Left to our own devices?

Click image for full Bado/Le Droit cartoon.

Lazy blogging

Yeah, it's been a slow year around here. Y'know, work, personal life, blah, blah, blah...

I've missed several opportunities to go on record before some controversy was resolved. I haven't given timely opinions on hot topics. The NSA knows what I'm thinking; isn't that enough?

My lazy blogging is probably not going to change soon.

But I can do this.

• It's blatantly unconstitutional that our government is spying on us at great expense (and we're paying for it). It's bad when Obama does it, just as it was when Duhbya did it.
• Intervening in Syria is a terrible, no good, stupid idea. You can tell because most of the neocons are for it. It's a dick-measuring contest, and those don't lead to good outcomes.
• Besides, we couldn't have been any clearer about how to manipulate us if we'd said, "Psst. We'll blow up shit if you convince us the other Islamist dickheads with inconsequential differences from you that you're fighting actually used chemical weapons." (Oops, that's not very clear.)
• Tell me again why the wingnuts hate Obama. Republican universal healthcare (from before that was an oxymoron, granted). Republican Middle East policy, right down to the UN inspectors and the weak, secret evidence oversold by a Secretary of State. Republican economic "recovery," where Wall St. is bullish and the ordinary middle class is losing ground.
• Oh, but Obama is black.
• Larry Summers would be an awful pick for Fed Chair, maybe the worst pick possible. That guy may be brilliant in some bloviating sense of the word, but I don't think he has a nanogram of sound judgement, and he's fucked up almost everything he's touched.
• And I think David Marsters must be a commenter on this blog. Or else wingnut teabaggers are universally angry, ignorant bigots. (OK, that's more likely.)
• But it's really fiiine that a white supremacist can't manage to take over a town when it only has at most two dozen residents and a house there costs $8600 - Detroit, North Dakota.
• Too bad civil rights has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.
• Joseph Stiglitz rocks.

No, I'll never be as terse as Atrios. Even when I try to go short, I wind up long. Must be the gin.

Do they think they're the government?

Facebook keeps dossiers on us all:

The personal information leaked by the bug is information that had not been given to Facebook by the users - it is data Facebook has been compiling on its users behind closed doors, without their consent.

Governments have never been able, long term, to distinguish dissidents and subversives from revolutionaries and enemies. Corporations just want to sell us more useless plastic shit.

Balanced on this knife edge

Like a Phoenix from the ashes of its 1980 debacle at Desert One, JSOC has risen to possess America's licence [sic] to kill:

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command ... even existed.

This kind of elite force is not easy to create. But, once one is created, the hardest task of a democracy is to keep it restrained to uses against our enemies. Once the impossible doesn't take long at all to do, it's easy for politicians to turn elite military units into instruments of personal power instead of their intended use as instruments of national defense.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

No surprise that a Democrat is better than a Republican. Also no surprise that he's not that much better.

JSOC has made brilliant use of sigint to locate targets.

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

This is more than likely part of what Bob Woodward likened to the Manhattan Project three years ago.

Still, some of that technology has been in use in American cities for a decade or more. Our cell phones track our movements. Acoustic listening posts triangulate gunshots origins in high-crime areas. We seize and do forensics on alleged criminals' electronic devices (rightly so with a warrant).

It's only a matter of time before JSOC innovations get used domestically. How likely is it in the modern American surveillance state that there will be Constitutional controls? And I really don't have enough of a neo-Confederate sense of humor to laugh at one of JSOC's nicknames, "the Secret Army of Northern Virginia."

Electric sheep

Unless you need to be touched, choose the scanner.

"Most people are unaware about the fact that there is significant radiation exposure associated with air travel because they are well above the Earth's atmosphere," said Robert J. Barish, a radiological and health physicist in New York City. "You'd get as much radiation in a whole-body scanner as you'd get in two minutes at 30,000 feet."

Of course, if you'd never wear a bathing suit in public, you may have concerns not related to the health impact of being scanned. But then you'd probably be Amish, so that would be moot.

The steady erosion of any privacy at all - and what if anything to do about it - is another question altogether.

Son of FISA

"The only privacy that's left is the inside of your head. Maybe that's enough."

The U.S. is trailing the U.K. in achieving the surveillance state. Trailing is a good thing. But the U.K.'s lead is tenuous.

Even though FISA was extremely easy to satisfy, it was amended under the scare tactics of the Bushists to make it almost completely toothless. Sure enough, the FBI couldn't even trouble itself to obey the weak tea of FISA as amended.

A few grains shy of a load

Click image for full Jen Sorenson cartoon.

Misty watercolor mem'ries

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

CIA/media follies

This Time report is what is technically known as wild-ass guessing. The program Darth Cheney reportedly protected was either assassination or it was domestic surveillance. Or it was unworkable and cancelled in 2008, I mean 2004, no biggie, move along, nothing to see.

Anyone can guess: How about enough resolution in satellite imagery to do facial recognition? (Why look straight down? Enemy of the State showed the problems with that.)

C'mon, give it a try! It's fun and easy, and there's no accountability for being wrong.

Enough bullshit! What we need from the media is not to print every goddamned unverified superficial rumor they hear. What we need is research, reporting, sourcing, and truth.

A bit of memory wouldn't hurt either. Could this "new" story relate to the unpursued Bob Woodward rhetorical bombshell of September 2008? Yes, at the time, I leaned to technology, too, since Woodward likened it to the Manhattan Project.

In any case, we still don't know.

Operation Blackbriar

We don't know what this program was. They tell us it wasn't waterboarding or the other torture methods. (You do realize that "harsh interrogation methods" is a euphemism worthy of the Nazis or the Soviets, right?) They tell us it wasn't the massive surveillance that essentially rendered the Fourth Amendment so much empty language.

They also tell us that it was never an "operational" program, even after nearly eight years. Oh, bullshit. To believe that, you'd have to have your head buried so far up your ass that it would be looking out your navel.

Dick Cheney, the true power of Duhbya's maladministration, ordered this program kept secret from Congress, kept immune from the oversight of democracy. He explicitly evaded the rule of law. (Again!) This was - and still is - the canonical impeachable offense. It's also a violation of his oath of office.

There is no way that Darth Cheney would have been interested enough in "planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year" to suppress disclosure of it. The New York Times is playing along to even print such nonsense.

Note: In all the wingnut foofaraw about Nancy Pelosi accusing Leon Panetta of lying about the CIA's legal obligations to brief Congress is the most obvious bullshit. Panetta did not say the CIA always briefed Congress in compliance with its legal obligations. He said that it was not the CIA's policy to withhold legally required briefings. Is everyone in the media too dense - or too happy to play along with the inside game - to notice this?

(h/t Boston Globe, where I first read the Times report on this)

Sitting here on the group Duhbya bench

Who forgot to invite Dick?

Click image for full Steven G. Artley cartoon.

All of a sudden

Dianne Feinstein is worried about illegal NSA domestic spying now? She's holding hearings about overbroad surveillance now?

The good news is that the Obama administration is allowing the NSA to care about the laws that govern it. That's change I can believe in.

Gov. Patrick's message on the gas tax

There's a lot of meat here missing from the Globe's story. I particularly value the breakdown of where Deval proposes to spend the revenue:

• 4 cents to roll back the toll increase on the Turnpike and Tunnels;
• 6 cents to maintain existing MBTA services, and avoid fare increases over the next few years;
• 1.5 cents to Regional Transit Authorities;
• 1.5 cents to targeted regional road projects;
• 3 cents to southern, western and northern rail projects;
• 1 cent for innovative gas and toll solutions;
• And 2 cents to begin to stop the costly practice of paying for transportation personnel from capital funds

There's also a portal to the Patrick administration's transportation plans here.

By the way, if that 1 cent for "innovative gas and toll solutions" is for GPS-surveilled mileage taxes, I'm still against that part of the plan.

Beats a monitoring anklet

The proposal to monitor our miles driven using GPS and to charge user fees based on miles driven is wrong on so many counts that I can't see why it would ever be proposed.

• It greatly increases potential state surveillance in a time when there's already a huge lack of privacy. Oh, sure, these GPS devices only record your whereabouts, but every gas pump in the state can download your worldline - how secure can that be? And you certainly couldn't claim that a warrant would be needed to access the information.
  
• It punishes light, gas-efficient vehicles by removing consumption from taxation. A per-gallon gas tax already provides good capitalist incentives to avoid gross and inefficient consumption. This would take it away. You Prius drivers? You're screwed.
  
• It heavily subsidizes heavy vehicles' road use, since they are much more damaging to the infrastructure. That motorcycle you're riding could drive over the roads and bridges of Massachusetts without ever causing any damage. Even wear would take many, many years. Appropriate taxes and user fees on semis - to cover their costs - would make rail more attractive economically.
  

If you have to do congestion pricing, there are ways that are much less damaging to good environmental policy, to civil liberty, and to sound economic incentives. Say it ain't so, Deval!

Update (2/20): President Obama is not going ahead with this. Joy!

Don't be stupid

Oregon and, allegedly, Congress and other states are considering a tax on miles driven. Democrats are interested. This is dumber than a bag of door knobs.

• We need to conserve gasoline (to save money, to slow global warming), not stop vehicles from slicing through the air (ooh, they might injure it).
• Semis batter the roads, not Priuses. Yes, trucks pay big taxes, but they still don't refill their own potholes.
• We really really don't want the government tracking us everywhere we go. At least now we can turn our GPS-enabled cell phones off. If we'd like to be unreachable for a little while, whether for hanky-panky or just a little damn peace and quiet.
• Bicyclists and pedestrians don't pay for road upkeep either. Better put monitoring bracelets on them, too, the sponging no-account bastards.
  

Here's a guy who gets it, even though it doesn't advantage him:

"It doesn't seem fair," said Paul Niedergang of Portland, that a hybrid would be taxed as much as his Dodge pickup. "I just think the gas tax needs to be updated."

The tax is not going to be easier to sell to taxpayers just because it's totally insanely 70 IQ stupid.

Extremists need enemies

It's far from clear why Muslim terrorists attacked civilians in Mumbai, but extremists need enemies. Most of all, when under pressure, they need to share their enemies and their hatreds with the populations that they hide among.

It's easy to stir up long-standing secular and sectarian enmities between India and Pakistan. They're never far below the surface.

Even a war of words between these two nuclear powers will rally Pakistanis to all things Pakistani and all things Islamic, even terrorist organizations. That benefits all the terrorist groups that thrive on chaos.

The U.S. has enough electronic surveillance to know already where these terrorists attacked from. The NSA knows who took their calls in Waziristan. Whether we'll ever know is another question.

Why believe this?

You can believe that our government has had us under surveillance if you want. But I'd have to believe then that the Bushists are lying to us about everything, and ...

Adrienne Kinne, a former U.S. Army Reserves Arab linguist, told ABC News the NSA was listening to the phone calls of U.S. military officers, journalists and aid workers overseas who were talking about "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

David Murfee Faulk, a former U.S. Navy Arab linguist, said in the news report that he and his colleagues were listening to the conversations of military officers in Iraq who were talking with their spouses or girlfriends in the United States.

Better prosecute these bad apples before they make this man look bad:

"There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news conference this past February.

Definitely don't let this get out:

"By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody," she said. "You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security."

Hit squads

Bob Woodward tells us that the escalation in Iraq (known in marketing-speak as the surge) didn't have as much effect as the Sunni changes (marketing: Anbar Awakening) nor a previously unreleased program of assassination (thin marketing: secret killing). He also likens the assassination campaign to the Manhattan Project.

First, let me say that war is about killing. Targeting that killing is in fact better than not targeting it, so I have no problem in principle with assassination as a tool of war. (As a tool of statecraft? Another matter entirely.)

Assassination is not new. Fiction has been written and filmed about it, and maybe a little non-fiction, too. We used it in Vietnam, though less successfully than the Viet Cong.

That means that even though Woodward is keeping mum (he's a journalist who requires elite access, after all) about what exactly is new. But the stunning "Manhattan Project" label is a clue.

I think that this campaign must have involved massive technology, though not quite to the level of "Déjà Vu". My guess: Tons of electronic surveillance of every phone call, email, movement, and purchase of the Iraqis and massive NSA keyword searching and machine translation (since so many of our military speakers of Arabic were too gay to be welcome to help), followed by human translation of data-mined messages and fact bases.

In short, I'd guess that the military massively replicated what the Clinton administration had deployed in prototype against Osama bin Laden and the Bushists scaled up under John Poindexter and his Carnivore-building ilk to watch Americans. If so, it's quite a technical achievement, though it does call into question why we haven't cared enough to find bin Laden himself.

Update (9/3/11): I was a little bit off here but not much. See this new item for follow-up.

Succeeding Sandy Berger

Among Alberto Gonzales's crimes, mishandling sensitive compartmentalized information related to illegal spying is relatively minor. Even so, should a Democrat do it, he would rightly be punished, though not drawn and quartered, as the frothing wingnuts wanted for Sandy Berger.

Of course, Gonzo's defense remains that he's an idiot with premature senile dementia:

[T]he attorney general was merely forgetful or unaware of the proper way to handle the top secret papers.

and then:

Gonzales' "best recollection is that he always placed the notes in the most secure place over which he had immediate personal control."

Thanks again, Gary Hart

What I want to know: Did the tip to the National Enquirer come from a Republican source? Rielle Hunter herself? Someone on the campaign? A member of the public?

Of course, if I were a Republican operative (shudder!), I'd launder my tip through, say, the bellhop at the Beverly Hilton. I'd be a nameless guy in the bar telling the witness how the Enquirer pays cash for good tips. No fingerprints.

I have no evidence, but it's a dirty game. If Duhbya would lie about everything, but especially about war-making in Iraq, and McCain would give up all his principles (torture? o.k.) to achieve the nomination, it's hard to imagine that no one is surveilling their opposition looking for salacious stories just like this.

This is how the game is played now, as sad as that is and as doomed as perhaps our democracy is because of it. Somehow though, I doubt that the Democrats are smart enough and bloody-minded enough to know this and act upon it. They really need to have some deterrence to show the Republicans: "You out any affair that Obama has had, and we'll out any affair of McCain's. Do we have an understanding?"