The Rise of the Surveillance State

In June 2013, The Guardian and Edward Snowden broke the story of how the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting massive quantities of consumer and citizen data for the purposes of gathering intelligence on potential terrorist threats. In recent months and weeks, it has been disclosed that the NSA has its hooks in nearly every major Internet Services Provider and data firm, including Google1,2.

In recent weeks, Senate hearings have taken place, and the director of the NSA, Keith Alexander, has repeatedly lied to the Senate about the scope of the NSA's data mining3. Furthermore, internal NSA documents instruct NSA employees to use 9/11 to justify the actions of the agency4.

9/11 was 12 years and 2 months ago. As an essay in Der Spiegel, the famous German newspaper, notes,

"It is often assumed that intelligence agencies are worlds of their own, and that they sometimes act on their own authority. However, they are also an expression of the societies in which they exist, especially of their fears. In other words, it is quite possible that there are not just paranoid agents, but also paranoid democracies that act in hysterical ways out of fear. They are characterized by a strong freedom myth, which leads to paranoia. It, in turn, poses a threat to freedom. The United States is currently in a late phase of this cycle."5

The German nation itself has been deeply offended by the actions of the NSA, following revelations that Chancellor Merkel's own personal cell phone had been tapped6.

Other, similar abuse of the NSA's surveillance apparatus is reportedly rampant: The Guardian again published a story on how one employee stalked nine women with the power granted to him by the NSA apparatus:

A National Security Agency employee was able to secretly intercept the phone calls of nine foreign women for six years without ever being detected by his managers, the agency's internal watchdog has revealed.
The unauthorised abuse of the NSA's surveillance tools only came to light after one of the women, who happened to be a US government employee, told a colleague that she suspected the man – with whom she was having a sexual relationship – was listening to her calls.
The case is among 12 documented in a letter from the NSA's inspector general to a leading member of Congress, who asked for a breakdown of cases in which the agency's powerful surveillance apparatus was deliberately abused by staff. One relates to a member of the US military who, on the first day he gained access to the surveillance system, used it to spy on six email addresses belonging to former girlfriends.7

If the stated intent of the NSA's surveillance programs are to gather actionable intelligence on terrorist threats, then why spy on Angela Merkel? I can only conclude that the NSA has grown far beyond its stated raison d'etre,  and has become a machine whose sole purpose is to feed itself. It should thus be immediately dissolved.

Some in our government are pushing for the reformation of the NSA, believing--albeit falsely--that it would be possible to transform the culture inside the NSA into something other than what it inherently is. By its very nature, the NSA must, in order to fulfill not only its stated purpose but also its own diseased hunger, harbor a culture that exhibits both an extreme paranoia, as well as a cavalier attitude toward the autonomy of others (citizens) and the law itself. No matter what sanctions are placed on the NSA, the power, thanks to its inherent attitude, will absolutely be abused to such an extent that it places the very ideals of the free world--personal autonomy and freedom of the press, among others--in extreme jeopardy.

I had a brief discussion with someone who attended the anti-surveillance protests in Washington DC, and I asked him what he thought of the NSA. What he said struck me as a little misguided: His objection to the actions of the NSA were based on the stated legality of its activities; if we are to be spied on, that would be acceptable so long as the gross intrusion is codified into law. His position reminded me of Socrates' acceptance of his fate in The Crito, where he turns himself in to the Greek government because, in his mind, he chose to live there and implicitly accepted their rule, even if it means that he should die.

This does not work for two reasons: Codified or not, the NSA's activities are a blatant contradiction to our democratic ideals, and severely impinge on our fundamental rights as citizens and human beings. Writing them into law does not make them any less egregious. The second, and arguably more important reason, is that the NSA's actions affect nearly every single human being on the planet, and thus it is absolutely impossible to "choose" whether or not to accept the NSA's existence. If the NSA can decide to tap Angela Merkel's phone (Germany is [was, now] a strong ally of the United States), who could possibly be above suspicion? Beyond that, the NSA gathers data from ISPs and Internet services companies, so innocent people are caught up in the storm at the source and would thus really have to make significant changes to how they send and receive traffic over the Internet.

The Guardian had published an article on October 8th, 2013 detailing the actual effectiveness of the NSA's mass surveillance apparatus, concluding that the apparatus is not at all effective in gathering actionable intelligence. It writes,

The admissions Leahy forced out of the NSA heads and DNI Clapper that they have been systematically overstating the effectiveness of bulk collection are consistent with the only other official assessments of bulk collection. The sole publicly available FISC opinion (pdf) that assesses the impact of bulk collection from 2006 to 2009 was unimpressed that:
"[T]he government's submission cites three examples in which the FBI opened three new preliminary investigations of persons in the US based on tips from the BR metadata program. [Emphasis mine --MiSaNtHrOpE] Judge Walton wrote that this achievement "does not seem particularly significant"8.

 Here, we can conclude that the NSA is not living up to its stated purpose, and calls into question the justifications for its existence and continued activity. The terrifying part about this particular revelation is that it proves that my earlier summation regarding its behavior is indeed correct. The almost non-existent "success rate" (insofar as stopping terrorist threats is still a criterion of success, as opposed to how many people it can possibly ensnare in its system) clearly proves that either the NSA is woefully incompetent and unable to accurately distinguish from good and bad intelligence (and therefore warrants dissolution for ineffectiveness), OR that its publicly stated goal, to produce actionable intelligence on terrorist threats, is not its real mission (therefore also warrants dissolution for the danger posed to democracy).

It is worth noting that other nations--including Germany, France, and Great Britain--all have their own respective variants of the NSA. Great Britain's GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) most notably attempted to destroy computers belonging to The Guardian as the NSA leaks were being published9. The Guardian notes that the GCHQ's eavesdropping activities were funded by the United States. It is not known yet just how far the NSA has gone to align itself with other similar organizations within allied nations.

The solution is clear: The NSA, as I have explained, must be dissolved. Its culture, its very existence, is anathema to the ideals of the free world, and places every single human being on the planet at risk for being falsely identified as a threat to the United States government, even where no evidence to that effect exists. I will not venture a guess as to what the NSA truly wants, as I know such dystopian fantasies are often the tools of hyperbole, but I will say that whatever it is, it cannot help us. Attempting to alter its culture is fundamentally misguided, as the nature of such an apparatus is inherently paranoid and dismissive of the rule of law.

1) http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googlers-say-f-you-to-nsa-company-encrypts-internal-network/

2) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-reports-nsa-secretly-intercepts-data-links?CMP=twt_fd&CMP=SOCxx2I2

3) http://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2013/06/06/did-intelligence-officials-lie-to-congress-about-nsa-domestic-spying/

4) http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/30/revealed-nsa-pushed911askeysoundbitetojustifysurveillance.html

5) http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/paranoia-has-undermined-united-states-claim-to-liberal-democracy-a-932326.html

6) http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-scandal-berlin-restricted-by-close-relationship-with-us-intelligence-a-931503.html

7) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/nsa-employee-spied-detection-internal-memo

8) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/08/nsa-bulk-metadata-surveillance-intelligence

9) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

How Bullying Works

I was inspired to write about this after seeing the Bully (2012) documentary. The documentary made me incredibly upset and angry because a lot of things that happened to the kids featured had actually happened to me when I was a kid.

It was clear from the start, and it was something I was discussing a little bit with a friend of mine earlier today that school administrations have absolutely no idea whatsoever what bullying actually is and how it works. What I mean by this is that administrators and teachers do not have the conceptual structure to even comprehend the power dynamics of bullying and are therefore are utterly incapable of confronting the problem in a meaningful way.

At one point in the documentary, the principal of one of the schools catches two kids in the courtyard arguing and having a confrontation. Both of them appear to be equally involved, but when the principal intervenes, the bully apologizes. The kid who is being oppressed, however, knows what the bully is and stands his ground, causing the principal to turn on him, even after the kid cites a whole stream of previous conflicts,  even associated police reports. The principal's response is simply, "Stay away from him."

In my own life, in middle school, I remember one incident in Social Studies class when I was being harassed by all of the kids in my immediate vicinity. I took it upon myself to write their names down and gave the list to the principal. The principal came back to me and told me that they had said that I was just as mean as they were (5 against 1, how could I be the oppressor?).

These two events illustrate one of two major problems: The bully (or bullies) know exactly how to play the game and appear less culpable and less sinister than they really are. It takes a certain degree of psychopathy to pull it off, but it works every time.

Even when a child complains about an incident or series of incidents, teachers and administrators consistently fail to connect the dots and form the whole picture. They only see one or two incidents, and the conditions and punishments are specific to that single incident; nothing is done to attempt to protect the child from future encounters. Otherwise, administrations are so impotent and/or unwilling that the child is forced to take matters into his own hands, and s/he ends up getting in trouble for his actions. Never do the police nor the school administration ever own up to the fact that these incidents were in fact reported, and never are these incidents ever deployed as a mitigating factor in the punishment of the unwilling vigilante.

Late in the documentary, we meet a young girl, an academic superstar, whose torment is so severe that she feels the need to bring her mother's pistol onto the bus and is forced into the juvenile justice system by a draconian local justice system that does not care about what brought her to bring that pistol on the bus that morning. Thankfully, by the end, we discover that she is acquitted of all charges, and is consigned to a mental  institution for a few months.

On the other side, in the documentary, we have Alex, a young kid who looks a bit different from the other kids. For this, he gets nothing but an ever-escalating bombardment of death threats and beatings on the way home from school. Nobody likes him, and we watch this young kid go from a normal boy to a severely depressed state. We watch what happens when kids don't fight back. At one point, the producers of the film decide to show their footage of what's going on on the bus to his parents because of an immediate danger to his life.

Watching what happens when the parents, who are absolutely terrified for their child, receive nothing but sweet-nothings from the principal, is absolutely devastating. What ensues is a more or less fruitless investigation in which a few children are punished. The guidance counselor and Alex finally meet:

Guidance Counselor: "Why didn't you come to me earlier?"
Alex: "You wouldn't do anything about it."
GC: "What about when [Redacted] sat on your head? Did he do it again?"
Alex: "No, but he still did other stuff."

This is the other major problem with how school administrations view bullying. Bullying is not a single isolated incident. It is the continued harassment, belittlement, and isolation of another human being. It is primarily about power and separation. With a single bully, the bully is trying to make himself feel empowered at the expense of another kid, typically one who is smaller in size than he. This is the one that can play administrators and teachers as though they were Beethoven on the harpsichord, and he makes alliances with them by playing them against the authenticity and true knowledge of the oppressed, who desperately wants something to be done against the real enemy at any expense.

The oppressed will not seek reconciliation because he knows that the bully is acting invariably in bad faith, and he is seeking, above all, for his torment to end. The bully, in turn, is indeed acting in bad faith, and knows that reconciliation--especially when he knows that the administration views the incident in question as equal--gets him out of punishment and in addition allows him to continue to harass his target in the future.

Despite this, and despite the laundry list of actually relevant incidents that could be cited by the oppressed, the administration does not in fact view these previous incidents as relevant; its only concern is the present incident, completely ignoring their history at its own peril, and, ultimately, at the peril of the boy who cried for help.

The bully is a friend to the administration, the oppressed is not. The oppressed is deliberately made to be an outsider, an Other, in order so that a) he will not have any support, and b) the bully can have his way with him. Often, the rest of the student body--in addition to the administration--will at best turn a blind eye, or worse, join in with the bully and wage a swift school-wide campaign to isolate the target. No amount of pleading by parents can reverse what has been done to him by the entire school infrastructure. Only when something truly terrible happens to the child in question is anything ever done to mitigate the damage--if possible.

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I am writing this chiefly because more than a few of my friends are teachers. I don't believe that any of them have received, or will ever receive any kind of meaningful official training on the subject, no matter what kind of measures are enacted. I want to empower them, to help them understand what is going on in their classrooms when they see something questionable. I want to bestow upon my friends who are teachers the power to prevent what happened to me from happening to someone under their charge. They may face an intractable superior, beholden to certain dependencies, or who claim their hands are tied. However, they have more power than they think they do. Simple things help:

Separate the kids in your class if you see any harassment. Force them to change seats.

If you notice a pattern, ask both of them to stay after class. DO NOT ask for reconciliation. Let them explain themselves. The oppressed will, if he is not yet totally affected by continued torment (you will know when he is), use this opportunity to tell you what's going on. You as a teacher may actually want to dismiss the bully at this point, which may seem counter-intuitive (bullies must be punished, after all), but this gives you an opportunity to let the oppressed know that he has your support. I would choose this option because the oppressed needs someone to help him much more than the bully needs to be punished.

If you decide that the situation is dire, based on the testimony of the oppressed, ask who his other teachers are and contact them. Inquire about any kinds of behavior directed at the oppressed in his other classes, and ask them to look out for him. If his other teachers report similar behavior, you can either a) contact his parents, or b) contact the administration. You may want to contact his parents before you contact the administration. If all of his teachers have corroborating intelligence, going to the administration could be a viable option. At the very least, notify his parents so that they can help their child.

Also, notify the parents of the bully. The bully may come from a dysfunctional family and his parents may not care that their child is a monster, but it is worth a shot now that bullying is a national issue. Of course, the bully could just as well manipulate his parents and deflect the negative attention as he does with the other adults he interacts with. It's your call.

As a teacher, I would imagine that going to the administration and requesting an investigation might be at least a little more fruitful than parental harassment, especially if all of his teachers are present and their stories corroborate.

Even if nothing can be done about the bully, do not give up. Instead of focusing your efforts on punishing the bully if the administration proves impotent, focus on helping the oppressed. As I have stressed, it is  more important to support the oppressed than it is to punish the bully. Have the oppressed stay after class a few times to talk about things. Earn his trust. Listen to him. These are very simple things that make a small but not insignificant impact on how he views his situation. I remember one teacher I had in high school who was absolutely phenomenal and helped me a great deal when I was severely depressed in 11th grade. She got me into my school's Teens Need Teens Core program Senior year. You may also want to suggest seeing a guidance counselor or, better--if your school has one--the school psychologist.

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Stopping bullying is not all about punishing the bully, which is where all of society's efforts to solve the problem are directed. It is more important to prevent irreparable psychological damage to the oppressed by letting him know that he is not alone, even if nothing can be done about the bully.

The bus is a No Man's Land, a terrifying hell in which the oppressed has only himself to rely on against assaults from all sides. But small things can be done to make his trip to and from school less dangerous. The oppressed should always sit in the front of the bus right behind the bus driver, and driver should be asked to give continuous weekly informal reports on what happens on the bus. The best thing to do would be to ask the bus driver to make those reports both to the principal and to the oppressed's teacher-ally so that people who have the power to help him know what is going on and at the very least suggest strategies to help him deal with his oppressor(s) or, better, either get him on another bus, or get him off the buses altogether. A carpool with neighbors, for example, would be an excellent alternative.

Remember, the focus is not on punishing the bully; rather it is helping to assure the survival of the oppressed.

If the oppressed is in a lower grade--is not a senior--please do not forget about him when the year ends. Inquire after him when the next year starts, and if you know he is still having problems, contact his other teachers, and, if you need to, ask one of them to look out for him and periodically check up on him.

Even if the administration cannot do anything about the bully, teachers have the power to help the oppressed. This is the more important--and the completely ignored--other half of our national anti-bullying movement. You don't have to control students' behavior (the impotent principal in Bully pleads that she can't). You just have to make one life a little bit more bearable.

What Exactly Does Freedom Mean in America?

Last week, I saw Lincoln with my dad. I didn't particularly care for the film, but it was interesting to see the debates in the House of Representatives, between the anti-slavery Republicans, and the Southern Democrats. The debate, it seemed, centered upon one crucial parallax:

To the anti-slavery faction, freedom means that one man is entitled to personal autonomy and to be free of undue social pressure in his endeavors; to not be conquered or enslaved by another. In this view, slavery is nothing less than a blight on the American ideal precisely because under the slave system, there are a class of people who are subjugated by men who are free under the law.

The slavers, however, believe that freedom means being endowed with the power to subjugate others: If I do not have the power to exert my will over another human being regardless of consent, I am not free. This is why the Southern Democrats can claim with a straight face that Lincoln is a tyrant. It is, specifically, this perversion of the meaning of freedom that continues to exist and exert its influence on American social and economic policy, particularly in the past 5 years.

The interesting part of this entire dynamic is that the people who believe in this warped notion of freedom completely understand what it means for themselves as individuals, and this enters the equation during the discussion regarding firearms, as we shall see.

The latter concept of freedom has continued to dominate the contemporary Republican party throughout Obama's presidency, and has manifested itself in three key areas: Darrel Issa's hearing on religious freedom and contraception, the laissez-faire reaction to the economic crash of 2008-2009, and, most recently, the gun control debate following Sandy Hook.

In the first example, those who testified regarding the requirement for religious institutions that provide healthcare for their employees fiercely protested the rule that they must also cover female contraception, specifically, the pill. The panel consisted entirely of male religious leaders, and collectively argued that their religious freedom would be jeopardized if they had to provide care for something they themselves did not believe in. This, of course, would put them in a position of power over others and infringe on the rights to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness of their employees. Not surprisingly, this was the exact same argument deployed by medical care providers who happen to be of a certain faith and refuse categorically to discuss reproductive health with their patients. This, obviously, puts their patients' lives at risk simply to satisfy the comfort zone (if not the conscience, if that patient happens to die) of a given healthcare provider. [As a side-note, I don't see how anyone who is particularly squeamish about bodily functions can be a competent healthcare provider. Maybe that's the point.]

On the economic front, we often hear corporate leaders claim that certain economic policies or members of the Senate aim to restrict their freedom or kill their business altogether. They have become used to and entitled to certain privileges that place them in the same kind of position described above, where they do indeed feel entitled to infringe upon the liberties both of their employees and the rest of society (taxpayers), and often go so far as to threaten opposing parties should they fail to get what they want. This has nothing to do, furthermore, with the size of the companies, or how large their cash reserves are: Many of the proposed policies do very little to actually impact the structure of the company, and only seek to curb irresponsible behavior (which also to a great degree prevents board members from having too much power over others' financial well-being; ie using it to trade mislabled subprime mortgage packages and crashing the economy). Obama and Elizabeth Warren are thus tyrants for trying to put more power in the hands of consumers and thus greatly limiting the amount these large financial institutions have over the global economy. Without this immense power over the entire global economy--a power I believe no single person or group of people should ever have--the CEO of AIG (which planned to sue the federal government over the terms of the bailout) can claim that his freedom is being infringed.

The ensuing gun debate following Sandy Hook is an excellent example of this twisted notion of freedom. If gun rights were restricted in any way, someone else would be able to exploit me and I would have no recourse with which to defend myself. Guns rights advocates fully understand that were they not able to possess military-grade firearms, someone else will be able to exploit them. They live in a truly tribalistic, Randian nightmare in which everyone they do not know or is not like them is out to destroy them. This is why the answer for anyone who is not a shill for a paid guns rights PAC is to arm more people. It is interesting, because the South--where the largest guns rights populations exist--knows first-hand how other human beings are subjugated, because they were doing it for so long. They are terrified that it could somehow happen to them in turn.

There was a popular conspiracy theory--I don't know how prevalent it is today--that there would eventually be a war between white people and black people. For the South, a region so dominated by slavery and racism (the latter continues to exist to a great degree). Django Unchained was a terrifying potential reality, and is a latent fear that still exists in some form.

To make this fear at least mildly less racist, they use the pretext of school shootings to vent their paranoia without explicitly mentioning the racial undertones in the history of their beliefs, and appear to totally accept the notion that adults and children should be able to shoot each other in the open. I saw an article on io9.com  last week about a South American clothing designer that made Kevlar children's clothing1. We would rather have our children go to school in full plate than to do something about guns.

On the other hand, what is a gun, anyway? A gun is an item of naked power. It represents, in its totality, absolute power over the life and death of another living thing, the power to let live, or to end life. The South is currently losing economic ground, as a series of devastating education measures, a failing Texas government, and devastating natural disasters, from Katrina to the Texas drought, widespread obesity, as well as the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs take their toll on the region, as well as having been dominated in the 2012 election (a trend that even many Republicans fear will continue). What else is a people so disenfranchised going to turn to in order to make a claim to a better life as the rest of civilization leaves them behind? What else is going to get them what they need the fastest? The gun. That is why they are so afraid. A society that once prospered on the backs of slaves is getting exactly what it deserves, and the Second Amendment is the only thing it has left to make a tangible impact on their world.

1) Bulletproof Jackets For Kids