Wait, Obama Is Worse On Civil Liberty Legalisms Than Bush?
So sayeth Keith Olbermann via Glenn Greenwald.
While of course it’s impossible to know how Obama personally feels, I am tempted to think that the Fineman commentary is most accurate: it’s protection of internal bureaucracy rather than personal policy preference. Long before he was a serious candidate, I thought that Obama had a great personal grip on policy and direction, but that he was too deferential to the establishment. Whether it’s on the economy or intelligence issues, the establishment is leading us astray but responsibility falls on Obama regardless of whether it’s the way that he would do it “ideally.”
What’s interesting is that both areas are dominated by a small group of people with inordinate amounts of influence and secrecy. They have long convinced the public writ large of this necessity, however, the last decade in particular has cast that view into doubt to the point that academic analysts are increasingly calling for the dismantling of the apparatuses entirely. And still they are protected by the political establishment on both sides without fail.
The reasons for the failure are actually very similar as well — what’s mathematically referred to as over-optimization. The general gist is that both systems are constructed to assume that there are extreme outliers that we need to worry about, that predictability is strongly correlated with amount of information, and that if enough data is processed and sifted (and kept private so people don’t change their behavior) then we can have great insight into the future and consequently take greater risks. That’s not how things really work though, and it quickly becomes mathematically impossible to “separate signal from noise” or in otherwords, figure out the information relevant to finding outliers.
The irony is that information makes the situation worse, because it breeds a false sense of security and starts driving decision making that would be seen as absurd without the models. I wish I could find the post again, but there was an intelligence analyst that showed even if there were 100x more possible terrorists in the US than suspected, and we had perfect information about every individual’s relationships and activities, the police would still have 15-20x more false positives than real ones. His argument was that this would not only be a huge civil liberties problem but lead to us being less safe because we’d be spending too many resources on running around like chickens with our heads off. His conclusion? Good ole detective work is far better. [It should be noted that the clearest signs of 9/11 came from FBI agents working on the ground through normal channels instead of all the top secret NSA/CIA work.]
As it was mentioned in the second MSNBC clip on Greenwald’s link, the only way that this will stop is if Congress asserts authority. Of course there will be gripes about separation of powers; I think instead of expecting Congress to stand up nothing will change until there is a mass change in public opinion and thus political pressure on Obama. But most people are too scared or ill informed to care, and the media falsely frames it as security vs. liberty, when the bulk of experts say it’s closer to security through liberty. Even worse, if there were attack(s) under our present regime we could pretend that we just need to do a better job and that we have control over it, even though we don’t have much. It’s a lot harder to get people to accept that we should roll back authority and accept our limitations.
5 Responses to “Wait, Obama Is Worse On Civil Liberty Legalisms Than Bush?”
As has been suggested several times by people who have not lost touch with reality:
The lawyers in this case are bound by their duty to their client to use any legal framework available in the best interests of their client. It is up to the court to determine whether these motions are in accordance with the law. If they are, it is congress who must amend the law, not the executive branch.
I am having a very hard time not seeing this as the same sort of quasi-factual reporting that Fox engages in. Much ado about nothing.
Uh no, that's not true at all. The Executive has great leeway in deciding how to implement laws in accordance with policy. That's kind of its job…
The OLC provides interpretations of Constitutional and Congressional law as it relates to the policy directives that the President wants to move towards and those opinions are de facto the laws of the country until they are challenged in court by someone with appropriate standing. The government lawyers aren't there to represent their “client,” and try to get the government off the hook, they are there to represent policy choices.
If you've been following these cases (and similar) since they've first come up, they always have had the same pattern: an OLC interpretation provides legal authority for a program, people are targeted — or at the very least have reason to suspect they were — and bring suit, the case is thrown out (appropriately) due to lack of standing. What's inappropriate is that the government doesn't allow for discovery to see if there is standing.
If you read the history the judges in these cases thought that the new government lawyers were going to drop all their objections and open up the evidence. In fact they were surprised when the government didn't and it was clear that they hadn't even fully been ready for that decision.
So if there is a problem with what the Executive is doing, there is the legal path (hoping to get a situation and judge that finds the court can even look into it, and if the court does hope that there is enough evidence that is submitted to make a decision) the political-legal path of having Congress amend the law explicitly, or the political path of having the Executive change its policy directives.
What you're saying is just another form of what's been driving me crazy the past 8 years which is pretending like the Executive is some normal entity and how we need to understand their decisions in the same context as if you or I were the accused. It's not.
This story has troubled greatly ever since I first heard it. I'm not concerned if it's the Executive or Legislative branches who address this problem, somebody needs to.
At stake is the right of privacy, and Eric Holder has submitted the argument that the US cannot be sued if plaintiffs charge our government with wiretapping them without just cause. The illegal data mining tactics of the last President that sifted your and my private conversations would now be immune to recourse for those who were wronged.
Regardless of which way the court finally rules on this notion, it demonstrates the first time I have to question the Obama Administration.
It would leave us with a Constitutional Right, but leaves citizens with no redress if its stolen. That's tantamount to not having the right at all.
Olbermann is funny. He condemns Bush on this issue, then, during the election season, plays down Obamas, shift on the FISA vote where he voted for the Cheney policy; and now that the elections are over again is suddenly once more enraged. Although Olbermann is right in his recent criticisms, its hard to take Keith seriously due to his own flip-flop-flip on this issue. When he takes a principled stand against a democrat during an election season call me.
Well, you know well what I am going to say here. I can't disagree with anything you have written (nor would I want to) but I fear you fail to closely examine the realities of the dismantling of the so called “apparatus”. Of course, I don't believe that it can be disestablished and take a bleak, apocalyptic point of view that ends badly for everyone.
A strict interpretation of the executive powers outlined in our constitution create the image of what should essentially be the essence of the literal meaning of “executive” – one who executes the law (in this case, or at least theoretically, the Constitution of the United States). Since our historical rise to an economic (and military) power that has the ability to dominate the world marketplace (and battlefield) the responsibilities of the executive have been greatly increased, along with it's law-making and oversight functions. I would argue this is largely do to the need for rapid decision-making in times of crisis, the most fundamental application being the use of nuclear weaponry against an attacking foe. But this power expansion has gone unchecked and has led to the advent of the prevention initiative, that is methods designed to model and predict outcomes and make decisions beforehand accordingly. Although wonderful for models of brain neuronal function, it makes the same fundamental error as elaborate economic game-theory models make in that they fail to take into account the full gambit of irrational variables. It might be said that I am referring to the lack of information by which decision-making algorithms fail for lack of data, but what I am really saying is that the variables themselves are bunk. They are bad because they ignore the rational self-interest motivator and replace it with the good feelings of mutualism.
Complicating matters is the notion (that seems so totally foreign to us) that not everyone thinks like an American. I believe we are “good people” using the very same semantic definition used by a somewhat popular writer of economic fiction that has tickled my fancy for the past eight months, but we have assumed with this seemingly assigned role as the stewards of righteousness the responsibility for co-mingling varying viewpoints that are almost always completely contradictory. Take Israel and Palestine…it's hopeless! Peace would be wonderful, but it is completely unrealistic when two groups of people, whose separate cultures are taught to despise one another, want the exact same chunk of desert for almost the same reason and they refuse to share it. They are fated to kill each other over matters that are as basic and clear-cut to them as freedom of speech is to us. I say pick a side, the side that is likely to aid the western powers the most (Israel) and go with it – it's pragmatic.
Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too and we help them to do that by sanctioning their arguments and meddling in foreign affairs. We usually we do this by flushing money away at a rate that simply boggles the mind. I have no doubt that we act earnestly, but we have everything to lose. Perhaps if we look at the world from a slightly more selfish point of view, we can give up the role as world ombudsman and point our government toward making policy that matters for it's citizens. With this “defocusing”, I think we will see a shift away from preventative measures being taken by the executive branch to stave off potential harm and thereby reduce the threat to our civil liberties.