介绍： TEA茶阅
EPUB电子书(current)
Governance: Standard operating procedure
How the war on terror turned into a fight about intelligence
From The Economist 20161112

From SR 20161112 special report: espionage

Audio:

0:00




AFTER THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet Union, intelligence was becalmed. Apartheid came to an ...

介绍： TEA茶阅
EPUB电子书(current)
Governance: Standard operating procedure
How the war on terror turned into a fight about intelligence
From The Economist 20161112

From SR 20161112 special report: espionage

Audio:

0:00




AFTER THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet Union, intelligence was becalmed. Apartheid came to an end, the Palestine Liberation Organisation said that it was abandoning terror, and economies around the world embraced the Washington consensus. The NSA, isolated by its own secrecy, was out of touch with the burgeoning internet; it lost 30% of both its budget and its workforce. Budgets at the CIA and MI6 were cut by a quarter. John Deutch, then the CIA’s director, thought the future lay in signals intelligence and began to retire old hands in what became known as the “agent scrub”. At gatherings of senior mandarins in Whitehall, Sir Colin McColl, then head of MI6, was asked by colleagues: “Are you still here?”

Everything changed on September 11th 2001. When al-Qaeda struck America, the recriminations flew. The CIA had been created after Pearl Harbour to guard against surprise attacks, yet in the 1990s the agency’s bin Laden hunters had been marginalised as eccentric and obsessive. The intelligence agencies scrambled to make up for what the 9/11 Commission later called their failure “to connect the dots”.

At the time, amid fears of the next assault, the intelligence agencies were called on to make the homeland safe. But when their conduct came to light later, in a less fearful world, they were condemned for their methods. The story of this whipsaw is a case study in how democratic, law-abiding societies struggle to govern bureaucracies that act behind a veil of secrecy. America has found the ensuing debate messy and bitter. The thing to remember, however, is that in other countries the debate barely took place at all.

One set of accusations was levelled at the “President’s Surveillance Programme”. Under this, the NSA intercepted international communications that it suspected had a bearing on al-Qaeda, even if one of the callers was in the United States and was thus protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards Americans against searches or seizures without a warrant. The agency also collected “metadata” (the details but not the content) of calls to, from and within America, acting outside the usual legal machinery. Administration lawyers advised that, as commander-in-chief, George W. Bush had war powers that overrode other laws.

A second set of accusations dealt with harsh treatment of prisoners by the CIA. In secret detention centres outside America it employed 13 techniques, including slapping, nudity and, notoriously, waterboarding. The aim was not to extract information directly but to break prisoners’ will, so that they tipped from a “zone of defiance” to a “zone of co-operation” in which they would talk freely. In “extraordinary renditions” some prisoners were handed over to other governments. Although these were supposed to give America assurances of fair treatment, critics said that in practice nothing could stop them from using torture.

In all, the CIA dealt with fewer than 100 high-value prisoners, and half that number were rendered up. Bush administration lawyers advised that prisoners’ treatment at the hands of the CIA stopped short of torture, which is illegal. Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention, which applies the stricter standard of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, was irrelevant, they said, because it applies only to civil wars.

Would you waterboard your daughter?

Both the surveillance and the interrogation programmes were to be mauled in the press, in Congress and in the courts. The Detainee Treatment Act, passed in 2005, banned cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment for any American prisoner. The same year the Washington Post revealed the existence of secret prisons in eastern Europe and others hinted at the harsh techniques. General Hayden, by then head of the CIA, reports that sessions between the agency and the House Security and Intelligence Committee descended into shouting matches. During one, he was asked if he would be prepared to waterboard his daughter. In 2006 the Supreme Court found against Mr Bush’s legal team and ruled that Common Article Three did in fact protect al-Qaeda prisoners. Early in his presidency, Barack Obama restricted interrogators to mild techniques, such as exploiting the subject’s fears and resentments or offering small rewards like cigarettes, laid out in the revised Army Field Manual. In effect, the vestiges of the CIA interrogation programme were shut down.

A chunk of the surveillance programme followed a similar trajectory. Reports about it surfaced in the New York Times in 2005 (though the paper had been sitting on the story for over a year), with an account of warrantless collection of information. The extent of the programmes became clear only in June 2013, when Edward Snowden released his trove of NSA files (see article). Immediately it became obvious that a few months earlier James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, had misled Congress. When asked whether the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans” he had replied under oath, “No sir”, and given a chance to clarify his answer, he continued: “Not wittingly.”

At the end of 2013 a presidential review panel and in early 2014 a government agency, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, both issued withering critiques of the metadata collection. The law says that the government can seize metadata if they are “relevant” to an FBI investigation. That language, the oversight board concluded, is not broad enough to allow the NSA to seize the whole lot before an investigation has begun. In May 2015 a federal appeals court in New York agreed. And a month later the USA Freedom Act gave the NSA six months to stop warehousing metadata—though it allowed the agency to go to telecoms companies with specific queries.

Grey areas



Copyright © 2015-2016 Share2China.com | Powered by Flask and MongoDB