Author Archive
Flynn’s ‘Recalibrating Homeland Security’
The May/June issue of Foreign Affairs focuses on “The New Arab Revolt” (also the focus of an event at Cato a month ago). Some of the articles have a touch of datedness because they refer to the continuing pursuit of Osama bin Laden. But not so Stephen Flynn’s “Recalibrating Homeland Security,” ($) a terrific discussion of how the federal government’s post-9/11 policies have failed to meet the challenge of terrorism. Flynn throws a sentence at the living icon of al Qaeda, but the insights of his article are well worth taking in.
Most insightfully, Flynn theorizes just why it is that “nearly a decade after al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Washington still lacks a coherent strategy for harnessing the nation’s best assets for managing risks to the homeland—civil society and the private sector.”
During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union required “a large, complex, and highly secretive national security establishment.”
To an extraordinary extent, this same self-contained Cold War-era national security apparatus is what Washington is using today to confront the far different challenge presented by terrorism. U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, the border agencies, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are subsumed in a world of security clearances and classified documents. Prohibited from sharing information on threats and vulnerabilities with the general public, these departments’ officials have become increasingly isolated from the people that they serve.
This helps explain TSA’s effrontery with travelers, the “secrecy reflex,” and the ongoing risk of overreaction. Flynn stresses that focusing on resiliency will do our country much better than those brittle, fear-backed political demands for 100% protection.
“Read the whole thing” is a bloggic accolade that I use sparingly, recognizing the limits on readers’ time. At a brief 10 pages, despite the hurdle of having to log in/buy access to the article, Flynn’s “Recalibrating Homeland Security” gets my: Read the whole thing.
House Approps Strips TSA of Strip-Search Funds
The fiscal 2012 Department of Homeland Security spending bill is starting to make its way through the process, and the House Appropriations Committee said in a release today that “the bill does not provide $76 million requested by the President for 275 additional advanced inspection technology (AIT) scanners nor the 535 staff requested to operate them.”
If the House committee’s approach carries the day, there won’t be 275 more strip-search machines in our nation’s airports. No word on whether the committee will defund the operations of existing strip-search machines.
Saving money and reducing privacy invasion? Sounds like a win-win.
FTC Advert: Cut Our Budget!
An insert that ran in the Washington Times this week didn’t say directly that the Federal Trade Commission’s budget should be cut. But a few short steps get you there.
The FTC-produced insert—a 16-page, color brochure appearing in a number of papers—is titled: “Living Life Online.” It’s aimed at teaching children how to use the Internet, with articles titled: “Sharing Well With Others” and “Minding Your Manners.” An ad on the back points kids to an FTC Web site about advertising called Admongo.gov, and little smart-phone insets contain factoids like:
DID YOU KNOW? Teens text 50 messages a day on average, five times more than the typical adult (who sends or receives 10 text messages a day).
Well, I have some factoids to share, too:
DID YOU KNOW? The U.S. Constitution provides for a federal government of limited, enumerated powers (and teaching kids about the Internet is not one of them).
Here’s another:
DID YOU KNOW? The federal government has had massive deficit spending in recent years, of $459 billion in FY2008, $1.4 trillion in FY2009, $1.3 trillion in FY2010, and $1.5 trillion in FY2011 (which is a huge damper on economic recovery).
It’s time to make serious budget cuts, and a government agency that seeks to replace parenting with government propagandizing to children is a great opportunity to do that.
Cato’s Downsizing Government project has been making its way through the major agencies, but don’t overlook the little ones. President Obama’s budget called for the FTC to spend $321 million in fiscal 2012. Zeroing that out would save a bunch, not only in direct expenses but in the dead-weight loss to the economy and consumer welfare symbolized by the FTC’s awful “Man Restraining Trade” statues.
Righting the Balance
In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment cut an important tie in the Constitution between state legislatures and the Congress. In the original Constitution, states were empowered to choose the senators who would represent them in Congress. The result? Senators had an allegiance to the state government as much as the people of the state they represented.
Why does this matter? Well, today—with direct, popular election of senators—there isn’t much of anyone looking after state legislatures in Congress. Accordingly, the federal government continually tries to turn states into administrative outposts of the federal government rather than respecting them as the independent political powers they’re supposed to be.
In program after program, remote federal officials set policy and raise taxes, then require states to administer the programs. When things go a-mess, people don’t know whether it’s the federal government or the state government they need to talk to. Political accountability suffers, contributing to the big morass of government in the United States today.
Now, it wasn’t all sweetness and light before the Seventeenth Amendment rejiggered our governmental system, but it isn’t sweetness and light now either.
So yesterday, constitutional amendments were introduced in both the House and Senate to right the balance. House Joint Resolution 62 and Senate Joint Resolution 12 would propose an amendment to the Constitution giving states the right to repeal federal laws and regulations. Under the amendments, when two-thirds of the states ratify repeal of a federal mandate, it would come off the books.
The idea is to again right the balance between the states and the federal government. Most of its effect would be upstream: the Congress would be a lot more circumspect, knowing that the states could reject its laws if they went too far. But occasionally states would get a head of steam and lop out a federal law that they find disagreeable. The federal legislature would have to be a little more humble.
The federal government and its officials are pretty remote from the people compared to state legislators. Some way to right the balance would be good, whether it’s this specific idea, repeal of the Seventeeth Amendment, or some other. The “Madison Amendment” would work toward the same end by empowering states to propose constitutional amendments the way the Congress now does.
In this modern era of national transportation, high-speed communications, and global markets, many people believe that it’s natural for regulation to gravitate to the national level (often not considering that the logical end is global regulation). But technological change has not altered the rule that government closer to the people—or self-rule by the people themselves—is best. We pay a high price every day in this country for having cut a tendon in the constitutional structure with the Seventeenth Amendment and direct election of senators. It’s good to see efforts out there to right this balance.
Want Privacy? Nevermind. We Want to Censor!
Senator Chuck Schumer rounds out a trifecta of bloggable moments from the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law’s hearing this morning.
Ignoring the subject of the “mobile privacy” hearing, Schumer queried the witnesses from both Google and Apple on whether they will accede to his demand that they reject certain “apps” on Android phones and iPhones. The applications Senator Schumer dislikes alert people on their mobile phones to the locations of DUI checkpoints.
Senator Schumer says these apps “allow drunk drivers to evade police checkpoints,” but that statement fails to include other parties who might rightly wish to avoid police checkpoints—such as law-abiding citizens who wish to live free in this country, for example.
Recently, I landed at Harford’s Bradley International Airport late on a Friday night, heading to a Saturday morning meeting in Northampton, Massachusetts. From my shuttle bus to a remote rental car area, I saw a DUI checkpoint. After I completed the arrangements for my car, I asked the agent how I might leave so as to avoid the checkpoint. I wanted neither the delay nor the impingement on my sober liberty that a police checkpoint represents. He cheerfully directed me to a route I could freely travel.
Senator Schumer wants to prevent conversations like this from taking place on a mass scale, facilitated by advanced technologies. He stands a good chance of succeeding—RIM has already given in—because Google and Apple have repeat business before the federal government. Senator Schumer can raise their regulatory costs far higher than the value of allowing minor, but controversial apps on their systems.
If Senator Schumer succeeds, our right to freely and efficiently communicate about police activity will diminish in a way that is effectively insulated from First Amendment challenge. Privacy and freedom be damned. There are drunk drivers to catch.
Want Privacy? We Start by Blinding You!
As I noted earlier, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law held a hearing this morning entitled: “Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy.” In it, Sentor Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) engaged in a fascinating colloquy with Google’s Alan Davidson.
Blumenthal pursued Davidson about the year-old incident in which Google’s Street View cars collected data on the location of WiFi nodes and mistakenly gathered snippets of “payload data”—that is, the data traveling over open WiFi networks in the moments when their Street View cars were passing by.
Some payload data may have contained personal information including passwords. Google has meekly been working with data protection authorities around the world since then, hoping once and for all to delete this unneeded and unwanted data.
Blumenthal was prosecutorial in tone, but made a classic prosecutor’s error: He asked questions to which he didn’t know the answers.
Isn’t “payload data” extremely valuable for mapping WiFi networks?, queried Senator Blumenthal.
Davidson’s answer, and the consensus of panelists: Ummmm, no, not really.
(If you were to map pay phones, it wouldn’t matter whether people were talking on them, either, or what they were saying.)
Despite looking foolish, Senator Blumenthal persisted, asking Davidson whether collecting “payload data” should be illegal. Davidson demurred, but it’s a fascinating question.
Should it be against the law to collect data from open WiFi networks? That is, to observe radio signals passing your location on a public street? Should the government determine when you can collect radio signals, or what bands of the radio spectrum you may observe? What should you be allowed to do with information carried on a radio signal that you inadvertently capture?
If the government should have this power, the same logic would support making it illegal to collect photons that arrive at your eyes or that enter your camera lens. The government might proscribe collecting sound waves that come to your ears or microphone.
Laws against observing the world around you would certainly protect privacy! Let the government blind us all, and privacy will flourish. But this is not privacy protection anyone should want.
To understand privacy, you have to understand a little physics. As I said in an earlier comment on Google’s collection of open WiFi data:
Given the way radio works, and the common security/privacy response—encryption—it’s hard to characterize data sent in the clear as private. The people operating them may have wanted their communications to be private. They may have thought their communications were private. But they were sending out their communications in the clear, by radio—like a little radio station broadcasting to anyone in range.
Trying to protect privacy in unencrypted radio broadcasts (like public displays or publically made sounds) is like trying to reverse the flow of a river—it’s a huge engineering project. Senator Blumenthal would start to protect your privacy by blinding you to the world around you. Then narrow exceptions would determine what radio signals, lights, and sounds you are allowed to observe…
Want Privacy? Increase Government Surveillance!
This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law had a hearing entitled: “Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy.”
Among the witnesses was Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein from the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. Weinstein made a gallingly Orwellian pitch: If you want privacy protection, increase government surveillance.
From his written statement:
ISPs may choose not to store IP records, may adopt a network architecture that frustrates their ability to track IP assignments and network transactions back to a specific account or device, or may store records for only a very short period of time. In many cases, these records are the only evidence that allows us to investigate and assign culpability for crimes committed on the Internet. In 2006, forty-nine Attorneys General wrote to Congress to express “grave concern” about “the problem of insufficient data retention policies by Internet Service Providers.”
Without more customer data retention by ISPs, and without greater government access to this data, the government won’t be able to prosecute crimes, some of which threaten privacy, Weinstein said in his spoken comments.
So there you have it. Turn more data over to the government so we can protect your privacy. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Transparency: The Inside and Outside Camps
Late last week, the Project on Government Oversight‘s Danielle Brian took a little umbrage at a Huffington Post piece by former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Beth Noveck, who had been implementing the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative until she recently returned to New York Law School.
Brian’s piece suggests a slight schism in the transparency community, between what I believe are the “insider” and “outsider” camps. Brian leaves to the end a crucial point: “[C]an’t the two camps in the open government world peacefully co-exist? There’s just too much work to be done for us to get bogged down in denigrating each others’ agendas.” They most certainly can.
Noveck was a bit dismissive of the open government movement as perceived by much of the transparency community. “Many people, even in the White House,” she wrote, “still assume that open government means transparency about government.” Actually, Noveck continued, open government is “open innovation or the idea that working in a transparent, participatory, and collaborative fashion helps improve performance, inform decisionmaking, encourage entrepreneurship, and solve problems more effectively. By working together as team [sic] with government in productive fashion, the public can then help to foster accountability.”
Visualize the difference between these two approaches: open government as a tool for public oversight and open government as a tool for public participation. When open government is about public oversight, the wording connotes the public looking down from above on the work its servants are doing. When open government is about collaboration, the public is at best an equal partner, allowed to participate in the work of governing. Noveck’s unfortunate language choice treats accountability as a kind of dessert to which the public will be entitled when it has donated sufficient energies to making the government work better.
The administration’s December 2009 open government memorandum predicted this divide. In calling for each agency to publish three “high-value data sets,” it said:
High-value information is information that can be used to increase agency accountability and responsiveness; improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations; further the core mission of the agency; create economic opportunity; or respond to need and demand as identified through public consultation.
As I noted at the time, it’s a very broad definition.
Without more restraint than that, public choice economics predicts that the agencies will choose the data feeds with the greatest likelihood of increasing their discretionary budgets or the least likelihood of shrinking them. That’s data that “further[s] the core mission of the agency” and not data that “increase[s] agency accountability and responsiveness.” It’s the Ag Department’s calorie counts, not the Ag Department’s check register.
Noveck wants us to put the calorie counts to use. Brian wants to see the check register.
There is no fundamental tension between these two agendas. Both are doable at the same time. The difference between them is that one is the openness agenda of the insider: using transparency, participation, and collaboration to improve on the functioning of government as it now exists.
The openness agenda of the outsider seeks information about the management, deliberation, and results of the government and its agencies. It is a reform (or “good government”) agenda that may well realign the balance of power between the government and the public. That may sound scary—it’s certainly complicates some things for insiders—but the “outsider” agenda is shared by groups across the ideological and political spectra. Its content sums to better public oversight and better functioning democracy, things insiders are not positioned to oppose.
I think these things will also reduce the public’s demand for government, or at least reduce the cost of delivering what it currently demands. But others who share the same commitment to transparency see it as likely to validate federal programs, root out corruption, and so on (a point I made in opening our December 2008 policy forum, “Just Give Us the Data!”) There are no losers in this bet. Better functioning programs and reduced corruption are better for fans of limited government than poorly functioning programs and corruption.
Forward on all fronts! The existence of two camps is interesting, but not confounding to the open government movement.
House Leadership’s Transparency Leadership
Last week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wrote a letter to the House clerk calling for new data standards that will make Congress more open and accountable. Spot on.
The THOMAS legislative database was a huge improvement when it came online in 1995 at the behest of the new Republican Congress, but the Internet has moved on. Today, publishing text or PDF documents is inadequate transparency. It’s more important to make available the data that represent various documents and activities in the legislative process. “Web 2.0″ will use that data various ways to deliver public oversight.
I’ll have much more to say in the near future, but here are the kinds of things get to full transparency, which the House leaders’ letter appears meant to imply:
- Specific Formats: Documents and data must be published in specific formats that allow Web sites, researchers, and reporters to interpret and use text and data easily and automatically. The SEC recently began requiring businesses to report financial information in a format called eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). This will improve corporate transparency and enable investors to make better decisions. The public should have equally good information about government.
- Flagging/Tagging: Within these data formats, key information must be “flagged” or “tagged” to highlight the things that matter: spending proposals, agencies and programs affected by a proposed law, recipients of federal money, existing statutes that may be amended, and so on. Flagging/tagging will make the relevance of documents and information immediately apparent to various interests.
- Bulk Access and Real-Time Updates: Documents and information must be available in bulk, so that new users have full access, and it must be updated in real time, so the public can “see” changes as they happen. It also must be version-controlled so the “story” of a policy’s formation or execution can be told. The public should never have to learn what is in a bill after it passes.
- Authoritative Sources: The mishmash of data sources that now exist must be replaced by authoritative sourcing. Congress, the White House, federal agencies, and other entities must publish and maintain their documents and data. The public must know once and for all where the definitive versions of documents and data will be.
Disclosure—simply “putting bills online”—was the beginning of the legislative transparency project, not the end. The many transparency Web sites out there have the bills, but they don’t have the data they need to help the public get their government under control.
As I suggested some months ago, House Republicans are positioned to take the transparency mantle from President Obama and the Democrats. Web 2.0 thought leader Tim O’Reilly—no Republican cheerleader—has already called the race, Tweeting last week, “The ‘R’s in Congress are doing better on this than ‘D’s did.” Assuming action consistent with this letter, the House Republicans will indeed soon have the transparency lead.
Can I Have My Airport Back Please?
Even while it was a rumor that President Obama would announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed, Americans began to digest the ramifications, asking, for example, “can I have my airport back please?”
Pleasing though it is to have in contemplation, the question is premature. Students of terrorism, such as those who attended our 2009 and 2010 counterterrorism conferences, know that the killing of bin Laden will have little direct effect on the network he spawned. Its indirect, discouraging effect on terrorism is something I mused about in an earlier post.
What about the effects on the rest of us, the people and actors in our great counterterrorism policymaking apparatus?
Osama bin Laden’s survival helped shore up the mystique of the terrorist supervillain, which has fed counterterrorism excess such as the Transportation Security Administration’s domestic airport security gauntlet. Now that bin Laden is gone, the public will be more willing to carefully balance security and privacy in our free country. By a small, but important margin, courts will be less willing to indulge extravagant government claims about threat and risk.
My friends in the national security bureaucracy may honestly perceive the contraction in their power as carelessness about a threat that they have dedicated their professional lives to combating, but the Declaration of Independence touts security only once, and freedom twice, in the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The counterterrorism debate continues.
Dead: ‘Al Qaeda’s Leader and Symbol’
What delightful news President Obama delivered last night! Osama bin Laden is dead—”al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” as the president called him.
Bin Laden was the founder of the al Qaeda network, which executed the devastating 9/11 attacks just under a decade ago. Thousands of Americans lost their lives in those attacks, and Americans lost the sense of security and peace of mind that had taken root in the post-Cold-War era. The 9/11 attacks catalyzed two wars, costing tens of thousands of lives and well over a trillion dollars in U.S. expenditures. Personally, bin Laden gave me a darker decade than I would have had, both professionally and personally.
When I learned the news of bin Laden’s death, my first thought was of the implications for our policy. Before too long, I realized I was just plain happy about it. I took some champagne over to my neighbors, and we enjoyed watching the returns on TV.
My Cato colleagues will be parsing many details of this event over the days to come. Among the fascinating dimensions: the substantial Abottabad, Pakistan compound where bin Laden was apparently in hiding; the role of Pakistan’s security service, the ISI; the brilliant success of the intelligence effort and the attack on the compound; the near-term threat that al Qaeda affiliates may try to avenge the death of bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden failed to reach any of his geopolitical goals. He did not topple any Middle East dictator toward the end of establishing a Muslim caliphate. Indeed, the people of the Middle East have begun toppling their own dictators toward the end (we earnestly hope) of establishing more liberal societies. (We examined the role of the Internet in Middle Eastern freedom movements at a Cato on Campus event a few months ago.)
Few beyond the kids that made their way to the White House Sunday night believe that bin Laden’s death mean it’s “over” for al Qaeda and terrorism. Indeed, a key question is whether bin Laden’s death will give the U.S. and its allies an upper hand against terrorism, and for how long.
In this, the issues are the same as they have always been. As we noted in the introduction to the Cato book, Terrorizing Ourselves: “Terrorists have motivations, there is a strategic logic to their actions, and examining these things can reveal strategies that frustrate and dissipate their efforts.”
The killing of bin Laden begs the question: How, and how well, will his death signal to terrorists that they are better off desisting from attacks and choosing other behaviors?
There will be many opportunities in the days and months ahead for American political and media figures to signal to terrorists and potential terrorists that theirs is a lost cause. The death of bin Laden simply initiates that effort.
This week, watch the news around bin Laden’s death not only with your own apprecation, relief, or other feelings in mind. Consider how events will be perceived in the communities around the world from which terrorists have come.
How various groups around the world interpret the death of “al Qaeda’s leader and symbol” will dictate our security from terrorism going forward.
You can review our two major conferences on counterterrorism policy here and here.
And the Winner Is . . . !
Melissa Yu is the winner of first prize in the middle school category of C-SPAN’s StudentCam 2011 competition. Her video, “Net Neutrality: The Federal Government’s Role in Our Online Community,” is an eight-minute look at the push for regulation of Internet service with an emphasis appropriate for students on how the three branches of government have each been involved in the story up to now.
If you haven’t been following along, or if you want a refresher on net neutrality regulation, here’s a better video than I could have produced in eighth grade. Or now. Congratulations, Melissa Yu!
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