Edward Snowden: Hero Or Zero?

That was the question of the day on the radio and the official Free Will formulation is (drumroll): "Zero + 2."

The guy's a zero for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with his deciding unilaterally to release classified information to the leftoid Guardian, a publication that has gone out of its way to undermine America. Then there's his laughable claim that Hong Kong was some kind of libertarian, free speech paradise. Good to know our worldly transnational sophisticates haven't caught up with the news that HK stopped being a free trade entrepot back in 1999. Snowden doesn't talk or act like a patriot, so excuse me if I don't join the "Snowden = Paul Revere" chorus line.*

Still, he gets points for making us confront an ugly reality, namely that the gov't is collecting an enormous amount of personal information about us and our interactions with the world. I get it that the NSA is making use of this information under close supervision and only when there is a probable cause rationale for running our numbers through a database. Other than that, it's just sitting there, inert. No, I don't find that reassuring. Instead, each of us now has a digital sword of Damocles over us, waiting to fall when we run the wrong google search, or receive too many phone calls from the wrong continents. The gov't won't look at you until it does, something that we have learned from the IRS and which we should not soon forget (also note that Mr. Patriot doesn't seem to have been motivated by the IRS's torment of conservatives and Tea Partiers).

But, what Snowden should be making us ask is whether all of this meta-data gathering is the best use of our time and resources. The whole point is to fight terrorism (remember that?) but it's hard to see that the system is working well when we've got a couple yokels from Chechnya blowing up the Boston Marathon without much trouble. We're seemingly spying on true blue Americans (and patting them down in airports) while studiously avoiding the Muslims who are causing all of this trouble in the first place!

There's one way to fight a war against a shadowy transnational guerrilla movement with a deadly ideology: kill as many of them as you can when you can; capture the ones with valuable information and then never let them go; seek out and destroy their leaders, etc. Doing targeted  computer searches of phone records and internet searches makes sense when you are fighting a war in such a manner. We *kind of* did that under Bush - and the left never stopped wailing about  the shredding of the Constitution and the slaughter of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. So now we have this new strategy: drone killings from afar and electronic snooping of every American's phone and internet records. Not an improvement.

(And what about the low quality of the folks who are getting top secret clearances so they can work on all of this electronic snooping? It was bad enough that soccer mom Valerie Plame could plausibly call herself a CIA operative, but at least she was getting her hands dirty. Bradley Manning was a gay Welsh 20 year old from Oklahoma with relationship issues. In an earlier era, he would not have been in the army, but in the Obama era, he had a security clearance that gave him access to State Dept. emails. Snowden is a high school drop-out with a naive view of life and freedom in other countries and who donated money to Ron Paul - not that there's anything wrong with that, but a Paul-bot is not the sort of person you would want with top secret clearance.)

Edward Snowden committed crimes and has acted in a way that has hurt the United States. His motives are mixed at best. But, given the expense and low success rate of the intrusive programs he has revealed, it would be nice to see a re-appraisal of what exactly we are doing to ourselves in the name of national security.

* and please don't expect me to appreciate your ability to parse the difference between Snowden and the worm Bradley Manning.

Search Engine: The Obama Administration's Surveillance State

I'm not a criminal law attorney so I have no idea whether the NSA's seizing all of Verizon's customer records is unconstitutional (fwiw, the steadfast likes of John Yoo and Andy McCarthy see nothing wrong). And, maybe there's some logical rationale for the newly revealed (but years' long) effort to poke through the servers of some of the internet's biggest names, but I've got a more basic question: is any of this data mining accomplishing anything?

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. 

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

I ask whether any of this is accomplishing anything because you may have noticed that, despite all of this intensive trolling through phone records and internet searches, two kids from Chechnya - one of whom had even been in contact with the DHS and FBI - managed to set off bombs at the Boston Marathon without much trouble. The Tsaernovs seem to have spent a lot of time on the phone and on the 'net, but still managed to slip through.

I haven't normally gone along with the black helicopter/Parallax View approach to issues like this, but after the IRS scandal, I literally do not trust the gov't at all. Sure, everyone's talking about how there are all these protections, and the searches are focused on "patterns" and the like; but isn't that what the IRS was doing? Plugging search terms like "Patriot" and "9/12" into their computers to better target the people they wanted to target? Seems like whatever the NSA guys were doing could just as easily been turned towards that direction without much trouble.

(plus, we are still being treated to 2012 election post-mortems featuring Democrat operatives crowing about how their data-mining efforts helped them to better target voters. Data mining, you say? And how do we know you also weren't using data mining to target your political enemies?)

As usual, Obama defenders are falling back on their first refuge: this program started under Bush. But, my memory was that Dems were calling for impeachment and worse - remember all of those assassination fantasies? - when the original NSA program was revealed by the NY Times. Now, Obama has taken the Bush-era data mining efforts and exploded them.

Either this stuff is dangerous and unconstitutional or it's not, but it looks like to the left "unconstitutional" really means "didn't go far enough."