The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Sweet nothings with the Farooks.

    By Flavius on Wed, 12/09/2015 - 11:28pm |

    According to Comey's House testimony today we now know that in their pre marital electronic discussions they discussed dying in an attack  on behalf of Isis. No doubt  if we know this now we could have known it then.

    Obviously I don't know the technical details and would have said  I  hope I - and Isis- never will . Except,if they didn't previously, they do now.And presumably, in some number of cities across this country tonight, other , still live, Isis sympathizers are recalling their various  romantic or other calls to Isis accomplices abroad.And checking the air line schedules. Too late , I hope.

    Unless you  think that  Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife were the only such people here.Oh, good. That makes one of us.

    Let's put the turkey on the table. Are our rights to privacy so inalienable that NSA -which presumably had the technical capability- shouldn't have tuned in on the sweet nothings between the soon-to-be- affianced Farooks.?.

    We could have a learned discussion about  constitutional rights to privacy or the futility of attempting to intercept conversations of possible Isis supporters  when we have so little  to go on other than  they are Muslims and made several trips to that part of the world.(Hm ,maybe not so little.) 

    But before indulging in those ever-popular speculations I've got an easier question for you.

    Should we?, 

     

    . 

    Comments

    There are apps like Telegram that allow encryption of data so that communications go undetected. Monitoring the regular channels may be futile

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/islamic-state-teaches-tech-savvy-1447720824


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 8:55am

    What we can't do, we can't do. No point discussing. 

    But Comey was able to tell Congress about things the Farooks said to one another.That suggests we were able to eaves drop on those  conversations ..We just didn't listen to what the system captured.

    Should we have?.

     


    by Flavius on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 9:16am

    No.
    First of all, Comes is a liar who's exaggerated the effectiveness of this program time and again while covering up unauthorized data time and again.
    Second, the government has set up a cottage industry of forced informers as well as putting ideas and impractical weapons in doofuses hands to criminalize their naive harmless chit-chat and emtrapbthem in acts they'd never carry out, to go along with all our illegal eavesdropping
    3Rd, we've seen how the government treats whistle-blower like Kiriakou and the vindictive stripped in cell treatment of Bradley Manning.
    4th, we killed a whole lot more innocent Muslims in our illegal, trumped up, intentionally deceitful rush into Iraq and 8 year occupation than the 14 killed in San Bernardino - some years averaging over 50 civilians killed a day
    5th, we just saw how Chicago cops handle a bit of extra power - and it's not unusual.
    6th, we've spent a trillion dollars or more on the combined Homeland Security and other NSACIAFBI including extra powers that strained our Constitution bad.
    7th, we saw crappy NY area "surveillance" that mostly involved hanging around falafel joints looking for suspicious types.
    How about they just do their jobs for once and shut up about it? 40,000 people die in car wrecks a year, cigarette smoking's effects cause a half million US deaths a year including 40,000 from 2nd hand smoke. We can easily suck up a few more terrorism deaths without pissing our pants and eavesdropping on every goddamned conversation in America.

    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 4:00pm

    I probably agree with you more than not but without that leading me either way on my question.

    We've historically opposed eaves dropping while doing quite a bit of it anyway.  Even when our tools were pretty useless.

    Now we have improved ones. And just had 14 people die, arguably because we didn't use them.

    Obama famously remarked he didn't oppose all wars, he opposed dumb ones.

    Does that logic apply to electronic eaves dropping?

     


    by Flavius on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 10:16pm

    So, "should we do more useless eavesdropping just to feel we're doing something, however useless?" I don't think that's a tough question. I still reference a Gorilla vs Gamers movie where earth surrendered rather than let 3 abducted children be harmed. Something you might see in a Japanese B-movie. I'm more concerned with the question of how we leave this Iraq-syria mess we helped create without looking weak and escalating the roving mini-bands of crazies. Instead of government doing more counterproductive shit to either take away our rights, abuse innocent minorities and bomb/foment civil wars for foreigners, how about it try to carefully improve a situation for once? Merkel just won person-of-the-year - maybe ask her what she'd do?

    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 12/11/2015 - 12:55am

    You are certainly right we should  try  carefully to deal with the threat from ISIS and from violent US supporters. But carefully can't mean slowly.

    The Farooks have sent us a message.Us meaning both the Government and the voters.Who might excuse it for this first disaster but not if it doesn't learn from it.

    Almost certainly  there are other untried things we can try. But , in engineering terms,  think in parallel not in series. While nurturing any promising sounding new route ,dust off the old ideas like the much scorned electronic eaves dropping.The fact we've done it wrong in the past doesn't mean we can't do it right now. 

    . 


    by Flavius on Fri, 12/11/2015 - 10:07am

    US spends $53 billion a year on its intelligence budget, which is probably doubled in secret spending. Why can't we move fast now? Why with that kind of money does moving fast have to equal moving stupidly?

    More importantly, giving them more access isn't a guarantee they'll move any faster except to screw up faster - put the wrong people in jail, add more wrong suspects to no-fly lists that never get off, pressure more people with their tawdry bottom-drawer secrets that aren't a threat - the pressure of "fast" will be "show us results", which will lead to the same shitty false positive quotas we're already dealing with.

    Take a breath, do it right. Don't panic. Slowly slowly, catch a monkey.


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 12/11/2015 - 10:56am

    The Farooks have sent us a message.Us meaning both the Government and the voters.Who might excuse it for this first disaster but not if it doesn't learn from it.

    And fuck them and the medieval horse they rode in on. Yes, it's always been amazingly easy to walk into a crowd in the US (or anywhere) and kill a bunch of people. Through hundreds of years, we've brought most of civilization up to where that doesn't happen much.

    I live in Europe, which doesn't have the stupid self-destructive gun permissiveness of the US, and while letting in a million people might let a few stupid murderous ones in, but mostly the normal laws and interpol/police operations as-is will handle problems, and as we see things not working, we can adjust as needed - typically A LITTLE BIT. If we had listened to Al Gore, we would have treated 9/11 as mostly a police matter that needed to be bolstered by a bit of military action, not regime change and nation building that's radicalized much more of the Mideast.

    128 died in Paris - only 14 in San Bernardino. Sure, more can happen. Presumably we can have police spend less time gathering 20 strong to shoot rather harmless knife-holding minorities in the middle of the street and actually doing their job with fewer people and focused on harmful activity. "I was too busy tasering speeders and breaking suspects' spines in the back of my van  or making women give me blowjobs to look for dangerous terrorists" - my heart goes out to these poor overworked servants of the law, but maybe they could just fucking do their jobs for once rather than whine about the need for more invasion of privacy? I don't think it will take away the risk of lone wolf attacks, but it would lower the overall level of fear in the US and let people get on with their lives without exaggerating the chance of a nutcase opening fire.

    (the actual "invasion of privacy" I do want is shutting down all the crazy gun owners who don't stand a chance in hell of defending our democracy, but do have a great chance of killing innocent people in the course of thinking they're Batman or Charles Bronson).

    Update:Comey bullshits again - the man has no shame: https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/12/10/jim-comey-makes-bogus-claims-about...
    Update 2: more good law enforcement bullshit- http://www.gq.com/story/untold-story-texas-biker-gang-shoot-out

    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 12/11/2015 - 2:26pm

    deleted by author

     

     


    by Flavius on Sat, 12/12/2015 - 8:38am

    ???

    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 12/12/2015 - 1:35am

    We shouldn't do it. Since you ask to leave the Constitution out of it then I will confine myself to a couple of observations:

    Once the system starts shutting down situations upon the basis of expressed intentions, there will be no reality principle through which meaningful intelligence can be distinguished from bad.

    When the illusion of privacy is broken down, it doesn't get rid of it. Privacy gets more intelligent. The downside of any tactic is that success trains the enemy.


    by moat on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 10:10am

    That's a subtle observation. Not a value judgement, just a categorization

    I mostly  think you should fix what you can fix.i.e. you don't let bad things happen unless you are really sure how bad they 'll be."Is it Granada or only Asbury Park?"

    Not always..

    For example in WW II under the "double cross" system, the Brits rolled up the German's UK spy network and continued to file  their reports so those phony "agents" could provide misinformation about D Day. That did require letting some bad things happen rather than blow the captured network's credibility.

    But mostly, no.. If you can prevent 14 people from being killed in San Berdo , you do. 


    by Flavius on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 11:07am

    The information that was collected did not come from a future telling machine. Nor was it an intercepted signal from a known combatant. If this was a part of a suspected network, it would be reasonable to expect preemption. It sounds like you are suggesting that an agency could preempt such actions on the basis of meta data.
     


    by moat on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 11:31am

    Yeah


    by Flavius on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 11:41am

    Too many unverified assumptions in this post to draw any useful conclusion. Comey's statement doesn't tell us anything about where these phone conversations were stored, most probably in phone company records not NSA or FBI gathered possible threats or that there is anything stopping either of these agencies from reading any communication in any format they desire. Another minor point is that the Islamic State didn't exist when this conversation was recorded!

    The biggest false assumption is that the Surveillance State's main function is to protect the public and that giving them more powers will somehow make us feel or be safer. Privacy in our world is an illusion when most everything we say or do is recorded by someone and mass surveillance has always been a tool of State control,  The Snowden Files exposed some of the actual uses for this data.

     

     


    by Peter (not verified) on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 11:44am

    Agree these conversations may have been stored in the phone company records.. The important point is that they were stored. They could have been accessed. And weren't . And 14 people  died as a result.

    I have no idea what constraints ,if any, were stopping the agencies from reading them. My question is whether we want the agencies to do that.

    I also have no idea  whether providing the Surveillance State more powers   would make us feel safer. My question is whether we would actually be safer.

    Should we decide that individuals who intend violence automatically forfeit their right to privacy we'd certainly have to "watch the watchdog". I suggest Edward Snowden as Inspector General.

    . 


    by Flavius on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 1:50pm

    With mass surveillance there is the problem of too much information to be scanned even with programs that screen for words such as bomb, Jihad, martyr and other trigger words so inferring that our non-omnipresent watchers could or would  have  stopped this attack is a false assertion. Our Surveillance Industrial Complex is very good at using this huge amount of data for tracking trends and connections in our society but when they place Greenpeace on the same threat continuum as al-Qaeda their priorities are exposed.

    Many people make threats of many kinds for many reasons and never carry them out so what you seem to be asking is can the Thought Police keep us safe from threats by identifying those people who will carry out attacks before they happen and the answer is no or very unlikely as we have seen on numerous occasions. We will see Muslim and other Amerikans turned in by their neighbors for suspicious activities and more harassment and suppression of the US Muslim community which will just exacerbate  the conditions where some people will decide Amerikans don't deserve or have a right to expect safety or security.


    by Peter (not verified) on Thu, 12/10/2015 - 6:42pm

    My personal choice would be to chance erring far in the direction of "no". Actually, I do not believe that we would be taking a 'chance' by restricting invasive programs of surviellance but would actually be guaranteeing that some preventable attacks inspired by various ideological clashes would occur. Some, but how many and how destructive is the question which the answer turns upon and a major factor to consider is how much risk for how much benefit we are willing to take.

    I just returned home from a 3000 mile round trip which entailed approximately 48 hours [according to google] of driving time which were done in spans of 15 and then 5 and then 7 and then 7 and then 17 hours behind the wheel. I survived a much greater risk than that of being a victim of any crime that invasive surveillance might likely protect me from. It was a good trip and I very much value the opportunity to take it which entails my own choice to take the risk involved and also my own choice to add to the risk to others created by my 70 mph presence in their near vicinity. If I had made that trip over holiday weekends my risk, and theirs, would have gone up appreciably and yet holidays have largely been set so as to make for three-day weekends despite the statistical proof that doing so results in more accidents which means more [preventable] carnage and death. I would not vote to either eliminate or move such holidays to Wednesday every year and I doubt many others would either. 

    All that said, I tend ro agree with Assange that the question of whether we should support or oppose more surveillance is pointless because more intrusive surveillance will happen regardless anything the electorate might choose. We live in a scary and somewhat  cowardly new world

    http://russia-insider.com/en/society/assange-says-fight-privacy-lost-mas...


    by A Guy Called LULU on Fri, 12/11/2015 - 1:03pm

    Thanks  for the link.

    You are dealing with the sort of questions I raised seriously.. I'm not. Just after dinner lazy arm -waving. 

    I wonder about , no - I don't just  wonder ,I completely disagree with- occasional references to the 60s and the supposed fearfulness of the period with the threats of imminent destruction, class room drills to hide under the desk, yatta, yatta , yatta .IMHO on scale of 1.-10 our fear of nuclear destruction at that time was about #87.

    Our concern today , again IMHO , about the Surveillance State invading our privacy  is in that same ballpark. Or maybe across the street next to the subway .. Of course the Government invades our privacy. Kind of thing Governments do. Keeps them out of trouble. Otherwise they'd really be worth overthrowing.

    Governments mostly are not all that competent. Composed of people who  failed to get a better paying job because they weren't attractive enough. Non governments are composed of people of the same intellectual level but  better shaved. Or have better wardrobes. Or legs.

    In both cases what actually get's done is what people want. I recall someone's illustration of  this .(Tolstoy?)

    Year after year Napolean issued an order: " Invade England". 

    "Oh yeah. We gotta get on to that. Someday....Where's lunch?" One June day, Poland, having once again been defeated, the Grande Army of the Republic was marching along the river by the border. The Commander , arriving at the bridge looked up to the hilltop where Nap squirmed in his saddle wondering whether  enough was enough (commanding conquering legions did have its  downside )and he could  dismount and have another good lunch.When the Commander nodded towards the bridge  either Nap didn't notice (the sun was in his eyes , and god was he hungry). Or he did , and agreed. Or disagreed but didn't care. And  either pointed East or scratched his nose..  And the Russian Invasion began. 

    Arguably things were much the same under Adolph.  Every order to cross the Channel was followed by another attack on ..Crete?

    The  Surveillance  State continues because 90% of the population couldn't care less.Or sort of like it. Maybe they're wrong. Or maybe what difference does it make? 

    I read  " 1984" in  1948 I think.(Clever of Orwell to just flip the numbers) And waited for   36 years. Turned out (to quote Beyond the Fringe)  it was "Not the  Conflagration we were banking on".In what I think was a better book "Homage to Catalonia" Orwell described the fascists pounding on the door of his(and his wife's) hotel room and searching it. Not under the bed of course because you didn't search under a  married woman's bed.

    In Long- clearly I can't say "in Short"- I suspect it will make little difference whether the USA adopts a " policy of Electronic Eaves Dropping". It will go on doing what it feels like and its nay sayers will go on nay saying, What else is new?. .

      

     


    by Flavius on Sat, 12/12/2015 - 11:41pm

    smiley

    And thanks for that response, I got a few smiles out of reading it. I think you are right that we will just live with the results of technology being applied to monitor and control our every inclination including those which incline towards or include actual lawbreaking. I have so far. My fifty plus year ongoing crime spree consists of driving nine miles per hour over the speed limit every chance I get. In the trip I just took I drove highway 287 north out of Texas through the very heart of the area worst affected by the dust bowl. It is now beautiful country [thanks government interference] and that beauty is not marred by roadside billboards that radar cops can hide behind to use their stealth technology . [Thanks, Ladybird]. Robot camera cops sent my daughter-in-law a $485. ticket in CA for rolling through a red light and making a right turn. Those cameras are actually being removed there and in many other places because they piss people off so much.

    So far and probably forever the biggest affect monitoring of my communications has had directly on me is that of merchants and which is the immediate barrage of pop up ads whenever I check out a product online. I can live with that. Still though, the government snooping pisses me off and the government insults me with the excuses and justifications bolstered so often by lies, yet I think the first and most dangerous indirect affect of the government's ability to see all evil and hear all evil but selectively speak of evil only where and when it wants to [another serious thought coming] will be the ability to pressure to the point of outright blackmail politicians and other powerful persons. As you suggest, I'll say "nay" and the gov will hear me if they so choose and almost certainly ignore me as they do almost everybody and life will go on until it no longer does. Not much changed about that, at least so far in our own country. As far as I can see, that is.

     

     


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sun, 12/13/2015 - 12:21pm

    Glad you got some chuckles. 

    I'll say this for Robotcops at least they're limited to the particular infraction they've discovered (or invented) and don't add on the ever popular failure to comply. Your daughter in law seems to have arrived home in one piece, thank Allah . Not so sure that would have been true if she had had to deal with flesh and blood kind.

    And of course there are plenty of good cops. The majority almost certainly.

    Hit the road , LL 

     

     


    by Flavius on Sun, 12/13/2015 - 11:59pm

    In your proposal to respond to the collection of information by some people intervening before crimes happen, the novel Minority Report by Philip K. Dick is a more applicable book than Orwell's 1984 as a model of the problem.
    Dick's novel concerns itself with an agency that has found a means to reveal future crimes through the reports of people who can see future events as if they were happening now. It takes the idea of "crime prevention" to its ultimate limit as an idea. One of the reporter's disagreed with findings of the others, leading to a realization that the completely objective point of view the agency assumed it was operating within turns out to be yet another set of conditions of what it cannot control.
    From that perspective, the problem is not just about central authority (but it certainly is also always about that) but the problem of verification of what actually happens. While I appreciate and embrace the Tolstoy smack down of Great Leaders who embrace the Great Leader's theory of history, I propose the emphasis on stopping specific crimes before they happen always becomes an internal narrative of the prosecutors without means of verification. The thread between Stalin show trials and McCarthy investigations is that they create this alternate universe where all this stuff would have happened if a certain group of watchers had not intervened. No way to prove that. Ever.
    At that point, it is not only the problem of who will watch the watchers but the ability to have any kind of common experience.


    by moat on Sun, 12/13/2015 - 6:06pm

    Yes Government prosecution for appearing to think about crimes would be frightening. 

    But seems like there's some better response than just paring our fingernails while reading the plans of the next  Farooks 


    by Flavius on Mon, 12/14/2015 - 12:08am