Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy and National Security’ Category
The Survival of Dumb Ideas
On the National Interest‘s Skeptics blog, I discuss Steve Walt’s article in the latest Foreign Policy magazine: “Where Do Bad Ideas Come From?” Walt explains why discredited ideas about foreign policy survive despite all the study and debate we give to them in this country. He is really talking about failure in what John Stuart Mill calls the “marketplace of ideas“—the tendency of free speech to bring debate that promotes good ideas and demotes bad ones, driving public policy toward improvement.
My take is that Walt’s impressive analysis has two flaws. First, he thinks it wise and possible to free policy debate from the clutches of interest groups. Second, he fails to appreciate how politics differs from academic semimars. Ideas about policy are generally the product, rather than the cause, of differing preferences about policy. They are tools to rally political support, not hypotheses that their authors are eager to test. Political debate tends to reify divisions rather than unify people around mutally-acknowledged truths.
From my post:
Walt writes that “this problem with self-interested individuals and groups interfering in the policy process appears to be getting worse.” That sentence carries the quixotic and undemocratic assumption that there once existed another kind of policy-making process, one free of self-interested actors, where all participants honestly argued in service of the national interest, and that those halcyon days can be restored. But a marketplace of ideas without self-interested groups and actors would be one robbed of the lion’s share of intellectual capital. Self-interest is the engine of policy-making in democracy, not its enemy.
Walt thinks that either the public or the politicians that serve them are like judges, weighing contending views to arrive at wise policy; or like academics, studying ideas to arrive at preferences, which they simply enact. A more accurate description of policy-making comes from pluralism (pluralist scholars include David Truman, Edward Banfield, Charles Lindblom, James Q. Wilson, and Robert Dahl), which imagines a more intense, but less efficient, marketplace of ideas. The American government, pluralists tell us, is an arena for the competition of interest groups (ideological or economic), manifested in pressure groups and governmental agencies. Collective action theory explains that only these concentrated interests will be reliably motivated to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Those interests’ contention is our politics; its current outcome is policy. Presidents preside over this fray, but their control is far less than we generally imagine. They accept the status quo far more than they change it, and having accepted it, they sell that compromise as their own policy, using ideas to match it to the national interest.
Bad ideas then persist because they are useful weapons in policy-fights. Policy-makers are more like lawyers than judges, using arguments about how their preferred policies serve the national interest to win adherents. Walt cites the resurrection of domino theory to illustrate his argument, arguing as if its intellectual defeat would prevent the policies it justifies. Instead, if no one believed in the domino theory, hawks would simply employ another argument about why we should fight in Afghanistan, or wherever we are next.
A Nobel Peace Prize for Julian Assange?
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Does WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, as Norwegian parliamentarian Snorre Valen urges, calling him “one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency”?
My response:
A Nobel Peace Prize for Julian Assange? Please! He’s a fence for stolen goods. Transparency has its place. But nations, like individuals and private organizations, need to conduct their business with varying degrees of confidence. Look at Egypt at the moment, where American, Egyptian, and other officials are conducting delicate negotiations in the context of a potentially explosive situation. Only the most naive would expect those to be fully transparent. That’s why all nations have strict rules about classified materials.
Is classification abused? Of course it is. In my experience in government, far too much was classified, often for the wrong reasons. But that’s hardly ground for abandoning classification. And if we have a classification system, it has to be enforced. If the alleged source of the WikiLeaks trove, Pfc. Bradley Manning, is proven guilty, he should be fully punished. It’s unclear whether our law can reach Assange, but surely he should not be honored, whatever incidental good may have come here and there from his duplicity. Not only would awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize dishonor the prize and so many who’ve received it before him, but it would contribute to undermining the very system of confidential communications that is essential to peace. The very idea should be put to rest, in the name of peace.
Jeff McKay: Cavalier About Violating Metro Riders’ Liberties, Spending Taxpayer Dollars
In a blog post of righteousness last week, I assailed Fairfax County (Virginia) Supervisor Jeff McKay for his failure to comprehend basic security principles as they pertain to the Metro system.
A Washington Examiner reporter retrieved McKay’s response:
[H]e laughed. But he quickly defended his stance, saying that random searches were recommended by the U.S. Transportation Security Association, the D.C. Police, and WMATA management.
“I trust the intelligence agencies when they tell me there’s a reason to do this,” he said.
McKay admitted that bag searches likely wouldn’t stop someone intent on causing mass destruction to the Metrorail, but that they will make passengers much more aware of security concerns.
Supervisor McKay was not flip about these issues at the meeting of the Metro board. He spoke about the bag search policy in terms of his moral duty to make the Metro system safe.
But it turns out he can’t defend the validity of bag searches as a security measure. He admits he’s just doing what he’s told, and he sees it as a way to keep Metro riders on edge. The taxpayer money spent on bag searches is pure waste. Interesting moral universe.
Protests in Egypt Continue
The new Egyptian cabinet was sworn in today amidst a seventh day of protests across the country. For the White House, the continual tweaking of their response to the crisis, and declining to call for Mubarak to step-down, has left many in Egypt and the region wondering if the United States does in fact want to see the arrival of democracy to Cairo, or if it is simply content with allowing the status-quo to remain, with minor reforms. Or perhaps they are just waiting for the chips to fall where they may.
This illustrates the conundrum facing the Obama administration. Over at The Skeptics, I examine this a bit further:
The Obama administration is stuck with a policy not entirely of its own making – decades of U.S. taxpayer support for the Mubarak regime – but it also seems trapped by the dominant worldview in Washington that is preoccupied with finding a solution to every problem in the world. This global view flows from deeply flawed assumptions about the likelihood of a worst-case scenario transpiring in every case, and then exaggerating the impact of that worst-case on U.S. security. In many instances, the impact is presumed to be nearly catastrophic. In actuality, they almost never are.
Might Egypt be an exception? It is an important country in its own right, traditionally a center of the Arab world. Its population of 80 million people is larger than that of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon combined. Egypt is the second leading recipient of U.S. foreign aid, behind only Israel, and it straddles one of the most important choke points in the world, the Suez Canal. Given its size, influence and location, there is the possibility that this spreads elsewhere. Protests have also broken out in Yemen, Algeria, and Sudan. The Saudis and Jordanians are nervous.
So how should the U.S. respond? In the short-term, the U.S. government needs to strike a balance, and not be seen as pushing too hard for Mubarak’s ouster; but Washington should not anoint a would-be successor, either. The message should be: this is for the Egyptian people to decide.
Click here to read the entire post.
A Pacifist Finds Her Call to Arms
The ongoing war of words between Glenn Beck and Frances Fox Piven over the prospect of workers rioting in the streets isn’t just a two-way dance. Stanley Kurtz has provided insight into Piven’s work over the years in his book, Radical-in-Chief, and a prominent figure of the left, Barbara Ehrenreich, has fired back. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Ehrenreich said that the reaction to Piven’s writings shows that America is “no longer a democracy but a tyranny of the heavily armed.”
Ehrenreich’s position contains a kernel of truth, but the real armed tyranny is the one Piven seeks to impose.
We have a window into Ehrenreich’s thoughts on violent struggle from her book on the subject, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. I attended a presentation Ehrenreich gave during my senior year of college precisely because of the contrast it might provide to my own views. Ehrenreich was a pacifist seeking to understand the passions that drive war so that they might be stifled or stamped out, while I was about to take a commission in the Army and head off to Infantry Officer Basic Course and Ranger School.
Ehrenreich traces man’s capacity for conflict back to the time when he was not at the top of the food chain. Early man’s violent instinct grew out of necessity; the need to build primitive weapons and fight in groups to kill natural predators, primarily lions and other big cats.
A rallying instinct lies at the heart of a successful hunt. Members of a hunting party must be willing to lay down their lives for each other, facing a beast with speed and natural weapons that would overwhelm each man individually. The bond produced by this group experience surpasses anything that develops on the football field. Indeed, combat is the only place where the phenomenon exists today.
In Ehrenreich’s view, this rallying instinct made the move from a hunter-gatherer society possible, but it also facilitated conflict between tribes and nations. Tribes rallied around the skin of an impressive kill or a totem symbolizing their most-feared predator when in conflict over land and natural resources.
As we began to aggregate our self-interests into larger groups, the totem became a flag, and the rallying instinct became nationalism or patriotism. The political class, the villains in Ehrenreich’s telling of the tale, could then use patriotism to manipulate the masses toward war.
While Ehrenreich takes a few feminist detours along the way, her theory on the origin of a rallying instinct I understood — patriotism — rang true. Ehrenreich’s assertion that we all have a remnant of this tribal instinct is consistent with thinkers across the spectrum. Blood Rites may make an appropriate companion to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
Ehrenreich admitted defeat at the end of the presentation. She noted that while some of the best of man’s nature is brought forth by war — think of a grunt throwing himself on a grenade to save his brothers in arms — she saw no way to turn these selfless instincts against war itself.
This is why Ehrenreich’s defense of Piven is a bit disappointing (though not surprising — both are Honorary Chairs at the Democratic Socialists of America). Piven’s citation of the riots in Greece as an example for American workers to follow is hardly an example of non-violence in action.
More disturbing is Ehrenreich’s blindness to — or obfuscation of — the fact that government is organized violence, and a push for government to do more is not a pacifistic stance. The rule of law is the threshold at which the government will spill blood and confiscate treasure. Changing the rule of law to guarantee equality of outcomes, not simply equality of opportunity, is a proposal for violence.
Government enforcement of a redistributive policy — taxes to support more handouts have to come from somewhere — is done with at least the implicit threat of violence sanctioned by the state. Try and resist and at some point men with guns — the police, IRS, or Marshals — get involved. SEIU President Andy Stern put this option on the table, explaining that his organization was using the “power of persuasion” before getting government to use the “persuasion of power.”
Ehrenreich talks a good game about seeking peace, but in the end she’s simply cheerleading from the other side of the battlefield. But this battlefield should remain rhetorical. The threats against Piven are inexcusable. We should oppose redistributive instincts — peacefully — now, not after the coercion of government takes the field in support of progressive efforts to “spread the wealth around.”
U.S. Should Stand With the Egyptian People
Oppressed people rarely get opportunities to express their anguish and disillusionment. Today in Egypt for the seventh straight day, thousands of ordinary citizens are pouring out onto the streets, demanding the expulsion of President Hosni Mubarak, calling for an end to emergency laws giving police extensive powers of arrest and detention, and claiming the legitimate right to run their own country. It is well past time for U.S. policymakers to stand with the Egyptian people and rethink Mubarak’s purported role as an “anchor of stability” in the Middle East.
Many in Washington fear that the path Egypt takes after Mubarak might not lead to a freer and more prosperous future and that an Islamist government led by the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Ikhwan, will assume power. This concern, however legitimate, is largely beside the point.
First, the Ikhwan is popular for very legitimate reasons. Like Hezbollah, Ikhwan’s social-welfare programs provide Egyptians cheap education and health care. Opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei has even formed a loose union with the movement, which over the years has become relatively more moderate.
Second, even if Egypt’s revolution does not bring about the political or economic freedom that Washington deems fit, it is not for the United States to decide whether Egyptians choose wisely the interests and concerns that lie within their limited grasp. Events have certainly moved quickly, and fundamental change is a gradual and often painful process, but Americans should not be reluctant to embrace a political emancipation movement for fear that it might be worse than whatever it replaces. After all, history shows that forces erected to suppress individual freedoms eventually break down or unravel, often in spite of the United States. Even if the Brethren does take control, it’s emergence would be a natural consequence of the lifting of Mubarak’s repressive police state. Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted repeatedly that Egypt’s future will be decided by the Egyptian people, not by Washington, even though the notion that U.S. officials can be neutral simply by not taking sides is demonstrably false, as protesters are being arrested by a U.S.-backed security apparatus and sprayed with tear gas manufactured in the United States.
Third, it is not clear at all that Mubarak is a reliable American client. Yes, he has kept peace with Israel, but the veneer of control under this Caesarist despot has faltered in the past several days. His curfew, rather than discourage Egyptians from rising up, has given them the opportunity to stand on the threshold of a political renaissance. In fact, reports on the ground suggest that lives may have changed completely. For instance, what was depicted over the weekend as a massive prison break was apparently Mubarak releasing criminals from jails in order to unleash terror in the streets and punish Egyptians for recent riots. Is Mubarak really the political figure that America should be supporting? Does this question really need to be asked?
The Obama administration can extend diplomatic support to a political emancipation movement in Egypt, thereby visibly abandoning its long-time dictatorial client and pushing other U.S.-backed autocrats to end censorship, political repression, and address their people’s demands for economic and political reforms. This change, however belated, can help salvage a decent relationship with a successor government and with the population of the country– similar to moves President Ronal Reagan made during the 1980s toward both South Korea and the Philippines. Although such a stance would likely do little to limit recruitment levels of militant outfits in North Africa, it does have the potential to substantially enhance America’s image in the Muslim world.
Although Mubarak has promised reforms, economic growth cannot act as a substitute for political liberty. Mubarak oversees a corrupt and exploitative political system that relies on patronage and cronyism. Economic opportunity and political expression have stagnated over the last fifty years (not just the last 30). Mubarak is now grasping at straws, pledging to institute economic reforms and policies that will just keep him in office longer. Despotic leaders like Mubarak love to adopt pseudo-economic reforms to mask their coercive measures and perpetuate the status quo, but in the end, the institutionalized oppression imposed by ruling elites cannot endure. Sooner, rather than later, Washington and Cairo must acknowledge and embrace the Egyptian people’s instinctive desire for freedom.
Ross Douthat’s War on Theory
I have been following the reporting out of Egypt with the same interest as other onlookers, and I share their ignorance. I know very little about Egypt and do not feel competent to offer predictions, much less advocate for one or the other position on the questions posed to the United States by events in that country.
While the events themselves are exhilarating to watch, of equal interest to me has been the parade of American commentators who know nothing about Egypt but nonetheless have been providing copious commentary on the subject. I thought Andrew Exum’s lament on this phenomenon was particularly righteous. Watching cable news, Exum reports that he was:
absolutely stunned by the willingness of the show’s guests to opine about Egypt without having any actual experience in or expertise on Egypt or the broader Middle East. Is it really that tough to say, “Hey, that’s a great question, Joe, but I am not really the best guy to give the viewers at home a good answer?”
Instead, guest after guest — most of whom are specialists in or pundits on U.S. domestic politics — made these broad, ridiculously sweeping statements about the meaning and direction of the protests.
It is in this context that Ross Douthat continues his war against those who make their foreign policy theories explicit:
Ross Douthat | photo by Josh Haner/The New York Times
The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door.
Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.
But history makes fools of us all…
Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.
The fact that theories are imperfect does not make them any less necessary. We take refuge in foreign policy theories because there is no alternative. As Ben Friedman pointed out in responding to Douthat previously, it is impossible to have foreign policies without foreign-policy theories. The same goes for economics, domestic politics, and a whole range of human behavior. People take (or oppose) various actions based on their expectations about what outcomes the actions will (or will not) produce. Whether people are conscious of it or not, our expectations are products of our theories. People disagree about which theories are good and which are bad, but we all have them.
Revolution in Egypt? Exhilaration and Fear
Chaos in Cairo’s streets likely signals the end of the putative Mubarak dynasty. Although Hosni Mubarak formally remains president, authoritarian regimes seldom survive after their security forces lose control. The military has been deployed, but so far its commanders have not fired on protestors—probably because the former cannot count on the loyalty of the troops.
The possible end of any dictatorship should excite Americans. However, most important is how any so-called revolution ends. Tragically, revolts against repressive regimes often lead to even greater repression: consider the French, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian revolutions.
Today Uncle Sam is little more than an interested bystander to events in Egypt. The Obama administration has issued the usual platitudes about reform, but is unwilling to press Mubarak to resign.
Not that Washington’s opinion matters much. The Egyptian crowds seeking to oust Mubarak have no interest in what the U.S. thinks. Egyptian elites may care more, but survival is their first priority. Gamal Mubarak, Hosni’s son and one-time presumed heir, likely is not the only member of the ruling establishment to have fled to London, apparently in Gamal’s case, or elsewhere overseas.
The U.S. has no good options. Washington has been attempting to influence events in Egypt for decades. Once a loyal ally of the Soviet Union, Cairo shifted to America’s side and made peace with Israel. Mubarak promoted U.S. foreign policy objectives in return for American acquiescence in his oppressive policies at home. Washington provided roughly $30 billion in aid over the years to demonstrate its gratitude.
Long identified with Mubarak, Washington desperately needs to separate itself from his regime and demonstrate that it cares more for the hopes of Egypt’s people than the power of Egypt’s elite. However, attempting to promote particular individuals or factions is likely to be counterproductive. The U.S. government has no credibility even if anyone in Cairo was inclined to listen to those who previously embraced Mubarak so tightly.
Thus, the Obama administration has little choice today but to watch from the sidelines, while preparing to deal with whatever replaces the Mubarak regime. In fact, Egypt matters far less today than during the Cold War. Having an allied government in Cairo is helpful, not vital. If a radical regime closed the Suez Canal it would risk dooming itself by cutting foreign revenue needed to pacify an angry population. If such a government was foolish enough to attack Israel Cairo likely would become another occupied territory.
The U.S. government, irrespective of administration, should back away from attempting to micro-manage politics in Egypt or other foreign nations. Americans should support democracy and a liberal society in the best sense of the word. But U.S. officials should not be in the business of attempting to oust even authoritarian governments.
Washington simply doesn’t know how to get there or exactly where “there” is. That certainly is the case in Egypt, where possible outcomes include direct military rule, domination by Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a reformulated authoritarian regime, or real democracy.
Even in pushing for the liberal ideal American officials are more likely to do harm than good. Washington likely will be blamed for whatever results. Even when the U.S. government is successful in buying friends, it inevitably makes enemies, many of whom have long memories. Of course, it is far worse when Washington backs authoritarians like Mubarak. Just ask the Iranian mullahs.
The Egyptian people deserve liberation. Unfortunately, history suggests that it will take more than street demonstrations to create a free society. Rather than attempt to dictate outcomes in foreign nations, Washington should recognize the limitations on its ability to influence events, and even more important, to influence events positively. Americans outside of government can do more to promote the principles of liberty and the national culture in which those principles are most likely to flourish.
Reading the News from Egypt
The news from Egypt is traveling fast — despite the goverment’s best efforts to clamp down on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. President Hosni Mubarak’s call for everyone else in the cabinet to resign ignores the signs and chants in the streets calling for him to go. Nobel Prize Winner Mohamed ElBaradei, the putative leader of the reform movement, is now under house arrest. The level of support that he enjoys among the public at large is unclear. The reports that I have seen and trust suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood is not playing a very large role in the protests, despite the fact that they are the leading opposition group in the country.
Mubarak has stoked fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt for decades, extracting billions of dollars in foreign aid from U.S. taxpayers, and convincing leaders in Washington not to push too hard for political reform. The Obama administration can’t undo years of bad policy, but it isn’t clear that they would do so, even if they could.
The simple fact is that no one, including the very few genuine experts on Egypt and the wider region, knows what is going to happen next. So we watch. And wait. And hope for the best.
The best case from my perspective is for the violence to abate. That would allow the inchoate reform impulses within the protest movement to coalesce around a clear alternative to Mubarak. And if Mubarak somehow manages to stay on a while longer, I hope that he will use that respite to move Egypt towards a genuine democracy, not merely invoke fears of further chaos in the country as an excuse to perpetuate his autocratic rule.
Washington’s long-standing support for Mubarak nearly ensures that some of the people marching in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria and Suez will eventually direct their ire on the United States, but the protests now seem focused on purely domestic matters: not enough jobs, too much corruption, and a general lack of political and economic opportunities. If the United States is seen as attempting to pick a successor for Mubarak, it will likely undermine that person’s credibility, and merely deepen suspicions that the Egyptian people aren’t really in control of their country. As with all successful political reform movements, the ideas might come from elsewhere, but the impulse for change must come from within.
Shades of Warning: What It Means to Inform
Ben Friedman helpfully supplies more information to go with my positive reaction to the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to scrap color-coded threat warnings.
Our colloquy leaves somewhat open what should replace color-coding. Because most threat warnings are false alarms, and because exhortations to vigilance will tend toward the vagueness of the color-coding system, Ben hopes “DHS winds up being tighter-lipped.”
His points are good ones, but they don’t dissuade me from my belief that DHS should “begin informing the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government.”
The right answer here centers on who is better at digesting threat information—experts in the national security bureaucracy or the public?
There is a great deal of expertise in the U.S. government focused on turning up threat information and digesting it for policymakers. However, that expertise has limits, often manifested as threat inflation, as Ben notes, and as myopia. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Secrecy: The American Experience illustrates the latter well (especially the edition with Richard Gid Powers’ fine introduction).
The public consists of hundreds of millions of subject matter experts in every walk of life. They include owners and operators of all our infrastructure, reporters and commentators in the professional and amateur press, academics, state and local law enforcement personnel, information networks, and social networks of all kinds. We have security-interested folk in the hundreds of millions spread out across the land, all in regular communication with each other. We’re a tremendously powerful information processing machine. I believe this public can do a better job of digesting threat information than “experts,” particularly when it comes to terrorism threats, which can—theoretically, at least—manifest themselves pretty much anywhere.
Egyptian Government Attacks Egypt’s Internet
In response to civil unrest, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. According to the blog post at the link just above, Egypt’s four main ISPs have cut off their connections to the outside world. Specifically, their “BGP routes were withdrawn.” The Border Gateway Protocol is what most Internet service providers use to establish routing between one another, so that Internet traffic flows among them.
An attack on BGP is one of few potential sources of global shock cited by an OECD report I noted here the other day. The report almost certainly imagined a technical attack by rogue actors but, assuming current reporting to be true, the source of this attack is a government exercising coercion over Internet service providers within its jursidiction. Nothing I pick up suggests that Egypt’s attack on its own Internet will have spillover effects, but it does suggest some important policy concerns.
The U.S. government has proposed both directly and indirectly to centralize control over U.S. Internet service providers. C|Net’s Declan McCullagh reports that an “Internet kill switch” proposal championed by by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) will be reintroduced in the new Congress very soon. The idea is to give “kill switch” authority to the government for use in responding to some kind of “cyberemergency.”
We see here that a government with “kill switch” power will use it when the “emergency” is a challenge to its authority. When done in good faith, flipping an Internet “kill switch” would be stupid and self-destructive, tantamount to an auto-immune reaction that compounds the damage from a cybersecurity incident. The more likely use of “kill switch” authority would be bad faith, as the Egyptian government illustrates, to suppress speech and assembly rights.
In the person of the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. government has also proposed to bring Internet service providers under a regulatory umbrella that it could then use for censorship or protest suppression in the future. On the TechLiberationFront blog, Larry Downes has recently completed a five-part analysis of the government’s regulatory plan (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The intention of its proponents is in no way to give the government this kind of authority, but government power is not always used as intended, and there is plenty of scholarship to show that government agencies use their power to achieve goals that are non-statutory and even unconstitutional.
The D.C. area’s surfeit of recent weather caused the cancellation yesterday of a book event I was to participate in, discussing Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. I don’t know that he makes the case overwhelmingly, but Morozov argues that governments are ably using the Internet to stifle freedom movements.
Events going on here in the United States right now could position the U.S. government to exercise the kind of authority we might look down our noses at Egypt for practicing. The lesson from the Egypt story—what we know of it so far—is that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Warning Without Color
Jim Harper noted yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security (after lengthy review) has decided to scrap its color-coded alert system. The change is long overdue–the alerts implied, absurdly, that danger was equally distributed across the nation. The fact that the Department never used the blue and green threat levels (general and low risk), which most accurately describe the true danger most Americans face from terrorism, showed the systems’ inherent threat inflation. Eventually, everyone started ignoring the threat level, officials stopped changing it, and system became a charade.
Jim argues that, in place of the colors, the Department should inform “the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government,” treating us like adults with a shared responsibility for protecting ourselves. According to a report from the National Journal‘s Chris Storm, DHS agrees, sort of. Storm links to a DHS document on the new warning policy, which states:
- DHS will implement a new system that is built on a clear and simple premise: When a threat develops that could impact the public, we will tell you. We will provide whatever information we can so you know how to protect yourselves, your families, and your communities.
- The new system reflects the reality that we must always be on alert and be ready. When we have information about a specific, credible threat, we will issue a formal alert providing as much information as we can.
- Depending on the nature of the threat, the alert may be limited to a particular audience, like law enforcement, or a segment of the private sector, like shopping malls or hotels.
- Or, the alert may be issued more broadly to the American people, distributed — through a statement from DHS — by the news media and social media channels.
- The alerts will be specific to the threat. They may ask you to take certain actions, or to look for specific suspicious behavior. And they will have an end date.
- This new system is built on the common-sense belief that we are all in this together — that we all have a role to play — and it was developed in that same collaborative spirit.
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