Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?(washingtonpost.com) |
Snowden: Why hasn’t DNI Clapper been punished for lying to Congress?(washingtonpost.com) |
No one went to jail for the Wall Street fiasco.
No one was fired for being wrong about WMDs in Iraq.
We still don't know anything about Benghazi while some poor sap who published a video rots in jail as a scapegoat... no one will suffer consequences.
No one in this administration will cooperate in determining the origins, extent, and details of the IRS attack on conservative political groups.
The list of government protecting its own goes on forever.
Why is anyone surprised that things are the same for this particular scandal? Particularly with this administration that gets a lot of political cover from the press?
More generally it's hard to take Congressional complaints of executive overreaching seriously when Congress refuses to utilize any of the many tools at its disposal.
Our Founding Fathers were very careful to separate executive and legislative powers, very much different and in reaction to the Westminster parliamentary system they had after all rebelled against. So I don't see the Congress having the power to go beyond jailing someone to force them to testify (their being the nation's Grand Inquisitor is part of our small 'c' constitution if not explicitly in the written one).
If you want to see Clapper clapped in irons, elect a non-Democratic Party President with a spine, and hope he doesn't get a pardon before then.
Minor correction: One person did to go jail[1].
[1]http://www.propublica.org/article/the-rise-of-corporate-impu...
I had always assumed that for everyone except those with something to lose (e.g. politicians, bureaucrats) that Snowden 's actions were seen in high regard.
If you believe public opinion polling, a majority of Americans don't like what he did and think he should return to face trial: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-most-think-edward-snowden-s...
I imagine this is entirely a function of your social circle. The polls conducted this year have been marginally in favor of his prosecution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentary_on_Edward_Snowden's_.... It's a deeply divisive issue for Americans, though it breaks along the usual lines (age, etc).
My dad, for example, who is very liberal on most things, is no fan of Snowden. Especially among the older generation who grew up during the Cold War, nothing Snowden revealed rises to the level of invasiveness that would be cause for alarm.
Most of the people I know simply do not care about surveillance. They're in the ideological majority, they don't have controversial opinions, and they (rightly) believe the government has no interest in using the fruits surveillance against them. They certainly don't sympathize with the ideas of hypothetical political dissidents that might be hypothetically suppressed using surveillance.
Oh jeez, not this shit again. It's not even relevant to the topic of the OP this time.
That is to say, here comes another giant pointless derail that will distract from the actual topic at hand.
What's unfortunate is that it's not controversial. It seems Clapper has the backing of a pretty big group in Congress.
That is absolutely, 100% not the case. Dodging the question, for this particular question is as much a leak of classified information as giving up the answer directly.
This is by the same principle used by hacktivists called the "warrant canary", which they think they invented: But the same thing happened to a CIA director (Helms?) in the 1970s and he did the same thing because the same principle applied back then too.
You can read the letter: http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2013-0...
There were ways to answer the question without jeopardizing a classified program. It has been done before and will be done again.
A little known fact: under UCC and UNCITRAL, you have 72 hours to modify any contracts you make in court via private correspondence. With 3 days to receive, and 3 days to send a response (and one day for a Sunday) tacked on. If the other party goes silent afterwards (as the committee did), clapper can use that silence as tacit acquiescence to his modified statements. In this case, the senate committee accepted that "least untruthful" was considered sufficient reason to make false public statements. Clapper brought that private agreement public via the press, and now it's nicely cemented in stone, as a valid process that anyone else can use in case they're ever caught lying to congress.
Someone really should be teaching Ed Snowden contract and trade law. I bet he'd pick it up rather quickly, and it'd make his current situation easier to deal with.
I think Congress is unsure about how to proceed on this issue because not all members of Congress are of one mind about what is best for the country in administration of NSA. I categorically reject the assertion that Congress is still moving forward slowly to change NSA oversight because "NSA has Congress by the balls." Nope. One of the most common kinds of comments here on Hacker News about issues like this is a comment that ASSUMES that if government leaders are under pervasive surveillance they are all afraid of blackmail. But I don't believe that, because some government leaders and some political candidates are essentially shameless. Even after they are caught (by old-fashioned journalism, or by a jilted lover or some unrelated criminal investigation) doing something unsavory, they are still willing to run for office, and SOME ARE REELECTED. United States Senator David Vitter was reelected in 2010 even after a scandal involving behavior that I would consider shameful,[1] and the antics of former DC mayor Marion Barry[2] are probably still notorious enough that they don't need further discussion here. In short, I call baloney on the idea that NSA can keep politicians on its leash simply by knowing their secrets. Some politicians have PUBLIC lives full of dirt, and still get elected and influence policy anyway.
The other reason I don't believe this HN hivemind theory of politics is that I by no means assume that everyone in politics lacks personal integrity. Some politicians, I am quite sure, could have all their secrets revealed only to have voters think "Why is that person such a straight-arrow? Why not have some fun once in a while?" The simple fact is that there is value system diversity in the United States electorate, and there is personal conduct probity variance among United States politicians, and there isn't any universal way to unduly influence politicians merely through even the most diligent efforts to discover personal secrets. If politicians think that NSA is going too far (as evidently several politicians from more than one party do think), then they will receive plenty of support from the general public to rein in the surveillance. (Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I am a lawyer, who as a judicial clerk for my state's Supreme Court used to review case files on attorney misconduct, and, yes, some of my law school classmates are elected officials, including one member of Congress. I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter#D.C._Madam_scanda...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_.26_d...
Among those types, what Snowden did was considered, at BEST, a warranted discussion but highly unprofessional and a breach of trust. (whether you agree with that or not, but that represents their core interests in serving the federal government)
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...
To make this more than mere snark, seriously, committees of the size of Congress are nearly entirely structurally incapable of taking serious stands of this nature. That's not sarcasm, it's a real structural problem with committees, and despite how we often refer to it in humor, it's a fully real thing, not a joke. This is why the US still needs an executive branch, which is structured in such a way that it can take a stand, potentially very quickly.
Pelosi added that she has always fought for checks and balances on CIA activity and its interactions with Congress: “You don’t fight it without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140317/07441526589/nancy-...
> I think Congress is unsure about how to proceed on this issue because not all members of Congress are of one mind about what is best for the country in administration of NSA.
> The other reason I don't believe this HN hivemind theory of politics is that I by no means assume that everyone in politics lacks personal integrity.
None of these points should be controversial, but oh well.
1) Every nation should protect their citizens against intelligence gathering from outsiders. 2) Intelligence-gathering must be subject of the rule of law. 3) Military forces must be under democratic control.
Surely, neither of those are controversial either?
The controversy stems from cost/benefit judgements on individual spy programs AND from the fact that Clapper perjured himself in front of congress and the american people. The latter is a far more clearcut issue than the former, and it's what we were talking about before the lawyer came in and changed the subject.
All the possible "radicalism" ends up at one end of the scale: PRISM, NDAA, and "least untruthful" causing barely a ripple.
The statement "Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy." is true, but it's true at every scale. Suppose someone spilled ALL the beans, and the US had to start over in deciding what's secret and what isn't, going forward. How long would it take to accumulate our current trove of secrets, and what does that say about the necessity of most of them?
1. Rumors and innuendo are not the same as hard evidence. While some politicians may survive a controversy, in most cases reputation-damaging information has a negative effect on a political career (especially if it's indisputable evidence). "Nobody wants a scandal". Furthermore, what an old enemy might leak to the press is a far cry from what might be uncovered through comprehensive digital surveillance. Having access to raw, captured Internet traffic is a game-changer.
2. If the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence don't feel that they are getting completely accurate and inclusive information from the NSA, why wouldn't they feel vulnerable? Who could know the truth if the NSA doesn't give straight information to the very people who are supposed to be overseeing their work?
What is the basis for this assertion? What would happen to a nation that didn't have that?
Terrorism? It's a pretty pedestrian intelligence agency whose primary aim is to prevent terrorism. The NSA is stuffed full of paranoid people with information addiction. They don't care about terrorism; they just want all the world's secrets. An intelligence guy is just as likely to respect other's privacy as a security researcher is to accept other people reading his files. It's in their nature not to.
First, there is a tremendous difference between (having already been exposed) choosing to run in the face of that difficulty (possibly not showing sufficient shame, to be sure, but dealing with what is effectively a sunk cost) and choosing to take (or postpone taking) that blow in the first place.
Second, even if there are congresspersons who wouldn't comply in the face of blackmail, are there enough or are they insufficiently identifiable that they can't simply be avoided?
Note that I'm not saying that I think blackmail of many in congress by the NSA is hugely likely, I'm just not sure your reasoning is sound.
As for your examples, the fact that politicians use drugs or have sex is no surprise to anyone, for example, but what if it was exposed that Berry secretly supported something that his constituency disagreed with? That's real political damage that's harder to survive.
I do think it's kinda far fetched that everyone is sufficiently intimidated that no one says anything.
Also, how do you explain Jane Harman? Google "jane harman alberto gonzalez" for details.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991375#up_5992149
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071480#up_7072301
I disagree (mildly) with his first point that operationally the US is affected. Because it's been a long held assumption that the US had extensive spying programs in place. Snowden simply provided the evidence. So, if you had something to hide from the NSA you were already hiding it as best as you could. Maybe, now a few more attack vectors have been revealed and hiding/encryption practices will be updated.
In this thread, it's the talking around in circles about "what the American people think about Snowden" and whether the speaker lives in a tech bubble or not that's irrelevant. We already know statistically that what people outside of the top 10% think has absolutely no relevance to policy.
You don't need dirt on all of congress (though I wouldn't be surprised if they had it on most of them) just key players committee leaders etc.
Hell the stuff doesn't even have to be illegal to be useful, illicit affairs have brought down presidents before.
Clapper lied under oath, he has received no retribution for his lie, and the US population doesn't give a shit. Kinda makes one loose faith in the system, doesn't it?
More seriously: I think it'd be a wild-card maneuver, but I honestly don't know that it would be political suicide. Some people are angry at Congress for being ineffective. Some people are angry at the administration for failing to check the powers it has been given along lines of "decency" and restraint. I don't think those people would be sad to see Congress start using its authority as a non-executive branch.
When you're in theater, you don't kick the other actors off the stage. The others might do the same to you.
Never mind the press going crazy over the silly headlines they'll be able to craft regardless of the actual situation.
Don't agree with me? You're a terrorist.
Don't think Snowden is a hero? You're a sock puppet.
If you don't want anyone advancing your argument to be labeled a sock puppet, don't hire sock puppets to advance your argument.
It was fairly short, probably 3 pages of dark humor, however he got the point and in now at the very least understands why this is important. I think many Americans (especially those who grew up in the cold war) do not realize how serious this is.
There was a campaign to white wash all the information, NPR, CNN, Fox, they really did not cover the story in a clear cut manner. The fact the government denied everything, and there was an abundance of information shut a lot of people down and out of the conversation.
That being said, every (older - 40+) person I talk to think Snowden was bad, until I ask the question, "Why did we fight the cold war?" You cannot spend decades battling Nazism/Communism only to accept the same practices a decade later. It's pathetic. Often after a clear explanation of what the NSA (or what we know the NSA) actually does, quickly changes their minds.
All they really need is an explanation.
My big two are: 1. Food and goods shortages requiring long lines. 2. Extreme restrictions on freedom to travel. (You must have your papers to go to the next town, state, etc.) Overall my biggest issue is that communism sought to convert the entire world and that it was intrusive into its citizen's daily lives.
My big issues with Snowden: 1. Most of this was strongly suspected/known. See the Wired article from 2 years before about the Utah data center. 2. If he did this on principle why not face the consequences of his actions. This has been a principle of resistance for years. 3. The documentation he leaked went beyond the scope of potential constitutional violations into tradecraft and technique. He turned over a treasure trove of information to foreign spy services.
Is that public anywhere? I'd be interested in reading and potentially passing it on to a few people I know.
For a generation that grew up with something like East Berlin and the Berlin Wall thinking that government surveillance isn't bad makes me wonder what level does one have to get to before it's considered bad for the people.
For those that did not live through or remember the Soviet Union collapse and the fall of the Berlin Wall leading to German unification I can understand. It's hard for current generations to understand how truly awful WWII was for the human race as a whole, they simply cannot relate.
Like Martin Luther King?
And if the rule of law require says every citizen is protected against warrant-less searches, you can not "steal" personal information about those citizens when it rest in care of a service provider.
But I take it that what is controversial is not that every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy. The controversy how an intelligence-gathering agency may behave.
Which is it? Is the NSA restrained in their surveillance, or does surveillance not actually ruin innovation?
The truth is, it isn't known, the scale of these operations, and you can assume everything is full of spooks or not. But the more reasonable assumption, absent evidence to the contrary, is that it's likely not a conspiracy. Particularly when you're describing points of view which a lot of Americans actually do hold.
Although then I suppose you could suggest that the reason Americans believe certain things, or even the appearance of that belief, is the result of propaganda but, again - who knows?
There's no "parallel construction" or "false flags" here. There's just propaganda. All governments use propaganda. Governments have always used propaganda. If you think propaganda isn't a large part of your day-to-day life you're just unable to see it.
This appears to assume that it's all but impossible to legitimately hold the opposing point of view, or be able to articulate it, without there being a script involved?
It's a non-falsifiable hypothesis. How can I prove your comment isn't some subtle form of propaganda? Maybe mine is. Maybe this forum is mostly shills, spooks and sockpuppets anyway. Maybe dang is a covert NSA operative. He did 'borrow' someone's account, after all. Can't prove he isn't.
>All governments use propaganda. Governments have always used propaganda. If you think propaganda isn't a large part of your day-to-day life you're just unable to see it.
If you think you see it everywhere, I would submit the government might have far more control over you than you believe.
You're reading a lot into "probably."
I'd expect that someone whose day job is to comment on forums to be better at writing comments than someone who only comments on forums as a hobby. That seems how it is in most professions.
It seems like without explicitly defining our experimental terms, the reverse (there are literally zero sockpuppet comments on the linked page) is equally unfalsifiable. Personally, if I were talking to a friend about what comments we've written on the Internet, and she mentioned writing a comment on that page, I'd take it as a virtual certainty that that particular comment was not written by a sockpuppet, so I don't think my belief is unfalsifiable.
>If you think you see it everywhere, I would submit the government might have far more control over you than you believe.
...no, I see propaganda pretty much everywhere. Less so now that I live outside a major city, but when I did there'd be propaganda all over the place.
You might be seeing propaganda as too narrow a term. Propaganda is just government advertising, sometimes related explicitly to supporting politicians but more often related to rather mundane things. "See something, say something" is propaganda. Ads on the bus or on bus stops about the risks of jaywalking are propaganda. Highways have maybe one propaganda sign every 50 miles, on average (this might be an East Coast thing). "Click it or ticket" was propaganda (and beautiful propaganda at that).
And that's just considering only things explicitly put up by the government. Bumper stickers are propaganda for political parties. You can go to the more government-dominated metro stations in DC and see propaganda advertisements from Boeing, Raytheon, Palantir, etc., aimed at politicians. Activist and advocacy groups produce propaganda full-time.
I suggest checking out the PropagandaPosters subreddit. There's great propaganda from World War II or the Cold War (from all over the world), but also a large amount of modern propaganda.
Yeah, this is a common argument, the intelligence arms race. It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament...only to start the cycle over again with digital information gathering, which is a lot easier to hide than a nuclear weapons program (and weaves itself into the fabric of citizens' private lives, in that sense it's much more sinister).
Who has the fortitude to step up and lead us (by example) towards a healthier geopolitical climate? Collaboration, not paranoid xenophobic competition. It saddens me (but doesn't surprise me) that my country is driving full speed in the opposite direction.
We have not started moving toward disarmament. Just ask Iran and North Korea.
If anything, what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they gave up existing nuclear weapons will hurt nuclear non-proliferation even further. And that's not even to get into the possibility of a Russia generally hostile to the West, which is the best possible thing that could have happened to U.S. nuclear weapons labs.
It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes with China. While there is truth to the claims of an undervalued yuan it's really overblown. It's about identity politics and feelings. China just happened to be a convenient target.
To the downvoter: Do you think Putin just now found out he is homophobic? That his claims that NGOs with foreign ties are foreign agents aiming to destabilize the country are real? No, it's all theater, scaremongering and scapegoating.
How do we know this? This strikes me as an assertion without evidence. Are there examples?
It also strikes me that the secrecy more often gets used to conceal career-ending mistakes and cost overruns, at least in the USA.
Has anybody done an honest assessment of secrecy?
To be honest I don't really know too much about this. I've read Cryptonomicon, and that's basically it. But it would be hard to dispute that signals intelligence is useful in war and that secrecy is necessary for SIGINT to work.
I think equating it to war fighting is a little naive and an over simplification. There is strategic and tactical war intelligence and there are real historical examples of them making the difference, no disputing that. But today, especially for the United States and most other g7 type nations, it's a communication channel for things that it's unpopular to communicate, don't under estimate this. Could any military in the world practice without the modern intelligence gathering that all these nations have? Also regarding any negotiation for anything, knowing when the other side is bluffing or telling the truth is huge, it's everything. Those powerful nations routinely ask/demand other nations to do things, stop doing things, etc.. Information is incredibly powerful in those discussions and these aren't commonly war related things.
Whether or not we need it, I don't know, I seriously doubt it would change the results of most wars though. Another world war? It could be decisive but with the global economy I think just about every body capable for world warring has too much invested and to risk to let that happen.
In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.
These questions can be answered with good-old fashioned spying, and nothing else. Russia is not going to give us their gameplan on a silver platter.
And when we do learn Russia's gameplan, it would be best if we kept that fact secret. We can't have Russia knowing that we know their gameplan during the negotiation process.
I didn't say hostile to the U.S. I said hostile to the West. That doesn't mean cutting off contact or anything so silly, but let's not act like Russia has not long been at odds with the general foreign policy of the West.
Even post-Cold War, it dates back to stuff like Bosnia and Kosovo. Remember reading the "TIL" about that singer who used to be in the British armed forces and claimed to have avoided WWIII by not attacking Russian troops at an airport in the Balkans during Bosnia?
The way Russia views it, the West has certainly been antagonistic towards them, between the NATO expansion, possible construction of missile shields in east Europe, intervention against their Serbian brothers in Bosnia and then Kosovo, open talk of friendship between the U.S. and Georgia, the difference in perception over what was authorized in the Libyan intervention, and later the EU trying to influence Ukraine away from Russia.
You are certainly right that there are domestical political reasons for Putin to play up an external enemy, but his behavior is certainly consistent with, at best, an antipathy towards the West. Sure, they'll play along in international politics as it becomes convenient to them, but the USSR did that too.
If he had faced the consequences of his actions, he wouldn't be around right now to continue this discussion.
I'd say Snowden made the right choice.
Trials aren't for finding out facts or uncovering the truth. They are the formal processes that a government must do after deciding that a citizen deserves punishment to actually effect their decision.
minor edits
Which is why I think he should not return to face trial, because I think there's no way he'll ever get a fair and open trial in the US.
Regarding Snowden fleeing, if you disagree with his choice then give this interview a read[1], it is with the whistleblower for the Pentagon papers. The opinion is that if Snowden didn't flee in today's climate then he likely would have ended up in isolation or Guantanamo.
As an outsider to the US it is interesting to observe that American's (on average) have a high distrust of their government, yet follow quite closely the US government's line. (Please note this is not intended to inflame, but it is an honest observation from an outsider that has observed many American's and is intended for you to reflect upon).
[1] http://www.salon.com/2013/06/14/daniel_ellsberg_edward_snowd...
That's his opinion, and it's unfounded IMHO. Actual terrorists are increasingly and deliberately put on public trial in New York, and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning got his (now her) trial as well.
I think it would be very hard to spin up on demand. There's not a catalogue of talented SIGINTs lying around. These people need to be found and hired. A whole organization as big as Google would have to be built overnight. It would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this organization would be starting from scratch while its counterparts might have taps into American society already.
As for the disparity in GDP, an order of magnitude is a bit of an exaggeration for Germany, only slightly for Japan at the beginning of the war and not at all by the end. Wikipedia has figures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Worl...
The US's advantage in the long term became enormous because it was so far removed from the fighting. Germany and Japan's economies were mostly flat, while the US's nearly doubled in that time period. By the end of the war, the economic disparity was almost 5x over Germany and over 10x for Japan. Even in 1941, the disparity between the US and Japan was well over 5x, which makes one wonder WTF they were thinking.
GDP is not really that good a measure of a nation's war-fighting ability. Only some types of production is useful for near-total war. A nation needs solid institutions, natural resources, logistics, roads, factories and heavy equipment. The service sector goes out the window, ditto with all luxury/entertainment production and the construction business. The European Coal and Steel Community didn't focus on those two because they were good indicators of GDP, but because they were good indicators of war capabilities.
As for what the Japanese were thinking? That they were the natural rulers of the world and everyone else should tremble before them. Everyone else were worthless barbarians in their opinion.
Nonetheless, I'll expand on what I meant by "popular"; in the mainstream his flight is seen as evidence of guilt, and the particular countries to which he fled cast even more of a shadow on his intentions. Lots of people I've talked to think he must be an enemy because he fled. Martyrdom is always terrible for the martyr but often better for the martyr's ideology than the alternative. You're definitely right that he's having a continued impact on the discussion, and perhaps that does make his exile a net positive for his ideology. But the people I know who think he's a traitor who betrayed his country before seeking asylum with its enemies don't tend to listen to what he has to say.
(I understand your point, though.)
You're right, of course, that GDP isn't by itself a good measure of war-fighting ability, but I think the US did as good a job as anyone at throwing the entire country behind that particular war.
As for war-winning magnitude, it's always hard to say, of course. On the one hand, it's hard to imagine Germany properly conquering a space as vast as the USSR. On the other hand, they sure came close to taking a lot of important places, like Moscow and Leningrad. Logistics is what wins wars, and the Soviets needed it even more than usual with their massive relocation of industry away from the invasion, and of Siberian military forces toward it.
In any case, Stalin seems to have thought that the American contribution was essential:
"Without American production the United Nations [the Allies] could never have won the war."
Well, he said it. Who knows what he really thought. I wouldn't necessarily put a lot of stock in his stated opinion on the matter, but I thought it was an interesting quote anyway.