Cover for Action

            It has been more than a year since Edward Snowden exposed the world to the disturbing message that the NSA seems to believe that it is perfectly reasonable for their office to have full, unrestrained access to the private, everyday dealings of any and every person living in the U.S. as well as many persons living abroad. In that span of time, the intelligence agencies at home and many abroad have tried their damnedest to discredit Snowden, labeling him a traitor and claiming that he put American (and British) lives at risk; and furthermore saying that his leaks are aiding terrorists in their efforts.

           

            These latter accusations, while quite polarizing and provocative, simply lack any firm foundation. The NSA has had fifteen months to produce even one instance of concrete evidence that Snowden's revelations have in fact harmed the U.S. or its citizens, and in that time they have come up empty handed. Considering the fact that many polls show  public support for Snowden hovering around fifty percent, one might think it would be in the NSA's best interest to show us some proof and thus tip the scales of public opinion in their favor. Every day that passes with them failing to do so, Snowden's case looks stronger and stronger.

           

            The favored claim--which is the main one Anthony Glees cites in the referenced article-- made against Snowden is that terrorists have shifted their tactics away from communications which can be intercepted, that cell phone traffic has dropped off precipitously after Snowden exposed the NSA's Prism surveillance program; and that without that broadcast traffic, our intelligence community is at a profound disadvantage. According to this logic, then, the argument proceeds that Edward Snowden is to blame for the recent round of beheadings carried out by the rabid, jihadist group, ISIL. Because ISIL stopped mobile communications, Glees argues, we couldn't find them--and therefore we couldn't find the hostages. 

            Who, then is to blame for all the prior beheadings of Americans in the region? We didn't have a great track record when it came to finding and rescuing hostages well before Snowden entered the picture. Also, before we buy into any argument which props up Snowden as an excuse for the CIA not being able to find dangerous people, let us remind ourselves who it was that took ten years to find Osama Bin Laden. Maybe they were too busy trying to find ways to subvert our constitutional rights to notice his change of address form.

            At best, Glees is delusional. Are we seriously expected to believe that, as a result of the NSA's actions being exposed, terrorists are, as the reporter suggests communicating "with each other only in person"? Not only is this notion quaint and silly, it is tactically unfeasible. There is no way in the twenty-first century that a fighting force like ISIL, with over 30,000 members spread across two countries can effectively carry out a campaign of terror using mid-nineteenth century technology. Conversely if they are really, as Glees posits eschewing modern technology, then they are at a serious disadvantage in the long term...which would mean that Snowden's actions actually impeded, not aided the terrorists in their efforts.

            Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though; the terrorists out there who wish to bring harm to the world are in fact using their cell-phones, their laptops, their twitter accounts and all other manner of technology. Perhaps post-Snowden they were a tad more leery for a spell, but it isn't like they didn't already know they were being watched. Nowadays, it doesn't take an inordinate amount of skill to combat electronic surveillance, and violent extremists bent on destruction have long-known of the many ways to avoid detection. Removal of the cell phone's battery; changing cell phones frequently ('burners'); encryption; 'spoofing' technologies which bounce internet communications off a remote IP address to mask location--these are all stock-in-trade tools in a terrorist's arsenal.

            Certainly the American intelligence community has counter-measures for some of these tactics, but without reliable on-the-ground, person-to-person intel to enhance what we gather electronically, these comparatively primitive techniques employed by ISIL are relatively effective at minimizing the value of remote surveillance. There is a fundamental and understandable mistrust of Westerners in the region which has made asset acquisition next to impossible. A strong argument could be made that this is the real reason for our intelligence failures in the years since 9/11: just as the NSA has broken the trust of the American citizenry, they have consistently failed to gain the trust of the good people of Iraq whose help they desperately need to win this war. This idea doesn't arise from a flowery or naive belief in the good of every human being, but rather the practical necessity for human intel in winning a war.

            Blaming Snowden for deaths in Iraq is like blaming a warning siren in your neighborhood for starting a fire across town. If we examine his whistle blowing charges against the NSA, we see that they are quite specifically aimed at illegal surveillance, particularly against citizens of the United States. To this point, the NSA and their ilk have not been able to come up with one shred of tangible, reportable proof that their Prism program, designed to find "a needle in a haystack," has done anything at all positive in halting terrorism. In suggesting otherwise, Mr. Glees is grasping at straws.

             

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2768841/An-intelligence-expert-s-devastating-verdict-Leaks-Edward-Snowden-Guardian-British-hostages-greater-peril.html

"Wired"-tapping Edward Snowden

               Apart from the occasional jaywalk or lapse in due diligence with regard to sorting my household recyclables, I'm what you would call your garden variety, law-abiding citizen. I shy away from online German pornography, I return library books on time, I would never even think of speed-walking with scissors, let alone running with them; I keep my nose clean. More importantly, I keep my electronic devices clean. The bits and bytes of my electronic existence are sufficiently unremarkable as to warrant their being surveilled.  I click on 'accept' at the end of privacy statements with impunity. I'm not worried. I've got nothing to hide.

            That is, until just a few minutes ago. It just dawned on me that in the course of researching Edward Snowden and the infamous security breach that is attached to his name, I very, very recently typed the following words or phrases into the search bar on my web browser: "NSA infiltration"; "precedents for Russian asylum"; "Espionage Act"; and "Tupperware versus Rubbermaid." (OK, that last one doesn't really have me worried so much as it is evidence of my abiding concern for my perishables). In light of Snowden's allegations that the NSA is spying on Americans' internet usage, though, you can see where a fella like me might start wondering if some monolithic, CIA supercomputer database somewhere isn't connecting those other, potentially seditious dots and turning a suspicious, blinking LED eye towards the nascent evidence I am assembling against myself piece by piece. I may have nothing to hide...but The Matrix doesn't know that.

            Alright, Matrix might be a bit of an overstatement (no neural interface...yet), but you can see where this is leading. In the referenced interview, Snowden reports that Prism, the NSA's intelligence gathering program is unique in that it isn't simply combing meta-data for red flags or dubious links; it is collecting actual content. In other words, the whole of our electronic lives, everything we engage in that has some kind of record, whether by phone or computer, is at least potentially, being collected and analyzed without our consent. Medical records, psychiatric diagnoses, sexual predilections, library records, private communications between lovers are all fair game--no warrant necessary.

            Lest we think that we are safe if we have done nothing wrong, imagine anyone, let alone the NSA or FBI having access to all that personal information about you. The temptation towards abuse of that access in order to leverage, extort or otherwise undermine your sheer existence would be too strong for those with that power to resist if they saw some advantage to themselves or their cause could be advanced if only they are willing to use it against you. Imagine a potential prosecutor who knows your every weakness in advance. Such a scenario would render any inquisitor virtually omnipotent.

            Our forefathers imagined such a scenario, albeit not as sophisticated technologically speaking, when they crafted the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution. In protecting every citizen's right against unreasonable search and seizure, the drafters of the aforementioned document addendum foresaw that giving our government, any government for that matter, too much skewed advantage over its citizens would inevitably lead to the trampling of civil liberties. Thus, those invested with the task of enforcing the law are kept in check by such notions as probable cause and due process. If Edward Snowden is to be trusted, both are woefully lacking in Prism's methods.

           

            http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/

Haboob: Sand Storm (Arabic: هَبوب‎ habūb "blasting/drafting")

            There is nothing like the searing desire for revenge or the stirrings of righteous indignation when it comes to getting the American public to sign off on a war. It worked in the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in 1898 when William Randolph Hearst and his ilk agitated public opinion into an irrational frenzy against Spain. It worked again in WWI, this time the sinking of the H.M.S. Lusitania providing the requisite outrage. Even more recently, Bush-the younger seized upon the American public's understandable shock and horror following the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks to initiate wars in two countries, both of which made little sense given the splintered and nomadic nature of Bush's alleged target, Al Qaeda.

            These are oversimplifications, to be sure; the full conflagration of any war never has its origins in a lone spark. Still, these precedents do give one pause, especially in light of President Obama's newly-minted plan to take us back into Iraq, fresh on the heels of the release of internet-broadcast, ISIL- produced beheadings of American journalists. In the months leading up to those gruesome videos, polls reported a fifty-five percent majority of Americans saying that the U.S. had no responsibility to do anything about the recent rise in violence in Iraq. Just days after the chilling decapitations were made public, however, a commanding seventy-one  percent of respondents supported air strikes in the same region; while a conspicuous ninety-four percent were aware of the murders--a figure that is higher than public awareness of any other news story in the past five years. Political pollsters, in particular, don't often see numbers as lopsided as those last two; tectonic shifts of this kind only happen when emotions are running high.

            Which is no way to determine foreign policy, let alone the strategic bombings of an enemy who most Americans didn't even know existed just a few scant weeks ago. Are we really this knee-jerky when it comes to girding our young sons' and daughters' collective loins for battle in a far off land against a justifiably pissed-off and motivated corps of burgeoning jihadists?  Isn't it possible that we, as the angry mob have a duty to examine the long-range effects of our interference before we set torches to a monster we helped to create?

            It seems likely though that it is our very tendency to meddle that ISIL is counting on. Without U.S. intervention (and the vast media conduit that comes with it), ISIL is a localized outbreak of a particularly virulent and savage pathogen. Once we go back into those shifting desert sands, ISIL has the attention of the entire world for a long time to come and thus the capacity to spread into a worldwide pandemic. The terrorists who killed Sotloff and Foley weren’t as angry regarding U.S. air strikes as they postured on camera. While it seems a safe bet that, all things being equal, your average Muslim terrorist prefers not being bombed as compared to being bombed, dead Muslims on TV, killed by American munitions make a great recruiting tool aimed at radicalized sons of Islam. In short, it is highly probable that ISIL wants to lure us in close where they have home-field advantage. Recent protracted entanglements in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and yes, Iraq should serve as cautionary tales against the hubris that comes with military might versus guerrilla warfare, but the muscle memory in our trigger fingers seems to get itchy once we are exposed to the vicious brutality that people who live in such places are forced to reckon with every day.

            There is no question that caliphatists who call themselves the Islamic State must be dealt with militarily. They are sweeping across Iraq and Syria at an alarming rate indiscriminately butchering anyone who disagrees with their particularly medieval brand of fundamentalism. They are well-funded and well organized, already attracting adherents from Western nations such as the U.S. and Britain. Their numbers are estimated to be as high as 20,000 and are reported to be growing rapidly. They have a battery of sophisticated weaponry, including tanks and anti-aircraft guns. The question then is who is going to stop them and how.

            The answer, according to our fearless leader, appears to be us, and (surprise, surprise) not the bordering Arab nations who have the most to lose should ISIL become unmanageable. President Obama issued a plan on national TV last week outlining his "strategy" for dealing with ISIL, and nowhere in that speech to the Nation did I hear any reference to the Intelligence failures that got us here, or to any semblance of a plan which takes into account the endemically fractious underlayment of a region which seems to produce one extremist group after another. Meanwhile, in spite of the President's assurances to the contrary, Republican leaders are already pushing to commit ground troops sooner rather than later.

            Does any of this sound frustratingly familiar to anyone else, or am I the only one scratching his head in wonder? We, as a nation are about to get waist-deep in a sweltering, dry desert that stretches on for miles with no water and no end in sight...again. President Obama's plan sounds simple enough. Ferret out the bad guys and bomb them into submission. Sadly, it's never that simple in this region. What do you do when the target uses human shields or retreats across the semi-permeable border into Syria? How do you form alliances in areas where violent sectarianism is the norm? Who do you trust in Syria where a three-way civil war virtually guarantees insurmountable strategic obstacles? Fortunately for Mr. Obama, these are all questions that he won't have to answer. More likely they will be answered, however inadequately, by his successor. Something tells me that by that time we will all have something new to be angry about.

Games of Strategy

         

           

            With midterm elections right around the corner in November, congressional campaign managers on both sides of the aisle are going to have to do some serious rhetoric tweaking now that President Obama has firmly and authoritatively placed the extermination of ISIL (aka ISIS) front and center in the minds of the American electorate. Congressmen in hotly contested seats around the country will be scrambling to put their domestic agenda further back in their talking points and figure out if  their constituency wants them to stand with or against the President.

            As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, Obama doesn't necessarily need the approval of Congress to take military action; that authority is implied with the rank. The title would be meaningless otherwise. The Constitution expressly grants the legislative branch the power to wage war, and the 1973 War Powers Act plugged up any loopholes that had been exploited by many a president up until that time (The Constitution hadn't stipulated that only Congress can declare war). President Obama can simply invoke his responsibility to protect the safety and well being of the American people. Tradition holds that no one in Congress wants to be the one holding the bag if the President turns out to be right or has a public mandate in current matters martial. At least that's what Obama is banking on. Historically, though, these things turn out to be a whole lot messier than that.

           

            Congress is going to want to be courted. Technically Obama has only sixty days to accomplish his mission before he will need congressional approval. Also, they know that the means for funding such a war (or military operation if we must put a fine point on it), go through Capitol Hill, and that the public approval ratings for such a campaign can easily be tipped unfavorably against the will of a President bent on being a Maverick. Many of Obama's most vocal critics, however,  a cadre of self-styled war hawks which includes among others Sen. John McCain of Arizona and N.Y. Rep. Peter King, seriously miscalculated in the days leading up to the speech, calling Obama's initial response to the threat "weak, " and "tepid."

              Apparently, Obama doesn't like being picked on, and his speech tonight more than rebuffed his attackers. In asking for bipartisan support from the Hill during tonight's speech, the President wasn't showing up on the steps of the Capitol building, hat in hand. On the contrary, his confident, direct, assertive and well-organized approach was more like slapping Congress in the face with his glove. It was as if he were saying, "My intention is to go kick some terrorist ass who are despoiling the cradle of civilization, are you coming with? Oh, and by the way, good luck with those midterm elections."

           

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/world/middleeast/obama-speech-isis.html?_r=0