Government Surveillance: A Sartre Moment

Louis Brandeis

Samuel Warren

Hendrick Herzberg

Jill Lepore

Huis Clos ("No Exit" or "Closed Doors") is one of those rare works which made the agonizing work of qualifying in French in college almost worthwhile.  Sartre's thesis, as elaborated by this excruciating, funny and mesmerizing play is, simply put: "Hell is other people."
 The obverse of that coin is nirvana is also other people. You can read alone in your room, camp in the wilderness, paddle down the river alone, but essentially, like D.H. Lawrence's caretaker, Mellors, living alone  in his stone hut, in the woods, eventually, you need other people, (in his case, Lady Chatterly.)

And so it is in the debate about privacy, which is, in itself, not the most intensely interesting or important debate extant in our public discourse today, but look at the people it has brought to surface, and listen to the music pouring forth from their souls.

Jill LePore, writing in this week's New Yorker, traces the intellectual history of the notion of a legal guarantee of privacy back to the famous paper by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy."  Brandeis, of course, would later expand his thinking in his erudite dissent in Olmstead v United States, saying Olmstead's right to be left alone had been violated by the wire tap of his telephone which led to his conviction for boot legging illegal alcohol.  Brandeis argued that before our Constitution prohibited it, the government could break into a citizen's home without warrant to obtain incriminating evidence, could obtain incriminating evidence by torture and this amounted to, among other things, espionage by our government on our citizens. It constituted forced testimony of self incrimination.

Of course, the response to this intrusion has been largely determined by what other feelings the speaker has about the government: Rush Limbaugh said the NSA spying program is just another example of Mr. Obama's "totalitarian nature," a nature he did not see in the same actions and programs when they were directed by Mr. George W. Bush.

Professor LePore sums up the quandary: "This has led, in our own time, to the paradox of an American culture obsessed, at once, with being seen and with being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection--ciphers of numbers and letters--so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose."

Mad Dog spent an entire blog trying to say what Dr. LePore has said in a single paragraph.

On NPR today,  the history of the program subsumed by the NSA was explored. The CIA had demanded of the phone companies that as they switched to digital technology they not employ technology which would make it impossible for the government to tap it. The companies agreed, despite the substantial costs involved in making phone records accessible to the government, but insisted the data be obtained with warrants.  The conversations themselves were of little interest to the government, but the patterns of calls were of great interest: If a caller orders surveillance equipment and information about airports and the World Trade Center and makes phone calls to Pakistan, Berlin, Qatar and Saudia Arabia, then flies to Somalia and then to New York, the NSA wants to be able to connect all that and to track that caller.

 In fact, just such a program was being developed at an Army base in suburban Washington, D.C. prior to 9/11 and the analysts there were on the trail of the plotters when they were shut down by Army lawyers, who saw Constitutional issues as violations of the Fourth Amendment.

The main question, of course is this:  If you knew allowing the government to collect this data for millions of Americans and non citizens would have prevented the attack on the World Trade Center, would thwart future attacks, would you still say, "No, you cannot gather this data" or would you say, well, we need to balance the loss of a sense of inviolability against the loss of life and treasure?

Mr. Obama said, "This war, like all wars, must end...We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us...difficult questions about the balance we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy."

The best thing about this argument, of course, is the pleasure of watching good minds at work.

Of course, the answers are far simpler than the subtly and complexity of the argument:   You do not need a Harvard degree to know the answer here. You have only to have watched the 5 seasons of "The Wire" (yes, there it is again) to understand how that balance must be struck. 

When The United States Intervenes

Mad Dog occasionally is compelled to venture out of the Shire and wander among the creatures far from his Hobbit realm.

San Francisco is filled with wondrous creatures doing odd and fascinating things and just looking at them is enough to set Mad Dog's eyes spinning--Eurasians with their high zygomatic arches, a couple, white and black walking down the street with their beautiful blue eyed son; this is definitely NOT whitebread New Hampshire.

The meeting is international, languages Mad Dog recognizes but cannot speak (German, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese) languages Mad Dog can understand but not speak (French, Irish) and languages he can only guess at (Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Polish).

In the midst of all this cacophony comes news a married male doctor in Afghanistan attempted to examine a female patient who was not his wife in an examining room in his office--an unremarkable event which occurs all across the USA, Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, but in Afghanistan all hell was unleashed. The doctor and his patient were chased out of the office by a howling mob, and both were stoned. Reports are sketchy and it not clear whether either survived but both may have--the doctor may have been removed to India for treatment of head wounds. 

When Mad Dog studied anthropology in college, there was a strong effort to discourage students from judging the values and actions of other people of other cultures by American standards. 

This idea has been supported by many since--the most emphatic example being The Spirit Moves Me and I Fall Down, about the efforts of American doctors in California to save a Hmong child who was suffering from epilepsy, whose parents refused to treat her with anticonvulsants, and the child was brought repeatedly to the Emergency Room in status epilepeticus, and the child eventually died in a convulsive event. But it was the American doctors, not the family, who the author faulted, for their lack of understanding of this ancient Hmong culture. The doctors and social workers viewed the parents as child abusers. For shame--the parents were merely viewing a seizure disorder as a universe which was out of harmony.

So Mad Dog understands he will be viewed as intolerant of other people and other cultures when he says, Let Us Get Out of Afghanistan, poste haste. And more than that, let us withdraw from all those places around the world who consider women as nothing more than baby making machines, who ought to be veiled, kept uneducated, treated like possessions and children and generally made to live half lives under the thumb of male domination. 

Mad Dog realizes that Franklin Roosevelt was reviled in some quarters for not doing more to intervene in places where Nazis were mistreating Jews. And Clinton still regrets not having done more to intervene in Rwanda.  But Mad Dog would submit, you cannot change some people and you cannot change cultures and you have cultures which, as their basic premise are intolerant. 

The one thing Americans ought not tolerate is intolerance, the unwillingness of any culture to hear the other side. Parte.altera tantum parte,  Hear the other side. 

We did not understand what was going on in Vietnam and we staggered around like demented Green giants for 5 years, killing and maiming and doing the Devil's work.

We may understand Afghanistan better, but that doesn't mean we have to like it or that we owe them anything. We will certainly never change or reform that way of thinking.

So let us simply remove our gallant young men and women and Bring 'Em Home. 

And let us resolve to not make that same mistake twice--no we are already into twice. Let us not make it a third time. 

Privacy. I Feel So Violated. Wah. Wah. Wah

Gail Collins is irate. The Tea Party is irate--always. Democrats are irate. Republicans, well, they are the Tea Party, so I repeat himself. Everyone is just as indignant as they can be over the government "snooping" into their private lives.

What will come next:  Some Orwellian  monitor screen in your bedroom a la 1984? Well, actually, it is already there: It's called a computer with Skype  or a smart phone, and it wasn't the government who put it there.

What is this thing called "Privacy" anyway?  

I consider my paycheck "private," but the IRS gets every last detail of that and more.  So does a bank, if I want a loan, or an auto dealership, if I am not going to pay cash. If I earn some outside income, the government must be told, and that is not new.

I have a driver's license,  and to get that my Social Security number and all sorts of things about me got taken in. And my picture got taken and stored in some government database.

I do not want my "private" bank account number to be published, and I want to keep my credit card numbers from public exposure, but every time I eat out in a restaurant or shop at the grocery store waiters and clerks handle this information. 

My friends  all have Face Book accounts, through which they publish astonishingly personal things to the world, pictures of themselves in wet swim suits, guzzling beer, and they "friend" people on the basis of having mutual friends. The woman on the train, three seats away, jabbers from Boston to New York City about where she had dinner, who she is sleeping with, who her mother is sleeping with, where her boyfriend is taking her on vacation, what she plans to eat for dinner, what her favorite color is. I wish that woman valued privacy more. I wish most people who talk on cell phones cared one tenth as much about privacy as the Attorney General Holder does, if he cares at all.

It strikes me this is an exhibitionist age, full of people trying to make connections.  Complaining about government looking at you through your phone bills is just one step beyond the woman at the nude beach complaining about men staring at her.

If you want to keep a communication "private,"  write a letter.  You don't even have to hand deliver it--the government never has opened mail--except during war time, when soldiers wrote home and their mail was censored on the basis of "security." Loose lips sink ships.

As Yosarian said in Catch-22,  it was pretty depressing having to read the letters from GI's to the folks back home so he could censor them,  because it made him realize what inconsequential things they talked about and how their lives were just as boring as the lives of officers.  (Eventually, Yosarian blacked out everything in the letters but "Dear Mom and Dad" and "Yours truly.") 

 But nobody today is talking about the government changing the content of phone calls or emails, although, now that I think of it, this may hold great potential for improving the national discourse. If we could at least correct some of the grammar, never mind the spelling in the case of emails and texts or the content, in the case of phone calls.)

As any addict of The Wire knows, listening in on telephone conversations can be of great value in criminal investigations, even when criminal organizations are very disciplined and cautious when talking on phones. 

For the most part, police and government types are simply bored by what they hear on telephone calls.

This is where I hope Mr. Obama takes us:  Let the NSA intercept all emails and cell phones and Facebook postings--which would eliminate all complaints about "profiling"--and put government workers to work improving the content of these things. Let's begin by eliminating photos of people floating in swimming pools holding cocktails and wearing sunglasses.

Let us move in the direction of enhancing privacy by refusing to allow citizens to indulge their exhibitionist tendencies.  

Stranger than Fiction

Mad Dog would never have chosen to watch a movie about Sarah Palin, especially a docudrama in which an actress portrays Ms. Palin in a bio docu drama politico thriller, but sometimes it is best Mad Dog finds himself over ruled.

In "Game Change," Julianne Moore plays Ms. Palin with such uncanny verisimilitude Mad Dog had to keep telling himself he was watching an actress, not the real thing. 

The story confirms what the average citizen could have concluded on his own, that Ms. Palin was astonishingly ignorant when she was chosen to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. 

The great parallel, subtly drawn in the film, between Palin and her hero, Ronald Reagan, is that they were both empty shells, but great actors, who could deliver lines and electrify crowds when they had been given the right lines to deliver, but neither had more than the minimal number of functioning brain cells.

Ms. Palin did not understand why there were two Koreas, really did think Alaska's proximity to Russia was her major foreign policy merit badge, needed remedial current events lectures, had no clue about what the Constitution actually says or means and, generally speaking is, in the worse sense of the phrase, a true hockey mom, and not far from the lipstick on the pit bull she described herself to be. 

Two things watching this remarkable movie did, which Mad Dog found astonishing: 1. It engenders a certain sympathy for Palin, who is portrayed as being genuinely hurt and humiliated as her deficiencies are exposed, particularly by the deft and brilliant interview by Katie Couric and the lancinating satire of Tina Fey.  2. It reminds you why Palin was such a potent force and such a seductive choice--she is a consummate entertainer. She delivers a devastating performance at her convention speech after the teleprompter fails, and she simply launches into her familiar, well honed populist script. She knows the lines that will inflame the crowd and she delivers.  

The movie reminds us that John McCain did have an honorable streak once, showing him refuse to stoke the racist, lunatic hysteria always present in his audiences.

"Game Change" is a reminder about how American politics really does have an Emperor's New Clothes aspect: Sometimes what you see what really is all there is.  You assume because she was chosen, Palin really had a depth and a background which was not evident on television, but the truth is, she was even more ignorant and backward than she appeared. She was the lipstick on the pit bull.

Listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes, available on line from the Johnson library, you can get the same sensation, listening to Johnson struggle with the truths which are so apparent to any citizen who watched Walter Cronkite's nightly reports on Vietnam: The war had nothing to do with defending freedom, defeating Communism or helping a beleaguered people yearning to resist the onslaught from a dark, blood thirsty regimen allied to Communist China. It was simply a war forced on an agrarian people who didn't care who was in power in Saigon, but just wanted to be left alone after the French colonists had departed.  Johnson refuses to see what is right in front of him, even when Richard  Russell, his good friend from Georgia, tells him the Vietcong and North Vietnamese know we don't want to stay in Vietnam and eventually we will leave, so they have only to wait us out. We can never win.

Sometimes the thing which is most obvious, most plainly presented in front of you, whether it is the woman from Alaska or the war in Vietnam is just so plain, you cannot believe what you are seeing is real. 

The Truth and Private Bradley Manning

Trials, lawyers will aver, are about seeking the truth.
This is, of course, hogwash. But then again, we are talking about what lawyers say.

Mad Dog is reading all he can about the Bradley Manning trial, and it is not easy. Discerning "the" truth is always a dicey proposition.  Likely there are many truths, and whose truth is more important is difficult to say.

Mr. Manning, Mad Dog suspects, was and is a tortured soul.
He may have been struggling with his sexual identity. His father may have pushed him into the military to "make a man" of him.
But so far, as far as the testimony has leaked out, according to the New York Times, when he was asked by a fellow hacker why he did not want to sell the documents he was planning to leak to Wikileaks, Manning replied he did not want to sell them because he thought they ought to be public property. Of course, we need to know more details, but this, at first blush, does not sound like an opportunist or a traitor. It sounds like a man of conscience.

Maybe.

And what exactly was contained in those thousands of documents? 
Did any of them actually expose agents who had worked on behalf of the United States to danger, as one would think revealing a spy might do?
Come to think of it, did Dick Cheney and company get thrown into a cell with 24 hours lights when he revealed Valerie Plame was a spy, and did that revelation endanger the lives of agents she ran?

The trial is young, but so far it appears what was really exposed was a raw nerve in the Obama administration, an administration which got us out of Iraq, saying it was the wrong war, which we could all understand because it looked just like Vietnam- no real purpose, no real achievable mission, a no win situation. 

Then there is the issue of 20,000 documents. If you want to really hide something well, like the Arc of the Covenant, you hide it among 20,000 other documents or boxes, as they did in "Raiders of the Lost Arc."

So far, Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder look no better than Richard Nixon when it comes to vindictiveness against those who would embarrass them. 

The thing is, embarrassing an administration, revealing the lie behind a war ought not be a crime. It ought to be considered an act of patriotism. When Daniel Ellsberg released a voluminous document from the Pentagon, the famous Pentagon Papers, detailing the lies which led us into Vietnam and which underlay that war's prosecution and raisen d'etre, he was not imprisoned. He was cheered. How is his case different from that of Private Manning?

On the other hand, if Mr. Manning did not examine those documents to be sure he would not be exposing and endangering lives, maybe he does deserve to be behind bars.

But one thing is clear, from the way he has already been treated, this is not a prosecution by a deliberate, clear headed, objective administration. This is a personal vendetta in which a man who has not yet been convicted of anything has already been tortured, when, in fact, he ought to have been treated with elaborate respect and courtesy. 

There will be time enough for meanness, after a conviction. Until then, if you treat any prisoner with anything less than complete politeness it is the accuser on whom most suspicion must lie.

If the Wikipedia article on Private Manning is accurate, it suggests the signs of Bradley Manning's personal angst were so obvious it beggars the imagination why a man as manifestly in crisis was allowed to be:  1. In Iraq, i.e. a war zone 2.  In the military (after at least one prior attempts to discharge him) 3. In proximity to any sort of secret or sensitive documents.  You do not put the boy who plays with matches, who burned down his school in charge of the ammunition dump. 

One thing which must be true if even a sliver of what is on Wikipedia is true is the Army must be the worst organization in the world when it comes to evaluating its own people. It is hard to imagine how it could be any worse. 

Remember Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who opened fire on unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood?  Now, there is another example of a soldier who had trouble written all over him, but his commanders responded to his palpable craziness by simply transferring him to some other unit.  The man gives a lecture at the Army medical school in Bethesda saying Muslims should kill infidels and his superior officer transfers him to Fort Hood, Texas. The rest is history, or rather, infamy.

Evidently, the Army can compete any day with  the Catholic Church, when it comes to dealing with problem personnel.

Obama Misgivings: Naked in the Cell

Mad Dog has the Fairey poster of Obama in his house, but he put it on his wall with some misgivings. Putting up a poster of a political figure seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of Hitler posters and photos found in private homes throughout Germany after WWII.  For years, after the end of WWII, maybe still, no magazine cover photos of Hitler were allowed to be published in Germany, for fear they would wind up framed in bars or in private homes. 

And, the fact is, when we get to "know" a political figure it is always a slow process of revelation. Putting up a poster or photo of a politician is an act of demi-worship at worst, and strong endorsement of a man, at best, and the fact is, what we ought to admire about a man is his philosophy, his policies, knowing that as a human being, he may have many failings, knowing, if we had him over to dinner, we may not like him much.  (Although, Mad Dog has always thought he would like Mr. Obama, personally, until now.) But Mad Dog has long harbored uncomfortable qualms about putting a photo of a human being on the wall. Just too many echoes of hero worship, and those photos of Kennedy right next to Jesus Christ on the walls of so many of Mad Dog's Catholic friends always made Mad Dog cringe a little.

After 4 years, despite some disappointments related to passivity or failure to push hard enough, most of Mr. Obama's failures have struck Mad Dog as failures of our Constitutional form of government, which intentionally created a weak president, bound by laws and Congress into a position which rendered him the persuader in chief, but faced with a determined minority opposition, or worse yet, faced with the opposition controlling either chamber of Congress, the President has few options and little power.

So, when Mr. Obama failed to close Gitmo, one could say his heart was in the right place but the dolts in Congress simply thwarted his best intentions.

Now there is news concerning the incarceration of Private Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, Maryland. Private Manning has been stripped naked, kept in a cell with lights always on, forced to say, every 5 minutes, to his guards, "I'm okay," not allowed to sleep with his arm over his eyes to cover them against the constant light. In other words, for 9 months, before ever being convicted of anything, he has been punished, and torture is not too strong a word.  Altogether, he has been in jail 3 years without trial.

Either Mr. Obama knows about this--and it is hard to imagine he does not-- and Mr. Obama approves,  or he does not know, which in a way is an even more egregious lapse in leadership.  In either case, that he would allow such nastiness prior to a conviction, that he would embrace torture, diminishes the man substantially. 

Now that you mention it, Mr. Obama's administration has been missing in action when it comes to opposing strip searches in jailhouses. Surely, there is some case out there which could be brought before the five conservative  jackasses on  Supreme Court, to force them, once again to endorse this form of torture, to make them squirm a little, or possibly even, back down.

Taken with reports of more raids and deportations of immigrants than occurred under Mr. Bush, these indicators of Mr. Obama's embrace of torture and police state tactics are very disturbing. 

Mad Dog applauded killing Osama Bin Laden without trial. But that was a case of a man who had gone all youtubey, a man who admitted and even bragged about his crimes.  And we do not put foreign antagonists on trial before the hostilities end. Had we been able to kill Hitler or Tojo while hostilities were underway, we would and should have done that. We have a tradition of "wanted dead or alive," but in that case the fugitive has the option of turning himself in.

Private Manning is not Hitler. He may turn out to be  more like Daniel Ellsberg. In fact, it is entirely possible that far from putting any American soldier at risk, what Private Manning really put at risk were embarrassing revelations regarding the conduct, the goals and the reality of the war in Iraq.

Joe Nocera is all upset about force feeding hunger striking prisoners at Gitmo. Mad Dog can see the case for force feeding. 

There is no justification Mad Dog can imagine for keeping an accused prisoner naked in a cell lit 24 hours daily.

Kelly Ayotte: What a Peach

Don't you just want to hug her?

Doesn't she look cute? Mad Dog can see her as the girl next door, mowing the lawn, taking her little brother to his soccer games and doing the pep team thing.

But she is Senator for the state of New Hampshire now  and Senator Ayotte voted against background checks for gun buyers.

Ms. Ayotte says she does not think the evidence is conclusive, for human activities being responsible for global warming. Mad Dog has to agree. It is rare scientific evidence is ever "conclusive." Beyond the idea the heart pumps blood to the brain, there are not all that many examples of received truth in science.

Senator Ayotte opposed the confirmation of Justice Elena Kagan, saying Justice Kagan was "unqualified," because she held some liberal opinions.

Ms. Ayotte opposes same sex marriage saying, "I absolutely support  marriage as between a man and a woman."  Now there is a bold position. She is for marriage. Next week she'll come out for apple pie. Can a big stand on motherhood be far behind?

Mad Dog, of course, is disappointed in this marriage stance. Mad Dog, personally, does not support homosexual marriage because he does not support heterosexual marriage. Mad Dog thinks the government has no business getting involved in marriage. 

While she opposes government spending, on principle, Ms. Ayotte wound up costing the state of New Hampshire $300,000 by fighting Planned Parenthood over the Parental Notification Act all the way to the Supreme Court of New Hampshire and a Federal District Court judge ordered New Hampshire to pay Planned Parenthood for attorney fees and court costs because Ms. Ayotte's case was so clearly ill founded, noting that every level of court found against her, for good reasons she refused to accept.

Mark Connolly

But none of this would make Ms. Ayotte particularly notable as a Tea Party zealot. What really raises Ms. Ayotte's star rise above the rest is her refusal to pursue or prosecute the miscreants who stole $100 million dollars from unfortunate New Hampshire Investors in a Ponzi scheme called Financial Resources Mortgage (FRM). 
As Mark Connolly, who was a state official heading a board of review, has documented in detail in his book, Cover Up, Ms. Ayotte was so determined to say nothing about this fraud her silence became more than suspicious.  When the crime was exposed Ms. Ayotte insisted she knew nothing, should have known nothing and had nothing to do with anything. After all, she was merely Attorney General of the State of New Hampshire, and she had ignored all the complaints pouring into her office because nobody had pinned her against a wall and shouted in her face. She blamed every other conceivable state agency and organization. But her hands were clean and pure as the driven snow.

Mr. Connolly is not a lawyer, he is careful to say. When asked whether or not Ms. Ayotte could be considered an "accessory after the fact" in the case of FRM, he looks down at his shoe tops and murmurs, "Well, I'm not a lawyer, as I've said."

Ms. Ayotte, of course, is hot on the trail of culpability in the Benghazi attack, looking for guilt anywhere she can find it. She is relentless in her investigation of the alleged linkage between IRS agents and agents of Obamacare to murder conservatives in their hospital beds.  That linkage was first exposed by, of course, Michele Bachmann.

We can feel for Ms. Ayotte because Michele Bachmann, her Doppelganger, has decided to leave Congress. Ms. Ayotte must feel bereft. How many fine afternoons she spent with Ms. Bachmann down at the K Street office of Grover Norquist, munching caramel covered apples and telling tales of their girlhood adventures. Ms. Bachmann regaled all with stories of time on the kibbutz in her wild youth, when she wore those shorts which make all the kibbutz girls look so fetching, and Ms. Ayotte told her own tales about working for an enviornmental law agency. Can you imagine? 

Well, both women tried things in their youth and they learned their lessons without compromising their core values.

So many of Ms. Ayotte's friends are looking for joy outside Washington.  Joe Arpaio, the self proclaimed toughest sheriff in America, an old buddy, is staying in Arizona, for now, looking for illegal alien wetbacks among the cactus. Rush Limbaugh is making too much money on radio to join Ms. Ayotte in the Senate. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) still ask her to their offices for pulled pork sandwiches, but she has been so busy flying back to New Hampshire to deny her vote on the gun background check bill, she doesn't have  time for lunch anymore.

We really have to do something for Kelly. Maybe, we should bring her home from Washington. Everyone would feel better.