Espionage/"Intelligence"

It’s an old axiom – “If an extraterrestrial (we used to say ‘Martian’ but we know what is in store for Mars – terraforming, toxic bombs of sulfur, microbes and viral, self-replicating bots, Avatars of purple epidermis and femurs as long as an NBA star’s jump shot) were to just drop into a city or plop right down in the middle of a Congressional hearing …  or land into a football stadium two minutes before halftime … or light into some Lazy Boy with the nuclear family watching TV, well, you get the idea – that Martian or extra-galaxy being would be blown away by our species.

An American citizen who is a member of al-Qaida is actively planning attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials say, and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy issued last year. (From the Associated Press)

In 1928, Ho Chi Minh was in Thailand while his Chinese wife, Zeng Xueming, remained in Canton. He sent her this letter:

From the day we parted, already more than a year.
I miss you with such anguish, it needn’t be said.
Borrowing rosy wings, I send a few lines to reassure you.
Such is my desire, and I wish your mother ten thousand good lucks.
Clumsily yours.

In his 7,000-word State of the Union speech last month, President Obama waited 5,700 words before stintingly devoting a single sentence to the subject of surveillance. He didn’t mention the rogue NSA, didn’t name specific reforms, adding only that the important thing was that “public confidence” in the “vital work” of the intelligence community was maintained. This cavalier approach to the topic of the year belies the administration’s essential disinterest in the public interest. This perspective was reified in the last two weeks by the voices of the American intelligence community.

In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley Blade Runner Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as “the acting president”, was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters”.

If an attack were to be launched on America in the very near future, it is my belief that America would not know that attack were about to be launched.
— Otis G. Pike, New York Times, Oct 18, 1975

Recently I have rediscovered the Stone page of the New York Times editorial section where guests philosophers are invited to write on important issues of our time. That a philosopher’s opinion today would actually have importance for the public at large is somewhat of a mystery, largely because the role of the philosopher as cultural critic or “public intellectual” has largely been usurped by the technological class: individuals whose inventions have largely transformed the way in which we interact as social beings.

In the midst of bipartisan bashing of Edward Snowden in a Senate intelligence hearing on January 29, some stood up for truth in the face of repeated lies and evasion from head intelligence chiefs.
Before the hearing began, activists from CODEPINK stood up holding signs reading ‘Stop – Killing, Lying, Spying’ and called for the firing of James Clapper, Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, Director of the CIA, and James Comey, Director of the FBI.

It will only get worse, but the last few days have been interesting in the accumulating annals of massive surveillance. Britain’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, GCHQ, has been placed under the legal microscope, and found wanting.
The legal briefs who have been advising 46 members of the all-party parliamentary group on drones has handed down a sobering assessment of the GCHQ mass surveillance program: It is, for the most part, illegal. In some cases, it may well patently criminal.

Edward Snowden’s revelations have given the public insights into a world that leads a shadowy existence. He has opened a vista to a shadow world that threatens humanity with a new form of totalitarianism, all-encompassing and therefore unique. Compared with this new totalitarianism, the German Stasi and the Soviet KGB were amateurs.