[governance] U.S. public opinion shifting in favor of civil liberties v national security

[Diego Rafael Canabarro]

Good thing to be coupled with the following Stratfor Report:

Keeping the NSA in Perspective
Geopolitical Weekly <http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical-weekly>
TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2013 - 04:01
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/keeping-nsa-perspective?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130716&utm_term=Gweekly&utm_content=readmore&elq=2528434adb954a2ab29d03e4952b7959

Read more: Keeping the NSA in Perspective |
Stratfor<http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/keeping-nsa-perspective#ixzz2ZKD9O3Tp>

Follow us: @stratfor on
Twitter<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rw?id=dKd9f6JQur37hqadbi-bpO&u=stratfor>
 | Stratfor on Facebook<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rf?id=dKd9f6JQur37hqadbi-bpO&u=Stratfor>

*By George Friedman*

In June 1942, the bulk of the Japanese fleet sailed to seize the Island of
Midway. Had Midway fallen, Pearl Harbor would have been at risk and U.S.
submarines, unable to refuel at Midway, would have been much less
effective. Most of all, the Japanese wanted to surprise the Americans and
draw them into a naval battle they couldn't win.

The Japanese fleet was vast. The Americans had two carriers intact in
addition to one that was badly damaged. The United States had only one
advantage: It had broken Japan's naval code and thus knew a great deal of
the country's battle plan. In large part because of this cryptologic
advantage, a handful of American ships devastated the Japanese fleet and
changed the balance of power in the Pacific permanently.

This -- and the advantage given to the allies by penetrating German codes
-- taught the Americans about the centrality of communications code
breaking. It is reasonable to argue that World War II would have ended much
less satisfactorily for the United States had its military not broken
German and Japanese codes. Where the Americans had previously been guided
to a great extent by Henry Stimson's famous principle that "gentlemen do
not read each other's mail," by the end of World War II they were obsessed
with stealing and reading all relevant communications.

The National Security Agency evolved out of various post-war organizations
charged with this task. In 1951, all of these disparate efforts were
organized under the NSA to capture and decrypt communications of other
governments around the world -- particularly those of the Soviet Union,
which was ruled by Josef Stalin, and of China, which the United States was
fighting in 1951. How far the NSA could go in pursuing this was governed
only by the extent to which such communications were electronic and the
extent to which the NSA could intercept and decrypt them.

The amount of communications other countries sent electronically surged
after World War II yet represented only a fraction of their communications.
Resources were limited, and given that the primary threat to the United
States was posed by nation-states, the NSA focused on state communications.
But the principle on which the NSA was founded has remained, and as the
world has come to rely more heavily on electronic and digital
communication, the scope of the NSA's commission has expanded.

What drove all of this was Pearl Harbor. The United States knew that the
Japanese were going to attack. They did not know where or when. The result
was disaster. All American strategic thinking during the Cold War was built
around Pearl Harbor -- the deep fear that the Soviets would launch a first
strike that the United States did not know about. The fear of an unforeseen
nuclear attack gave the NSA leave to be as aggressive as possible in
penetrating not only Soviet codes but also the codes of other nations. You
don't know what you don't know, and given the stakes, the United States
became obsessed with knowing everything it possibly could.

In order to collect data about nuclear attacks, you must also collect vast
amounts of data that have nothing to do with nuclear attacks. The Cold War
with the Soviet Union had to do with more than just nuclear exchanges, and
the information on what the Soviets were doing -- what governments they had
penetrated, who was working for them -- was a global issue. But you
couldn't judge what was important and what was unimportant until after you
read it. Thus the mechanics of assuaging fears about a "nuclear Pearl
Harbor" rapidly devolved into a global collection system, whereby vast
amounts of information were collected regardless of their pertinence to the
Cold War.

There was nothing that was not potentially important, and a highly focused
collection strategy could miss vital things. So the focus grew, the
technology advanced and the penetration of private communications logically
followed. This was not confined to the United States. The Soviet Union,
China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India and any country with
foreign policy interests spent a great deal on collecting electronic
information. Much of what was collected on all sides was not read because
far more was collected than could possibly be absorbed by the staff. Still,
it was collected. It became a vast intrusion mitigated only by inherent
inefficiency or the strength of the target's encryption.
Justified Fear

The Pearl Harbor dread declined with the end of the Cold War -- until Sept.
11, 2001. In order to understand 9/11's impact, a clear memory of our own
fears must be recalled. As individuals, Americans were stunned by 9/11 not
only because of its size and daring but also because it was unexpected.
Terrorist attacks were not uncommon, but this one raised another question:
What comes next? Unlike Timothy McVeigh, it appeared that al Qaeda was
capable of other, perhaps greater acts of terrorism. Fear gripped the
land<http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090420_torture_and_u_s_intelligence_failure>.
It was a justified fear, and while it resonated across the world, it struck
the United States particularly hard.

Part of the fear was that U.S. intelligence had failed again to predict the
attack.  The public did not know what would come next, nor did it believe
that U.S. intelligence had any idea. A federal commission on 9/11 was
created to study the defense failure. It charged that the president had
ignored warnings. The focus in those days was on intelligence failure. The
CIA admitted it lacked the human sources inside al Qaeda. By default the
only way to track al Qaeda was via their communications. It was to be the
NSA's job<http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110525-bin-laden-operation-tapping-human-intelligence>
.

As we have written, al Qaeda was a global, sparse and dispersed network. It
appeared to be tied together by burying itself in a vast new communications
network: the Internet. At one point, al Qaeda had communicated by embedding
messages in pictures transmitted via the Internet. They appeared to be
using free and anonymous Hotmail accounts. To find Japanese communications,
you looked in the electronic ether. To find al Qaeda's message, you looked
on the Internet.

But with a global, sparse and dispersed network you are looking for at most
a few hundred men in the midst of billions of people, and a few dozen
messages among hundreds of billions. And given the architecture of the
Internet, the messages did not have to originate where the sender was
located or be read where the reader was located. It was like looking for a
needle in a haystack. The needle can be found only if you are willing to
sift the entire haystack. That led to PRISM and other NSA programs.

The mission was to stop any further al Qaeda attacks. The means was to
break into their communications and read their plans and orders. To find
their plans and orders, it was necessary to examine all communications. The
anonymity of the Internet and the uncertainties built into its system meant
that any message could be one of a tiny handful of messages. Nothing could
be ruled out. Everything was suspect. This was reality, not paranoia.

It also meant that the NSA could not exclude the communications of American
citizens because some al Qaeda members were citizens. This was an attack on
the civil rights of Americans, but it was not an unprecedented attack.
During World War II, the United States imposed postal censorship on
military personnel, and the FBI intercepted selected letters sent in the
United States and from overseas. The government created a system of
voluntary media censorship that was less than voluntary in many ways. Most
famously, the United States abrogated the civil rights of citizens of
Japanese origin by seizing property and transporting them to other
locations. Members of pro-German organizations were harassed and arrested
even prior to Pearl Harbor. Decades earlier, Abraham Lincoln suspended the
writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, effectively allowing the arrest
and isolation of citizens without due process.

There are two major differences between the war on terror and the
aforementioned wars. First, there was a declaration of war in World War II.
Second, there is a provision in the Constitution that allows the president
to suspend habeas corpus in the event of a rebellion. The declaration of
war imbues the president with certain powers as commander in
chief<http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110328-what-happened-american-declaration-war>
--
as does rebellion. Neither of these conditions was put in place to justify
NSA programs such as PRISM.

Moreover, partly because of the constitutional basis of the actions and
partly because of the nature of the conflicts, World War II and the Civil
War had a clear end, a point at which civil rights had to be restored or a
process had to be created for their restoration. No such terminal point
exists for the war on terror. As was witnessed at the Boston Marathon --
and in many instances over the past several centuries -- the ease with
which improvised explosive devices can be assembled makes it possible for
simple terrorist acts to be carried out cheaply and effectively. Some plots
might be detectable by intercepting all communications, but obviously the
Boston Marathon attack could not be predicted.

The problem with the war on terror is that it has no criteria of success
that is potentially obtainable. It defines no level of terrorism that is
tolerable but has as its goal the elimination of all terrorism, not just
from Islamic sources but from all sources. That is simply never going to
happen and therefore, PRISM and its attendant programs will never end.
These intrusions, unlike all prior ones, have set a condition for success
that is unattainable, and therefore the suspension of civil rights is
permanent. Without a constitutional amendment, formal declaration of war or
declaration of a state of emergency, the executive branch has overridden
fundamental limits on its powers and protections for citizens.

Since World War II, the constitutional requirements for waging war have
fallen by the wayside. President Harry S. Truman used a U.N resolution to
justify the Korean War. President Lyndon Johnson justified an extended
large-scale war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, equating it to a
declaration of war. The conceptual chaos of the war on terror left out any
declaration, and it also included North Korea in the axis of evil the
United States was fighting against. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is
charged with aiding an enemy that has never been legally designated. Anyone
who might contemplate terrorism is therefore an enemy. The enemy in this
case was clear. It was the organization of al Qaeda but since that was not
a rigid nation but an evolving group, the definition spread well beyond
them to include any person contemplating an infinite number of actions.
After all, how do you define terrorism, and how do you distinguish it from
crime?

Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attacks, and we know that al Qaeda
wished to kill more because it has said that it intended to do so. Al Qaeda
and other jihadist movements -- and indeed those unaffiliated with Islamic
movements -- pose threats. Some of their members are American citizens,
others are citizens of foreign nations. Preventing these attacks, rather
than prosecuting in the aftermath, is important. I do not know enough about
PRISM to even try to guess how useful it is.

At the same time, the threat that PRISM is fighting must be kept in
perspective. Some terrorist threats are dangerous, but you simply cannot
stop every nut who wants to pop off a pipe bomb for a political cause. So
the critical question is whether the danger posed by terrorism is
sufficient to justify indifference to the spirit of the Constitution,
despite the current state of the law. If it is, then formally declare war
or declare a state of emergency. The danger of PRISM and other programs is
that the decision to build it was not made after the Congress and the
president were required to make a clear finding on war and peace. That was
the point where they undermined the Constitution, and the American public
is responsible for allowing them to do so.
Defensible Origins, Dangerous Futures

The emergence of programs such as PRISM was not the result of despots
seeking to control the world. It had a much more clear, logical and
defensible origin in our experiences of war and in legitimate fears of real
dangers. The NSA was charged with stopping terrorism, and it devised a plan
that was not nearly as secret as some claim. Obviously it was not as
effective as hoped, or the Boston Marathon attack wouldn't have happened.
If the program was meant to suppress dissent it has certainly failed, as
the polls and the media of the past weeks show.

The revelations about PRISM are far from new or interesting in themselves.
The NSA was created with a charter to do these things, and given the state
of technology it was inevitable that the NSA would be capturing
communications around the world. Many leaks prior to Snowden's showed that
the NSA was doing this. It would have been more newsworthy if the leak
revealed the NSA had not been capturing all communications. But this does
give us an opportunity to consider what has happened and to consider
whether it is tolerable.

The threat posed by PRISM and other programs is not what has been done with
them but rather what could happen if they are permitted to survive. But
this is not simply about the United States ending this program. The United
States certainly is not the only country with such a program. But a
reasonable start is for the country that claims to be most dedicated to its
Constitution to adhere to it meticulously above and beyond the narrowest
interpretation. This is not a path without danger. As Benjamin Franklin
said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
"<a href="http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/keeping-nsa-perspective">Keeping
the NSA in Perspective</a> is republished with permission of Stratfor."

Read more: Keeping the NSA in Perspective |
Stratfor<http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/keeping-nsa-perspective#ixzz2ZKColiu9>

Follow us: @stratfor on
Twitter<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rw?id=dKd9f6JQur37hqadbi-bpO&u=stratfor>
 | Stratfor on Facebook<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rf?id=dKd9f6JQur37hqadbi-bpO&u=Stratfor>


On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Carolina Rossini <
carolina.rossini at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> *
> http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/public-opinion-shifts-on-security-liberty-balance/
> *
>
> Public Opinion Shifts on Security-Liberty BalanceBy NATE SILVER<http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nate-silver/>
>
> A new Quinnipiac poll has found a significant shift in public opinion<http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-institute/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=1919> on
> the trade-off between civil liberties and national security. In the new
> survey, released on Wednesday, 45 percent of the public said they thought
> the government’s antiterrorism policies have “gone too far in restricting
> the average person’s civil liberties” — as compared with 40 percent who
> said they have “not gone far enough to adequately protect the country.”
>
>
> --
> *Carolina Rossini*
> http://carolinarossini.net/
> + 1 6176979389
> *carolina.rossini at gmail.com*
> skype: carolrossini
> @carolinarossini
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
> You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>      governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> To be removed from the list, visit:
>      http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing
>
> For all other list information and functions, see:
>      http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
> To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
>      http://www.igcaucus.org/
>
> Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t
>
>


-- 
Diego R. Canabarro
http://lattes.cnpq.br/4980585945314597

--
diego.canabarro [at] ufrgs.br
diego [at] pubpol.umass.edu
MSN: diegocanabarro [at] gmail.com
Skype: diegocanabarro
Cell # +55-51-9244-3425 (Brasil) / +1-413-362-0133 (USA)
--
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20130717/7586b059/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t