Saving face: Contextualizing the NSA surveillance leaks
The recent revelations about the NSA’s large-scale clandestine surveillance of the general public have sparked a fiery national debate over the ethics and efficacy of private data collection. Fears of a police state and comparisons to the Stasi and KGB abound in online discourse, yet these trains of thought may be misleading and ultimately irrelevant.
We live in a world being revolutionized by data collection and manipulation, and large-scale private data collection is a potentially formidable asset to have in the ongoing fight against extremism. Presumably, this data is being used for the purpose of utilizing pattern recognition algorithms in order to find unusual data potentially suggestive of extremist conspiracy. Naturally, the larger the data set, the better the algorithm outputs, and this is especially the case with data about the US general public, in an era in which lone wolf, homegrown terrorism is the biggest risk of all.
The relevant question is not whether such surveillance aids in preventing terrorist attacks. Rather, the focus should be on whether such keeping such surveillance clandestine is vital to protecting national security. And this speaks to significant issues in both the terms behind confidentiality in recent presidential administrations, as well as the US’s overarching strategy in fighting global extremism.
I find it hard to believe that these surveillance operations were conducted secretly strictly because of national security risks. Recovered Al Qaeda training manuals from a decade ago show ample counter-surveillance tactics that took for granted that essentially all communication was monitored. Dhiren Barot, a British extremist who plotted to bomb the IMF, World Bank, and New York Stock Exchange in 2004, went so far as to travel hundreds miles from London to Swansea, Wales, just in order to communicate with co-conspirators at an internet cafe, after which he returned to London. This suggests a level of locational counter-surveillance that relates directly to the data being tracked by the NSA, namely the locations of the source and destination for all calls involving a US-based phone. The leak about these NSA tactics will not surprise extremists, nor compel them to alter their strategies.
Occam’s razor compels me to think that the secrecy behind these operations was simply political. President Obama won election in 2008 largely as the “anti-Bush” candidate, with strong support from an electorate against the War in Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, and enhanced interrogation techniques. President Obama has continued and expanded much of President Bush’s legacy regarding these issues, but suppression of this information would help the Obama administration to save face to its electorate.
As a Pakistani-born American citizen, I personally have no problem with large-scale surveillance; I believe that references to Benjamin Franklin’s oft-quoted unwillingness to sacrifice freedom for security are as obsolete and anachronistic as gun rights proponents that reference the Second Amendment’s mention of a “well-regulated militia” to protect the people from an oppressive government. Semiautomatic guns will not protect anyone from the federal government’s arsenal of drones, fighter jets, ICBMs, and nuclear warheads. Similarly, the concept of freedom itself has changed and evolved in this era of data aggregation.
However, the shift from privacy to transparency works both ways, and it is the responsibility of the government to be transparent and accountable, especially when it wanders into grey areas of the public’s privacy. President Obama and his administration must be questioned over this potential abuse of federal power for the sake of political and credibility reasons. The arguments for this are well-accepted, from the precedents it can set to the abuses of power it can lead to. Indeed, it is hard to imagine, even if the US government suddenly “defeats” the nebulous enemy of “terrorism” overnight, that the federal government would suddenly reverse the Patriot Act and its allowances to the NSA. It is indeed a new normal, due to new technological paradigms our world is now based around, but it requires a new normal in government accountability as well, including an overhaul in the federal government's confidentiality standards.
But these issues speak to the larger question of the US strategy against extremism, as well. The motivations behind the 9/11 attack and the Islamist extremism movement since revolve around foreign presence and aggression in Islamic countries. Bin Laden specifically referenced the Gulf War-era sanctions against Iraq, presence of US military in Saudi Arabia, and unilateral US support of Israel as justifications for his operations. Although there are obvious reasons for the US’s Gulf War strategies and its special relationship with Israel, the underlying issues stem from the colonizing of the Islamic world, which itself stemmed from the economic need to export excess savings, as Michael Pettis argues in “The Great Rebalancing”. The modern-day borders behind Islamic nations is a legacy of Imperialist delineations, and feed many of the ethnic tensions that led to authoritarianism in the Middle East. According to The Oxford History of Islam, for example, “British interests in Persian Gulf oil led to the creation of Kuwait” and “the need to protect India from Russia meanwhile led to the creation of Afghanistan, as similar concerns about France after 1798 led to British occupation of Egypt, which in turn warranted British control of Palestine after World War I.” Indeed, Bin Laden himself pointed to the legacy of Western influence in the Islamic world, including naming Muammar Qaddafi and Hosni Mubarak, as the force against which he was acting, which is why the Arab Spring has led to an increase in extremist influence in Arab governance, and now with the worrisome veiled credibility of democracy.
The point of this argument is not to moralize the extremist mentality or to “blame” any country for modern-day terrorism. Rather, it is to take a realistic view of the drivers of extremist Islamism, which requires one to realize terrorism is a strategy of the disenfranchised, exacerbated and proliferated by an elite few (eg Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, al-Awlaki, etc) who manipulate religion as a political tool. There is no sense in “undoing” past errors regarding Western influence in the Islamic world, like for example Ron Paul may propose, because the world is dynamic and time has an arrow. Rather, the US could realize that it is in its own self-interest to neutralize its stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (instead of vetoing more UNSC resolutions about Israel since 1982 than the rest of the UNSC veto powers’ combined veto count in that timeframe) and let the international community find a common ground. And more generally, the US could focus more on the sources of extremism than extremism itself, as the entire ordeal becomes like a game of Whack-a-Mole, in which the US finds itself stuck in various engagements and as soon as one target is taken out, a crop of new faces turns up. Al-Awlaki’s death did not stop the rise of lone wolf, homegrown Internet jihadism, as we all know. Instead of allying the US with the growing “netizen” populations of countries like Pakistan and Iran, which are secular and disillusioned by the status quo, we have left the large power of Internet organization to the extremists, who have succeeded in using Jihadist online magazines like Inspire to motivate US-based students to terrorize the Boston Marathon.
However, any perceived departure from the policy status quo will certainly spark cries of “we should not negotiate with terrorists”. The concept of saving face is what ties together the NSA’s powers under the Obama administration and the US strategy against extremism as a whole. Just as President Obama has every incentive to maintain the perception of “change” (especially in foreign policy and relevant federal powers) that his electorate voted for, the US has every incentive to maintain the perception of being the “good guys” and the perception of anyone and everyone who supports or is brainwashed into extremism as “the bad guys”. However, saving face is a myopic strategy in these cases, and delving into the nuance is what would allow for long-term, sustainable victories, for both liberalism against neoconservatism and the Tea Party, and for the world (not just the West) against Qutbist- and Salfist-influenced extremism.
Otherwise, all we are doing is feeding the narratives that motivate millions of disenfranchised, poor, uneducated youth against the US and the West. And leaning directly into Bin Laden’s own expressed strategy against the US of economic depletion through attrition warfare.
One of my hopes as an Obama voter was that he would have the courage to engage in at least some reform of the US’s foreign policy, as I felt it delusional to expect any bold, sweeping change in this delicate arena. Thus far, now only has he failed to turn the tide on the margin, he has amplified prior missteps in an effort to save face. Transitioning from a ground troops-focused to intelligence and spec ops-focused counterterrorism strategy is a positive step, but nowhere near sufficient to actually eradicate the Islamist front, especially if this transition only is able to occur through politically-motivated deception of the US public itself. I am neither a foreign policy nor intelligence expert, but I do believe that the public debate about the NSA and counterterrorism as a whole is misguided to a certain extent. I sincerely hope our current strategies one day succeed in defeating the extremist Islamist agenda, but unfortunately I highly doubt that is likely.
University of Chicago professor Robert Page, who has spent much of his career studying the motives and rationales behind suicide terrorism, concluded in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism that the rationales behind the majority of Islamist suicide attacks he studied shared the common perception of foreign occupation by a democracy of a different religion. The US should focus on the delicate task of showing disenfranchised Muslim youth that extremists are making fools of them and manipulating them for political reasons. But a continuation of our blunt, aggressive strategy status quo will only feed the extremist narrative that we are the manipulators. We need to be cognizant of the perceptions we help catalyze and exacerbate, and not dismiss or nullify them as propaganda or untrue; indeed, we need to acknowledge and mitigate these perceptions, specifically for the US's and the world's safety from religious extremism.
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