Karzai: American Foreign Policy Caused 9/11

Karzai: American Foreign Policy Caused 9/11:

President Hamid Karzai is at it again.
This time he's calling out the U.S. for its fight against the Soviets in the 80s. In that decade, Washington armed the Taliban and funded the building of Madrassas in order to secure victory.
For Karzai though, and many in Afghanistan, the success quickly turned into a fail.
According to the Afghan president, aside from turning Afghanistan into Taliban-ruled chaos, America's course of action also led to the attacks on 9/11.
From the Daily Beast:

“The United States, the rest of the Western world, and our neighbors tried to impose radicalism on our resistance against the Soviet Union,” Karzai said at the 2013 U.S.-Islamic World Forum, hosted jointly by the Brookings Institute and the government of Qatar. “The more radical we looked and talked, the more we were called mujaheddin. The consequence of that was a massive effort toward uprooting traditional Afghan values and culture and tolerance.”

“When the mujaheddin succeeded, the next day … the U.S. and Europe closed their embassies and left and we were left to the wishes of our neighbors and those around us,” Karzai said. “That brought us to the tragedy of September 11 and the destruction of the twin towers and the attack on America, and thus the return of the U.S. and NATO to Afghanistan.”

Karzai went on to say that U.S. policies are aimed at curtailing global terrorism, but end up creating more terrorists in the process.
Karzai's argument isn't a new one. Hillary Clinton in 2009 told Congress that much of the Coalition's problems with militants in Pakistan was a direct result of policies enacted in the 80s.
Watch:

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NSA Surveillance Heat Map: NSA Lied To Congress

NSA Surveillance Heat Map: NSA Lied To Congress: anagama writes "NSA officials have repeatedly denied under oath to Congress that even producing an estimate of the number of Americans caught up in its surveillance is impossible. Leaked screenshots of an NSA application that does exactly that, prove that the NSA flat out lied (surprise). Glenn Greenwald continues his relentless attacks with another bombshell this time exposing Boundless Informant. Interestingly, the NSA spies more on America than China according to the heat map. Representative Wyden had sought amendments to FISA reauthorization bill that would have required the NSA to provide information like this (hence the NSA's lies), but Obama and Feinstein demanded a pure reauthorization of FISA, which they got at the end of 2012." And if you don't mind that you might have your name on yet another special list, you might enjoy this Twitter-based take on the ongoing news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Obama Administration Also Sticking It To Wolves Today

Obama Administration Also Sticking It To Wolves Today:

If you're feeling like the U.S. government is only picking on American humans this week, consider the wolves hunted very nearly to extinction until federal endangered species protection brought them back from the brink. As of today, wolves are on their own again.
Read more...

Who Is Afraid Of Big Brother?

Who Is Afraid Of Big Brother?:
When you hear lots of rhetoric about Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, it’s worth reminding oneself that its themes are infinitely more dire than our current situation. The danger of the abuse of power is omni-present, but as Matthew Steinglass explains, the Orwellian metaphor is too drastic to explain our present unease:

It’s not the totalitarian fear that an agency that knows exactly where we are and who we’re talking to at all times would find it easier to round us up; we’re not a totalitarian state, and in any case, in modern America, if the police want to arrest you, they’ll be able to find you. The legitimate fear boils down to two things. The first is the possibility of illegitimate pressure based on information we didn’t intend to be made public. Everyone has secrets; everyone has things they’d prefer not be publicly known. … This problem is exacerbated by the fact that when we say “the government”, we are actually referring to huge numbers of different agencies and individuals, each of which have their own interests and will use whatever information resources they get their hands on to pursue those interests.
The second is the fear that a pattern of circumstantial activity will lead us to be falsely incriminated, or to suffer administrative penalties that don’t even require any actual indictment.

In the era of the no-fly list, it’s not clear what set of activities are enough to get you to pop up on somebody’s computer screen at DHS and turn your life into a Kafkaesque hassle-dome. Did you visit Qatar, then Pakistan, then Qatar again? Did you spray-paint artistic graffiti on a sidewalk that turned out to be too close to Dick Cheney’s daughter’s house? We don’t know; our security agencies will never tell us. Giving the NSA a vast database of phone calls, and inviting them to search for correlations that might be predictive of terrorist activity, is likely to generate a massive number of false positives.

John Sides notes that “most Americans do not express much anxiety about domestic surveillance”:

 In a recent article (gated), political scientists Samuel J. Best, Brian S. Krueger, and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz reported the results of a 2007 survey in which they explicitly asked whether Americans were anxious, worried, or scared about “the government monitoring the activities of people like you.”  Only about 30% of Americans said that they were “somewhat” or “very” anxious, worried, or scared.  Best and colleagues note that this is more than some commentators and scholars have suggested.  The question, though, is whether it is “enough” to engender a backlash.  I have not seen comparable questions asked in more recent surveys, but my guess is that there is not a great deal more anxiety.

Many people I admire – from Conor to the Pet Shop Boys – find all this horrifying. I still don’t. Maybe it’s because what’s left of my own privacy was destroyed long ago; maybe it’s because I lived under government surveillance as a non-permanent resident for almost two decades. I had to constantly report where I lived, make sure my visa was always in good standing, and go before all-powerful immigration officials at least every three years. I’m now routinely taken aside for extra interviews whenever I enter the US (I’m told my name is on an Irish terrorist-suspect list, but who knows?) and I had to give the government a sample of my own blood in order to stay here. So apart from my blood, my address, my salary, and almost every detail of my professional and private life, I’ve been a free man. After that, maybe meta-data is never going to terrify me.

Why The NSA’s Secret Online Surveillance Should Scare You

Why The NSA’s Secret Online Surveillance Should Scare You:


The reaction to the National Security Agency (NSA)’s secret online spying program, PRISM, has been polarized between seething outrage and some variant on “what did you expect?” Some have gone so far as to say this program helps open the door to fascism, while others have downplayed it as in line with the way that we already let corporations get ahold of our personal data.
That second reaction illustrates precisely why this program is so troubling. The more we accept perpetual government and corporate surveillance as the norm, the more we change our actions and behavior to fit that expectation — subtly but inexorably corrupting the liberal ideal that each person should be free to live life as they choose without fear of anyone else interfering with it.
Put differently, George Orwell isn’t who you should be reading to understand the dangers inherent to the NSA’s dragnet. You’d be better off turning to famous French social theorist Michel Foucault.
The basic concern with the PRISM program is that it is undoubtedly collecting information on significant numbers of Americans, in secret, who may not have any real connection to the case the Agency is pursuing. PRISM sifts through tech giants’ databases to cull information about suspected national security threats. However, since it uses a 51 percent confidence threshold for determining whether a target is foreign, and likely extends to individuals that are “two degrees of separation” from the original target, the chances are extraordinarily high that this program is spying on a significant number of Americans.
A citizenry that’s constantly on guard for secret, unaccountable surveillance is one that’s constantly being remade along the lines the state would prefer. Foucault illustrated this point by reference to a hypothetical prison called the Panopticon. Designed by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon is a prison where all cells can be seen from a central tower shielded such that the guards can see out but the prisoners can’t see in. The prisoners in the Panopticon could thus never know whether they were being surveilled, meaning that they have to, if they want to avoid running the risk of severe punishment, assume that they were being watched at all times. Thus, the Panopticon functioned as an effective tool of social control even when it wasn’t being staffed by a single guard.
In his famous Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that we live in a world where the state exercises power in the same fashion as the Panopticon’s guards. Foucault called it “disciplinary power;” the basic idea is that the omnipresent fear of being watched by the state or judged according to prevailing social norms caused people to adjust the way they acted and even thought without ever actually punished. People had become “self-regulating” agents, people who “voluntarily” changed who they were to fit social and political expectations without any need for actual coercion.
Online privacy advocates have long worried that government surveillance programs could end up disciplining internet users in precisely this fashion. In 1997, the FBI began using something called Project Carnivore, an online surveillance data tool designed to mimic traditional wiretaps, but for email. However, because online information is not like a phone number in several basic senses, Carnivore ended up capturing far more information than it was intended to. It also had virtually no oversight outside of the FBI.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Congress in 2000, “Systems like Carnivore have the potential to turn into mass surveillance systems that will harm our free and open society…Once individuals realize that they have a lowered expectation of privacy on the Net, they may not visit particular web sites that they may otherwise have visited.” Writing in 2004, a group of scholars drew a straight line from this analysis to Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power. “Resembling the ever-present powers of the central watchtower in a prison modeled after the Panopticon,” they wrote “the very fact that the FBI has the potential to monitor communications on a website may lead Internet users to believe that they are constantly being watched.”
We know now that this hypothetical fear about Carnivore has become a reality, courtesy of the NSA. The more people come to see mass online surveillance as a norm, rather than something used only on specific subjects of investigation, the more they’ll tailor their online habits to it. Since people understandably don’t want the government looking at their private information, that’ll mean the internet will over time slowly become less of a place for vibrant self-expression. That should trouble anyone who believes that the best society is one in which people are most free to be themselves in whatever way they find most meaningful. In essence, that should trouble anyone committed to the basic liberal project.
Foucault’s point wasn’t that disciplinary power was intrinsically bad; the idea that, for example, pedophiles might be deterred from accessing child pornography for fear of state surveillance of child porn sites shouldn’t bother anyone. Rather, Foucault warned, disciplinary power was dangerous — used in certain fashions, it could be subtly corrosive of exactly the sorts of freedoms of expression and self-identity that liberal democracies purportedly protected absolutely. The NSA program, especially as its breadth becomes clear, is exactly the sort of overreach his work should warn us against.