
The War on Terror's Jedi Mind Trick - dkasper
http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-war-on-terrors-jedi-mind-trick/282620/
======
rdtsc
At some point they do it because they are doing it. In other words they
learned to regurgitate some basic "War On Terror" lines when asked about they
are doing it, but really they do it because there are jobs, resources,
servers, infrastructure, support, billable hours, resumes, training, sunk into
doing it. And stopping it is just not profitable.

They can never make that as the official reason (although, for example, the
private prison lobbyists are not shy about why they advocate for maintaining
War on Drugs, it is simply bottom lines for their clients). Here it might one
layer lower, on top wrapped in some idealistic War On Terror / Keeping
Americans Safe rhetoric. But almost everyone in the chain knows it is about
just keep going.

~~~
mathattack
It is emotionally difficult to back out of decisions. Many doomsday cults find
their fanatics get even more enthusiastic after the predictions are false.

~~~
rdtsc
Good point. Yeah sometimes the fiercest apologists are those that start seeing
or having a little doubt, so they double down on the effort in hopes to
explain it away, and that is not just for the others but for their own minds
as well.

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joe_the_user
Well,

It would comforting to think that all bullshit of NSA just comes because the
"War On Terror" gave them a free pass and as that fades, things will get back
to normal.

Sorry, it is more like "entrenched interests are entrenched". Should the War
On Terror(TM) rhetoric seem to fade, our fearless will put their think tanks
to work and find an appropriately deceptive other trick.

The point where the horse left was pretty at the point the CIA was created. As
soon as convince people that "there are thing that in this democracy we have
to able to hide from, the democratic public", you have a point of leverage you
can push harder and harder and harder till you have all the coconuts in the
watering hole. And that's pretty how thing all now.

Could this change? Not without more than a little "surgery".

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Should the War On Terror(TM) rhetoric seem to fade (...)_

I don't think it will, at least not anytime soon. Americans have pissed off
enough people, whose fathers, mothers, wives, daughters and sisters were
killed in drone strikes, that at some point someone will try to take revenge.
And at this point the government will just spin it into "terrorists are here,
even more dangerous than ever", and we'll be back to square 9/11.

------
ChrisAntaki
The most interesting part of the article, in my eyes.

> Yet it later came out that an FBI agent had quickly obtained the records
> under a traditional grand-jury subpoena—then, with the documents in hand,
> been ordered over the phone to return them and try again with an NSL, even
> though NSLs clearly didn’t apply to education records. The FBI had, in other
> words, created its own unnecessary delay, then used the story to claim it
> needed more power.

------
at-fates-hands
Is it the NSA just doesn't want to profile for terrorists? It would seem to
me, that would be much more successful than trying to monitor every single
person in the country.

And yeah, if they actually did profiling, they would've gotten the Ft. Hood
shooter Nidal Hasan, Richard Reid, and the Boston Bombers. Instead of focusing
on the obvious, the NSA chose to try and monitor every single citizen. Not
effective at all and it allowed at least four terrorist attacks to take place
on American soil.

~~~
mikeash
What makes you think the NSA's ineffectual dragnet would suddenly have been
super effective if they had done "profiling"? And why are you including
Richard Reid, whose plan failed miserably, in your list?

Furthermore, given your examples, "profiling" only appears to work because
"terrorism" is informally defined partly based on the religion/ethnicity of
the attackers. Aside from those aspects, James Holmes, Aaron Alexis, and Adam
Lanza would be perfectly at home on your list, but they don't count as "terror
attacks" because our definition of the word is idiotic. And the fact that
"profiling" would completely miss attackers like these is ignored, because we
don't consider them to be important.

~~~
at-fates-hands
>>>> What makes you think the NSA's ineffectual dragnet would suddenly have
been super effective if they had done "profiling"?

Because all of the warning signs were there in every case and and were still
blatantly overlooked.

For example, in the Hasan case:

"Intelligence agencies learned that Hasan had contacts with an Islamist
sympathetic to al Qaeda and relayed the information to law enforcement, but no
action was taken, the report noted."

"The report said evidence of Hasan's "radicalization to violent Islamist
extremism" was on display to his colleagues during his military medical
training and he was referred to as a "ticking time bomb" by two of them."

For example in the Boston Bombings:

"Federal Bureau of Investigation officials ignored warnings about the radical
origins and nature of the mosque frequented by the Tsarnaev brothers for years
before this April’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings."

"After tough questioning by the highly perturbed Texas Republican Rep. Louie
Gohmert, Mueller confessed that he had absolutely no idea the Tsarnaevs’
mosque was founded by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who was convicted in 2004 of
plotting with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to assassinate Saudi Crown
Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz."

In the case of Richard Reid, had he not been so inept, he would have been
successful, and yes there were warning signs there too:

"The Government ignored specific warnings more than a year ago that Muslim
extremists were infiltrating prisons and recruiting inmates, The Telegraph can
reveal.

Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, and Martin Narey, the director general of
the Prison Service, were told by mainstream Muslim leaders that "bad
practices" meant that untrained, radical imams could operate in prisons."

Richard Reid was recruited in jail, then sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan to
train with Al Qaeda. He was also a member of a very radical mosque in North
London.

As for the Holmes, Alexis and Lanza, you make a good point, but they could've
been stopped had there been proper mental health resources in place to help
these people. Holmes had clear mental health issues that have been well
documented throughout his case. Alexis thought he was being controlled by
ultra low frequency radio waves and the government was trying to control his
mind. Lanza was said to have a personality disorder and had trouble
socializing and didn't have any friends in school. You can blame the Lanza
shooting on his mother for not keeping her guys locked up and controlled
properly so they would be out of reach of her son.

~~~
mikeash
There are always tons of warning signs in hindsight. The trick is picking them
out beforehand, and _not_ picking out the vast numbers of warning signs that
apply to all the other people who aren't going to blow stuff up or start
shooting people.

In order to support your case, you need to demonstrate not only that these
signs were there, _but_ that the NSA could have picked them out of the vast
quantity of data collected if they had applied "profiling", and show this in
such a way that also lines up with the fact that they couldn't pick it out
without "profiling". You also need to show that "profiling" wouldn't have
caused them to miss more attacks than it would discover, due to murderous
maniacs coming from all ethnicities and religions.

Your comment about mental health at the end really drives home my point about
how stupid our definition of "terrorism" is. If a guy thinks that the
government is trying to control his mind with low-frequency radio waves, we
just call him crazy, blame the mental health system, and call his action a
"shooting". If a guy thinks that the creator of the universe used telepathy to
tell him that he should blow up a marathon or shoot up an army base, we call
him completely sane but evil and refer to his act as "terrorism".

------
netfire
Besides the obvious violation of individual rights, I worry about the enormous
potential for abuse in these programs that could quickly turn our democracy
into a dictatorship.

Systems designed to identify terrorists could easily be used to identify
political opposition and supress them once they've been labeled as
"terrorists". The lack of due process, transparency and checks and balances
here is concerning.

~~~
sixothree
It almost seems like the system was designed to be used in a political manner.

------
ams6110
_[Judge Leon] found the program’s invasion of privacy especially troubling
given the “utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been
prevented "_

I find it troubling that judges are considering a benefit such as crime
reduction in considering right-to-privacy issues. Certainly many crimes might
be prevented if we did away with the constitutional rights of the accused,
restrictions on search and seizure, etc. but is that the world we want to live
in? Do we all want to be subject to random, warrantless searches of our homes,
computers, or bodies, or warrantless arrest and interrogation, if the net
result is a reduction in crime?

The classic Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind here.

~~~
nitid_name
There is a balance between privacy and crime reduction already codified into
law and common law.

See: the use of snoopers and other IR devices to look for grow houses
(generally accepted as unreasonable) and the use of airborne BAC sensors to
look for drunk drivers (generally accepted as reasonable)

Legal decisions are about balance between individual rights and group rights.
Free speech vs "fire in a crowded theater" is a classic example of this
balancing act.

------
joelrunyon
Desktop version - [http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-
war-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-war-on-
terrors-jedi-mind-trick/282620/)

------
caprad
This is the problem when agencies are allowed to govern themselves, with no
proper over site.

> Perhaps most egregious is the case of Magdy Mahmoud Mostafa el-Nashar, a
> former acquaintance of the perpetrators of the 2005 London transit-system
> bombings....The FBI had, in other words, created its own unnecessary delay,
> then used the story to claim it needed more power.

Rather than accept responsibility, they turned this embarrassing case into a
win by spinning the story to show they did not have enough access.

~~~
sixothree
Checks an balances seems to be a concept completely ignored so many ways in
modern America.

------
dev1n
I am not in defense of the NSA's mass surveillance program. However it would
be an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if, instead
of caching metadata, the NSA required people to submit reports of suspicious
behavior on their neighbors.

What would happen then? Is it possible people would become so suspicious of
their neighbors that they would be reporting even the slightest oddity? We
already have a deep trust issue in America as it is between citizens and the
government. Imagine no trust at all between citizens?

~~~
alecdbrooks
East Germany already tried that — you are basically describing the Stasi
program of "unofficial collaborators." From _The Legacy of Surveillance_ [0]:
"For every 1,000 GDR citizens there were approximately 5.5 state security
personnel and another 11 unofficial informers. About 1 in 50 of the country’s
adults were working for the Stasi and enabled the ministry to conduct an
almost blanket surveillance of society."

The movie _The Lives of Others_ is an acclaimed look at living under such
ubiquitous surveillance. Without spoiling the plot, agents bugged apartments,
blackmailed family members and tapped phones. Not every citizen was looked at
intensely as the characters in the film, but millions of East Germans made it
into the agency's files. Wired reported in 2008 that the Stasi had indexed
their records by 5.6 million names. [1] Even people who hadn't been overtly
persecuted by the Stasi are often concerned their friends were spying on them.
There's concrete evidence of grossly undermined trust, too: The paper I cite
above suggests that East Germany's economic problems are partly due to
distrust caused by the unofficial collaborators.

[0]:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1554604](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1554604)

[1]
[http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_sta...](http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi)

