Jacques Barzun, "Meditations on the Literature of Spying," 1965:
One reason for my annoyance is the contamination that the sophisticated and the spies have brought into the story of detection. ... Under a surface likeness, the purposes of spying and criminal detection are opposite: the spy aims at destroying a polity by sowing confusion and civil strife; the detective aims at saving a polity by suppressing crime. Thanks to our literary men we have been made so much at home with crime, we have found the spy's shadow world serving us so well as a sort of subconscious of society, that we readily agree with the head of the French Secret Police who said no man "could fully understand our age unless he had spent some time in prison." Logic thus compels the writer to turn detective fiction into the domestic branch of espionage. [...]
The great illusion is to believe that all these impulses and enjoyments betoken maturity, worldliness, being "realistic." The truth is that Maugham's observer and the ubiquitous spy are bright boys of nine years. Nine is the age of seeking omniscience on a low level. The spy's ingenuity, his shifting partisanship without a cause, like his double bluffs, his vagrant attachments, and his love of torturing and of being tortured, are the mores of the preadolescent gang. For adult readers to divert themselves with tales of childish fantasy is nothing new and not in itself reprehensible. What is new is for readers to accept the fantasy as wiser than civil government, and what is reprehensible is for the modern world to have made official the dreams and actions of little boys.
A little off-topic, and a little incidental to myself (not being a consumer of spy fiction); nonetheless, this mostly literary tirade provokes some thought about that "subconscious of society" in an age when torture is a technicality and the lines between criminal and military are incoherent.
And to what extent are our intelligence operations, forty-five years after Barzun wrote, still like "the dreams and actions of little boys," presumptuous beyond the probability of success? Or is it our military operations that are too ambitious (~$700bn budget), and our intelligence still too weak (~$70bn budget)?
In "
Digital Diplomacy ," the NYT's Jesse Lichtenstein profiles
Jared Cohen and
Alec Ross , the State Department's chief social-media evangelists. Fortunately, these two are well-grounded in the real world; reading the opening paragraphs, one fears for a moment that these two enthusiasts are stuck inside the social-media bubble where all messaging problems can seemingly be solved by a tweet.
On the contrary. Aside from copious tweeting, Cohen and Ross travel abundantly, seeking partnerships with private companies, brainstorming how new technologies can aid the work of NGOs, and generally pushing the frontiers of connectivity ("they speak at length about telemedicine, tele-education and something called telejustice, the details of which they haven't quite worked out yet"). The collaboration they initiated with Carlos Slim, to launch a free and anonymous SMS crime-reporting service in Mexico, is particularly impressive.
But the thesis of Lichtenstein's piece is not a superficial praise of young adventurers Cohen and Ross, nor is it a meditation on the quickening pace of globalization. Rather, it lies in a few salient references to the fact that, urged by the borderless nature of social media, soft power has overwhelmed hard power. An implicit question therein challenges both authoritarianism that seeks to control the Internet (Google and China, Iran and Twitter, Egypt and bloggers...) and, in a broader sense, the policies of many states (our own included) that still seek to change the world through force.
When Lichtenstein asks about Wikileaks, Cohen responds:
...that technology isn't going anywhere. So we can fear we can't control it and ignore the space, or we can recognize we can't control it, but we can influence it.
Later Cohen backs up the statement with what he and Ross use as a bit of a tagline: "The 21st century is a really terrible time to be a control freak."
Clay Shirky, an NYU professor quoted in the article, follows suit:
The loss of control you fear is already in the past. ... You do not actually control the message, and if you believe you control the message, it merely means you no longer understand what's going on.
The truth of these statements resonates far beyond the
@StateDept Twitter account. Power is so diffuse in the Internet Age that there is very little "control" left. China cannot thoroughly regulate what its citizens learn any more than the U.S. can successfully hold all its classified cards close to its chest.
The Internet may well be the ultimate tool of democracy. But harnessing it for institutional gain is about more than setting up a p.r. feed on Twitter; it's about engaging key players and everyday users for mutually beneficial ends. When successful, such efforts can sweep aside an oppressive government or a terrorizing cartel. That's the message of Cohen and Ross.
How ably the rest of our government employs that wisdom will determine much about American power and the perception of our nation abroad.
Having just read (finally) Robert Baer's
See No Evil , I am left with two thoughts. (1) Baer really had a rough go and is still rather bitter. A lot of the book seems to represent his trying to have the last word in various Agency skirmishes. Well, who am I to judge? But
See No Evil does leave the reader with something like the feeling of being unaware of a particularly important inside joke. (2) Would Baer be happier with the state of the intelligence community today? Certainly budgets are up,
not only since 9/11 but also since the 1980s . But how much of that translates into more HUMINT? The chief (if oblique) lesson of the Russian soccer-mom spies affair seems to be that other countries are still doing HUMINT and for many reasons we must do so too. The
Post (NY) actually picked up on this thread recently,
see here . Bookmark this for later exploration.
For those following Muslim relations in America, there are few places more interesting than metro Detroit.
Ann Arbor-based Thomas More Law Center ("a Christian answer to the ACLU," "effectively fighting the culture war") has brought a lawsuit and is now requesting an injunction against SMART, the Detroit public bus operator, which refuses to host ads for "Refuge from Islam," a website that encourages converts. The ads ask, "Fatwa on your head? Leaving Islam? Got Questions? Get Answers!" The Free Press quotes Thomas More's attorney arguing that there is precedent in a pro-atheist ad that previously appeared on SMART buses.
Never mind that positively promoting the atheist philosophy is different from portraying Islam as life-threatening. (Refuge from Islam takes an unnerving tone with prospective "refugees": "Do not tell your Muslim friends or family," "The Qur'an commands your death," "call the police immediately," etc.) And let's also leave SMART's precise legal situation to the judge. This ad seems to fall far short of incitement or defamation; without legislation comparable to the UK's religious hatred law , there is limited recourse for anyone offended.
The pressing question for Detroit, and for other cities where similar ads are in the pipeline, is social in character. Without straying into the politics of the city, we can at least recognize a rift between the large Muslim population in Dearborn/Detroit proper and the rest of the region. CAIR and Michigan State University had a spat that became a popular e-mail chain; a popular chain of restaurants closed after its owner was accused of ties to Hezbollah ; last year's FBI raid and shooting of an imam rattled nerves; and Abdulmutallab's attempted bombing linked Detroit to worldwide takfiri-jihad in a very unexpected way.
With effort, Detroit can encourage improvements. One does not hear calls in Michigan for the aggressive steps seen in Europe to ban the niqab, block construction of minarets, and so on. But efforts like the Refuge from Islam ads are certainly provocative, and at a sensitive time. They are a product of the current environment -- "honor killings" and harsh traditionalism are certainly present in other religious communities, but receive much less attention -- and also serve to perpetuate it. Imagining another situation, could one defend an ad on the side of a bus that encouraged defectors from Catholicism? Perhaps the ad could make suggestive comments alluding to sexual abuse by priests. Legally defensible, probably, but socially reprehensible all the same.
It's time for local leaders to address a simmering situation -- without getting entangled in the legal questions of the narrow SMART case -- before tensions grow out of control.
I have finally (!) read the
New Yorker feature on Julian Assange , founder of WikiLeaks. Actually not a bombastic piece, although it made for fun reading. On a human level, I'm interested in his personality type --
He can concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport. ... In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them....
-- while on a policy level I have more sympathy for Steven Aftergood's (of FAS) philosophy regarding disclosure of sensitive documents (quoted near the end of the article).
In any case, two salient points from the piece.
First, the tack taken by the Army spokesman when asked about WikiLeaks was sadly predictable in its irritability.
Lieutenant Colonel Lee Packnett, the spokesperson for intelligence matters for the Army, was deeply agitated when I called him. ... "You can talk to someone else. It’s not an Army issue.” As he saw it, once “Collateral Murder” had passed through the news cycle, the broader counter-intelligence problem that WikiLeaks poses to the military had disappeared as well. “It went away,” he said.
Of course, anyone (including, I must believe, the colonel himself) knows that to be untrue.
"Collateral Murder" was not the first and will not be the last military secret divulged through WikiLeaks. As Bradley Manning's M.O. shows us, sufficient policies and practices are not in place to prevent further leaks, if that is even possible. The colonel's testy response suggests the sort of denial and turf wars that have previously undermined national security. As Packnett represents it, this is an Army willing to acknowledge neither the flaws in its security protocols nor the problem of over-classification.
Second, WikiLeaks is simply an open fire hydrant of information. As the New Yorker paints it, so little of the uploaded source material is filtered out that WikiLeaks functions as if it were in a vacuum. All that guides the organization is Assange's philosophy that secrecy corrupts, corruption de-legitimizes, and an illegitimate government is a rotten conspiracy.
The philosophy is not without merit. Governments (and corporations) deem some matters "sensitive" only because they would expose a liability or create an embarrassment; shining light on them is the goal of FOIA, whistleblower protections, and so on. But one would be hard-pressed to defend on such lofty grounds Assange's leak of the details of "electromagnetic devices designed to prevent IEDs from being triggered." What behavior of an illegitimate, secret-hoarding government does that leak seek to confront?
Assange's team pointedly maintains that "we are not the press." Quite right. What distinguishes journalists from leakers is the acceptance of the fact that there are more variables in the equation than "information = freedom."
Only time for a short post right now. Just read the
NYT investigative piece on Iran's practice of repeatedly changing ships' names and ownership to evade sanctions enforcement. A few thoughts:
This is what good newspapers are for. Much like the Bradley Manning affair , this is a simple problem with no simple solutions. Iran is exploiting loopholes of which everyone is aware; they're not even particularly creative. But true safeguards would require extensive (and expensive) controls that the international system does not seem ready to design. There is a clear analogue in the system of blacklisting individuals and organizations (e.g., on the 1267 list), a subject I've been thinking about a good deal lately. I'll do a fuller exploration a.s.a.p. The key quotation from NYT relevant to point #3 there is the following, which I'll leave you with:
Mr. Levey, under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, acknowledged that his department had been challenged trying to keep up with Irisl. Though the Treasury Department has accounted for some of the ship-name changes since the sanctions were enacted, it has not added new shell companies controlled by Irisl to the blacklist, or ships that have been launched since then.
Unacceptable.
Plain and simple: I'm engaging in this self-education project to learn more about the present geopolitical era, marked but not defined by the "Global War on Terror" and another phenomenon somewhat clumsily labeled "the clash of civilizations."
Hard to pinpoint just what I'm after, but -- to borrow another tired expression -- I know it when I see it. Combating terrorism in its many guises (military, law enforcement, AML/CFT, etc.) is a thrill to me. Also irresistible are the fault-lines in West/Near East interactions, of which I could cite numerous fascinating examples: the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, Switzerland's ban on minarets, the very existence of Salman Rushdie....
Those are the topics I'll touch on, while also tracking my various explorations of pertinent goings-on in intelligence, defense, and national security. This blog/stream is personal, in the sense that I am not developing it with public consumption in mind; however, it is a public medium, which will pressure me to update at a reasonably regular pace. If I am lucky, you are reading this, and perhaps you will contribute to the discussion, and in turn to my education.
Long live the free Internet.
