Category Archives: real life

Ed Snowden: Hero or Traitor?

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This post is not going to settle that question for you, and it’s not one I thought I’d be writing about, a recent resurgence in coverage of Snowden has made me think more deeply about him, now that the original panic and dismay have subsided. Most of the coverage is prompted by reporter James Bamford’s recent article, published in Wired. Bamford conducted the longest set of in-person interviews with Snowden since he went to ground in Russia a year ago. I’ve also been studying Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s, essay, published by Brookings, “The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists.”

Who Is Ed Snowden?

Ed Snowden, NSA, privacy, security, TED talk

Ed Snowden’s TED talk (photo: wikimedia.org)

Snowden’s position from the beginning has been that he is a patriot and a whistleblower, “bent on saving his country from becoming an Orwellian security state,” as Taylor puts it. Others have recorded his ambition, his highly visible, well-polished initial announcements and PowerPoints, and his more recent TED talk, which may suggest more complex and troubling motivations. Washington Post reporter and author David Ignatius (whose novel about a rogue CIA cyber-expert is reviewed on my home page) has said, “Snowden looks these days more like an intelligence defector, seeking haven in a country hostile to the United States, than a whistleblower.”

Ironically, given the current fractured state of U.S.-Russia relations, Snowden was offered asylum there only if he stopped his work aimed “at harming our American partners,” Russian President Putin stipulated. Snowden first withdrew his asylum application, but ultimately agreed not to release more intelligence secrets. The stolen National Security Agency (NSA) documents are no longer in his hands.

Security vs. Privacy

You will recall that in Snowden’s jobs, he accumulated evidence that the NSA was collecting and storing phone records, emails, and other private Internet activity of a great many American citizens, not just those suspected of terrorism, associating with terrorists, or even remotely connected to any—we “ordinary Americans.” This revelation led to retired NSA director Keith Alexander’s famous haystack analogy: If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you need the whole haystack.

In polls, the majority of Americans oppose this wholesale domestic spying, and the government has damaged its credibility as a result. Yet, Snowden worries the public will become inured to disclosures of mass surveillance, as the PBS News Hour reported. Our acceptance may be in part because Ordinary Americans feel privacy is already hopelessly lost, in part because we believe we are helpless to stop the spying, and in part because people tend to become numb to successive outrages and risks

By spying on foreign citizens and leaders, NSA also has damaged relationships abroad. What the public has heard most about, however, is the spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone calls, while “the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory,” Snowden says.

A fundamental and inevitable tension Taylor explores is between national security and individual privacy and the irony that a security apparatus is needed in order to protect privacy. He covers, in a readable way, the basic tenets of relevant U.S. law going back to the Bill of Rights, in which the Fourth Amendment obligates the U.S. government to ensure that citizens “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Before the telegraph, before the telephone, before the Internet, securing one’s “papers and effects” was relatively simple.

Snowden Fallout

Today, we must entrust the transmission and disposition of our communications to third parties that may or may not have an interest in protecting them or be able to do so when the NSA comes calling. However, the bad publicity Snowden’s revelations generated for the telephone companies and Internet giants has prompted a rethinking of corporate policies and strengthening of encryption practices.

Those steps haven’t come cheap. Tech companies have been hit by both substantial additional expenses and loss of income, as foreign clients become wary of their products—a potential $180 billion revenue loss, according to Forrester Research analysts.

In addition, the State Department says Snowden has not only damaged U.S. intelligence-gathering, but also potentially endangered U.S. agents abroad, without citing specifics.

Evolution of Law

After Watergate, Fourth Amendment protections were purportedly strengthened by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which put a layer of judicial review between U.S. citizens (or permanent resident aliens) and the intelligence agencies that want to spy on them. But post-9/11, the Senate outflanked the FISA mechanism, in the hurriedly adopted Patriot Act. That new law widened the government’s authority to conduct surveillance and investigations.

Although critics predictably labeled the sweeping reforms President Obama proposed last spring as “going too far” and “not going far enough,” the changes may have begun to move the needle. And, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to halt the NSA’s practice of conducting warrantless searches of its database containing millions of Americans’ emails and phone calls—“one of many proposed reforms that never would have happened had it not been for Snowden,” Bamford claims.

Evolution of Technology

The “exponential leap” in authority under the Patriot Act coincided with greatly increased technical ability to collect, store, and monitor electronic communications data, a combination that, in Taylor’s words, has “run roughshod over laws, standards of conduct, and international norms,” jeopardizing the desired balance between national security and individual privacy contained in the Fourth Amendment.

NSA’s new million-square-foot data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, potentially can hold “upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text,” Bamford says. Every hour, billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through this facility. “Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.”

Then, there are the leaks. And, as Bamford points out, evidence suggests that Snowden is not the only leaker, because some media reports cite documents that apparently did not come from him. This put NSA in a real bind: “accused of rogue behavior in its snooping,” Taylor says, “and of incompetence in protecting the information it had collected.” Snowden says NSA cannot seem to tell which documents he just electronically “touched” and those he actually stole, though he says he left digital clues to enable them to be differentiated. “I figured they would have a hard time,” he told Bamford. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

Solutions?

A second major tension, is “the severe limit on the degree to which transparency can be reconciled with functions of government that must be opaque — that is, secret — in order to be effective,” Taylor says. Certainly, the solutions Snowden himself suggests do nothing to reconcile that tension. In Bamford’s article, he suggests, for example, “making encryption a universal standard—where all communications are encrypted by default.” Regarding future leaks, he says, “The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Further Information

Check out the upper left corner of the Brookings article to see what its computers are tracking about you, as you read.

NSA surveillance capabilities allow it to map your movements by monitoring the unique identifiers emitted by your cell phone, computer, and other electronic devices. You can get the flavor of this by checking out what Google can do, unless your device has this feature turned off (how to turn it off).

Read about the MonsterMind, a real? program designed to counter international electronic threats. It poses two dangers: the ability to wage autonomous retaliatory attacks that have unanticipated consequences; and, to the privacy point, the system’s need to monitor virtually all communication between people in the United States and those overseas, as Snowden says, “without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”

Experts’ views on the future of the Internet, in light of a range of security concerns, reported in July 2014 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“Pulling the trigger is easy”

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Russian missile, Malaysia Airlines

Russian Buk missiles (photo: wikipedia)

Discovery of “shrapnel-like holes” on pieces of the fuselage of downed Malaysia Airlines flight 17 adds to evidence suggesting it was shot down using Russian Buk missile technology (which NATO calls the SA-11). A Wired article by Alex Davies reveals just how easy that would be. Says Davies, “The weapon in question is the SA-11, a radar-guided surface to air missile (SAM) system.” The system is mobile, as it was designed to protect troops near the front line from fighter jet attacks. It can hit targets up to twenty miles away and higher than 70,000 feet. It requires a crew of just four.

Once the system is set up, that crew doesn’t need much training to use it. It’s knowing what to fire at that takes the skill, because “the SA-11’s radar system shows the same ‘blip’ for all different targets,” Davies writes. He quotes Paul Huter a Lockheed-Martin aerospace engineer: “Once the radar picks up a target, it is a matter of telling the system that it should engage the target and issuing a fire command.” Another interviewee compared it to firing a gun. “Pulling the trigger is easy. Judgment is hard.”

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*****Down by the River

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drugs, El Paso, Rio Grande, narcotraficantes, DEA, Border Patrol, Mexico, Texas

U.S. Border Patrol agents on the Rio Grande (photo: c1.staticflickr)

By Charles Bowden. Investigative reporter Bowden has produced a number of excellent nonfiction books, and this 2002 book about the porous U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and the heavy traffic in drugs and violence spanning the Rio Grande there–was highly regarded from the start. Since it’s a dozen years old, as I read, I couldn’t help hoping the situation has improved. Ample recent evidence here, here, and here, suggests it has not, and ongoing drug-related violence throughout the Central American region is a principal reason its children are fleeing here.

The rivalry, lack of cooperation, and mutual undermining of DEA, FBI, and CIA agents in their interactions with the corrupt Mexican hierarchy clouded any comprehensive understanding of the problem and precluded any effective action. When one of these government agencies would get the goods on a bad guy, another would put on the brakes, maybe because the man was one of their thousands of snitches–an always shaky investigational strategy, as any TV watcher knows–or maybe for some other reason. The Mexican drug lords outflanked the clueless American agents at every turn, playing one against the other.

Bowden had no idea it would take eight years to sieve the truth from the slurry of lies and to assemble the fragments of this accounting from hints, scattered news reports, reportorial digging, and conversations with people afraid to talk. He doesn’t discuss the risks to himself, but they had to be industrial grade. He frames the whole convoluted, vague, and hopelessly tangled mess with the story of the death of one 26-year-old El Paso man, Bruno Jordan. Jordan’s family lives close to a border bridge, dangerous Ciudad Juarez crowded up to the Rio Grande’s opposite bank. Jordan was shot down in a K-Mart parking lot in what the police claimed was a car-jacking by a 13-year-old boy, and what his family believes was a hit. Bruno had nothing to do with drugs, but his older brother headed the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center and, in the course of his career, had rubbed a great many of the vindictive and ultra-violent narcotraficantes the wrong way.

The cupidity and corruption of Mexico’s elected leaders, the federal police, the army, and every “get tough on drugs” task force they set up is old news now, but the extent of it is nonetheless shocking. According to a source Bowden cites, when Vincente Fox became president, one of his cabinet members said, “All of our phones, faxes and e-mails are monitored by the narcos. We are surrounded by enemies. We cannot attack corruption unless Washington ends its indifference to wrongdoing by the Mexican elite.” But Washington ignored it, for political reasons of its own, and instead, for decades, has touted the phony War on Drugs.

confiscated drug money

Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)

While the people live in poverty and terror, the drug czars live in multimillion-dollar mansions, protected by gun-toting federales. One provincial governor cracked down on the drug lords who live in luxury and some safety in his prisons (operating their networks unimpeded, of course), by decreeing they could no longer have Jacuzzis in their cells. At the time of Bowden’s writing, Northern Mexico was essentially a lawless region where the amounts of money are so huge that anyone can be bought. According to the DEA, in 1995 Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s Juarez-based cartel alone was generating approximately $200 million every week.) With cash flow like that, the Mexican government couldn’t afford to shut it down if it wanted to. “Unsuspecting” U.S. and European banks launder perhaps $.5 to $1 trillion dollars a year of this dirty money. Have an account at Citibank?

U.S. law enforcement and border officials may not be corrupt individuals, but everyone they must deal with is likely to be, or might be, today, or another day. In a 2013 interview Bowden talked about the continued violence and murder in Mexico, spawned by Americans’ drug habits, and how this violence is routinely ignored by politicians, bankers, and others who wink-wink don’t ask where the money comes from, calling it “the willful ignorance of the US press covering Mexico. The Mexican press is terrorized. The U.S. press does not like to challenge power.”

Author Charles Bowden died August 30, 2014, at his Las Cruces, New Mexico, home.

Mother Jones encomium and other excellent links.

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****Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen

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English history, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII

Book Cover and Matching Lamp (photo: author)

By Giles Tremlett – An excellent, well researched and highly readable biography that breathes life into the woman Henry was married to for 24 years—longer than all his other wives put together. As The Guardian says, “Catherine of Aragon tends to get shuffled into the Prologue, something to be rushed through as quickly as possible. You can’t help feeling, along with Henry himself, that things would be so much pacier if only Spanish Catherine would hurry up and cede her place to that home-grown minx, Anne Boleyn.”

But Catherine stuck it out, refusing to be divorced from Henry and finally dying, abandoned and isolated from court—though still much-loved by the common people. Her death freed Henry of Anne, as well, and only 19 weeks later Anne of the Waspish Tongue was beheaded. Neither woman produced a male heir, a persistent frustration for Henry.

Catherine was well prepared to be a staunch defender of the Catholic principles that underlay her opposition to the divorce, even though she feared she and her daughter Mary might themselves be executed. She had powerful parents, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to serve as role models. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, was her nephew to whom she sent pleas for support. Catherine’s ultimate decision not to goad Charles into war was “possibly as important as any other she made,” says Tremlett.

The impact of Catherine and Henry’s marriage still reverberates. She petitioned the Pope for aid, and his support, albeit tardy, led to Henry’s assertion of his authority over the church, the schism with Rome, and formation of the Church of England. In her five-year reign, Catherine’s daughter Mary (“Bloody Mary”) attempted to restore the Church, perpetuating the religious crisis, and it was left to Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth I to complete the Reformation.

Tremlett’s descriptions of the political to-and-fro, court life for insiders and outsiders, and the place of women in Tudor society create living, breathing—and unforgettable—characters at this massive historical turning point.

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“The Gatekeepers” Redux

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Gaza, Israel, Palestinians, Middle East conflict

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Fred Kaplan’s important Slate article this week about Israeli leaders’ apparent inability to think strategically about its worsening situation—at home and in the world—included a reference to the superb documentary of 2013, The Gatekeepers, originally reviewed here 3-18-13. That review is, alas, increasingly relevant, and here it is.

Saw the amazing documentary, The Gatekeepers, yesterday. It reviews the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes and words of all six surviving directors of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency. Old footage of the Six-Day War in 1968—after which Israel annexed the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza—and subsequent events—the bus bombings, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the intifadas, pinpoint bombings of Palestinian targets, meetings brokered by President Clinton—all roll on hopelessly toward the present stalemate.

To a man, these former spy chiefs, who have studied the Israeli security situation closer than anyone else, believe the hardline strategy has been a mistake, that fighting when Israel should have been working for peace has made the country less safe, not more. Continued saber-rattling takes its toll on every one of them, and their childhood dreams of a peaceful Israel have turned into a nightmare for everyone, Israeli and Palestinian alike. As one said, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This line from the New York Times review is especially apt. “It is hard to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.”

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A Quandary

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Bitcoins

(photo: Mike Cauldwell, Creative Commons)

Can I escape this post with my First Amendment advocacy credentials intact? Doubtful.

Talking to so many accomplished writers trying mightily to get published, I’ve about decided blind luck is the key ingredient in the publication lottery. Then, in the midst of a long Wired story by Andy Greenberg on crypto-anarchy, one sentence snags my attention: Simon & Schuster has paid Cody Wilson $250,000—a figure a vanishingly small number of authors see these days—to write his memoir.

Who is Cody Wilson you ask? And why does he move to the head of the line, the top of the heap? You may recognize his name as the 26-year-old creator of the world’s first fully 3-D printable gun, which I wrote about here in May. Blueprints of his useable firearm were downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days.

Wilson is also co-creator of Dark Wallet, software intended to enable fully anonymous, untraceable online payments using bitcoins. The software’s purpose is to let people anonymously trade in weapons, drugs, pornography, and general mayhem, and Wilson drapes his creation in the flag of the First Amendment. Untraceable and untouchable, he and his lawyers hope.

Since bitcoins are an international phenomenon, it’s no surprise that Iraq’s newest crop of super-violent, decapitation-loving jihadi fighters, ISIS, selectively aware of the 21st century, touts Dark Wallet as a way to fund their activities.

Wilson takes his anarchic role in stride. “Well, yes, bad things are going to happen on these marketplaces,” he says. “To quote the old civil libertarians, liberty is a dangerous thing.”

More questions for Simon & Schuster: Can he write? Does it even matter?

(if you click on either of the related links below, be sure to visit the comments.)

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Vancouver Cool

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Vancouver, Marine building, Superman doorway

(photo: author)

Five days in Vancouver for a wedding last week. What a great city! Outdoor art, cathedral-forested Stanley Park, great food (order the salmon!), friendly people, and water views everywhere. Especially enjoyed the Aquarium (for a smile, see the sea otter cam here—I wanted to show you the jelly fish cam, because they were so spectacular, but I’m not sure it’s working; you can try), a walking tour of the city’s scattered Art Deco buildings (Vancouver is a city where the Developer is King), reminders of the 2012 winter Olympics, and being on the water. Great to leave a place with “more to see” and reasons to return. You may recognize the “Gotham” doorway at right from numerous movies!

orca, Blackfish, outdoor art, VancouverThe Aquarium is caught up in the anti-cetacean captivity controversy, touched on in this recent New Yorker article about challenges in aquarium design. The Vancouver Aquarium’s position is explained in this open letter. They are non-profit and do not keep orcas, problems about which were stunningly revealed in the documentary, Blackfish.

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You’ve Been Hacked!

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government spying, cell phone, mobile phone, law enforcement surveillance

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

So how do cops and spooks steal data from your mobile phone, anyway? Research teams at the Kaspersky Lab in Russia and Toronto’s Citizen Lab independently analyzed a digital surveillance tool created by the Italian Company, Hacking Team (do watch this marketing video if you want something to think about), which more than 60 government worldwide use to snatch and record mobile phone data. The tool’s components have been designed to target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users—one of whom is probably you.

According to a lengthy Wired article by Kim Zetter, here’s what the Hacking Team’s tool can do: collect your emails, text messages, call history, and address books; log keystrokes, reveal where you’ve searched, and take screenshots; record audio of calls and the ambient sounds in the room where the phone is; and use the phone’s camera to take pictures of the surroundings. No surprise, the tool can use the phone’s GPS system to locate it (and probably, you, too). In other words, the tool can do with the phone pretty much everything you can.

What’s new about these revelations is that this is the first time these techniques have been reverse-engineered to reveal how they really work, including how they protect themselves from detection. Here’s a blog post about these discoveries from Russian researcher Sergey Golovanov.

film noir, spies

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Spies following each other through the wetly reflecting nighttime alleys of Eastern Europe will be relegated to film noir, since the above functions let a tracker follow you to that screening of 1984 and home again from some remote center. Most countries using this technology have one or two command-and-control centers to monitor multiple targets and conduct surveillance. The nation with by far the most such centers? The United States, with 64.

The genie is out of the bottle, however, and “This type of exceptionally invasive toolkit, once a costly boutique capability deployed by intelligence communities and militaries, is now being marketed for targeting everyday criminality and ‘security threats,’” say Citizen Lab researchers. Inevitably, people who shouldn’t have it, will.

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****Spycraft

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Desmond Llewelyn, Q, James Bond, Spycraft

Desmond Llewelyn as “Q” (photo: wikimedia.org)

By Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger. Foreword by George Tenet, narration by David Drummond. The digitization and miniaturization everywhere in our daily lives has affected tradecraft in the espionage world, too—and sometimes began there before entering the consumer market. Initially, the CIA tried to heavily censor Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda, but eventually ended up making almost no changes. The book details the history of the Agency’s Office of Technical Services—the department that, since World War II, has come up with all the dead drops, audio surveillance techniques, secret inks, espionage gear, and so on needed by field agents. Q, in other words.

Co-authored by a former OTS director, Spycraft begins with a review of cases involving some of the most notorious and significant, mostly Soviet, spies run by the CIA, then turns to a detailed review of various spycraft essentials and what makes them work—or not—in the field. The history of the Soviet spies, most of whom were discovered and executed, provides an appreciation for the steady improvements in technology, though it’s pretty much a mug’s game, because improvements in detection soon follow. The challenge is to remain one step ahead. I didn’t come away with a satisfactory answer to the key question: with all this amazing technology, how come the CIA has missed the big plays? 9/11, Iraq’s true WMD situation, the Arab Spring?

For anyone writing spy and espionage fiction, Spycraft summarizes innumerable backstory issues and technical details that must be right! But beyond these specifics, the choice of what OTS worked on and how the technical officers solved problems reveals the dilemmas faced by field agents. Other readers may simply be amazed at the scope and persistence of this clandestine effort. (Amazon reader rating: 4.5 stars.)

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*****His Excellency: George Washington

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George Washington

General George Washington at Trenton by John Trumbull

By Joseph J. Ellis–Historical figures go in and out of fashion like men’s wide lapels, and I must have had my little exposure to George Washington during one of his dreary periods, because, well, yawn. This book was a revelation. It presents Washington in a balanced light, including his flaws, though the author is obviously a fan. With two Pulitzers to his credit (for Founding Brothers and American Sphinx, a biography of Thomas Jefferson), Ellis knows his early American history. I had a timely trip to nearby Monmouth Battlefield—where “Molly Pitcher” pitched in—which made the Revolutionary War period of Washington’s career come further alive.

Because mammoth biographies of Washington already exist, and his papers and letters have been preserved and cataloged, “The great American patriarch sits squarely in front of us: vulnerable, exposed, even talkative at last.” Thus Ellis’s purposes were to create a biography of modest size (275 pages), not another in an “endless row of verbal coffins,” and to put Washington in clearer context with respect to revolutionary ideology, social and economic forces, the political and military strategic options of 1776, slavery, and the fate of the Indians. The result is an eminently readable story that I expect will provide every reader with new insights about the supremely human Father of our country.

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