Exiting the maze

Perhaps the tide is beginning to turn. Perhaps the US will in time manage to haul itself back from this perilous course. It is in any case interesting that support for change is slowly drifting into the mainstream. Per Jay Rosen, whose recent article sparked mine: "When the CEO and editor-at-large of Foreign Policy magazine is saying: it took me a while, but now I see why Snowden was necessary… it means the elites in Washington are waking up to something big."

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post did D.C. residents a big favor earlier this week when he courageously acknowledged the service Edward Snowden did for the United States… and for the global debate on rights and privacy in the big data era. I have myself been too slow to recognize that the benefits we have derived from Snowden's revelations substantially outweigh the costs associated with the breach. It is time we move from the kind of Patriot Act thinking that overstates security threats to such a degree that we subordinate our basic freedoms to something more consistent with our historical systems of checks and balances." ("Declaring an End to the Decade of Fear" David Rothkopf – - Foreign Policy)

Rothkopf goes further and suggests it's time to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and the Directorate of National intelligence and return their essential functions to whence they came. These two behemoths were, as he put it, "born of fear."

Yesterday (Friday the 9th), the President chimed in. Much of his press conference was devoted to the uneasy balance between civil liberties and surveillance. He portrayed Snowden's revelations as illegal, unnecessary and potentially destructive given that: he (the President) had already "called for a thorough review" and signed an executive order providing whistleblower protection to the intelligence community pre-Snowden; and, "there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred".

If we pay attention to actions rather than words, these contentions look shaky. Back in late June, post-Snowden, USA Today interviewed former NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe at length. Each had initially gone through all the appropriate channels to report their misgivings and only went public when those efforts failed completely. The results weren't pretty; Drake, for example, was initially charged with 10 felony counts with potential prison terms totalling 35 years, only to have them dropped on the eve of the trial. The presiding judge was not happy, calling the government's conduct "unconscionable".

Each was convinced Snowden did the right thing in not following normal whistleblower procedures (if such a thing exists anymore). They thought their own experience provided more than enough evidence, but if that weren't enough developments under the "Insider Threat Program" ought to do the trick.

Nevertheless, Obama did make some promises yesterday that he may to some degree be held to this time around, including this one in answer to a question.

What I'm going to be pushing the IC [intelligence community] to do is rather than have a trunk come out here and leg come out there and a tail come out there, let's just put the whole elephant out there so people know exactly what they're looking at.

We shall see. I'm not particularly optimistic, but at least there's now a modicum of two-way traffic around this debate and the political pressure seems unlikely to dry up any time soon.