
The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Manipulation - r0h1n
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/the-surveillance-state-puts-us-elections-at-risk-of-manipulation/281232/
======
spoiledtechie
As much as you might think this is out there, I have a hunch, however stupid
it might be that leaks about candidates could in fact come out this way.

it might not even be Obamas team leaking. Lets sat a partisan person who works
for the NSA wants to destroy a candidate. They could in fact do all the
research themselves rather than anyone even close to Obama.

I look at one direct example of Herman Cain. How did the press ever get ahold
of the fact that he was paying women out? Literally, you could say the women
spoke up, but with the NSA, you could say someone who works at the NSA leaked
the information just because they didn't like Herman Cain to begin with.

Now that's scary. Someone's reputation could be destroyed just by a rogue NSA
agent.

~~~
legutierr
There is at least one case of character assassination that we can with near
certainty attribute to the US surveillance apparatus.

Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York, former AG of New York, famous gadfly
of Wall Street, and a top contender before the 2008 election to be Obama's
pick for Attorney General, when it was discovered that he was paying
prostitutes.

The explanation as to how this information was discovered is as follows: he
paid for these "services" using a wire transfer to the madam, who had created
an "anonymous" corporation to collect payments, as a convenience to her
wealthy and famous clients. According to Wikipedia, "The investigation of
Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious
transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act
provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering."
[1]

Every bank is required by the Patriot Act to file "Suspicious Activity
Reports" regarding certain activity to FinCEN, which reports must be kept
secret from the person being reported upon. SARs are typically filed
electronically, and then centralized in FinCEN review centers, where patterns
are analyzed and information is distributed to law enforcement personnel.
Spritzer was being monitored because one of the chief criteria used in
determining whether a SAR should be filed is whether an individual being
monitored is a "Politically Exposed Person" or PEP (that acronym is actually
used actively). [2]

In other words, by explicit provision of the Patriot Act and US DoT
regulations, all financial activities of politicians must be monitored and
reported on in secret by financial institutions.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who
frequents call girls. It was Spitzer's own self-destructiveness that created
the opportunity for this take down. But you have to ask, if it weren't for his
aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? Perhaps he
wouldn't have been. There are certainly similar transgressions committed by
less "problematic" politicians that never leak. For instance, even after the
whole Spitzer hullabaloo, we don't know who any of this madam's other clients
were, even though it was reported that some were famous politicos.

What's most significant here, though, is that we don't need to speculate about
how this power can work to the advantage of certain interest groups.

In this case, broad-spectrum surveillance may have resulted in Eric Holder
becoming AG at the height of the financial crisis, instead of the one man
perhaps most qualified by experience and temperament to prosecute financial
crimes, Eliot Spitzer.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scandal)

[2] [http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-
Cons...](http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Consequences-
Spitzer-caught-by-Patriot-Act)

~~~
yummyfajitas
_But you have to ask, if it weren 't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance,
would he have been targeted? No, he wouldn't have been._

That's silly. Plenty of people have been busted for prostitution without being
politicians. For example, NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer busted a whole
bunch of people who weren't politicians:

[http://www.artharris.com/2008/03/11/bald-truth-exclusive-
ag-...](http://www.artharris.com/2008/03/11/bald-truth-exclusive-ag-spitzer-
busted-hookers/)

[http://nypost.com/2008/03/11/bane-of-the-brothels-is-
hoist-b...](http://nypost.com/2008/03/11/bane-of-the-brothels-is-hoist-by-his-
own-petard/)

As for special surveillance of PEPs, sounds like a good thing to me. Can you
think of a reason that our politicians should not be subject to extra
scrutiny?

~~~
throwaway2048
The problem with your post is exactly why selective prosecution is the very
embodiment of an oppressive regime. After all they DID break the law, and they
SHOULD be punished right? Who could argue with that.

Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full knowledge
of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if they take a
meaningful stand against their agenda.

The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew every
bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose the ones
that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible people they
were.

Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or
unsavory at some point in their life.

Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete and
total political power.

~~~
FrojoS
Best post in the thread. This is exactly the problem.

Now, an interesting question is, what happens if everyone knew almost
everything? This is the alternative scenario. If the end of privacy is more
ubiquitous and democratic, the power of the secret services would shrink. It
might lead to a change of our laws and social norms to something that more
realistically represents our reality.

I'm not optimistic that this would be a good or even better world, but this is
the best argument I've heard from the people who are not afraid of the end of
privacy. I would count Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt into that group, but
also many of my friends.

Which norms and laws would change? I can imagine that e.g. the use of certain
drugs like cocaine and sexual behaviors like sado maso and yes prostitution
would be the first to be tolerated by the majority. In some societies, that is
already the case. A more difficult to swallow reality might be pedophily. I'm
quite sure that child abuse would always be unacceptable but simply being
pedophilic might be accepted as normal for a certain percentage of the
population.

~~~
throwaway2048
The power inherent in not allowing others to know what bad shit you are doing
is unfortunately too great. Its always going to be possible to hide a
conspiracy. Information asymmetry rules the world around you.

I find the logic of Schmidt and Zuckerberg to be extremely self serving, where
can we know all the details of their online and offline life, like they seek
to know about ours?

Death of privacy indeed, but for who?

~~~
FrojoS
> Information asymmetry rules the world around you.

True. Good point. But is information asymmetry becoming larger or smaller? I
would argue that it becomes smaller, but I have nothing to prove it.

An anecdotal example out of my memory, is Kofi Annan saying in an interview,
that he started to use Google, more and more instead of having to ask his
assistants. Another example are journalists, able to uncover secret CIA
locations with Google. Or a single whistleblower, Edward Snowden, able to leak
a good part of the NSA's secret operations with just a USB stick. Sure, the
NSA has more knowledge than ever. But the average Internet user, too, has
unprecedented access to personal information of strangers. Just knowing your
real name will likely allow me to find your location, employment, a picture of
you and much more. So has the information asymmetry between us and the NSA
grown or shrunk?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> But is information asymmetry becoming larger or smaller?

I think the _asymmetry_ is becoming larger. Certainly in absolute terms we all
have more information about one another than we did before, but the problem
now is not having the information, it's searching through it to find the
relevant information. Or being able to act on the information.

What can you as an ordinary individual do with a publicly available list of
corrupt government officials? What can a corrupt president or FBI director do
with a publicly available list of political opponents?

~~~
vinceguidry
That favors the people, who will always have way more manpower to search and
process the data than the elites who try to hide it. The more information in
the public realm, the more that scores of interested scholars, journalists,
statisticians, lawyers and other such professionals can use the tools of their
trade to come to useful conclusions. Of course, most people could do nothing
with such information, but released into the wild, even minor outrage can
cause real change.

------
001sky
_I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using
their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the
deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too?_

There is an argument[1] that this may have been what took out General
Patreaus. It was no coincedence he was removed from the Army and put into the
CIA post just prior to catching Bin Laden [2,3]. Patreus would have received
all of the credit, not Obama. But we know that the prep work for Bin Laden
involved building a replicate of the abbatobad compound in the US, etc. so was
well underway under the leadership of Patreus, not Panetta. Obama was very
wary of Patreus entereing the 2012 elections, and would have been a much more
credible candidate than any republican. In the end, Patreus was of course done
in by someone snooping through his gmail. Wether or not he was also the victim
of a parallel construction, in how that came about, we'll never know.

[1] ie, Informal line of resoning or logic. In this case, circumstantial.

[2] edit: The move was orchestrated and announced earlier in the spring. viz:
_On April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had nominated
Petraeus to become the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency._

[3] Bin Laden: Died May 2, 2011 (aged 54) Abbottabad, Pakistan 34°10′9″N
73°14′33″E

~~~
griffordson
It has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt since there is no
documentation and no named sources, but in July Jack Murphy reported that his
sources in the CIA told him that the "seventh floor" at CIA wanted Petraeus
out and used his affair to do it. And that Clapper and Petraeus had a heated
meeting where Petraeus was informed that he would be resigning.

[http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_kil...](http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_killing_of_ambassador)

The fact that we can't be sure that he wasn't being blackmailed with something
even more scandalous demonstrates the problem perfectly. There is no reason to
believe that he was, but you can't say it is impossible now that we have
documentation proving their capabilities. That is why this sort of dragnet
mass surveillance is so dangerous to a democracy. It undermines the legitimacy
of the political process.

------
ojbyrne
"Did the Obama Administration ever spy on Mitt Romney during the recent
presidential contest?"

It's interesting, in hindsight, that probably the seminal event in Mitt
Romney's loss was via an unidentified person making an unapproved recording:

[http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81346.html](http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81346.html)

There was no real need for top down NSA surveillance here. All you needed was
someone sympathetic to your cause ("an operative") who could infiltrate the
oppositions meetings, with a cell phone.

~~~
chalst
The source of the recording has been exposed: it was a bartender, Scott
Prouty, employed for that function.

See [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/scott-
prouty-47-...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/scott-
prouty-47-percent-video)

------
Amadou
Julian Sanchez identified this precise problem back in 2008 (and I'm sure he
wasn't the first either).

Sanchez cites examples of Truman using an FBI wiretap on a potential supreme
court nominee and Johnson wiretapping Martin Luther King and indirectly
wiretapping presidential candidate Richard Nixon (ironic given how crazy Nixon
went with wiretapping once he got into office).

[http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-
sanchez16](http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-sanchez16)

------
frank_boyd
> Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or
> permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered,
> rectified or punished.

That's the thing. It can not be "fixed", it will not (although our
representatives will offer all kinds of PR actions/"legislations" to try to
calm us down and "accept it"). This kind of power is already strong enough to
defend itself. Rather, it's going to become stronger (also because it is being
attacked). It will take some sort of serious revolution for this sort of
cancer to be undone. And for that to happen, we're going to have to feel some
serious pain, first. That's our nature.

~~~
joeshevland
Moving the marker from apathy to critical thought, in the masses, is the thing
I think. That, and fixing the central banking cartel and the military
industrial complex, I suppose.

------
yummyfajitas
Incidentally, the prospect of government agencies messing with US elections
has already happened. It was just the IRS, not the NSA.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Tea_Party_investigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Tea_Party_investigation)

So this isn't hypothetical.

~~~
spoiledtechie
Great Point.

------
MRSallee
Why is the author so sure this hasn't already happened? He gives the current
(and past) administration a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt.

"To be clear, I don't think it's happened yet." "Obama was probably as
surprised as we were." "But what about a future, less scrupulous president?"

(Paraphrasing.)

~~~
rlpb
He is showing how his argument stands whether or not the reader believes that
this has already happened. His stance only strengthens his argument, since he
makes it clear that his argument doesn't rely on a conspiracy theory.

~~~
drjesusphd
How is it not "conspiracy theory"? Because it's in the future?

------
ianstormtaylor
This is extremely scary, and it also seems like a better way of phrasing the
argument for the general populace to realize what mass surveillance is capable
of. I don't think most people would argue in favor of Watergate type spying,
evidenced by how Nixon resigned shortly after it was revealed. Hopefully this
kind of tack will be used more and more to get these stories to resonate with
the average non-techie person and get them worked up enough to care.

~~~
protomyth
"I don't think most people would argue in favor of Watergate type spying,
evidenced by how Nixon resigned shortly after it was revealed."

You might want to review a timeline of events for Watergate. Nixon won re-
election after the initial reporting and stayed in office until Aug of 74.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
Definitely should review them then haha. Looking at it now "shortly" was the
wrong word to use. He got re-elected after the initial story leaked, but more
things started leaking, like the 18-minute gap in the tapes, and other things
started to unravel.

Although, I think the fact that the cover up was so grand is pretty good
evidence that the general populace is against that type of behavior once they
become aware of it's magnitude.

~~~
protomyth
I hope the general populace is against it, but there are so many cases of
worse stuff that I have come to doubt it. It seems like if you look good on TV
the populace gives you a rather large pass.

------
ksherlock
Previous NSA whistle blower Russ Tice [1] has stated that the NSA targeted
Barack Obama (in 2004), Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, David
Petraeus, Colin Powell, and Supreme Court nominees.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice)

------
ck2
Superpacs are far more dangerous.

Not just out of state but out of country sources can pour millions into any
campaign, no matter how big or small, and there will be zero paper trail.

Yet no-one seems to care. It's mind-boggling.

------
joeshevland
To me its bloody frustrating to look at a problem, and see it wallow around in
all its greedy and obese glory. Its really frustrating to think the mechanisms
for changing the problem are co-opted. Makes you feel a bit impotent. This
overreach, and the general military-industrial complex, to me, are sickening.
I don't understand how it survives the light of day.

------
pasbesoin
In the state of Wisconsin, numerous stories point to Governor Walker's staff
vetting hires based on their political activity. For example, withdrawing a
candidate they proposed for a governance position with the University of
Wisconsin because they subsequently learned he had signed the recall position
(for the sake of a family member and their job; the candidate is actually a
staunch Walker supporter, himself).

(This being my and many others' determination based upon detailed accounting
of the story, despite subsequent PR spin to the contrary.)

It's widely suspected that Governor Walker has ambitions for a 2016 run for
the Presidency. Or maybe 2020.

One has to wonder what such an Administration might get up to with respect to
surveillance results feeding bias.

"Conservative" or "Liberal". I don't want that power in either hands.

------
codex
Abuse of state apparatus has been a risk throughout history. The Internet has
now joined the informant, undercover agent, letter, telegram, phone,
microphone and video camera as technologies of surveillance. The state has had
these older options available for a long, long time and democracy has survived
so far. In fact, technology allows us to implement safeguards which are more
infallible than a mere human. A blacklist of current and candidate
politicians, for example, would be easy to implement in software. However, the
main defense against abuse has always been a system of checks and balances
combined with the rule of law.

------
w_t_payne
These allegations are very dangerous: they undermine confidence in the
democratic system. What will happen next? Will they start calling for violent
revolution? We must stop these irresponsible journalists before it is too
late.

------
pvnick
I liked the point about "Bizarro Edward Snowden" acting on conscience to spy
on and take down nsa threats as a sort of lone gunman of information. Don't
get me wrong, I'm one of those conspiracy theorists who believes there's a
piece of bureaucracy somewhere that's a little more formal which serves that
purpose, but the idea certainly makes the whole conspiracy a little more
approachable.

------
walshemj
There is far more risk from local machines and blatant gerrymandering of
districts and selective targeting of minorities to deny them the vote.

------
transfire
Puts them at risk? If you were really paying attention you would know they are
already being manipulated.

------
w_t_payne
Can insights gained from surveillance lead to increased effectiveness of
lobbying activities due to better targeting of persuasion techniques?

I suspect that the preponderance of the evidence leans a rational decision
maker towards an answer to that question with affirmative qualities.

------
phryk
_Let 's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or
permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered,
rectified or punished._

What does he think he is, some sort of time-traveler?

------
zarify
To be honest I don't know how much scarier this is than the current overt
clout wielded by entities like the gun lobby.

------
AsymetricCom
Hahaha, that's a good one. Lets just upload our votes to the net. Then we can
outsource our voting machines to Diebold and neglect any sort of actual
engineering for hardware tamper resistance. At this point, I'm wondering who
_hasn 't_ cheated voters yet.

What a fucking stupid article.

------
Desposible
Monitoring sub-atomic particles for science, sure.

------
shitlord
The government probably watches over everyone in a position of power,
regardless of their political opinions. It wants to make sure that the people
in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated. I'm pretty sure
President Obama explicitly mentioned that in one of his statements.

I think this "theory" of election manipulation is tenuous _at best_. Pull off
election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot
of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government
does not have.

I'm not saying it's impossible to pull off, but the risk (potential political
blowback) would certainly outweigh the reward.

~~~
grey-area
_Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy,
and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the
government does not have._

There is strong evidence this has been done in the recent past on a massive
scale, in the US, by the intelligence agencies and president - see Nixon's
plumbers, and J Edgar Hoover, and that was before these capabilities were
available. Your assumption about a conspiracy being required is completely
unfounded [1]. That is not a theory, that is fact, and it is in no way
tenuous, so it lends serious credibility to the idea that in the present new
tools are being used in similar ways.

The other point which lends this credibility is the evidence we have seen of
use of these powers for all sorts of industrial and political espionage abroad
- they are doing exactly this sort of activity abroad (e.g. bugging Merkel
before she was leader, Petrobras, Belgacom) - I find it highly likely they are
also using these powers at home, at the very least to stymie investigations
into their power. Note how obedient to the wishes of the spying agencies
almost every politician is.

 _it wants to make sure that people in power aren 't corrupt and aren't being
manipulated_

You seem to trust the current admin, even though they have been shown to lie
repeatedly (Clapper, Obama [2]). Why do you trust that if given power they
would use it in your best interests and to clean up politics, doesn't that
strike you as somewhat naive given the huge compromises every politician has
to make just to get elected president?

[1]
[http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Church_Committee](http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Church_Committee)
[2] [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114276/obama-
surveillance...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114276/obama-surveillance-
comments-dishonesty-isnt-only-problem)

