  Julian Assange is now probably better known, by those who care, as a date rapist avoiding prosecution than as an information liberator.  The Obama DOJ went after AP and Fox News phone records and normally thoughtful people on the left criticized the press for whining and demanding special rights and privileges.

    So, I look at all this and think, "We have conceded this fact.  We have, in all likelihood, conceded more than this."  I mean, do you really believe that what you say into your phone is between you and the chosen party?  Do I really believe, that if somebody with power cared, that they couldn't pinpoint me posting this, almost to the second and to the square footage of my (svelte) posterior?

    I think, in the end, this story has less to do with Obama, or what we think of him and more to do with what we have collectively given up.  We need to back up and have a real debate.  It's not going to happen, but that's what we need to do.

     

     

    Topics: 
    Politics

    Comments

    Actually, they almost certainly have you posting this from your residence or workplace, via IP numbers & email addresses & logins - through a huge dragnet that stores their "Big Data" Big Brother info - and then it's just whether they want to use it on your or not.   (of if you're Muslim a reporter curious about Anonymous, they can get your grandma's mother's info to make sure you cooperate on entrapment of some friend or acquaintance [updated as read the case of Barrett Brown). As you note, the FBI order turns the info over to the NSA, the guys with the humongous data centers & huge ears.

    The name of the game is coercion, not incarceration. The threat of what they can do to you, how much hell they can make your life vs. doing some favors - that's their biggest power. It doesn't matter whether Bradley Manning is convicted now - he's been in jail under awful conditions for years. That's our "innocent until proven guilty" system.

    With James Rosen, the government effectively tapped his whereabouts, got courts for his emails & phone calls, without him knowing. They'll get away with it, and from now on, every reporter will know that the quaint Watergate era concept of journalistic privilege is more than 6 ft under - in fact being a journalist will be like having a huge bullseye on your movement & data use. "Follow, search & archive me - someday you might need my data". The concept the DoJ uses to justify this - "solicitation" of confidential info, even though publishing confidential proof of government malfeasance is not illegal - is the Mack truck sized loophole they'll drive through. (similarly to Manning's giving data to Wikileaks becomes a de facto much larger crime by contending that the data would then be seen by Al Qaeda, so it's the same as handing Osama bin Laden microfilm at a discreet lunch.)

    John Kiriakou is punished for revealing torture, disguised as a conviction for outing an agent - even when Scooter Libby & Karl Rove intentionally outed an agent to slam a guy who'd outed their ginning up a war. (you might even partially excuse them if they thought they had to get us to war out of national need no matter what - but months after we were there, it was simply a political coverup of what was already done). So a whistleblower is again punished, a government coverup is protected.

    Similarly to Scott Bloch using his position to punish whistleblowers and the DoJ helping him plead to 0 time, 0 charge. Amazing. Or Leon Panetta having SOCOM delete material for Freedom of Information requests. Or even the FBI erasing torture tapes. Or the "don't look back look forward" approach of commending the CIA team that erased torture tapes with a promotion - fortunately since rescinded - by the tainted new head of CIA, pro-torture John Brennan.

    It's a bizarre world out there, and we need more than a discussion - some kind of serious action. (oops, black helicopters hovering over my blogging station out in my outhouse next to the still... Ruby Ridge just can't catch a break)


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:27am

    Like I've warned before, the government wants the guns. Then when the next scandal breaks or they get caught abusing ....  OUR ......   Bill of Rights; the government can tell us, EAT Shite.    It appears were already at the point, our freedoms are being taken away..... and shortly; the only thing we can do to protect ourselves; is hope they don't take away our sling shots.


    by Resistance on Sat, 06/08/2013 - 12:56am

    Good morning, Mr. Blue...

    by jollyroger on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 8:21am

    It seems that this data mining goes on every three months. I would doubt that Verizon is the only service where this happens. The major problem is that this is legal. The only approach is going to be to convince the public that this type of data mining is not needed to keep us safe,a somewhat hard sell.  It is hard to visualize it as Stop and Frisk on global scale. It may be that giving up information on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is so commonplace that this will not be viewed as a major deal.


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:40am

    Yeah, the problem is that it's legal and, as you say, we have all grown up giving our information away to anyone who asks, whether it was to a video rental company in the 90s or a social network now.  The government can basically win the PR war by saying, "we're not listening to your actual calls," which is all anybody really cares about.


    by Michael Maiello on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:49am

    I am more upset about how much I felt pestered by being on LinkedIn than was about reading about government data mining.Its virtually impossible to ever really disconnect yourself from Facebook. Everybody from corporations to government thinks that your information is their information.


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 11:46am

    I do not even know how to frame this debate.

    Supposedly 'liberals' wish for background checks prior to allowing the purchase of weapons.

    One background check would involve discovering whether the potential gun owner is nuts. So are we to have a national register of everyone who ever visited a therapist or a shrink? Or are we just talking about people convicted of being crazy or people who have been put on 24 hour holds.

    Are therapists supposed to give info on their patients? Well sometimes the answer involves the issue of whether or not the patient is a danger to himself or to others?

    Doctors are required by law in most states to report gun shot wounds appearing in their ER's. Reminds me of the famous Dr. Mudd! There appears to be much less confidentiality these days between doctors and patients, priests and penitents, husbands and wives...

    During the period in which state laws were not overshadowed by Federal Law a Wyatt Earp could be a murderer and horse thief in one state but end up a law man in other states.

    A hundred and more years ago a man might make a 'clean start of it'.

    Why should I be allowed to know that Mitt was guilty of some chicanery at his fraternity forty years ago?

    We are now all 'branded' at an early age due to this new informational age!

    I do not have any idea how to frame the issue concerning a right to privacy.

    The corporations are compiling info on all of us every hour of every day.

    People do not even deal in cash very much anymore. Your credit card tells everyone what you are purchasing and when you are purchasing and where you are purchasing.

    Oh well....

     


    by Richard Day on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 12:43pm

    Until there is actual evidence of extreme abuse of this "privilege," there isn't going to be some serious protest and outrage. 

    Since 9/11 especially, I assume when I say the words "terrorist" or "bomb" or "president" that somewhere an uber-computer starts flashing and buzzing, and all my information is recorded, including the conversation. 

    Manning decision to do a massive dump of information without any idea what harm it may have led to will mean he will never become a sympathetic defendant.  At best, he is viewed as well-intentioned, but naive idiot. 


    by Elusive Trope on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 1:17pm

    I'm just perplexed that gathering all call data from everyone at all times doesn't strike people as serious abuse!


    by Michael Maiello on Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:34pm

    Flipping through TV channels prior to and after viewing MSNBC's three evening shows, I notice many shows like NCIS, Burn Notice, etc that have gotten us used to the idea that the government is capable of catching bad guys because it has access to a large amount of data on all of us. There is a show on CBS, "Person of Interest", built on the premise of a man able to detect patterns that indicate that a person is in trouble based on data mining.

    There was a great deal of outrage on display from the MSNBC hosts regarding Verizon and Prism. I wonder if the country at large is simply not shocked.


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 12:25am

    Even before the age of the Internet, I think people had come used to the gathering of information from not only the government, but also private entities. If the gas station collects data on you and other customers in order to better market their product, most people won't blink an eye. It is what is done with that information in many cases that is considered the serious abuse, not the actual gathering. The gathering is just a minor abuse, one of a zillion minor abuses happening all the time. If one lets minor abuses get to one, it will just drive one insane. There is a certain logic which says it might not be such a bad thing that there is someone out there listening for and crunching data to see the next Timothy McVeigh. Just like people don't generally get into a frenzy over sobriety check points, which are a major abuse in my opinion.

    by Elusive Trope on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 8:51am

    Just noted another interesting motor-vehicle traffic comparison here at BBC News' Prism: Just how much do the spooks know?:

    General analysis of traffic on the networks is not necessarily a privacy scandal, thinks Prof Woodward.

    "It is no different from the cameras routinely looking at the traffic road network. If you see a problem, for example an accident, you may want to zoom in but you need to get a court order in order to access the registration of a particular vehicle," he said.

    When the news broke, I myself thought of surveillance cameras in public places, we have 24/7 taping going on where no one looks at the damn things unless necessary and often they are recorded over.

    Then I thought about what the difference is with phone and internet: that we have grown up with a tradition, from the days of landlines, that the home phone line is a sacred private part of the home (Yes, back in the day, there were "party lines" where listening in was possible, but doing that was also considered a sin.) And this itself transferred from the sacred private nature of snail mail. (No access by government and the convention that even another person at the same address should not open another's mail.)

    But but but the internet has also been touted as the great new public space. It is not part of our sacrosant home. We are using it to communicate but still applying the privacy norms of landlines and snail mail. But it's a huge open public network in most cases, not person-to-person communication.

    The problem is: which one is your connection to this big new world network? Public or private? Is your smartphone subject to "a man's home and vehicle is his castle" or not like a landline once was? This problem of identification--public or private?-- is also the reason for all kinds of other debate about the "world wide web" as it were. Such as the arguments about not using real names for commenting on the internet, and whether the site owner is honor bound to not identifying the person via IP address. Etc.

    We might not realize it, but we are in the process of technology redefining what privacy is?


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 11:13am

    I feel like we've outsourced this whole conversation to the court system and the court is packed with people who are, by disposition likely to side with law enforcement and corporations.

    You're right about the public network of the Internet and, when it comes to cell phones, the spectrum that they use is a public asset.  We can define private spaces however we want.  But our leaders do not really want to have an open discussion about it.  Even as Obama says he welcomes the debate he condemns the leakers who  made debate possible and continues to argue that trusting that your Senator was briefed should be transparency enough.


    by Michael Maiello on Sat, 06/08/2013 - 12:58pm

    Its unfortunate but inevitable that the court is the only place to go to protect civil liberties. Not enough people care about it for it to be a voting issue or produce a major public backlash. Neither democrat or republican politicians care about it.

    The court has always been where freedom and civil liberties have been decided. When the court was liberal, rights and freedoms expanded. Now, with a conservative court, we're losing them.


    by ocean-kat on Sat, 06/08/2013 - 1:45pm

    When a school shooting occurs and the personal Internet posts or website of the suspect is revealed, we often reflect that there were clear signs that violence was a possibility."Someone should have done something" is the cry.


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 11:31am

    yup...and then one of the most contentious and mind-boggling (no pun intended) civil liberties debates you can get into is about forced treatment of mental illness....which gets into what mental illness is....which brings you to...no coincidence totalitarian regimes of the past found "mental institutions" to be very useful institutions...all for the "common good"....

    What if an Eric Harris really really doesn't want to go to counseling sessions? What if he wishes to continue to revel in self-identification as a rebel without a cause and societal reject? What do you do then? Monitor all his words and actions?  A locksmith said to me the other day about a kid that may have tried to break in: they used to have what they called "juvie hall."


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 11:56am

    If I understand the controversy over the DSM-5 listings, everybody has a mental disorder smiley


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 12:07pm

    Have you met everybody? I'd say the DSM-5 has it right.


    by Verified Atheist on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 1:26pm

    Snowden's comment below explains well why Manning isn't getting the sympathy:

    Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden's leaks began to make news.

    "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 06/10/2013 - 8:07am

    Well, I found some outrage out there. The NYTimes' Editorial board expresses more outrage than Michael Maiello. It is not pleased,it sounds fed up. It is far from happy with Senator Feinstein's cooing. It goes on to express extreme loss of hope (Hope) and increased cynicism as regards Obama. It calls for the entire Patriot Act to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 1:01am

    I was pretty shocked by that.  Nice to see, though.


    by Michael Maiello on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 10:53am

    Same here, it was like my mouth was hanging open reading it. Like: Say what? Is that really you guys saying that?


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/07/2013 - 11:17am

    Jonathan Turley nearly equally outraged. His summary paragraph:

    With some Democrats blindly following this president, there appears no concern over excessive surveillance or the ever-expanding security state. It is the final evidence of how Obama has truly crippled the civil liberties movement in the United States.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/08/2013 - 1:52pm

    Turley's blog post over NSA he refers to is also worth reading - it makes it obvious that we don't know whether NSA actually records most or a large set of domestic phone calls, because the FISA revision made that information completely off the record, and the courts have ruled that no one has standing to question this program. Even most of Congress has no access to actual details, and the courts just play "they must know what they're doing", being mostly packed with conservative Bush "what me worry-me so scaried about terruh" types.

    Strangely, when Scalia becomes one of the holdout defenders of civil liberties, we've passed into strange territory.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 8:21am

    Sounds like Congressional and White House staffers still read the NYT Editorials, including Senator Feinstein. (Also in the linked piece is a response to your news post calling for Clapper to resign: In unbroadcast elements of a transcript issued by NBC, the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said he had responded in the "least untruthful manner" possible when denying that the NSA collected data on millions of Americans during congressional hearings.)


    by artappraiser on Mon, 06/10/2013 - 8:04pm

    I know I SHOULD be outraged, but I gotta tell ya, I'm not. In this day in age, I figure the credit cards companies, insurance companies, and everyone else under the sun knows what I watch, what I read, what I buy, so who cares if the government knows who I call and how long I stayed on the line.

    I got a robo call from Costco the other day to let me know that a product I had purchased was being re-called because of contamination. And as freaky as it was, I was kinda glad they knew that.

    I guess I figure as long as I'm not doing anything wrong, who cares who knows what I'm doing or who I'm calling?

    Had it not been for cameras all over the place, the Boston terrorists probably would not have been caught.

    I just can't get too worked up over this. If I ever decide on a life of crime, I might change my mind.


    by stillidealistic on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 1:10am

    wow, considered a name change to 'stillapathetic'?

    "trust us, we're the government - why would we do anything wrong?"

    maybe we're ready for those Big Brother morning aerobic programs.

    Of course credit card companies and banks just foreclose on mortgages illegally, even when you've paid up in advance as a number of cases showed.

    Nope, government might actually throw you or your kin in jail. Guess no big deal - supposedly we're living longer (if wealthy & a good health insurance package) so why not spend a few years of that in jail? I'm sure we've all thought something illegal, so we probably deserve it.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 8:01am

    The reason for being upset about corporation data mining is because. the government can simply download the data that the corporations are collecting. Even if you try to disconnect from Facebook, they continue to track your purchases, what you are reading, your politics, etc. Why does Facebook need all of this data? Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg when we consider how many people sitting at a corporate keyboard have access to massive data on all of us. The corporate data mining makes it easy for the government to obtain data.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 10:50am

    The reason for being upset about corporation data mining is because. the government can simply download the data that the corporations are collecting. Even if you try to disconnect from Facebook, they continue to track your purchases, what you are reading, your politics, etc. Why does Facebook need all of this data? Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg when we consider how many people sitting at a corporate keyboard have access to massive data on all of us. The corporate data mining makes it easy for the government to obtain data.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 10:50am

    BTW, Boston big breakthrough was from a guy who saw them and woke up in a hospital, wrote down key info for the FBI. Once again, the effective anti-terror value of sticking cameras up our posteriors is way way way overrated. And note that this was to catch them after - didn't stop the bombing (except a highly theoretical followup bomb spree on the run) - in fact we didn't even work out details from info the Russians were giving us, though it seems the Russians were being jackasses & giving snippets of halfway useful info. Of course the FBI did manage to kill their friend after a 5 hour interrogation when he supposedly attacked the one agent (left alone with him) with a mop handle. Feel the excellence.

    Meanwhile, the FBI in New York has gone to great lengths to spy on a hair salon where Muslims get their hair products. It's so comforting to know how technologically advanced our anti-terror insight is. It's a shame it hasn't helped us stop any terror attacks (except for young idiots the FBI convinces to try doing something technically stupid & illegal but with no chance of real success) - maybe one day we'll have a real example of an anti-terror success from our $70 billion a year we spend to be safe.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 11:03am

    You know, this Ibragim Todashev story is fucking crazy, and it's amazing that more people aren't pointing out that it's fucking crazy.

    This won't endear me to some of my progressive friends. I've just personally never seen any contradiction in believing that government is necessary, that it can do positive good if we force it to, and that it is absolutely never to be trusted. I find those, in fact, naturally corollaries of each other.

    http://lhote.blogspot.com/2013/05/it-would-be-easier-to-rebut-stupid.html


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 11:19am

    It is kinda the heart of the social contract.

    Feudalism was a deal with lords- protect us and we work for near free.

    All that kings & queens stuff was a bit the same - predicated on "we probably are too powerless to overthrow you anyway" but with marauding armies from Xerxes on, well, the risk of being overrun by Huns was a bit too much the chance.

    Here in 2013, we're still playing the same "united we stand, divided we fall" game, but that never meant we have to like the other Musketeers or even trust them.

    Look at the allies in WWII - Stalin? bedmate of choice?

    So why after all the obvious evil in government have so many supposedly smart people gone to trusting government in the last decade? Yeah, sometimes we have to suck it up and just hope they're not more evil than Dr. Evil, but to trust them? Haven't all the best mass murderers been the best at appearing friendly & normal & trustworthy? Why should we think anything less of our most popular politicians? Just professional salesmen with a sick twist. Yet here we are, rushing to be defended against those evil Muslims. Seems no one's familiar with the car window business scam of sending a 15-year-old around on a bike with a pail of rocks. The scams get bigger, but the basic art's the same.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 12:05pm

    And then there's the Yemeni held at Gitmo, Adnan Latif, who "suffered from headaches" or something, and somehow died, and somehow they held his body until it rot so there was no way to verify the suspicious autopsy before turning it over....

    They do this the stupid way because even if someone reports it, no one cares enough for it to matter. And if there's enough evidence to convict, the Feds lobby to let him off anyway.

    Why exactly does government keep doing this stupid stuff? Because we've become too stupid and conditioned for them to even worry about us. Someone will find a reason why it's all okay, and the story will fall off page 1 if it even makes it that far.

     

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 12:16pm

    Screw the water board; tell us what you know or we'll kill you?


    by Resistance on Mon, 06/10/2013 - 1:27am

    I don't think it's apathy. More like there are so many things to make myself crazy over (like the repubs trying to keep people from voting, the FDAs refusal to keep our food supply safe, rich people paying so little in taxes, greedy corporations sending jobs overseas to make yet more money, the deterioration of the social safety net, gun violence, the House doing everything they can to make Obamacare fail, uninformed voters, medicare waste and fraud, wasting gazzillions of dollars on the failed war on drugs, the slow pace of legalizing marijuana, and on, and on, and on) that this one doesn't bug me so much. I'm already spilling my guts on Facebook - so I just don't care so much about this.

    Top that off with I just think this screaming "they are taking away our freedom" thing is getting outta hand. We are not now, nor have we ever been COMPLETELY free. And we can't be because so many people use the guise of freedom to take advantage of others. I don't really WANT for you to have the freedom to go build a bomb and set it off wherever you please. I don't WANT you to have the freedom to have a loaded gun for a child to get ahold of and shoot my kid when they come over to play. I don't WANT you to have the freedom to conspire with others to overthrow the government. I don't want you get ahold of my personal info and steal my identity. I don't WANT you to have the freedom to blow your tobacco smoke in my face, or pollute my drinking water, or use children or unwilling women for your sexual gratification (an again, on and on and on.)

    I recognize it is a slippery slope and all that, but where do you draw the line? How much of people's badness do you have to tolerate in the name of freedom? I can't say I completely trust the government (especially now that the inmates are running the asylum) but I don't trust you to look out for me, and I can't do it all by myself, so what choice do I have?

    It's an interesting dilema.


    by stillidealistic on Sun, 06/09/2013 - 7:00pm

    Latest Comments