Friday links! Birthday edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

Cake-picture-1

I never thought I would live to see it, but people all over the world can use an electronic network to view pictures of unsuccessful cakes. Today is my birthday. I am 36, which means my opinion is no longer valuable re: movies, popular music or men’s shaving products. I took my brother to the airport at five this morning and drove home with the dim light of the 18-35 year-old demographic growing brighter ahead of me. It was an imperfect analogy, frankly, and I felt the tendrils of despair. Then I remembered that, in the words of MC Lyte or possibly Da Brat, age ain’t nothing but a number. It’s just a number and a social arbiter and a quantifiable reminder of my inexorable progress toward death, but on the plus side, everyone has to do what I say. Today is Friday, so read my arbitrary opinions and marvel at how I made it this far.

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Okay, they are looking at the content of your emails

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 2 Comments
Traitor!

Traitor!

The New York Times announced today that, contrary to earlier assurances from the executive branch, the NSA is looking at the contents of large numbers of Americans’ emails. Don’t worry, though: they’re only looking at emails and text messages that originate or are received overseas, and they’re only searching for information related to specific targets. The word “target” appears in an alarming number of reassurances about this program. While we’re trusting implicitly the institutional structures of America, there’s also this paragraph from the Times report:

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency “seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target.” The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked “Top Secret” amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.

Which is understandable, because why would journalists notice the one marked “Top Secret?”

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FISC court builds body of secret law

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 7 Comments
But this guy is the dick for telling you about it.

But this guy is the dick for telling you about it.

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal ran stories about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this week, and I urge you to read them. The FISC, which the Times insists on calling the “FISA court” after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, has established a body of case law that significantly expands the federal government’s domestic surveillance powers, and it’s all secret. You’re not allowed to know what the FISC determines the NSA and FBI can legally do, because that would help terrorists. In June, when the Senate asked NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander whether FISC would ever make some of its rulings public, Alexander said:

I don’t want to jeopardize the security of Americans by making a mistake in saying, ‘Yes, we’re going to do all that.’

So “no,” then? Here’s a link to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” just in case Gen. Alexander is reading this. We know someone in his office is.

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Friday links! Forced perspective edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

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I think it’s fair to say I went a little craze-balls regarding the NSA thing. I maintain that’s because secretly collecting millions of Americans’ phone records is a historically craze-balls thing for the US government to do, but there are good arguments on the other side. Probably, the NSA doesn’t care about anything besides preventing the President from coming down into their spy basement and personally blaming them for another terrorist attack, and most of our metadata is collected by the waste basket. Almost certainly, the hypothetical Fourth Amendment value of our Facebook friends is not so ethically compelling as an explosion-free Boston marathon. Today is Friday, and the week recedes behind us in forced perspective. Won’t you take a step back with me?

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The case against secret government

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 28 Comments

Guy Fawkes

My grandfather once said that you know you’re doing something wrong when you don’t want to tell anyone about it. Unless the NSA is using our phone records and social media data to plan an awesome surprise party, there is something suspect in the claim that domestic surveillance was kept secret for our own good. Secrecy is antithetical to democracy. Tim Weiner argues as much at Bloomberg, where he points out that presidents from LBJ to GWB have demonstrated that you can’t trust the executive. At Esquire, Charles Pierce puts a simultaneously finer and more vulgar point on it when he asks that the federal government please tell him what it is doing in his name.

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