Category Archives: Commentary

All written commentary.

NSA and AT&T cooperated closely since 1985

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From “AT&T Helped N.S.A. Spy on an Array of Internet Traffic” in The New York Times:

Fairview is one of its oldest programs. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications. An analysis of the Fairview documents by The Times and ProPublica reveals a constellation of evidence that points to AT&T as that program’s partner. Several former intelligence officials confirmed that finding.
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In September 2003, according to the previously undisclosed N.S.A. documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the N.S.A. said amounted to a “ ‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the Fairview program forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system” at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. Stormbrew [another program] was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic separate from the post-9/11 program.

In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.

 
One of the other issues discussed is that the NSA has been scooping a lot of emails (or fragments of emails) of people unrelated to intended searches because the emails are transmitted in blocks of information pieces before being re-assembled at the destination, so the target emails are probably mixed with everyone else’s emails at the interception points.

There was also a lot of discussion in the article about how AT&T and Verizon were making infrastructural repairs for the NSA overseas.

NSA

Emergency restriction areas re-appear in Turkey

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

Al-Monitor: “Is Turkey’s ’emergency rule’ back?”

As of this writing, 37 areas in Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Tunceli, Kars, Agri, Hakkari, Siirt and Sirnak provinces had been declared provisional security zones. The law allows bans from 15 days to six months. Nobody can enter those zones without permission, and doing so could mean fines and imprisonment.

Idris Baluken, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party Parliamentary Group, asked for a parliamentary inquiry about the decision. In a petition to the parliamentary speaker, Baluken said the decision is illegal.

“With this decision for forbidden zones, what is suspended is democracy,” Baluken said. “Rule of law is being violated. In addition to the political ramifications of the decision, there are also the legal aspects. Basic rights of residence, traveling and communications recognized by the constitution are violated. The ‘contract’ between the people and the public authority of law is violated by the authority.”

Although most of the forbidden zones are those where the PKK is known to be active, two areas on the Syrian border were also included on the off-limits list.

 

Previously from AFD on this topic:

– “Turkey’s Erdogan demands total information awareness”

The surge is a lie. A really dangerous lie.

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The mythology of the Iraq War “surge” has been driving me bonkers for years — since at least as far back as 2009 or so, I think; I can’t remember exactly when I started getting into huge arguments with Republicans about it, but I remember a lot of arguments.

The surge was self-evidently a total failure even then, if you measured it by George W. Bush’s own stated objectives: suppress the violence long enough for a political solution to be reached.

As usual, like they did at every point in that war, the administration moved the goalposts to include only the first half (violence reduction) after the second half didn’t work (no political solution) — and many Republicans thus incorrectly believed it had been a success (because the violence was briefly suppressed). Unfortunately, it was an indivisible twin mandate, with the second being vastly more important and meaningful. Achieving the first part without the second can only be read as an expensive and bloody prolonging of the existing failure.

In a comprehensive article for The Atlantic entitled “The Surge Fallacy”, Peter Beinart makes the same point I’ve been making for years now — and extends out the hugely frightening consequences of the myth taking hold in place of the reality so quickly:

Above all, it’s the legend of the surge. The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it.
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In the late 1970s, the legend of the congressional cutoff [as a purported cause of failure in Vietnam]—and it was a legend; Congress reduced but never cut off South Vietnam’s aid—spurred the hawkish revival that helped elect Ronald Reagan. As we approach 2016, the legend of the surge is playing a similar role. Which is why it’s so important to understand that the legend is wrong.
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In 2007, the war took the lives of 26,000 Iraqi civilians. In 2008, that number fell to just over 10,000. By 2009, it was down to about 5,000. When Republicans today claim that the surge succeeded—and that with it Bush won the war—this is what they mean.

But they forget something crucial. The surge was not intended merely to reduce violence. Reducing violence was a means to a larger goal: political reconciliation. Only when Iraq’s Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government would the country be safe from civil war. As a senior administration official told journalists the day Bush announced the surge, “The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen.” But although the violence went down, the reconciliation never occurred.
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The problem with the legend of the surge is that it reproduces the very hubris that led America into Iraq in the first place.

 
He then cites various harebrained Republican proposals to invade and occupy pretty much every country in the region based on the premise that the Iraq surge was a huge success and more troops = more success.

Less discussed perhaps is how President Obama, while taking much of the wrongful blame for “losing” a war that was already long lost in Iraq, seems to have managed to validate much of the mythology by trying to apply the surge approach (twice?) in Afghanistan with costly non-results.

But that ship has already sailed. In contrast, there is no need for the United States to make the same errors elsewhere going forward in the coming months and years. Misunderstanding what happened in Iraq after 2006 is likely to ensure a repetition of catastrophic mistakes.

Pictured: A December 2007 suicide car bombing in Baghdad during the surge. (Credit: Jim Gordon via Wikimedia)

Pictured: A December 2007 suicide car bombing in Baghdad during the surge. (Credit: Jim Gordon via Wikimedia)

Burma conservatives overthrow reform rivals in military party

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Here at Arsenal For Democracy, beyond my general interest in government transitions, we’ve recently been keeping an eye on the rickety Burmese political transition to democracy ➚, on the not-so-off-chance ➚ that the Myanmar military would eventually decided to overthrow its own party and scrap the transition (or water it down ➚ to pointlessness). Some version of that appears to have begun this week. At the very least, an internal coup of some kind occurred, with coercive shakeups in the ruling party and cabinet.

It’s still unclear whether the active-duty military brass or rival ex-military politicians ordered the action by security forces, but the military-aligned USD Party found its top leaders removed from party positions at gunpoint on Wednesday:

Sources within the headquarters of the USDP – which is effectively a political extension of the military – said Shwe Mann, party chairman and speaker of the parliament, had been deposed and was under police guard.
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“Police entered the party compound last night. Since then no one was allowed in or out,” Toe Naing Mann, Shwe Mann’s son, told Agence France-Presse. “So-called guards” were also outside his father’s residence in the capital, Naypyidaw, he said.

Several trucks of soldiers and police officers arrived at the compound at about 10pm on Wednesday, sources said. “We have not been allowed to move around since late yesterday,” said one party member.

The USDP general secretary, Maung Maung Thein, was also forced from his post. “They called me and told me I don’t need to come to the office anymore,” he told Reuters.
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Christian Lewis, a political risk analyst for Eurasia Group, said a faction in the party loyal to [President] Thein Sein appeared to have finally moved decisively against Shwe Mann after a long-running power struggle.
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“I think primarily that is the ruling party’s internal affair, but the internal struggle of the ruling party can threaten the democratisation process of [Burma],” [local political commentator Yan Myo Thein] said. “Because of the power struggle and incidents inside the ruling party, the upcoming general election can be postponed. If the election is postponed the process of democratisation in Myanmar will be delayed.”

 
The ruling party issued a statement saying that the removal was strictly limited to party postings (such as the chairmanship and general secretariat) and nobody had been deposed from governmental offices — which seems like a delicate way of splitting hairs to apply a veneer of legality to what is essentially a low-key coup by party conservatives. (One partisan claimed that 200 security people were on site when the party held a meeting on the firings.) The USDP did not clarify why its politicians had been fired from the party leadership.

Presidential spokesman Ye Htut did offer this veiled commentary to Voice of America:

“Any party will have to go about changes when its leadership deviates from the party’s policies, ignores the party members’ will, prioritizes personal profit over the country’s interests and creates factionalism within the party.”

 
One interesting angle is that Parliamentary Speaker Shwe Mann (one of the people removed from his party post in this week’s purge by soldiers and police) had — in the eyes of conservative military brass and ex-military figures — reportedly become too politically close with Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the official parliamentary opposition since 2012 (and a longtime, globally-recognized pro-democracy activist). New York Times:

Mr. Shwe Mann, like many politicians in Myanmar today, is a complex and somewhat compromised figure. As a leading member of the former junta, he was complicit in the persecution and economic mismanagement that left millions in poverty and kept thousands in prison for their political beliefs.

But as speaker, he sought to bolster the power of Parliament and pushed legislation opposed by the military that would have decentralized the country’s hierarchical administration, a legacy of military rule. His partnership with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was tenuous, but some saw hope for a grand bargain between the military and democratic forces.

 
The candidacy filing deadline for the key November elections is today, and Speaker Shwe Mann may struggle to gain ballot access without his party role. The question I posed in January, when it made my list of 15 elections to watch in 2015, remains:

Burma: Is the country really transitioning to democracy or is the transition all a façade by the new military-derived leaders to end the country’s devastating isolation?

 
Flag-of-Myanmar-Burma

Turkey’s Erdogan demands total information awareness

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

Recep-Tayyip-Erdogan

BGN News: “Turkey’s Erdoğan asks village administrators to spy on citizens for him”

“In order to continue its operations in a determined and forceful manner, the state has to determine what is going on in every house via intelligence gathering,” Erdoğan said during a meeting on Wednesday. “Who is in which home? What is going on inside? My muhtar will calmly, and in an appropriate manner, come and notify the district governor or the police chief.”
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The last time muhtars were instructed to gather intelligence for the state was during the period of martial law following the 1980 military coup, a bloody period marred by severe state repression and severe infringements of the rule of law.

 

NYT editorial against Pentagon’s new journalist rules

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

arsenal-bolt-logo

“The Pentagon’s Dangerous Views on the Wartime Press” – The New York Times Editorial Board:

The manual warns that “Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying”
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Authoritarian leaders around the world could point to it to show that their despotic treatment of journalists — including Americans — is broadly in line with the standards set by the United States government.
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Even more disturbing is the document’s broad assertion that journalists’ work may need to be censored lest it reveal sensitive information to the enemy. This unqualified statement seems to contravene American constitutional and case law, and offers other countries that routinely censor the press a handy reference point.

 
You can also read much more at the recent post CPJ: “In times of war, Pentagon reserves right to treat journalists like spies”