John Mueller Joins Cato
I am pleased to announce that John Mueller, a leading scholar in the fields of political science, international relations, and national security, has joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow.
All of us at Cato are very excited to have John as a colleague. Over the last decade as a professor of political science and as the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies, John has taken on the conventional wisdom in the national security arena with a rare combination of accessible, breezy prose and meticulous cost-benefit analysis. In particular, he has focused on how policymakers inflate national security threats at home and abroad.
His newest book, Terror Money and Security, which he presented at a recent Cato forum, examines whether the gains in security over the past decade were worth the funds expended. For the vast majority of U.S. homeland security and counterterrorism policies, John and his co-author, Mark Stewart, resoundingly conclude “no.”
As a member of the Cato Institute, John will contribute to our multitude of programs and publications while furthering his work on the subjects of security, defense, and U.S. foreign policy. Cato is fortunate to have such a brilliant scholar join its staff.
For more Cato Institute work on foreign policy and national security, go here.
Iraq Violence Not an Excuse for US Troops to Stay
A wave of violence spread across Iraq today with 70 dead and some 300 injured. Iraqi security forces are blaming al Qaida affiliates, but no group has officially claimed responsibility. The New York Times puts the events in context:
Coming a little less than two weeks after the Iraqi government said it would negotiate with the United States about keeping some of its 48,000 troops here after the end of the year, the violence raised significant questions about the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces.
This is indeed a tragic loss of life, but this level of violence actually has become less common and usually occurs when the Iraqi government is making important decisions on the future of the country and U.S. troop presence. Each time a bomb is detonated in Iraq, commentators argue that it proves we cannot leave Iraq yet; the job is not done.
If the job isn’t done, it should be. And soon. There will certainly be violence in Iraq for the foreseeable future, but a U.S. troop presence is not going to prevent these horrific incidents and often serves as a pretext for them. The continued violence shouldn’t obscure one unalterable fact: the Iraqis must solve their internal security problems. That, in turn, will likely require them to also solve their political problems, something that they have so far refused to do.
As Ted Galen Carpenter and Doug Bandow have explained those calling for an extended U.S. presence in Iraq base their arguments on faulty logic that is devoid of serious considerations about strategic U.S. interests in the region. The most committed of the stay longer/forever crowd hopes our presence in Iraq will resemble that of U.S. troops in South Korea or Germany. But this isn’t only a false analogy; it is based on false premises about vital U.S. interests: namely, that the U.S. government, and U.S. taxpayers, should be responsible for the security of other countries.
Those who worry about us leaving too soon/ever shouldn’t fret too much, however. Regardless of what happens in the negotiations over an extension of the U.S. troop presence, the United States will still maintain a staff of 17,000 employees (including contractors) based out of the world’s largest embassy.
Through it all, President Obama has been relatively silent. He has claimed that we are “winding down” the nation’s wars, but the prospect of tens of thousands of Americans remaining in Iraq hardly constitutes an end-game there. And no one knows what sort of long-term presence the president has in mind for Afghanistan.
President Obama won the presidency due in part to his opposition to the Iraq war at a time when most other politicians were either supportive or silent. This stand allowed him to build credibility with the American people, despite his relative lack of foreign policy experience. While other so-called experts were calling for war, he was concerned that the Iraq war was likely to undermine American and regional security, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and claim many tens of thousands of lives. Tragically, he was correct.
The combat mission may have ended, but Americans are still dying in Iraq. It is time for the President and his administration to keep the promise of ending U.S. military involvement there, and hasten the day when Iraqis are fully responsible for their own affairs.
Behavior Detection as Interrogation
With the Department of Homeland Security constantly spinning out new projects and programs (plus re-branded old ones) to investigate you, me, and the kitchen sink, it’s sometimes hard to keep up. But I was intrigued with a report that behvaior detection officers are getting another look from the Transportation Security Administration. Behavior detection is the unproven, and so far highly unsuccessful (Rittgers, Harper), program premised on the idea that telltale cues can reliably and cost-effectively indicate intent to do harm at airports.
But there’s a new behavior detection program already underway. Or is it interrogation?
Due to a bottleneck at the magnetometers in one concourse of the San Francisco airport (no strip-search machines!), I recently had the chance to briefly interview a Transportation Security Administration agent about a new security technique he was implementing. As each passenger reached him, he would begin to examine the traveler’s documentation and simultaneously ask the person’s last name. He confirmed to me that the purpose was to detect people who did not immediately, easily, and accurately respond. In thousands of interactions, he would quickly and naturally learn to detect obfuscation on the part of anyone carrying an ID that does not have the last name they usually use.
As a way of helping to confirm identity, it’s a straightforward and sensible technique. Almost everyone knows his or her last name, and quickly and easily repeats it. The average TSA agent with some level of experience will fluently detect people who do not quickly and easily repeat the name on the identity card they carry. The examination is done quickly. This epistemetric check (of a “something-you-know” identifier—see my book, Identity Crisis) occurs during the brief time that the documents are already getting visual examination.
Some people will not repeat their name consistent with custom, of course. The hard of hearing, speakers of foreign languages, people who are very nervous, people who have speech or other communication impediments, and another group of sufferers—recently married women—may exhibit “suspicious” failure to recite their recently changed surnames. Some of these anomalies TSA agents will quickly and easily dismiss as non-suspicious. Others they won’t, and in marginal cases they might use non-suspicious indicia like ethnicity or rudeness to adjudge someone “suspicious.”
The question whether these false positives are a problem depends on the sanction that attaches to suspicion. If a stutterer gets a gauntlet at the airport each time he or she fails to rattle off a name, the cost of the technique grows compared to the value of catching … not the small number of people who travel on false identification—the extremely small number of people who travel on false identification so as to menace air transportation.
The NYT‘s Weak Defense of Homeland Security Grants
Last week, the House passed a homeland security appropriations bill slashing funding for grants to states and localities. The New York Times has now noticed and unleashed an indignant editorial:
House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.
The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”
Only a few months ago, Times editorials accused King of trying to “hype” and “stoke” fear of homegrown Muslim terrorism. It’s sort of touching to see them get behind his fearmongering when the beneficiaries are local firefighters, police, and other local interests.
But the editorial has trouble worse than hypocrisy. For starters, it’s light on facts. Its accounting seems to omit over $320 million in funds for local firefighters that a floor amendment put in the bill. It also fails to mention that the bill eliminates a formula that ensures that homeland security funds are distributed to every state. Because it means that counterterrorism spending is highest per-capita in rural areas where the threat from terrorism is lowest, homeland security watchers have long attacked that minimum funding provision. So while this bill would indeed cut homeland security funds going to New York, it would also mean that New York gets more of the remaining funds.
Government Control of Language and Other Protocols
It might be tempting to laugh at France’s ban on words like “Facebook” and Twitter” in the media. France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel recently ruled that specific references to these sites (in stories not about them) would violate a 1992 law banning “secret” advertising. The council was created in 1989 to ensure fairness in French audiovisual communications, such as in allocation of television time to political candidates, and to protect children from some types of programming.
Sure, laugh at the French. But not for too long. The United States has similarly busy-bodied regulators, who, for example, have primly regulated such advertising themselves. American regulators carefully oversee non-secret advertising, too. Our government nannies equal the French in usurping parents’ decisions about children’s access to media. And the Federal Communications Commission endlessly plays footsie with speech regulation.
In the United States, banning words seems too blatant an affront to our First Amendment, but the United States has a fairly lively “English only” movement. Somehow, regulating an entire communications protocol doesn’t have the same censorious stink.
So it is that our Federal Communications Commission asserts a right to regulate the delivery of Internet service. The protocols on which the Internet runs are communications protocols, remember. Withdraw private control of them and you’ve got a more thoroughgoing and insidious form of speech control: it may look like speech rights remain with the people, but government controls the medium over which the speech travels.
The government has sought to control protocols in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The “crypto wars,” in which government tried to control secure communications protocols, merely presage struggles of the future. Perhaps the next battle will be over BitCoin, an online currency that is resistant to surveillance and confiscation. In BitCoin, communications and value transfer are melded together. To protect us from the scourge of illegal drugs and the recently manufactured crime of “money laundering,” governments will almost certainly seek to bar us from trading with one another and transferring our wealth securely and privately.
So laugh at France. But don’t laugh too hard. Leave the smugness to them.
“If He Approve, He Shall Sign It…”
The Patriot Act extension passed by Congress this week did not become the law of the land. It is void and without effect.
So may argue some future defendant whose conviction rests on evidence gotten under Patriot Act powers during the extended period Congress sought to establish in the bill it passed this week.
President Obama is at a meeting in Europe, so he had the bill signed by auto-pen. Representative Tom Graves (R-GA) has written a letter inquiring of the president whether he was presented the bill and truly intended to sign it.
Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution says:
Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it…
Is presentment and signing a quaint formality? Something to put aside in light of modern technology and time-constraints? Or is it an important step in the law-making process, to be executed quite literally without deviation from past practice?
The answer lies mostly in consideration of what a signature is, and what it does. I looked into signatures, among many other identifiers and security techniques in my book, Identity Crisis.
Wikipedia has a definition of “signature” that’s good enough: “A signature is a handwritten (and sometimes stylized) depiction of someone’s name, nickname, or even a simple ‘X’ that a person writes on documents as a proof of identity and intent.” Key words: identity and intent.
The Pentagon Propaganda Machine Rears Its Head
Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings—yes, that Michael Hastings—has written another investigative article on U.S. operations in Afghanistan, centered again on a general in the theatre. The revelations are perhaps more shocking than those that resulted in General Stanley McChrystal’s dismissal last summer.
His newest bombshell alleges that the U.S Army illegally engaged in “psychological operations” with the aim of manipulating various high-level U.S. government officials into believing that the war was progressing in order to gain their continued support. The list of targets includes members of Congress, diplomats, think tank analysts, and even Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff. Over at The Skeptics, I attempt to put this in context:
While American soldiers and Afghan civilians continue to kill and be killed in Afghanistan, the Pentagon seeks to provide the illusion of progress, systematically misrepresenting realities on the ground to bide more time, gain more troops, and acquire more funding. It’s bad enough that the American media uncritically relays statements from U.S. officials portraying “success” on the ground. Now the Pentagon is using its massive propaganda budget to blur the line between informing the public and spinning it to death. In fact, several years ago the Associated Press found that the Pentagon had spent $4.7 billion on public relations in 2009 alone, and employs 27,000 people for recruitment, advertising and public relations, nearly as many as the 30,000-person State Department. Essentially the Pentagon is trying to influence public policy and lobby civilian officials to shift policies toward their own ends while dispersing the costs onto the American taxpayer.
Luckily, it appears that Americans have come to learn that despite the media’s frequent adulation of their uniformed military, the Pentagon operates just like every other bureaucracy in the federal government. According to a poll released earlier this month by Gallup, 72 percent of Americans want Congress to speed up troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. Much like the McChrystal flap from last summer, there is a very fine line between military officials offering their honest opinion and threatening civilian control of the war.
Click here for the full post.
A Patriot Update
A few developments from a business meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee held this morning. As I noted last month the new House Intelligence Chair, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) has already introduced another one-year straight renewal without modification. Since then, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) has introduced a bill that would renew the expiring Patriot Act surveillance provisions through 2013, but with some very basic additional safeguards and oversight requirements—many of which the Justice Department has already agreed to implement voluntarily—including most crucially added constraints and a new sunset for expanded National Security Letter powers, which have already been held at least partly unconstitutional in their current form by federal courts, and which the government’s own watchdogs have already found to be subject to widespread abuse.
Enter Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who played a key role in killing the same mild reforms last year. She’s already introduced legislation of her own, which would provide for an extension through the end of 2013, without any modifications, of not only the provisions set to expire this year, but also the highly troubling FISA Amendments Act, which in effect legalized the Bush administration’s illicit programmatic wiretapping with an added sliver of judicial oversight. Even this was not quite enough for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who announced he would introduce a bill making the expiring provisions permanent—effectively removing an important impetus to continuing oversight.
Feinstein, interestingly, purported to be theoretically supportive of Leahy’s reformist impulses, but argued that the “time crunch” created by the end-of-February sunset deadline makes this the wrong time to consider reforms. (In order to hurry things up, a Hill contact tells me, Feinstein’s bill will be fast-tracked to the floor under Senate Rule 14, circumventing the committee process.) This really makes very little sense. Leahy’s bill is essentially the same proposal reported out favorably by a bipartisan Judiciary Committee majority; the point of doing a one-year reauthorization in 2010 was supposedly to allow Congress to consider reform alternatives in the interim. Moreover, the Justice Department has already effectively agreed to accept the reforms that bill contains. If there’s nevertheless a need for further deliberation, Congress can do exactly what it did last time around and extend the sunset by a few weeks or months to allow for additional debate.
The time constraints here are wholly of Congress’ own making. And while the Leahy bill doesn’t go far enough by any means, there is just no good excuse to delay at least the beginning of needed reforms any further.
Beijing Key in Controlling North Korea’s Recklessness
Shortly after unveiling a new uranium enrichment facility, North Korea has shelled a disputed island held by the Republic of Korea. A score of South Koreans reportedly were killed or wounded.
These two steps underscore the North’s reputation for recklessness. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution: serious military retaliation risks full-scale war, while intensified sanctions will have no impact without China’s support.
Instead, the U.S. should join with the ROK in an intensive diplomatic offensive in Beijing. So far China has assumed that the Korean status quo is to its advantage. However, Washington and Seoul should point out that Beijing has much to lose if things go badly in North Korea.
The North is about to embark on a potentially uncertain leadership transition. North Koreans remain impoverished; indeed, malnutrition reportedly is spreading. With the regime apparently determined to press ahead with its nuclear program while committing regular acts of war against the South, the entire peninsula could go up in flames. China would be burned, along with the rest of North Korea’s neighbors.
The U.S. also should inform Beijing that Washington might choose not to remain in the middle if the North continues its nuclear program. Given the choice of forever guaranteeing South Korean and Japanese security against an irresponsible North Korea, or allowing those nations to decide on their own defense, including possible acquisition of nuclear weapons, the U.S. would seriously consider the latter. Then China would have to deal with the consequences.
Beijing’s best option would be to join with the U.S. and South Korea in offering a package deal for denuclearization, backed by effective sanctions, meaning the cut-off of Chinese food and energy assistance. Otherwise, Beijing might find itself sharing in a future North Korean nightmare.
The Security Logic Clarifies the Question
A new post on the TSA blog gets the logic behind the strip/grope combination correct.
[I]f you’re selected for AIT and choose to opt-out, we still need to check you for non-metallic threats. That’s why a pat-down is required. If you refuse both, you can’t fly.
Any alternative allows someone concealing something to decline the strip-search machine, decline the intimate pat-down, and leave the airport, returning another day in hopes of not being selected for the strip-search machine. The TSA reserves the right to fine you $11,000 for declining these searches.
So the question is joined: Should the TSA be able to condition air travel on you permitting someone to look at or touch your genitals?
I’ve argued that the strip/grope is security excess not validated by risk management. It’s akin to a regulation that fails the “arbitrary and capricious” standard in adminstrative law. But the TSA is not so constrained.
Unclear on Internet Security and Surveillance
The Washington Post has a poorly thought through editorial today on the Justice Department’s “CALEA for the Cloud” initiative. That’s the formative proposal to require all Internet services to open back doors to their systems for court-ordered government surveillance.
“Some privacy advocates and technology experts have sounded alarms,” says the Post, “arguing that such changes would make programs more vulnerable to hackers.”
Those advocates—of privacy and security both—are right. Julian Sanchez recently described here how unknown hackers exploited surveillance software to eavesdrop on high government officials in Greece.
“Some argue that because the vast majority of users are law-abiding citizens, the government must accept the risk that a few criminals or terrorists may rely on the same secure networks.”
That view is also correct. The many benefits of giving the vast majority of law-abiding people secure communications outstrips the cost of allowing law-breakers also to have secure communications.
But the Post editorial goes on, sounding in certainty but exhibiting befuddlement.
The policy question is not difficult: The FBI should be able to quickly obtain court-approved information, particularly data related to a national security probe. Companies should work with the FBI to determine whether there are safe ways to provide access without inviting unwanted intrusions. In the end, there may not be a way to perfectly protect both interests — and the current state of technology may prove an impenetrable obstacle.
The policy question, which the Post piece begs, is actually very difficult. Would we be better off overall if most or all of the information that traverses the Internet were partially insecure so that the FBI could obtain court-approved information? What about protocols and communications that aren’t owned or controlled by the business sector—indeed, not controlled by anyone?
The Tahoe-LAFS secure online storage project, for example—an open-source project, not controlled by anyone—recently announced its intention not to compromise the security of the system by opening back doors.
The government could require the signatories to the statement to change the code they’re working on, but thousands of others would continue to work with versions of the code that are secure. As long as people are free to write their own code—and that will not change—there is no way to achieve selective government access that is also secure.
The current state of technology, thankfully, is an impenetrable obstacle to compromised security in the interest of government surveillance. The only conclusion here, which happily increases our security and liberty overall, is that everyone should have access to fully secure communications.
Actually We Aren’t Running the World
Bloggers have already noted the most glaring problems with Arthur Brooks, Edwin Feulner and Bill Kristol’s Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Peace Doesn’t Keep Itself,” which worries that conservatives are figuring out that trying to run the world is not conservative.
The op-ed pretends that the fact that defense spending isn’t the largest cause of the deficit means it isn’t a cause of the deficit. It obscures the fact that we spend more on defense than we did in the Cold War by counting the defense budget as a portion of the economy without noting the latter has grown faster than the former.
So I can limit myself to less obvious angles. The first is that neoconservatives like Kristol are for increasing the defense budget no matter what. For them the military is basically an expression of national awesomeness (to use an academic term). Enemies and other details, like what we spend already, come up mainly in the justification phase.
In 2000, when U.S. defense spending was nearly $180 billion lower than today—excluding the wars and adjusting for inflation—Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wanted to increase defense spending by $60 to $100 billion a year. After September 11, they called for a “large” and “substantial” increase. Having got that and then some, Kristol, at least, wants even more. The neoconservative appetite for military spending is insatiable because their militarism is.
Second, I want to pick on one point the op-ed makes because it is both wrong and widely believed: “Global prosperity requires commerce and trade, and this requires peace. But the peace does not keep itself.”
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