Anyone can write what David Brooks wrote, dodging anything of importance about the situation. Here, I'll do with David Brooks what he did with Snowden -- avoiding looking at the situation, slighting someone's character without knowing anything important. I'll just work with his Wikipedia page.
Here goes...
David Brooks sounds like an intelligent guy, but if you look at his background you see his true colors. Raised in suburban Philadelphia's ultra-wealthy Main Line, he started and has never wavered from an ultra-elite, insider status, leading to today living literally inside the Beltway, the quintessential system man, his status-quo "opinions" on every issue a foregone conclusion.
His intelligence sadly belies his consistent conclusion-first-supporting-argument-second reflexive responses. What else would you expect from someone so ingrained in the establishment -- Yale, Duke, University of Chicago, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. This man may have never said a single word to someone who didn't know where their next meal might come from, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil with a creme fraiche brulee.
This nation could use discussion of important issues, debate, thoughtful exchange. He delivers rubber stamp answers. We as a nation lose out. While he can't single-handedly deserve credit for our slide into partisan bickering and bureaucracy, he proudly contributes more than his share. And why not, with lucrative speaking fees and book options paving his way.
If you want a pundit to unthinkingly deliver a preconceived notion supporting keeping things the way they are, David Brooks is your man. Sadly, if you want thoughtful consideration of complex issues, he'll stand in the way of whoever would deliver.
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There, how was that? Can I have a job as the knee-jerk conservative guy at the New York Times now?
Lest we forget, Reason nailed Brooks already: "Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail."
I think that's the point: ad hominem attacks are unhelpful even when they accurate. Snowden's character and motivations should not figure into the broader debate at all.
I think Alan Colmes is just there to argue with the host or the other guests of whatever show they allow him on. It's like he doesn't even have a setting besides "disagree".
Surprised no one has pointed out the worst of Brooks' warped logic:
> If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably
> revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.
and
> He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak
> like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter.
> They limit debate a little more.
This is exactly like something a friend from the former Soviet Union told me a few years ago. People in the community would self-censor, and moreso censor each other by saying explicitly: "If we don't censor amongst ourselves, the central authorities will be forced to step in and impose even tighter and more strict measures than we are under now."
This goes beyond a simple fear of consequences. It's a pervasive acceptance of the aggressor's malevolence in which the victim ritualistically cowtows in order to appease it.
* The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.
* The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.
* The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.
EDIT:
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome "a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors or abusers, sometimes to the point of defending them. [...] One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat."
Great quote ... and we are all kind of susceptible to Battered Person Syndrome, post 911, post Boston.
It takes a concerted effort to resist the feeling we are guilty : our government and military and legal systems are there to protect us.. if I'm noticed and singled out when I cross a border, for criticizing Cheney on twitter, then maybe its me.. maybe I'm out of line.
Maybe the huge embarrassment at having to take my belt off in public at TSA checkpoint was my fault.. after all, I chose to wear a belt that had a metal buckle.. I brought it upon myself.
I think this happened to David Brooks.. I think the state sponsored 'terror' scheme of putting hackers and journalists away for 10 years for acts of conscience.. has been effective in keeping Journalists in line. Speak out and you too could end up rotting in a cell.
I'm not from the Northeastern US, but it seems to me like it might not really be the old 9/11 and Boston traumas. Surveillance and harassment of reporters certainly didn't start then.
For example, in 1971 the Nixon administration broke into leak-conduit reporter Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in an attempt to obtain medical files with which to publicly discredit him.
Of course, recent administrations have pushed for and obtained laws requiring that all medical records be stored electronically.
Daniel Ellsberg turned himself over to the authorities, was released on bail, and saw the charges against him thrown out. Today I imagine he would be held indefinitely in degrading conditions, brutally interrogated, and sentenced to decades in prison if the government ever bothered bringing him to trial.
He's showing his sympathy for things liberals care about. He takes great pains to sound evenhanded. It could be because he's trying to win over liberal NY Times readers, or, it's possible that he's unaware that he's a conservative.
"...the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds ... deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, ... the assumption that individual preference should be supreme... the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric..."
It's the culture wars. The issue might not be inherently about left and right, but the way David Brooks is framing it is straight from the culture wars of the 1960s. I think he's slightly in denial, but he seems to argue with himself and then take reliably conservative positions.
Better yet, if I recall correctly, inflicting this malaise upon malignant actors that engage in this kind of bad faith behaviour was one of the stated side effect objectives of wikileaks, by forcing their targets to close ranks and become less and less open and in touch with the real world they cripple their ability to interact and interface with that real world, and trust counterparties in conspiring and analysis of the data that they have access to in putting their plans and foreign policies into action.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but eventually, hopefully to the point that one day they just disappear into irrelevancy.
I'm disappointed you upvoted my comment for spite. I'd much rather have a thoughtful reply (pro or con). For the record, I respect David Brooks as a person, have found his writing to be insightful in the past, and of course do not believe he or anyone deserves to be battered.
I do not believe that David Brooks has clinical BPS. But, the arguments he makes in his opinion piece display the exact same form of backwards logic that are commonly heard from victims of long-term abuse.
Make no mistake: Surveillance is abuse. Over time it will fuck with your mind.
Long term mass surveillance is always a destabilizing force upon society, never a stabilizing one.
It irks me a little how everyone keeps dropping the "high-school dropout" bit. If you watch the video of him speaking [1], it is readily apparent he is no flunky. At any rate, he was taken under the wing of CIA/NSA/Booz Allen, who must have seen something in him, and given a highly specialized and job specific education.
FYI: Booz probably hired him not because they trusted him, but because he possessed a Top Secret/Secure Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) Clearance, along with experience for the CIA. People think the CIA is very selective with who they hire: they aren't. As a guy whose former company used to make me go to career fairs every now and then to man the booth in the DC area, I was shocked at how many cocky, CIA employees looking for a way to cash in their TS/SCI clearance at a contractor would show up and have AWFUL education credentials (colleges with reputations as being diploma farms with dorms, weak majors, etc). The CIA is more likely to hire someone who went to a "joke" party school with an A average than someone who went to a difficult school with a C average.
I can't speak for Snowden's skills, since I never knew him. I will say this: he worked IT security for a while. The Federal Government, and particularly IC and DoD IT security has no middle class. It is made up of the teeming masses of talentless certification whores with zero coding skills and a complete lack of offensive hacking skills. They rely on their Security +, CISSPA, etc certs, which are obtained with cramming courses followed by incredibly easy (for people who are smart enough to code) tests. Then there are the "red team" folks. These are the bad asses, the small minority who often have weird, unconventional backgrounds, write books on penetration testing (Violent Python for example) and laugh their asses off at the whole joke of a security apparatus that is the CISSPA paperwork paradigm.
Here you're wrong. The CIA and some other members of the IC are very selective in who they hire, but not in the way most top-tier companies are. The issue is applicant clearance. So if you're a genius, native-US born linguist who has lived in several Middle Easter countries, speaks Arabic, and has a honors degree from a top school, or a brilliant mathmetician/computer scientist who studied in Eastern Europe and married an Eastern European, it's relatively hard to get the level of clearance you need for the CIA, because of the way that foreign residence and/or family and friends count on your clearance questionnaire. And if you've got this background and smoked a couple of dozen joints in college, getting a clearance becomes near impossible.
On the other hand, if you're a community-college educated applicant with solid grades and military or law enforcement experience, and no foreign residencies or drug experiences and/or alcohol-related misdemeanors, you're golden. You allude to this phenomenon.
But while it relatively easy for a certain kind of applicant to get into the CIA, it's far from the truth to say that they're not selective. They're incredibly selective, and they're excluding some of the most promising candidates that apply because of their particular kind of selectivity.
Beside the loss of many highly-qualified applicants (what serious language expert hasn't lived overseas?), this is also said to create a certain culture that bears more resemblance to boot camp than to the highly-professional organization the CIA has been traditionally. Snowden alluded to this in his interview.
This is not a secret problem. In fact, there were quite a few public Senate hearings on the issue after 911. But nothing much is reported to have changed.
My time working classified projects agrees with both of you - ability to clear is more important than talent, it is essentially the first prereq - everything else is secondary. And there are a handful of highly talented security people with a strong sense of the absurd from which basically all knowledge flows and the untalented are left to implement it via glorified checklists.
Perhaps this focus on ultra-conventionality is why we are where we are now with these programs. Too many of the people involved that are essentially "go along to get along" types. You have to have a streak of rebelliousness in order to question the status quo, to see the social implications of these programs as anything other than "we are the good guys ergo whatever we do is good" and the selection process weeds out the people with that characteristic.
I live an exceptionally boring life, always have, more as a result of laziness than anything else, but having a clearance always felt like a yoke on my shoulders. I am glad that I was never in the position that Snowden found himself.
Ah, you make a good point. Let me rephrase: by "selective", I mean hiring the best and the brightest, as opposed to boring assholes who are easy to clear.
It's simple: it's an easy way to belittle him. It's part of the broad character assassination we always see when somebody tries to make waves.
How many people now hear of Julian Assange and think "he's kinda creepy and megalomaniacal?". They believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him.
I think it's a fairly common attitude that if you just do as you're told and don't rock the boat you'll be successful. So of course it's going to be provoking that someone who doesn't fit the mold can still make a very good living.
Apparently, you're the less learned one. Hong Kong was a former property of HRH and still maintains, both culturally and politically, the civic values from their predecessors. As a matter of fact, judging from what I saw last time I was over there, one could reasonably argue that they handle civil dissent much better than us here in the states, both on the protesters' side and on the government's side.
I've lived in Hong Kong for over a decade so know it's culture. It's not that dissimilar from Singapore in its western leanings.
Hong Kong's history is irrelevant as they have an extradition treaty with the USA. Any normal person would not seek asylum in a country where this was the case.
Only on the surface is it close to Singapore. When you are a part of what political pundits have always hyped up as "the biggest threat to the USA/the next superpower", things change -- attitudes change. "Western leanings" sure, I'll give you that. But that is not equivalent to being pro-American. In fact, if pro-west meant just abiding by the majority of Western countries' attitudes, then on this matter pro-west might as well be equivalent to anti-USA. (I've lived in HK as well).
And the USA has basically an extradition treaty with every country. They are not always followed, either (granted, I am not an expert on this matter). Of course, they might extradite him, but I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it out.
Basically every country that he can probably go to under the conditions he made (medical), without rousing suspicion, has an extradition treaty with the USA. Certainly if he wanted to go to Afghanistan for "epilepsy treatment", it'd be weird, right?
Which one's good? If you really cared about the extradition treaty so much, you'd have a problem going anywhere (given his situation, and I think even for the typical tourist most countries on that list are countries you might not even ever think about visiting. Though I've admittedly visit quite a few of those, so I may be wrong on that point).
Exactly. I also read that the gov't there is currently revamping their asylum rules and that for now anybody who applies for asylum can stay until the rules are sorted out, which may take quite a long time... I don't think he's done so, but it may be a more savvy location than you'd think.
Totally unimpressed with Brooks' character assassination piece.
This college dropout did what those at the NSA with PhDs failed to do in their responsibility to ensure that their organisation stayed within the spirit and laws of their mandate.
He did what Brooks failed to do as a journalist, ie. to draw attention to a worrying centralization of absolute power, and abuse of law.
Lets describe Benjamin Franklin, John Rockefeller, Walt Disney as high school dropouts, rather than look at what they achieved.
Brooks deserved a response like this. Just looking at the very top comments voted up on the NYT:
> This column reads like ... Nixon's Enemies List.
> This is something right out of Nixon's secret tapes ranting about that Daniel Ellsberg fellow.
> Mr. Brooks, this is one of your more bizarre commentaries.
> Brook's article is nothing more than a shallow and poorly thought through character assassination
> What a bizarre column.
> Brooks column is the most awful piece of smear journalism I have ever read.
To be honest, I'm almost surprised the NYT ran it. I've read a lot of his columns, never thought much of them, they just seemed fairly "normal". But this one is truly just bizarre, just bizarre. I really want to know what on earth he was thinking?
He's doing his part to help diffuse the situation. It's his show of loyalty to the powers that be. He's thought of as influential and this kind of thing is expected of him.
He won't be held accountable for this piece. He's done his duty and would never submit to any kind of rational questioning of his motives or his beliefs. I guess what it boils down to is that he's an actor.
What I can't understand is how anyone can respect the NY Times with stuff like this being published. This guy is one of the paper's star writers and he writes this kind of thing.
It's one thing to be conservative and wish to defend atrocities committed by governments, but it's completely another to do so using the kinds of techniques Brooks employs.
I'd go so far as to say that the NY Times is complicit in the moral wrongs that it spreads propaganda to help cover up.
One story here is about what a “hacker” is. What the word represents, what people who identify with it value, and what role those people play in private industry, in government, and in the military/security/intelligence world.
Here on Hacker News, where most of the top stories, threads and comments are favorable to Edward Snowden, you might have the impression that there's some unspoken “hacker code” just below the surface, encompasing ideals like sharing source, promoting freedom of expression and privacy, understood by anyone whose work closely concerns the internet.
When it comes to the intelligence community, this impression would be sorely mistaken. If you are a regular on hacker news, NSA types already have a stereotype for people like you:
After this incident, they'll probably step up efforts to keep people who sympathize with these sorts of values away from classified information. They'll find plenty of other able candidates who don't share these values.
Brooks's entire business model is getting people to respond to what he writes, however stupid it is. "Trolling for money" (a trite observation, but there it is). It's unfortunate that even sound rebuttals like this one feed into the cycle that makes him a successful columnist.
Is the information so grave that it’s worth betraying an oath, circumventing the established decision-making procedures, unilaterally exposing secrets that can never be reclassified?
Isn't the fact that this story has had such strong "legs" a great indication that this act of whistle blowing was justified?
What I can't figure out is how it always takes 1000 words for David Brooks to explain a concept simple enough to convey in 10. I'm not that big of a fan of the TL;DR...but with David Brooks, you don't actually gain anything by reading the whole thing.
I tend to think of this immediate reversion to ad hominem attacks as an extension of the bike-shedding impulse.
Is PRISM a good idea? Did Edward Snowden do the right thing? Where is the line between unacceptable disclosures (that should be punished severely) and, e.g., the Pentagon Papers. These are complex issues and few people are courageous enough to take a stand on them, especially under their real names. There's just too much uncertainty. I sure as hell don't know what the right answer is, on many of these questions.
But everyone feels entitled to an opinion of whether Julian Assange is "creepy", "arrogant", et cetera.
As a lesser degree of whistleblower, I went through something similar. People make all kinds of speculations about why you did what you did, and they're usually far off the mark. Granted, in my case I made some mistakes along the way. For one example, I probably should not have implored Google to "choke on a taint" at one point (if only because it distracted attention away from the valid message there) even if, on that particular issue, my indignation was justified.
People get into bike-shedding discussions about personalities and possible motivations because it's a lot easier than discussing the underlying and often more complicated issues.
"betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed."
Actually, if you look at the Constitution, it says -
"The Congress shall have power...To declare War...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions...To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia"
If the US was going to have a permanent standing army, an intelligence service monitoring its citizens and so forth, why specifically limit appropriations to two years? Why place power in Congress's hands? Why have citizen's militias repelling foreign invasions?
The US has a professional army more akin to Czarist Russia than anything the founder's imagined.
I never really thought that much about Ai Weiwei, but what he just said is right. There's really no fundamental difference between the kinds of monitoring the government of China does and what the US is doing with things like PRISM.
Here goes...
David Brooks sounds like an intelligent guy, but if you look at his background you see his true colors. Raised in suburban Philadelphia's ultra-wealthy Main Line, he started and has never wavered from an ultra-elite, insider status, leading to today living literally inside the Beltway, the quintessential system man, his status-quo "opinions" on every issue a foregone conclusion.
His intelligence sadly belies his consistent conclusion-first-supporting-argument-second reflexive responses. What else would you expect from someone so ingrained in the establishment -- Yale, Duke, University of Chicago, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. This man may have never said a single word to someone who didn't know where their next meal might come from, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil with a creme fraiche brulee.
This nation could use discussion of important issues, debate, thoughtful exchange. He delivers rubber stamp answers. We as a nation lose out. While he can't single-handedly deserve credit for our slide into partisan bickering and bureaucracy, he proudly contributes more than his share. And why not, with lucrative speaking fees and book options paving his way.
If you want a pundit to unthinkingly deliver a preconceived notion supporting keeping things the way they are, David Brooks is your man. Sadly, if you want thoughtful consideration of complex issues, he'll stand in the way of whoever would deliver.
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There, how was that? Can I have a job as the knee-jerk conservative guy at the New York Times now?