This is a hard diary for me to write, and I've been sitting on my hands for a while now, mostly because in matters of progressive politics, I lean more toward the so-called "suxer" side of things and have tremendous respect for a number of regular commenters who fall into that category and who hold extremely favorable views of Greenwald. So this is a win-no-friends diary in the making. Another reason I've sat on my hands is that I'm fully aware of the two-year history of this site when it comes to this issue, in particular the community-directed hostilities of an obnoxious individual or two. And, well, there's also the fact that I'm a big slacker when it comes to admitting I'm wrong about something -- and I was wrong about this issue for at least a year on this site.
For almost two years now, Glenn Greenwald and his ilk have blurred the lines between legitimate foreign-intelligence activity (terrorist, diplomatic, economic, military, engineering, etc.) and domestic activity, and it's become increasingly obvious to me that this was a deliberate conflation for personal gain. They have also erected a ridiculous straw man to which no government's SIGINT activities adhere: that it's all about hunting terrorists. Once that straw man was erected, it was much easier to play people like a fiddle and manufacture outrage about the kinds of diplomatic and economic espionage that every government worth its salt has done since the dawn of civilization.
Even if you're someone who's highly cynical about our government's secrets and want the public to clamor for transparency, you have to admit that Glenn Greenwald and his ilk have numbed the public to this issue, using a supposedly ingenious trickle strategy that in hindsight wasn't about keeping the government on its toes but more about keeping Glenn Greenwald in the limelight. I recently made the semi-serious comment that the Greenwald crowd has unwittingly conducted the most impressive psy-op I've ever seen, desensitizing Americans to this issue like slowly boiled frogs. Obviously I don't mean a psy-op in the conspiratorial sense in which there are locked-chamber actors -- rather, it's been what I'd call an emergent psy-op, completely undirected but nevertheless inadvertently orchestrated by self-patting "trickle strategists" who failed to appreciate mass psychology. It's no small wonder that our government, even after suffering incalculable damage to its legitimate and legal cyberintelligence apparatus, and even after being the victim of an unfair smear job (not that there isn't plenty for which it deserves to be smeared, mind you -- but these operatives conducting a thankless task aren't exactly Wall Street millionaires), it has concluded that these borderline traitorous leaks are "manageable."
The most recent hit job against legitimate foreign-intelligence gathering was the stuff about malware targeting hard-drive firmware, "spies spy spyingly" spycraft tools that any government making more than $5,000 in tax revenue each year would have at its disposal. Yes, the Kaspersky report mentions infections detected in the United States. What can you honestly conclude from that? Do you even know whether those infections targeted US citizens vs. visiting foreigners? (For, say, a conference -- hey, didn't the report mention some scientific conference in Houston? And, incidentally, anyone who thinks our government has no business monitoring foreign nanotechnology developments is being considerably naive, I dare say.) No, the report is just an amorphous blob of inconclusive details (on the US infections, that is -- the reverse engineering details are superb, littered as they are with product plugs, and notwithstanding the irony that, as the independent AV-Comparatives has shown, the average citizen and business is more likely to hand over a completely benign personal/sensitive document on a computer to an antivirus company than to a state-level actor).
Probably the most amusing thing is how some of these leak articles undermine their own scare tactics. "EVERY COMPUTER HAS A BACKDOOR IN IT!!! OMG!!!" But look over here at the next shiny object: "SECURITY AGENCIES INTERCEPTING MAIL TO PLANT BACKDOORS!!!" Err, OK. I don't ever recall seeing this headline: "AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HAS BOMB UP OSAMA BIN LADEN'S ASS BUT IS PLAYING HANKY-PANKY WITH ONE OF HIS CAPTURED COURIERS TO MAKE INROADS."
Then you have the articles that try desperately to undermine the anti-terrorism narrative but only bolster it, my favorite being the WaPo one on incidental collection, of which I had this to say:
The drip-drip strategy is one factor that has succeeded in numbing and desensitizing the American public to these stories.
Another factor is that the vast majority of the stories show the NSA to be excelling at its assigned mission of foreign-intelligence gathering. Look at that WaPo "9 out of 10" story, for instance:
* opens with a pic of a target package on a legit terrorist
* describes legit foreign-intelligence gathering: "secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks."
* the collateral collection looks reasonable when the focus is on such activity. It's sort of like domestic law enforcement capturing all conversations in a hotel to bring down the mob -- not many Americans are really gonna care about that incursion of privacy for the greater good.
* describes the newspaper's bending over backwards to accommodate the different agencies' requests... mustn't be too horrifying then, eh?
* fails to mention that "extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies" is done via legal request, as the companies claim -- and if it's not, well, they didn't ever get around to proving that, did they?
* chooses as its stellar example of an innocent victim the girlfriend of a terrorist sympathizer and discusses her plight at length.
Sorry, but Gellman & Co. do nothing but make American intelligence agencies look good.
Greenwald & Co. try their utmost to make American intelligence agencies look bad but don't really have the goods to deliver. Hence their disingenuous distortions that try to blur the lines between foreign and domestic.
These journalists have turned out to be utter duds.
That's not to say the journalists haven't toyed with a domestic issue here and there. Let's check off some of them:
* Collection of phone metadata. Legitimately old news. Definitely worth debating, not yawn-worthy in the ostrich sense, but old news. You occasionally get some folks claiming the Utah data center wouldn't need so much storage capacity (figures they've pulled from who-knows-where) for mere metadata. Well, no shit -- how about how much storage capacity they'd need for foreign content collection? Yeah, doesn't go with the domestic scare tactics, right?
* A handful of LOVEINT bad apples who have spied on spouses. Wonderful. Let's extend the approach and switch off the government completely because we have corrupt politicians. Let's get rid of law enforcement because of the cops who act like jackbooted thugs. Let's get rid of teachers because of the ones who've had sexual relations with their students. Let's get rid of doctors because of last week's malpractice case.
* Incidental collection that is technically unavoidable and would be preposterous to use as a criticism in any other intelligence/law-enforcement context.
* A handful of Muslim-Americans, with no conclusive details whatsoever on whether they had extremist connections. This is further undermining of the narrative, by the way. As I said once before:
It kinda makes a mockery of the whole "All Americans are being spied on, now, 24/7" thing when the best they can cough up is such an extremely narrow and highly qualified instance. I guess the 'mastermind' drip-drip strategy makes it harder to see such message-undermining dynamics.
So here we are, almost two years later, about to reach the second anniversary of the Greenwald saga, and all we've seen, notwithstanding the free-for-all assumptions and non sequiturs, is that our government has been collecting legitimate and legal foreign intelligence and that our spies have been a-spyin' -- in other words, that we have one of those aforementioned governments that rake in more than $5,000 in tax revenue each year.