Bradley Manning Trial

--Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on 
 --What's Going On, Marvin Gaye 

I'm as mad as hell
and I'm not going to take this anymore! 
--Network (1976)
____________________

The National Security Agency moved swiftly and forcefully today to remind its employees of its longstanding zero-tolerance policy on conscience, warning that any violation of that policy would result in immediate termination. 

“When you sign on to work at the N.S.A. you swear to uphold the standards of amorality and soullessness that this agency was founded upon,” said N.S.A. director General Keith B. Alexander. “Any evidence of ethics, decency, or a sense of right and wrong will not be tolerated. These things have no place in the intelligence community.” 

To enforce the policy, General Alexander said that once a month all N.S.A. employees will be wired to a computer to take full inventory of what is going on in their minds: “We want to be sure they are spending their free time playing Call of Duty, not reading the Federalist Papers.” 

-- fr. N.S.A. Enforces Zero-Tolerance Policy on Conscience, Andy Borowitz

_________________

The Bradley Manning trial which began this week is not getting much press; some 75% of mainstream news outlets will not be covering the trial, and the press gallery remains mostly empty.

Meanwhile, the United States government continues perfecting its adversarial electronic surveillance posture against both the press and the rest of us. It is apparent that secrecy and the diminution of our privacy rights are a daily event in our brave new world, and we the marching morons continue in lockstep throwing our rights away by the fistfuls.

As Juan Cole wrote, "The US Government has been gleefully getting access to your private correspondence and that gave the Government Class an inherent superiority over ordinary Americans. Manning announced that turnabout is fair play, and we should be able to see their correspondence, too, especially given the war crimes in Iraq. That's why they're trying to execute him."

But as U.S. intelligence agencies perfect their methods of spying on us -- with our complicity -- there will always be the few like Edward Snowden and Manning who refuse to forbear their part in the voyeurism. Adrian Lamo who turned Manning in, under oath described Manning as having a sort of oceanic moment of awareness in which he realized the brutality we do to others, we do to ourselves. At this thought Manning felt suicidal, but instead of acting on that he revealed to us the source of the impulse to self-immolation.

We did not do much with the data other than to shuffle it off with a time-worn, "Things happen in war."

Once in a while there's a Howard Beale who dares to yell out the open window, but we don't mollycoddle our whistle blowers. Most of us go along to get along, just so happy for the Costco membership, the (hopefully one) mortgage and the 10-day family vacation. But there is another Bradley Manning out there now releasing secret court orders and PowerPoint presentations showing government tendencies to overreach its constitutionally-mandated boundaries.

To that person, whomever he may be -- we will say, "thank you for your service."

Big Brother

--Schot, De Volksrant

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

 --PRESIDENT OBAMA, 

defending government surveillance programs.

Well your nobody called today
She hung up when I asked her name
Well, I wonder
Does she think she's being clever

--Your Nobody Called Today, Sylvia

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

--Fourth Amendment

_______________________

 
If your consumer life extends beyond cash purchases at Sears and Safeway, someone's got tabs on you. They sold the Internet to you as a World of Warcraft and other fun games, but now we know that the price of our amusement comes at the cost of the State's declared need for security in the form of data mining. But is the effort worth the cost?

President Obama tells us to get over ourselves; nobody's listening.  But he sounds schizophrenic when he says the government both is and is not surveilling our phone conversations. Everyone is hedging, with tech companies conceding to surveillance programs -- but "just a bit". Sorry -- you cooperate or you do not; the act cannot be mitigated.  And the trawling is done so quickly now as to obviate the need for justification of targets. David Bromwich gives a good critique of the "Total Protection Government" HERE.

Even if you accede to your government's claims that snooping over your shoulder saves lives -- "What need I worry if I'm doing nothing wrong?" -- there are problems with electronic intelligence (ELINT) and intelligence in general. Usually, such a wide net collects too much data, and proof is never provided to justify the violation of our privacy. If the intrusion into our privacy is so crucial to fighting to terrorism, show us the data. The shelf life of these data intercepts is brief, and are designed only to develop link analysis and association matrices -- "mail trees" in pre-computer days. 

However, the efficacy of these programs was based upon stable, non-mobile targets. Terrorism is based upon dynamic membership with rapid movement, implying the need for international cooperation between police agencies versus a unilateral isolated National Security Agency (NSA) effort. History shows manifold failures of such isolated intelligence: President George W. Bush did not synthesize the terror warnings he was provided in early August of 2001; the U.S. Navy fleet was in berth at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. 

Intel is useless if it is so highly compartmentalized and classified that it is not disseminated down to the action level. If these data collections were so effective, why doesn't law enforcement use them to eliminate the spree shootings we find so horrifying, for example? No criminal or terrorist venture reaches the execution phase without giving off intel indicators that the event will take place.

We are not children, though we may be useful idiots if we believe there is congressional oversight for these intrusions into our technological lives. We must define for ourselves what is intel and what is its shelf life.

Moreover, what do we do with it, --both when it is viable, and when it becomes rancid?