CHRISTOPHER DICKEY DAILY BEAST
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made it clear in a public statement while visiting the White House: no more drones! Never mind that his predecessors reportedly signed off on the not-so-secret CIA drone program blowing away jihadist bad guys and, all too often, bystanders in the remote mountains near Afghanistan.
Even the intelligence operations of the redoubtable New York City Police Department are under fire. A coalition of 125 civil rights, religious and community groups has just written to the U.S. Department of Justice to demand a federal investigation of the surveillance activities the cops conduct in New York’s Muslim communities.
In the 1980s the intelligence community in the United States already had difficulties with the sheer volume of stuff it collected. “It now produces so much information, such an all-sources glut of words, images and electronic data that the number of intelligence officers who can understand it all, who see the overall pictures, is rapidly declining,” Knightley wrote. [Philip Knightley’s classic study, The Second Oldest Profession, about spies and spying in the last century.]
As James Bamford pointed out back in 2009 in great detail in his book The Shadow Factory, when global communications moved from wires and satellites to undersea and underground fiber optic cables carrying millions of calls and emails at a time, the whole business of intelligence gathering shifted its emphasis to what’s called “collection first.”
It was no longer practical or indeed possible to put alligator clips on the landline of a terrorist. He was using the Internet for his emails and his phone calls. So, virtually all data moving through the fiber optic lines that crisscross the globe has to be sucked into the NSA’s computers, then sophisticated filters (many of which were developed by the Israelis, as Bamford points out) are used to sift the torrent of communications until only a very narrow range of suspect ones actually are monitored.
How do you figure out what phones or email accounts to target? You look at who’s communicating with whom, and that information is to be found in the metadata that the NSA has collected from the major Internet service providers and other communications companies.
Steward A. Baker, a former general counsel at the NSA and assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security when it was formed after the attacks on the United States, notes that this may be shocking to some, but it’s perfectly legal in the United States, since “the Supreme Court has held that such records are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, since they’ve already been given to a third party,” the private company, which then shared that information with the U.S. government. “Google is the real Big Brother,” as people in the intelligence community like to say.
The angry protests from Germany’s chancellor over the National Security Agency’s monitoring of her cellphone and France’s furor over the collection of data about millions of its citizens have obscured a new reality: The digital age has merely expanded the ability of nations to do to one another what they have done for centuries.
But at the same time, it has allowed the Europeans, the Chinese and other powers to replicate N.S.A. techniques.
France has long been considered one of the most talented powers at stealing industrial secrets and intellectual property, intelligence officials say, although in recent years it has been pushed to the sidelines by the Chinese. Their daily cyberattacks have worked their way into the Pentagon and gotten them the blueprints for the F-35, the most expensive fighter jet in history.
The Russians have a reputation in the intelligence community for taking their time to infiltrate specific communications targets. “They are a lot more patient than the Chinese,” one former American intelligence official said recently, “and so they don’t get caught as often.”
The Israelis are well known for cooperating with the United States on major intelligence targets, mostly Iran, while using a combination of old-fashioned spies and sophisticated electronic techniques to decipher Washington’s internal debates, the officials say.
A surveillance drone.While it is tempting to dismiss the latest revelations with an everyone-does-it shrug, American officials now concede that the uproar in Europe about the N.S.A.’s programs — both the popular outrage and a more calculated political response by Ms. Merkel and France’s president, François Hollande — may have a broader diplomatic and economic effect than they first imagined.
In Washington, the reaction has set off a debate over whether it is time to put the brakes on the N.S.A., whose capabilities, Mr. Obama has hinted, have expanded faster than its judgment. There are now two groups looking at the N.S.A.’s activities: one inside the National Security Council, another with outside advisers. The president all but told Ms. Merkel that “we don’t have the balance right,” according to one official.
“Sure, everyone does it, but that’s been an N.S.A. excuse for too long,” one former senior official who talks to Mr. Obama often on intelligence matters said Friday. “Obama has said, publicly and privately, that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it. But everyone has moved too slowly in moving that from a slogan to a policy.”
In Europe, where Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande demanded Friday that the United States open negotiations on a “code of conduct” that would limit surveillance, there is a sense that the steady stream of revelations may give them an upper hand. Ms. Merkel keeps repeating the phrase that the Americans must “restore trust.” One way the French and Germans intend to do that is to seek some form of inclusion in the inner circle of American intelligence allies, or at least for a deeper intelligence alliance.
PETER BEINART DAILY BEAST
I spent Wednesday afternoon meandering across the web, looking at how the American media were covering allegations that the National Security Agency had spied on yet another foreign leader. “Don’t Tap My Phone,” screamed the banner headline at Huffington Post, above a grim-faced German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Obama to Merkel: We’re Not Spying On You,” announced the lead story on msnbc.com. Then I tacked right, to see how the websites of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Red State, National Review, and The Weekly Standard were handling the story. They weren’t. None of them featured the allegations at all, though it had been the subject of a Jay Carney White House press briefing just hours before.
This is part of the reason America is struggling as a superpower: our nationalists don’t give a fig about the nationalism of anyone else. American conservatives sometimes say that unlike American liberals, who believe in surrendering power to global institutions, they believe in the nation as the sole legitimate source of authority in international affairs. And that’s true when defending our nation’s prerogatives. Had news broken that Germany was tapping our president’s cell phone, Limbaugh would be musing about fire-bombing Dresden again. But the American right is indifferent, if not hostile, to non-Americans defending their nation’s honor. NSA spying on foreign leaders is only the latest example. In Colorado, they’re now issuing drone-hunting licenses so Americans can shoot down any airborne spy planes that trespass their property. And yet there’s scarcely any sympathy on the right for the Pakistanis and Yemenis who are upset that the U.S. sends drones over their countries, though those drones regularly kill people.
This isn’t American “exceptionalism”—the belief that the U.S. is fundamentally different, and better, than other nations. It’s what the international relations scholar John Ruggie has called (PDF) American “exemptionalism”—the belief that America need not play by everyone else’s rules. The notion isn’t completely absurd. As a superpower, which many smaller countries look to for protection, the U.S. does have special burdens that may sometimes require a special freedom of action. It’s easy for Belgium to say it won’t take military action without United Nations approval. It’s harder for the U.S., the country that gets disproportionately blamed if a Security Council deadlock prevents it from stopping genocide or protecting an ally from harm.
But American foreign policy has been most successful when the U.S. has been more, rather than less, sensitive to other countries’ pride. A good example is the Marshall Plan, which the United States funded but let the nations of Western Europe design, even though they organized their postwar economies in ways that looked socialistic to American eyes. Another is NATO, which at least in theory meant that the U.S. had obligations to smaller, weaker European nations, not just the other way around.
Obama called Reinhold Niebuhr his favorite philosopher
In the unipolar era that followed the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. didn’t show this kind of deference very often. Many conservatives, and some liberals, thought it didn’t need to. But that unipolar era is ending. In a world where other countries have more power relative to the U.S., it’s increasingly dangerous to believe we can do things to them we would never tolerate them doing to us. Many decades ago, the man sometimes called Obama’s “favorite theologian” argued that the “pride and self-righteousness of powerful nations are a greater hazard to their success than the machinations of their foes.” It would be nice if Obama remembered that, if even if Fox News won’t.
UPDATE
European leaders are mad and President Obama knows it. After NSA leaker Edward Snowden broke the news that the U.S. is keeping tabs on leaders of European countries, even those who are U.S. allies, President Obama ordered a review of who we’re snooping on and why. Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said, “We wanted to ensure we’re collecting information because we need it and not just because we can.” Germany and France have demanded that the U.S. put a stop to eavesdropping on leaders, companies and law-abiding citizens. The U.S. already has a no-spying agreement with Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia.