The United States of Secrets (review)

Ed Loomis: NSA cryptographer who quit in 2001

The best part of the recent Frontline documentary The United States of Secrets is the telling of the story of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program under the Bush Administration. This takes up much of the 3 hour, two-part film and is presented in, as one reviewer put it, a stylish 'tick tock' manner. 

The film includes little that is new and is better taken as explanatory journalism that provides a primer on the post-9/11 history of NSA surveillance, while making the case that it has gone too far. But it does include extensive interviews with NSA and Justice Department insiders. The main voice of the film is Barton Gellman, anti-surveillance crusading journalist, who has spent the last year or so poring over the documents Snowden leaked. As a counterpoint, former NSA director Mike Hayden appears with some regularity to defend his agency.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the NSA moved aggressively towards the use of new technologies. "Why did you miss this?" they were asked. In response they wanted to know how can we mine big data to collect better intelligence on al Qaeda? The interview with NSA cryptologist Ed Loomis is poignant [Part 1, 14:54]:

I do believe it could have been prevented with revisions to the way we were permitted to operate before 9/11, revisions that I tried to get the general counsel to embrace and wouldn’t — and couldn’t. I tried to get them to make adjustments to how we were operating, how we were permitted to operate, and they wouldn’t do it! I felt this ever since it occurred, that over 3,000 people’s lives were lost. And it’s just a weight that I have been having trouble bearing! It’s— I’m sorry, I— [weeps]

Sincerity is evident in his tear-stained face wracked with pain, even after many years have passed. I can only hope that the NSA continues to be staffed with such quality, but it must be a difficult time for recruiters. 

Loomis had the vision prior to 9/11 to lobby the agency to use a program named ThinThread to monitor foreign-domestic communications traffic. But when he learned in 2001 that they had belatedly adopted it but removed the safeguards on purely domestic communications, he quit -- refusing to be a part of it. And he was just one of a number of dissenters that would include three other NSA employees, a Congressional staffer and a couple of lawyers from the Justice Department. 

The drama peaks when the Justice Department refuses to reauthorize "the program". Surprisingly, Attorney General Ashcroft heroically dresses down White House officials while gravely ill in his hospital bed. Not to be denied, the White House decides it doesn't need the signature of the AG and continues its spying ways, spearheaded as always by the arch Cheney and his gunslinger David Addington.

Eventually a justice official named Thomas Tamm leaked the warrantless program that skirted FISA review and Congressional oversight to the New York Times. But the Times was persuaded by the White House to spike the story and ended up sitting on it for a year until the reporter James Risen threatened to publish it in a book.

Now surely the unrestrained domestic spying must end, no? According to most accounts I am familiar with, yes indeed, the Bush administration was forced in 2007 to rein it in. But Frontline takes a different tack, alleging that the program continued unabated (news to me). Moreover the candidate who campaigned fiercely against it, Barrack Obama, also continued it when he became president in 2009. 

This left me scratching my head. There seems to be little evidence and it appears to contradict what we know from the Snowden leaks about the NSA programs under Obama. Frontline should have done a better job here using the word 'alleged'. If they have evidence that warrantless wiretapping continues, they should come forward with it.

The second part of the film covers the role of Google and other corporations. It also gives a rather humdrum - at least for those keeping up with it - recounting of Snowden's story. It does seem unusual that the NSA spied on telecom companies in their counter-terrorism efforts. Apparently the NSA decided: who does big data better than Google? So they snuck into this data via cookies (not the yummy kind). This raises some interesting questions. 

At the end of the day, in spite of the leaks, we still don't know a lot about these NSA programs. But what we do know (although Frontline gainsays it) suggests that purely domestic communications are more protected and there is now better oversight. This does not prevent speculation, especially among the conspiracy-minded. Social scientist Shankar Vedantam recently noted on NPR that at least 50% of Americans believe in one conspiracy theory or another, and that this is correlated with distrust of authority. Nor does it prevent people from making over-heated claims that 'everything' is being collected and it is being done without checks and balances.

The pot and the kettle - climate change

I couldn't resist the title of Charles Krauthammer's latest column: The myth of 'settled science'. The touchstone for his rant is President Obama's assertion that "the debate is settled". He is far more judicious and scientific in his stalwart stance athwart the fence - refusing to know whether climate change is anthropogenic. His argument rests on an epistemological technicality - that nothing can be known for certain.

The IPCC agrees. Which is why in 2007 they quantified their level of certainty at 90-100% and in 2013 they revised that upwards to 95-100%. The level of consensus among scientists is considerably higher then in the public or political sphere. The number of climate science papers that challenge the consensus is 'vanishingly small', according to a recent study, whereas 97% of those that express opinion are in favor of the consensus.

Dr. K ignores the fact that the vast majority of scientists and every major scientific organization endorse the consensus view. Instead he focuses on one scientist in particular - a rather unscientific survey if you ask me. His subject is no less than his eminence Freeman Dyson, who has criticized some of the assumptions in climate simulations. But Dyson, who is 90, has not done serious climate work since the 70s. In a 2009 interview he said:

My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against the way those people behave the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.

Lost in the shuffle is that Dyson actually agrees with the consensus!

And what about the pause in global warming over the last 15 years?

Even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?

There has indeed been a 15 year pause in the rise of the earth's surface temperature, but not in any other key indicators of global warming. The heat is going into the oceans. Sea levels and polar melting have not paused. In fact sea level rise, due to heat expansion of seawater, has accelerated over the same period.

But Dr. K's treatment of the science is just a sideshow for his main agenda which is to criticize President Obama's "whoring" climate propaganda. I kid you not:

But whoring is whoring, and the gods must be appeased. So if California burns, you send your high priest … to offer up … a burnt offering called a "climate resilience fund".

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Propaganda goes both ways of course in politics. But to suggest that we should wait for 100% certainty in anything before we plan for the future is surely folly.