June 7, 2013
From 9/11 to Prism: A Nation Gone Dotty
Here’s one of the things I want to know about the government’s electronic-spying programs, which evidently give it the power to find out intimate details about virtually anybody. Who designed the spooky red-and-black logo for the National Security Agency’s Prism program? My colleague Amy Davidson correctly points out that it owes something to Storm Thorgerson’s album cover for Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” a ponderous recording that back in the nineteen-seventies drove me and many others to punk rock. But it’s also reminiscent of the logos featured in the cinematic version of “1984,” featuring John Hurt and Richard Burton, which came out in 1984. In the film, for example, the logo for IngSoc, the all-powerful ruling party of Oceania, the dystopian land of the future, is a red-and-black capital “V.”
Was the Prism designer, whose identity is
doubtless classified, a “prog rock” fan, or did he or she share Orwell’s
wry sense of humor? When you are dealing with this intelligence stuff,
you certainly need an example of the latter, or you will go a bit batty.
Take me. Only a few weeks ago, I praised President Obama for publicly questioning
the basis of the ongoing “war on terror.” At the time, a couple of
commenters suggested I’d been duped, that it was all just fine-sounding
rhetoric, but I was willing to take the President at his word. Big
mistake. As the editorial board of the Times points out,
Obama and his Administration have lost all credibility on the issue of
domestic surveillance, which is an integral part of the war on terror.
It’s come to something when Rand Paul—he of the Tea Party membership, goblin-like father, and nutty conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve—is the hero of the hour, but we have reached that point. Back in July, 2011, when Congress was renewing the Patriot Act for another four years, Paul, who had only recently been elected as the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, delayed the vote for several days as he demanded limits on the powers it bestowed upon the federal government. At the time, these stalling tactics were widely dismissed as Paul being Paul, but it turns out he was dead right.
The bit of the Patriot Act that Paul objected to most vociferously was Section 215, which gives the government the power to seize Americans’ “business records,” including their phone records, virtually at will, without seeking a warrant. It was this provision that the N.S.A. relied on in sweeping up phone records from Verizon and, presumably, other U.S. telephone companies. (Another piece of legislation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which legalized Prism—in which the N.S.A. tracked the Internet activity, including the Google and Facebook accounts, of terrorist suspects overseas and an undisclosed number of American residents, whose accounts were swept up “incidentally”—was also involved.)
Acting in accordance with the hysteria that has suffused the public debate about counter-terrorism since 9/11—or, more accurately, lack of debate—Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, accused Paul of abetting America’s enemies, saying failure to renew the Patriot Act unchanged would “be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected.” Paul stood his ground, asking if the Act shouldn’t include “some rules that say before they come into your house, before they go into your banking records, that a judge should be asked for permission, that there should be judicial review? Do we want a lawless land?”
Not lawless, exactly. The former lecturer in constitutional law who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would never go along with that. Over the past few years, his Administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have put quite a bit of effort into bringing domestic spying within the ambit of the law. Thus, when the news broke about the seizure of domestic phone records, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, could say, “It is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress.” And when reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian revealed the existence of the Prism operation, a White House official could tell the press it was “subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress,” and that it “involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted.”
Now, we get it. Far from dismantling the surveillance state that George W. Bush built up, Obama has legitimized it and strengthened its defenses against outside criticisms. Another way to put it is that America has gone dotty, and it’s all part of the post-9/11 syndrome. As Ron Fournier, the editorial director of National Journal, pointed out on Thursday, we don’t live in the age of Obama. Rather, we are stuck in the “the era of Bush-Obama“—a period that “will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election. It made little difference.”
Which brings us back to Orwell’s Oceania, where there was no point complaining about, or trying to foil, extensive state surveillance: it was perfectly legal, it relied on the latest technology, and it was part of daily life. Every home had a “telescreen” that recorded the activities of its inhabitants. Winston sat in an alcove, which he believed was hidden from the camera, and wrote subversive things in his journal. But that didn’t protect him from informers, who eventually turned in him and his lover, Julia.
It’s just a story, of course. America isn’t a totalitarian country, and, from a technological perspective, Orwell was living in the Stone Age. With the rise of digital communication, the spying agencies often don’t need human informants at all. They can simply demand calling records from Verizon or AT&T, or access the servers of Google or Facebook or Skype, and find out all they need to know. (To what extent that happened in operation Prism is disputed. Google said Thursday that it “does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.”)
But some of Orwell’s message still rings true. It is precisely because technological progress has greatly increased the scope for official (and corporate) infringement on personal privacy that we need more restrictions on who can access personal data, and we need our political leaders to take a stand on this issue. Obama still hasn’t got the message. Speaking on Friday, he defended the seizure of Americans’ phone records, and he also reiterated the argument that it was all perfectly legal and Congress had gone along with it. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” the President said. Are you feeling reassured?
Photograph by T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty.
Read more of our coverage of government surveillance programs.
It’s come to something when Rand Paul—he of the Tea Party membership, goblin-like father, and nutty conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve—is the hero of the hour, but we have reached that point. Back in July, 2011, when Congress was renewing the Patriot Act for another four years, Paul, who had only recently been elected as the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, delayed the vote for several days as he demanded limits on the powers it bestowed upon the federal government. At the time, these stalling tactics were widely dismissed as Paul being Paul, but it turns out he was dead right.
The bit of the Patriot Act that Paul objected to most vociferously was Section 215, which gives the government the power to seize Americans’ “business records,” including their phone records, virtually at will, without seeking a warrant. It was this provision that the N.S.A. relied on in sweeping up phone records from Verizon and, presumably, other U.S. telephone companies. (Another piece of legislation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which legalized Prism—in which the N.S.A. tracked the Internet activity, including the Google and Facebook accounts, of terrorist suspects overseas and an undisclosed number of American residents, whose accounts were swept up “incidentally”—was also involved.)
Acting in accordance with the hysteria that has suffused the public debate about counter-terrorism since 9/11—or, more accurately, lack of debate—Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, accused Paul of abetting America’s enemies, saying failure to renew the Patriot Act unchanged would “be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected.” Paul stood his ground, asking if the Act shouldn’t include “some rules that say before they come into your house, before they go into your banking records, that a judge should be asked for permission, that there should be judicial review? Do we want a lawless land?”
Not lawless, exactly. The former lecturer in constitutional law who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would never go along with that. Over the past few years, his Administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have put quite a bit of effort into bringing domestic spying within the ambit of the law. Thus, when the news broke about the seizure of domestic phone records, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, could say, “It is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress.” And when reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian revealed the existence of the Prism operation, a White House official could tell the press it was “subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress,” and that it “involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted.”
Now, we get it. Far from dismantling the surveillance state that George W. Bush built up, Obama has legitimized it and strengthened its defenses against outside criticisms. Another way to put it is that America has gone dotty, and it’s all part of the post-9/11 syndrome. As Ron Fournier, the editorial director of National Journal, pointed out on Thursday, we don’t live in the age of Obama. Rather, we are stuck in the “the era of Bush-Obama“—a period that “will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election. It made little difference.”
Which brings us back to Orwell’s Oceania, where there was no point complaining about, or trying to foil, extensive state surveillance: it was perfectly legal, it relied on the latest technology, and it was part of daily life. Every home had a “telescreen” that recorded the activities of its inhabitants. Winston sat in an alcove, which he believed was hidden from the camera, and wrote subversive things in his journal. But that didn’t protect him from informers, who eventually turned in him and his lover, Julia.
It’s just a story, of course. America isn’t a totalitarian country, and, from a technological perspective, Orwell was living in the Stone Age. With the rise of digital communication, the spying agencies often don’t need human informants at all. They can simply demand calling records from Verizon or AT&T, or access the servers of Google or Facebook or Skype, and find out all they need to know. (To what extent that happened in operation Prism is disputed. Google said Thursday that it “does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.”)
But some of Orwell’s message still rings true. It is precisely because technological progress has greatly increased the scope for official (and corporate) infringement on personal privacy that we need more restrictions on who can access personal data, and we need our political leaders to take a stand on this issue. Obama still hasn’t got the message. Speaking on Friday, he defended the seizure of Americans’ phone records, and he also reiterated the argument that it was all perfectly legal and Congress had gone along with it. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” the President said. Are you feeling reassured?
Photograph by T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty.
Read more of our coverage of government surveillance programs.