1984

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On PRISM

prism

First, I want to congratulate the NSA-leaker Edward Snowden for his courage and the great service he has done to Americans and to the world in exposing the NSA’s PRISM surveillance programs. The man must have balls the size of basketballs, although perhaps letting the world know his location — in Hong Kong, territory controlled by the People’s Republic of China, another nation that runs its own share of online surveillance programs  — was unwise.

Some critics like the New York Times’ David Brooks say that what Snowden did was wrong, and that he showed a lack of respect for authority. It is certainly true that we live in an age where distrust of authority and the state has become commonplace. But perhaps that is only fair — after all, it is just ten years since the Iraq war, a war for which David Brooks was a cheerleader, wasted trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, and hundreds of thousands of lives chasing after so-called weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. If my state goes about wasting my money and thousands and thousands of lives on destroying foreign lands chasing after non-existent weapons of mass destruction, I am prone to distrust the state. Had the security services’ claims been subjected to proper scrutiny, it is possible that the disaster of Iraq could have been averted. Snowden is opening the surveillance and intelligence agencies that brought us the Iraq war — and that have now brought us PRISM — to proper public scrutiny.

In a democratic society, this is critical. These mass surveillance programs have been implemented without any real public discussion, precisely because they have been enacted in secret. This means that there has been no public discussion of goals, evidence, effectiveness and procedure.

We don’t know how effective or ineffective these programs are, because they have been concocted, enacted and analysed secretly. The security services have, in the interests of “national security” been empowered to enact the policies of their choice with limited governmental oversight, and certainly no public oversight. Their implicit hypothesis — that mass surveillance can prevent or reduce terrorism — has not as far as I can tell been subjected to serious academic scrutiny, at least publicly. This is not a scientific approach to policy — it is a knee-jerk approach to policy. In science, you collect data, release your findings and let others review your data, not claim a finding, secretly enact policies based on that finding, and hide any data.

We know that PRISM did not stop the Boston Bombings, or Sandy Hook, or the Aurora massacre. So perhaps it is the case that mass surveillance programs are ineffective against terrorists, particularly lone wolves who may exist outside of traditional social networks. Agencies have many questions to answer. Are there not more effective methods to preventing terrorism than dragnet surveillance? On what scientific basis have agencies enacted their current policies? Would Geiger counters not be more effective than surveillance dragnets in preventing nuclear terrorism? Where is the data to show that mass surveillance is or can be effective?

The bigger question, though, is whether the agencies involved considered the constitutional implications of their actions. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This empowers agencies to search and seize only with a warrant that particularly describes the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. A dragnet like PRISM would seem to obliterate any such protections. Did the NSA and those who empowered them to undertake surveillance consider PRISM to be constitutional? If so, why? Although only a slim majority of Americans are against monitoring everyone’s electronic communications for the purposes of preventing terrorism, the Constitution is very clear about the conditions necessary in order to seize evidence.

Ultimately, the essence of national security are the legal and constitutional frameworks upon which civilised countries are based. By shredding constitutional protections through unaccountable and secretive mass surveillance programs, governments may be giving up the national security that they claim to be seeking to save. Only with transparency and daylight can society properly assess which measures are effective and acceptable to public safety and public liberty, and implement them in an accountable way.

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Should Obama and Congress Be Arrested Under the NDAA?

Should President Obama (alongside Lindsay Graham and John McCain) be wearing an orange jumpsuit?

Welcome to the beautiful and surreal reality of life under American corporatism, under a Congress that churns out thousands  and thousands of pages of (often contradictory) legislation a year.

If providing material assistance to al-Qaeda is illegal under the National Defence Authorization Act (2012), and Obama and Congress are sending $25 million of aid to al-Qaeda-affiliated Syrian opposition, aren’t Congress and President Obama violating their own law? Should Obama (or at least the Justice Department) not be using “all necessary and appropriate force” including “the power to indefinitely detain” to prevent Obama and Congress from assisting al-Qaeda? Did anyone in Congress or the Obama administration even bother to read the law that they were signing? Do Federal laws no longer apply to lawmakers?

The only question left from this abrupt and absurd turnaround — from funding bin Laden’s mujahideen thirty years ago, to ten years ago declaring war on al-Qaeda, to today sending them material assistance — would appear to be whether or not Obama will pull a 1984 and claim that “we have always been at war with Eurasia“.

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Thoughtcrime is Real

I am careful what I say on Twitter especially, and the internet in general.

The sad reality is that the internet is not the place for expressing views that you do not want the wider public — including law enforcement and intelligence agencies — to know you hold.

We already know that the National Security Agency will soon capture all communications — phone calls, search histories, web history, e-mails, passwords, etc — in their Utah data centre.

In Britain, a dangerous precedent is being set.

From the BBC:

A teenager arrested over a malicious tweet sent to Team GB diver Tom Daley has been issued with a warning.

Dorset Police said the 17-year-old boy was held at a guest house in the Weymouth area on suspicion of malicious communications and later bailed.

After coming fourth in the men’s synchronised 10m platform diving event on Monday, Daley, 18, from Plymouth received a message on Twitter.

It told him he had let down his father Rob, who died in 2011 from cancer.

Arrested and cautioned for expressing an opinion. Not for threatening violence. Not even for racial or sexual abuse — as happened in March when a student was convicted of incitement to racial hatred after he tweeted a series of racial slurs.

Just for expressing an opinion that the authorities found to be distasteful. 

I admit, it was a distasteful comment. But the idea that the government should arrest the person who made it is far, far, far more distasteful still.

Meanwhile, the number of bankers arrested for rigging LIBOR remains at zero.

This is a very salient example of the problems with the internet in its present state. If the state has the opportunity to gather and index citizens’ thoughts, these cases in Britain — supposedly a free country — illustrate that it is a very short and slippery slope toward the state punishing citizens for expressing their opinions.

While the First Amendment might seem to protect speech, the United States has already got involved in policing expression. And the First Amendment has a massive loophole — it only restricts Congress’ ability to legislate against speech. Other agencies — like the TSA — would seem to be be able to restrict speech under “administrative” grounds (the same rationale they use to gut the Fourth Amendment and search travellers without probable cause).

From the BBC:

Holidaymakers have been warned to watch their words after two friends were refused entry to the US on security grounds after a tweet.

Before his trip, Leigh Van Bryan wrote that he was going to “destroy America”.

He insisted he was referring to simply having a good time — but was sent home.

Trade association Abta told the BBC that the case highlighted that holidaymakers should never do anything to raise “concern or suspicion in any way”.

The US Department for Homeland Security picked up Mr Bryan’s messages ahead of his holiday in Los Angeles.

The 26-year-old bar manager wrote a message to a friend on the micro-blogging service, saying: “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”

US law enforcement represents the overwhelming majority of requests to Twitter for users’ private information.

From Reuters:

Law enforcement agencies in the United States are behind the overwhelming majority of requests for Twitter users’ private information, the social media company revealed Monday in its first ever public report on the subject.

Of the 849 total government requests for user information during the period spanning January 1 to June 30 this year, 679 — or 80 percent — took place in the United States, typically for use in criminal investigations, Twitter said.

Japan was in second place after the United States with 98 requests filed by police, followed by 11 requests from law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom and the same number from agencies in Canada.

Speech on Twitter — and on the internet in general — isn’t free.

UPDATE: It would seem that the arrested party did later make some threats. Whether he was arrested for these or his initial messages remains to be seen — he was cautioned for “malicious communications” which means “causing anxiety or distress”, and so could easily apply to the first tweet — as opposed to intimidation or criminal threatening, which he was not cautioned for.

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The Ministry of Truth

In a truly staggering article, Evgeny Morozov makes the case that the internet needs a Ministry of Truth:

In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse—a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips. That much has happened—but with a twist: In addition to borrowing existing items from its vast collections, we, the patrons, could also deposit our own books, pamphlets and other scribbles—with no or little quality control.

Such democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them. Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?

Morozov’s solution?

The options aren’t many. One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like “vaccination leads to autism” appears in our browser, that sentence would be marked in red—perhaps, also accompanied by a pop-up window advising us to check a more authoritative source. The trick here is to come up with a database of disputed claims that itself would correspond to the latest consensus in modern science—a challenging goal that projects like “Dispute Finder” are tackling head on.

The second—and not necessarily mutually exclusive—option is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like “global warming” or “vaccination.” Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.

Readers will be aware that I oppose the central planning of markets, for three reasons: the dangers of regulatory capture, the problem of unintended consequences, and most significantly the distortion of the market mechanism:

Capitalism means both successes and failures. It is a fundamentally experimental system, with a continuous feedback mechanism — the market, and ultimately profit and loss. Ideas that work are rewarded with financial success, and ideas that don’t are punished with failure. With capitalism, systems, ideas and firms that fail to produce what the market wants fail. They go bankrupt. Their assets, and their debt is liquidated.

When that mechanism is suspended by a government or central bank that thinks it knows best — and that a system that is too interconnected to fail is worth saving at any cost — the result is almost always stagnation. This is for a number of reasons — most obviously that bailouts sustain crippling debt levels, and are paid for through contractionary austerity. But it is larger than just that.

In nature, ideas and schemes that work are rewarded — and ideas and schemes that don’t work are punished. Our ancestors who correctly judged the climate, soil and rainfall and planted crops that flourished were rewarded with a bumper harvest. Those who planted the wrong crops did not get a bailout — they got a lean harvest, and were forced to either learn from their mistakes, or perish.

Precisely the same problems exist when the government steps in to centrally plan the market for ideas. The market mechanism — of good ideas that yield favourable consequences, and bad ideas that yield unfavourable ones — becomes distorted.

Regular reader FO SHO suggested that this problem does not merely affect monetary or financial markets:

Gresham’s Law — Bad money drives out good if their exchange rate is set by law.

Following the logic of Gresham’s Law, I would like to propose a couple new additional economic laws along the line of Gresham’s Law. (Forgive me if these laws already exist!)

Bliss’s Law (My last name!) — When bad economists drive out good economists due to the favour of a corrupt government and/or central bankers.

Aziz’s Law (Why not?) — When bad bankers drive out good bankers due to excessive greed and stupidity  due to bad bankers being bailed out by government.

Alas, the second point is not merely applicable to the field of economics: it is applicable to every field of ideas.

In order to get the benefits of a strong and dynamic debate, people need to be free to believe whatever they want. If their ideas are successful, they reap the rewards. If their ideas are unsuccessful, they must accept the problems.

Government  does not need to centrally plan the market of ideas by designating (in all of its wisdom) what is truth and what is not. If a lie is found to be injurious by a court of law, there is the common law precedent of  defamation. If words are used to incite hatred or promote violence or terrorism there are legal precedents and criminal laws to deal with such behaviour.

These limitations on speech are limited to preventing harm and injury.  But Morozov’s suggestions go far beyond the scope of this — while he dresses his claims up in the clothes of preventing harm, the real concern here is that he seems to believe that government ought to have a monopoly on the truth.

Giving government a monopoly on determining which ideas are valid and which are not is a dangerous precedent. It can be used to suppress dissent and dissidents. It can be used to entrench bad systems. It would entail the creation of a massive, far-reaching and costly bureaucracy, not only to monitor discussion, but to determine “truth”, and to intervene against speech that they determine to be “untruthful”.

This wouldn’t just be a disaster for the market of ideas — it would be a fiscal disaster, too.