I've always said "Open Source=Closed Society of Coders" -- and it was more right than I knew. They always twist and corrupt the meaning of an open society -- which also has to do with laws of fairness and due process and justice that keep it open for all -- and turn it into a realm wherea anarchist hackers enjoy freedom of absolute encryption even from legitimat law-enforcement, even with warrants, and can decide to disable or destroy the rights of others, dependent on their servers, at will.
Here's Conor Friedensdorf trying to be an erudite hipster and quoting Karl Popper, as many "progressives" with no notion of pluralism in a real open society have done before him -- including George Soros himself, who counts Popper among his greatest influencers and has moved toward a very closed nature of his trademarked Open Society.
How an Unfalsifiable Counterterrorism Strategy Makes Us Less Safe
Like many progs. Conor Friedersdorf thinks that if he can't see everything the NSA is doing in its spy program, it must not be accountable.
I think like a lot of journalists, he wouldn't have the attention span to keep on it even if it were sent to his email box weekly, but the reality, the NSA has lots of checks and balances within it and outside it in Congress and the courts.
But because progs like Conor ultimately believe in executive power and not in checks and balances, especially on themselves and their own ideologues, they keep banging on the NSA itself, rather than Congress or the public, because their political vision really does involve just forcing through to power their chosen executive, and then, through molding and influencing various executive agencies, running the state as the avant garde of the revolutionary justice movement.
That's why I consider people like this as little better than Bolsheviks -- they don't really want pluralism, or political challenge from the left or right as part of a democracy, or rules that pertain equally to all political forces, they just want to scientifically declare themselves "right," ram through to power, then "fix" all the agencies to run by their notions. This is of course eminently "progressives" and anyone who challenges it must not only be #tcot and #Benghazi obsessed but #deathpanels.
In fact, Michael Hayden makes a valuable case for keeping surveillance programs as they are, particularly on that telephone metadata hoovering that progs hate so much (as do libertarians) -- you know, in the interest of all of us keeping our freedoms from terrorists:
Congress is almost certain to rein in the NSA at exactly the moment when its mass surveillance operations are most vital, Michael Hirsh argues in National Journal. The decimation of Al Qaeda's core in Pakistan "only set the stage for a rebirth of al-Qaida as a global threat," he writes, one that will focus on carrying out smaller, more frequent attacks, rather than an elaborate plot like the one carried out on September 11, 2001. He approvingly quotes one analyst claiming that "Al-Qaeda is far more a problem a dozen years after 9/11 than it was back then."
Conor doesn't find this "falsifiable" (sign) so he resists it:
This style of argument should not be allowed to carry the day in America, because if it does, the national security state will cease to be rigorous or accountable in any way. In Hirsh's telling, America's national security elites have presided over policies that coincided with the rise of a more dangerous Al Qaeda. But the answer is not to fire the people in charge for failing to competently reduce the terrorism threat. Rather, it's to empower them to pursue existing policy more vigorously.
Well, why? Because a journalist says so who doesn't like the idea? Aside from the fourth estate -- and the fifth estate, the illegal hackers like Snowden -- you know, we do have Congress and the courts, and they are handling this by...first of all rejecting frivolous lawfaring suits from the ACLU on this (so far, although this may change) and second of all by drafting various competing legislative initiatives, none of which Conor likes, although the representatives of his fellow Americans, including his own congress people, are going to pass one or the other without him.
Then Conor pulls the Tsarnaev argument which is always so lame, because he neglects to explain why more wasn't done with those two thugs -- because their civil rights would have been violated:
We're supposed to accept the proposition that "NSA surveillance may well be the only thing that can stop the next terrorist from blowing apart innocent Americans, as happened in Boston." But NSA surveillance was operational long before the Boston bombing, and did nothing to stop it from happening. In addition, long before the bombing happened, Russian authorities warned the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev should be considered a terrorism threat. Authorities hardly needed a comprehensive haystack to find that particular needle.
This is faulty analysis, because the real problem with the Tsarnaevs is Russian intelligence -- with which we were supposedly cooperating more closely than we do now -- was supposedly informing us. Except...when were the Russians going to tell us that they assassinated at least one if not two or even three of Tamerlan's associates while he was in Dagestan! Hello! That's pretty important information and we didn't have it! The Russians let him go! It's my belief they deliberately let nature take its course.
But progs like Conor are always disingenuous when they play the Tsarnaev card in an argument because they'd be the last ones for putting Youtube jihad lovers on heavy surveillance lists merely because they enjoy watching the World Trade Center blow up over and over and spouting crazy with their extremist friends.
Instead of saying, "It appears that a troubling existential problem is created by the realization that we might have to violate the privacy rights of some suspects for the sake of controlling terrorism" -- which would be the honest, obvious thing to say -- they say "the failure to stop the Tsarnaevs even though they had Islamist Youtubes and some strange statements about explosives on their Twitter lets us know that surveillance doesn't work."
They're afraid to say that it might work all to well if it weren't crippled -- like it does in Russia, where within two weeks of the Volgograd bus bombing said to be committed by a female suicide bomber, her husband, said to be the mastermind of this and other bombings, was dead at the hands of Russian troops without any trial or defense, and certainly no ACLU claiming he was merely "Interneting while Muslim."
Is there a way between these two extremes -- the brutal rights-free Russian method that has only led to more terrorism, and the licentious realm that Conor and other progs envision which will also enable terrorism? Of course there is, and we have it now -- likely with not a lot of adjustment, it just requires patient explication and argumentation -- of the sort we get precious little of, from adversarial journalists worshipping Snowden.
Aside from the plethora of idiots that always show up for these debates online, the discussion there has some interesting debate about cell phone data possibly being drawn from cell towers in this investigation, which may have helped identify the Boston bombers -- not to mention that surveillance video from stores, meant only to cope with shop-lifting, were vital in finally apprehending the suspects -- opening up the entire question of whether video surveillance on streets is warranted. As one commenter named "m w" put it starkly:
CF opposed the collection of cell phone and other aggregated data as a violation of privacy. He also opposes video surveillance. Do you? Getting the name of the cell used between bombings led to the identity of the bomber in the picture at the scene.
Rand Paul and CF wanted a change in law that would bar any release of data other than individual data by court order. That would have made correlational analysis of the aggregate data impossible. Do you? You see how that relates to the issue of collection of aggregate data by NSA?
My comment:
You're really abusing Popper here -- and he'd roll in his grave if he knew that you were using his works literarally to justify a closed society of powerful hacker elites who encrypt themselves and gain criminal unaccountability.
No thank you.
So really, there are so many falsehoods in your very story, starting with the idea that all truths must be literally falsifiable to be truths. That is taking Popper too far. The existence of God, for example, is not something that is "falsifiable"; Snowden very likely has helped Russian intelligence and may have all along -- falsifiability or not does nothing to prove or disprove this, just common sense and history works.
As for the notion that the Russians warned us about Tsarnaev -- nonsense. They gave a very, very misleading and very partial warning. In fact, they were tracking Tsarnaev in Dagestan as he met with known jihadists that Russian forces *assassinated* the summer Tamerlan was in Dagestan. When were they going to tell us that?! They didn't! Not only did they let him leave the country, they never even demanded that he pick up his new passport to replace one "lost" and allowed him to travel on a Kyrgyzstan passport although he no longer had residence there but had a US green card. The Russians were definitely up to no good here, and the notion that the FBI dropped the ball is false. What really happened is the Russians hid it.
Regardless, the failure of one case to be caught in time doesn't mean this program is worthless. Jamshid Muhtorov was properly arrested on the basis of FISA intelligence (the Uzbek terrorism suspect). Now that trial will become a test case. Maybe his case will be dismissed over a decision that this evidence was somehow unlawful but likely not. He was intercepted before going to help a jihad group in Turkey that kills our soldiers in Afghanistan. There are other cases like that pending.
What is it with you minimizers of terrorism?! It's not like your personal freedoms are harmed by the existence of these working and lawful laws and procedures.
Snowden and Greenwald and company have yet to come up with a single COINTELPRO style case of anyone actually followed unlawfully, much less arrested unlawfully.
As for complaints about secrecy -- hey, Snowden hacked an enormous amount and you learned way more than you were supposed to, but it's never enough, is it? What threshold DO you recognize as legitimate?!
And lawyers of clients like Muhtorov have always been free to challenge the arrests of their clients on classified intelligence.
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And I added this:
You're outlining the differences, yes, but I still think you need to go back to "metadata" and "collection" and define these terms. You think they already mean "seizure". But they don't. Metadata is not personal communications, but -- as the term indicates -- information generated by machines in the course of moving that communication of yours from point A to point B. The law has never determined -- and would have no grounds to determine -- that your phone number or zip code are some object is protected by the 4th amendment.
Furthermore, when a machine -- as distinct from the human eye -- scans your data, it isn't seeing it or seizing it in any meaningful way. It's merely holding it, waiting for a match. WHEN it matches, THEN a warrant may be sought. You don't say that a cop on a bat looking down every alley or into every coffee shop "needs a warrant" or "is engaged in unreasonable search and seizure" as he walks a beat.
Grabbing metadata that may be matched later to a suspect's phone when there is probable cause is the same as walking that beat, and gathering by electronic means what used to be gathered by organic means as a matter of course.
Analogies of online to offline aren't perfect, but people like you always seem to want to award online some sort of magic properties of freedom from law enforcement they could never get away with if the issue were in real life.
If a cop walks along a street and steps into a bar or coffee shop when he spots a man wearing a knit cap and carrying a knapsack that matches a victim's description, the fact that he had to scan lots of other bars or coffee shops on the way to reaching that suspect isn't somehow held against him. They are looked at and discounted mechanically, as "not matching" even by the human eye -- so much more by the machine eye.
Yet online anarchists want to insist that no one can ever scan to make a match mechanically and insist on absolute encryption.
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