Entries Tagged "intelligence"

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How the NSA Threatens National Security

Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programs continue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassified additional information, and the President’s Review Group has just released its report and recommendations.

With all this going on, it’s easy to become inured to the breadth and depth of the NSA’s activities. But through the disclosures, we’ve learned an enormous amount about the agency’s capabilities, how it is failing to protect us, and what we need to do to regain security in the Information Age.

First and foremost, the surveillance state is robust. It is robust politically, legally, and technically. I can name three different NSA programs to collect Gmail user data. These programs are based on three different technical eavesdropping capabilities. They rely on three different legal authorities. They involve collaborations with three different companies. And this is just Gmail. The same is true for cell phone call records, Internet chats, cell-phone location data.

Second, the NSA continues to lie about its capabilities. It hides behind tortured interpretations of words like “collect,” “incidentally,” “target,” and “directed.” It cloaks programs in multiple code names to obscure their full extent and capabilities. Officials testify that a particular surveillance activity is not done under one particular program or authority, conveniently omitting that it is done under some other program or authority.

Third, US government surveillance is not just about the NSA. The Snowden documents have given us extraordinary details about the NSA’s activities, but we now know that the CIA, NRO, FBI, DEA, and local police all engage in ubiquitous surveillance using the same sorts of eavesdropping tools, and that they regularly share information with each other.

The NSA’s collect-everything mentality is largely a hold-over from the Cold War, when a voyeuristic interest in the Soviet Union was the norm. Still, it is unclear how effective targeted surveillance against “enemy” countries really is. Even when we learn actual secrets, as we did regarding Syria’s use of chemical weapons earlier this year, we often can’t do anything with the information.

Ubiquitous surveillance should have died with the fall of Communism, but it got a new—and even more dangerous—life with the intelligence community’s post-9/11 “never again” terrorism mission. This quixotic goal of preventing something from happening forces us to try to know everything that does happen. This pushes the NSA to eavesdrop on online gaming worlds and on every cell phone in the world. But it’s a fool’s errand; there are simply too many ways to communicate.

We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to “one or two.” At this point, the only “plot” prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn’t detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an ineffective counterterrorism tool.

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don’t mean just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I’m also talking about the cost to our society. It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as US computer products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.

And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and—more recently—the Occupy movement. Outside the US, there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.

It’s not just domestic abuse we have to worry about; it’s the rest of the world, too. The more we choose to eavesdrop on the Internet and other communications technologies, the less we are secure from eavesdropping by others. Our choice isn’t between a digital world where the NSA can eavesdrop and one where the NSA is prevented from eavesdropping; it’s between a digital world that is vulnerable to all attackers, and one that is secure for all users.

Fixing this problem is going to be hard. We are long past the point where simple legal interventions can help. The bill in Congress to limit NSA surveillance won’t actually do much to limit NSA surveillance. Maybe the NSA will figure out an interpretation of the law that will allow it to do what it wants anyway. Maybe it’ll do it another way, using another justification. Maybe the FBI will do it and give it a copy. And when asked, it’ll lie about it.

NSA-level surveillance is like the Maginot Line was in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful. We need to openly disclose what surveillance we have been doing, and the known insecurities that make it possible. We need to work toward security, even if other countries like China continue to use the Internet as a giant surveillance platform. We need to build a coalition of free-world nations dedicated to a secure global Internet, and we need to continually push back against bad actors—both state and non-state—that work against that goal.

Securing the Internet requires both laws and technology. It requires Internet technology that secures data wherever it is and however it travels. It requires broad laws that put security ahead of both domestic and international surveillance. It requires additional technology to enforce those laws, and a worldwide enforcement regime to deal with bad actors. It’s not easy, and has all the problems that other international issues have: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon non-proliferation; small arms trafficking; human trafficking; money laundering; intellectual property. Global information security and anti-surveillance needs to join those difficult global problems, so we can start making progress.

The President’s Review Group recommendations are largely positive, but they don’t go nearly far enough. We need to recognize that security is more important than surveillance, and work towards that goal.

This essay previously appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

Posted on January 13, 2014 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

1971 FBI Burglary

Interesting story:

…burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

Video article. And the book.

Interesting precursor to Edward Snowden.

Posted on January 10, 2014 at 6:45 AM • View Comments

The FBI Might Do More Domestic Surveillance than the NSA

This is a long article about the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), which is basically its own internal NSA.

It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies—an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.

[…]

The unit works closely with the “big three” U.S. telecommunications companies—AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint—to ensure its ability to intercept the telephone and Internet communications of its domestic targets, as well as the NSA’s ability to intercept electronic communications transiting through the United States on fiber-optic cables.

[…]

After Prism was disclosed in the Washington Post and the Guardian, some technology company executives claimed they knew nothing about a collection program run by the NSA. And that may have been true. The companies would likely have interacted only with officials from the DITU and others in the FBI and the Justice Department, said sources who have worked with the unit to implement surveillance orders.

[…]

Recently, the DITU has helped construct data-filtering software that the FBI wants telecom carriers and Internet service providers to install on their networks so that the government can collect large volumes of data about emails and Internet traffic.

The software, known as a port reader, makes copies of emails as they flow through a network. Then, in practically an instant, the port reader dissects them, removing only the metadata that has been approved by a court.

The FBI has built metadata collection systems before. In the late 1990s, it deployed the Carnivore system, which the DITU helped manage, to pull header information out of emails. But the FBI today is after much more than just traditional metadata—who sent a message and who received it. The FBI wants as many as 13 individual fields of information, according to the industry representative. The data include the route a message took over a network, Internet protocol addresses, and port numbers, which are used to handle different kinds of incoming and outgoing communications. Those last two pieces of information can reveal where a computer is physically located—perhaps along with its user—as well as what types of applications and operating system it’s running. That information could be useful for government hackers who want to install spyware on a suspect’s computer—a secret task that the DITU also helps carry out.

[…]

Some federal prosecutors have gone to court to compel port reader adoption, the industry representative said. If a company failed to comply with a court order, it could be held in contempt.

[…]

It’s not clear how many companies have installed the port reader, but at least two firms are pushing back, arguing that because it captures an entire email, including content, the government needs a warrant to get the information. The government counters that the emails are only copied for a fraction of a second and that no content is passed along to the government, only metadata. The port reader is designed also to collect information about the size of communications packets and traffic flows, which can help analysts better understand how communications are moving on a network. It’s unclear whether this data is considered metadata or content; it appears to fall within a legal gray zone, experts said.

[…]

The Operational Technology Division also specializes in so-called black-bag jobs to install surveillance equipment, as well as computer hacking, referred to on the website as “covert entry/search capability,” which is carried out under law enforcement and intelligence warrants.

[…]

But having the DITU act as a conduit provides a useful public relations benefit: Technology companies can claim—correctly—that they do not provide any information about their customers directly to the NSA, because they give it to the DITU, which in turn passes it to the NSA.

There is an enormous amount of information in the article, which exposes yet another piece of the vast US government surveillance infrastructure. It’s good to read that “at least two” companies are fighting at least a part of this. Any legislation aimed at restoring security and trust in US Internet companies needs to address the whole problem, and not just a piece of it.

Posted on November 26, 2013 at 6:29 AM • View Comments

The Limitations of Intelligence

We recently learned that US intelligence agencies had at least three days’ warning that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was preparing to launch a chemical attack on his own people, but wasn’t able to stop it. At least that’s what an intelligence briefing from the White House reveals. With the combined abilities of our national intelligence apparatus—the CIA, NSA, National Reconnaissance Office and all the rest—it’s not surprising that we had advance notice. It’s not known whether the US shared what it knew.

More interestingly, the US government did not choose to act on that knowledge (for example, launch a preemptive strike), which left some wondering why.

There are several possible explanations, all of which point to a fundamental problem with intelligence information and our national intelligence apparatuses.

The first possibility is that we may have had the data, but didn’t fully understand what it meant. This is the proverbial connect-the-dots problem. As we’ve learned again and again, connecting the dots is hard. Our intelligence services collect billions of individual pieces of data every day. After the fact, it’s easy to walk backward through the data and notice all the individual pieces that point to what actually happened. Before the fact, though, it’s much more difficult. The overwhelming majority of those bits of data point in random directions, or nowhere at all. Almost all the dots don’t connect to anything.

Rather than thinking of intelligence as a connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Which picture is the relevant one? We have no idea. Turning that data into actual information is an extraordinarily difficult problem, and one that the vast scope of our data-gathering programs makes even more difficult.

The second possible explanation is that while we had some information about al-Assad’s plans, we didn’t have enough confirmation to act on that information. This is probably the most likely explanation. We can’t act on inklings, hunches, or possibilities. We probably can’t even act on probabilities; we have to be sure. But when it comes to intelligence, it’s hard to be sure. There could always be something else going on—something we’re not able to eavesdrop on, spy on, or see from our satellites. Again, our knowledge is most obvious after the fact.

The third is that while we were sure of our information, we couldn’t act because that would reveal “sources and methods.” This is probably the most frustrating explanation. Imagine we are able to eavesdrop on al-Assad’s most private conversations with his generals and aides, and are absolutely sure of his plans. If we act on them, we reveal that we are eavesdropping. As a result, he’s likely to change how he communicates, costing us our ability to eavesdrop. It might sound perverse, but often the fact that we are able to successfully spy on someone is a bigger secret than the information we learn from that spying.

This dynamic was vitally important during World War II. During the war, the British were able to break the German Enigma encryption machine and eavesdrop on German military communications. But while the Allies knew a lot, they would only act on information they learned when there was another plausible way they could have learned it. They even occasionally manufactured plausible explanations. It was just too risky to tip the Germans off that their encryption machines’ code had been broken.

The fourth possibility is that there was nothing useful we could have done. And it is hard to imagine how we could have prevented the use of chemical weapons in Syria. We couldn’t have launched a preemptive strike, and it’s probable that it wouldn’t have been effective. The only feasible action would be to alert the opposition—and that, too, might not have accomplished anything. Or perhaps there wasn’t sufficient agreement for any one course of action—so, by default, nothing was done.

All of these explanations point out the limitations of intelligence. The NSA serves as an example. The agency measures its success by amount of data collected, not by information synthesized or knowledge gained. But it’s knowledge that matters.

The NSA’s belief that more data is always good, and that it’s worth doing anything in order to collect it, is wrong. There are diminishing returns, and the NSA almost certainly passed that point long ago. But the idea of trade-offs does not seem to be part of its thinking.

The NSA missed the Boston Marathon bombers, even though the suspects left a really sloppy Internet trail and the older brother was on the terrorist watch list. With all the NSA is doing eavesdropping on the world, you would think the least it could manage would be keeping track of people on the terrorist watch list. Apparently not.

I don’t know how the CIA measures its success, but it failed to predict the end of the Cold War.

More data does not necessarily mean better information. It’s much easier to look backward than to predict. Information does not necessarily enable the government to act. Even when we know something, protecting the methods of collection can be more valuable than the possibility of taking action based on gathered information. But there’s not a lot of value to intelligence that can’t be used for action. These are the paradoxes of intelligence, and it’s time we started remembering them.

Of course, we need organizations like the CIA, the NSA, the NRO and all the rest. Intelligence is a vital component of national security, and can be invaluable in both wartime and peacetime. But it is just one security tool among many, and there are significant costs and limitations.

We’ve just learned from the recently leaked “black budget” that we’re spending $52 billion annually on national intelligence. We need to take a serious look at what kind of value we’re getting for our money, and whether it’s worth it.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.

Posted on September 17, 2013 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Government Secrecy and the Generation Gap

Big-government secrets require a lot of secret-keepers. As of October 2012, almost 5m people in the US have security clearances, with 1.4m at the top-secret level or higher, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Most of these people do not have access to as much information as Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor turned leaker, or even Chelsea Manning, the former US army soldier previously known as Bradley who was convicted for giving material to WikiLeaks. But a lot of them do—and that may prove the Achilles heel of government. Keeping secrets is an act of loyalty as much as anything else, and that sort of loyalty is becoming harder to find in the younger generations. If the NSA and other intelligence bodies are going to survive in their present form, they are going to have to figure out how to reduce the number of secrets.

As the writer Charles Stross has explained, the old way of keeping intelligence secrets was to make it part of a life-long culture. The intelligence world would recruit people early in their careers and give them jobs for life. It was a private club, one filled with code words and secret knowledge.

You can see part of this in Mr Snowden’s leaked documents. The NSA has its own lingo—the documents are riddled with codename—its own conferences, its own awards and recognitions. An intelligence career meant that you had access to a new world, one to which “normal” people on the outside were completely oblivious. Membership of the private club meant people were loyal to their organisations, which were in turn loyal back to them.

Those days are gone. Yes, there are still the codenames and the secret knowledge, but a lot of the loyalty is gone. Many jobs in intelligence are now outsourced, and there is no job-for-life culture in the corporate world any more. Workforces are flexible, jobs are interchangeable and people are expendable.

Sure, it is possible to build a career in the classified world of government contracting, but there are no guarantees. Younger people grew up knowing this: there are no employment guarantees anywhere. They see it in their friends. They see it all around them.

Many will also believe in openness, especially the hacker types the NSA needs to recruit. They believe that information wants to be free, and that security comes from public knowledge and debate. Yes, there are important reasons why some intelligence secrets need to be secret, and the NSA culture reinforces secrecy daily. But this is a crowd that is used to radical openness. They have been writing about themselves on the internet for years. They have said very personal things on Twitter; they have had embarrassing photographs of themselves posted on Facebook. They have been dumped by a lover in public. They have overshared in the most compromising ways—and they have got through it. It is a tougher sell convincing this crowd that government secrecy trumps the public’s right to know.

Psychologically, it is hard to be a whistleblower. There is an enormous amount of pressure to be loyal to our peer group: to conform to their beliefs, and not to let them down. Loyalty is a natural human trait; it is one of the social mechanisms we use to thrive in our complex social world. This is why good people sometimes do bad things at work.

When someone becomes a whistleblower, he or she is deliberately eschewing that loyalty. In essence, they are deciding that allegiance to society at large trumps that to peers at work. That is the difficult part. They know their work buddies by name, but “society at large” is amorphous and anonymous. Believing that your bosses ultimately do not care about you makes that switch easier.

Whistleblowing is the civil disobedience of the information age. It is a way that someone without power can make a difference. And in the information age—the fact that everything is stored on computers and potentially accessible with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks—whistleblowing is easier than ever.

Mr Snowden is 30 years old; Manning 25. They are members of the generation we taught not to expect anything long-term from their employers. As such, employers should not expect anything long-term from them. It is still hard to be a whistleblower, but for this generation it is a whole lot easier.

A lot has been written about the problem of over-classification in US government. It has long been thought of as anti-democratic and a barrier to government oversight. Now we know that it is also a security risk. Organizations such as the NSA need to change their culture of secrecy, and concentrate their security efforts on what truly needs to remain secret. Their default practice of classifying everything is not going to work any more.

Hey, NSA, you’ve got a problem.

This essay previously appeared in the Financial Times.

EDITED TO ADD (9/14): Blog comments on this essay are particularly interesting.

Posted on September 9, 2013 at 1:30 PM • View Comments

The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet

The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They’re doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics.

It’s joint reporting between the Guardian, the New York Times, and ProPublica.

I have been working with Glenn Greenwald on the Snowden documents, and I have seen a lot of them. These are my two essays on today’s revelations.

Remember this: The math is good, but math has no agency. Code has agency, and the code has been subverted.

EDITED TO ADD (9/6): Someone somewhere commented that the NSA’s “groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities” could include a practical attack on RC4. I don’t know one way or the other, but that’s a good speculation.

EDITED TO ADD (9/6): Relevant Slashdot and Reddit threads.

EDITED TO ADD (9/13): An opposing view to my call to action.

Posted on September 5, 2013 at 2:46 PM • View Comments

How Many Leakers Came Before Snowden?

Assume it’s really true that the NSA has no idea what documents Snowden took, and that they wouldn’t even know he’d taken anything if he hadn’t gone public. The fact that abuses of their systems by NSA officers were largely discovered through self-reporting substantiates that belief.

Given that, why should anyone believe that Snowden is the first person to walk out the NSA’s door with multiple gigabytes of classified documents? He might be the first to release documents to the public, but it’s a reasonable assumption that the previous leakers were working for Russia, or China, or elsewhere.

Posted on August 29, 2013 at 1:13 PM • View Comments

Detaining David Miranda

Last Sunday, David Miranda was detained while changing planes at London Heathrow Airport by British authorities for nine hours under a controversial British law—the maximum time allowable without making an arrest. There has been much made of the fact that he’s the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter whom Edward Snowden trusted with many of his NSA documents and the most prolific reporter of the surveillance abuses disclosed in those documents. There’s less discussion of what I feel was the real reason for Miranda’s detention. He was ferrying documents between Greenwald and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and his co-reporter on Snowden and his information. These document were on several USB memory sticks he had with him. He had already carried documents from Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro to Poitras in Berlin, and was on his way back with different documents when he was detained.

The memory sticks were encrypted, of course, and Miranda did not know the key. This didn’t stop the British authorities from repeatedly asking for the key, and from confiscating the memory sticks along with his other electronics.

The incident prompted a major outcry in the UK. The UK’s Terrorist Act has always been controversial, and this clear misuse—it was intended to give authorities the right to detain and question suspected terrorists—is prompting new calls for its review. Certainly the UK. police will be more reluctant to misuse the law again in this manner.

I have to admit this story has me puzzled. Why would the British do something like this? What did they hope to gain, and why did they think it worth the cost? And—of course—were the British acting on their own under the Official Secrets Act, or were they acting on behalf of the United States? (My initial assumption was that they were acting on behalf of the US, but after the bizarre story of the British GCHQ demanding the destruction of Guardian computers last month, I’m not sure anymore.)

We do know the British were waiting for Miranda. It’s reasonable to assume they knew his itinerary, and had good reason to suspect that he was ferrying documents back and forth between Greenwald and Poitras. These documents could be source documents provided by Snowden, new documents that the two were working on either separately or together, or both. That being said, it’s inconceivable that the memory sticks would contain the only copies of these documents. Poitras retained copies of everything she gave Miranda. So the British authorities couldn’t possibly destroy the documents; the best they could hope for is that they would be able to read them.

Is it truly possible that the NSA doesn’t already know what Snowden has? They claim they don’t, but after Snowden’s name became public, the NSA would have conducted the mother of all audits. It would try to figure out what computer systems Snowden had access to, and therefore what documents he could have accessed. Hopefully, the audit information would give more detail, such as which documents he downloaded. I have a hard time believing that its internal auditing systems would be so bad that it wouldn’t be able to discover this.

So if the NSA knows what Snowden has, or what he could have, then the most it could learn from the USB sticks is what Greenwald and Poitras are currently working on, or thinking about working on. But presumably the things the two of them are working on are the things they’re going to publish next. Did the intelligence agencies really do all this simply for a few weeks’ heads-up on what was coming? Given how ham-handedly the NSA has handled PR as each document was exposed, it seems implausible that it wanted advance knowledge so it could work on a response. It’s been two months since the first Snowden revelation, and it still doesn’t have a decent PR story.

Furthermore, the UK authorities must have known that the data would be encrypted. Greenwald might have been a crypto newbie at the start of the Snowden affair, but Poitras is known to be good at security. The two have been communicating securely by e-mail when they do communicate. Maybe the UK authorities thought there was a good chance that one of them would make a security mistake, or that Miranda would be carrying paper documents.

Another possibility is that this was just intimidation. If so, it’s misguided. Anyone who regularly reads Greenwald could have told them that he would not have been intimidated—and, in fact, he expressed the exact opposite sentiment—and anyone who follows Poitras knows that she is even more strident in her views. Going after the loved ones of state enemies is a typically thuggish tactic, but it’s not a very good one in this case. The Snowden documents will get released. There’s no way to put this cat back in the bag, not even by killing the principal players.

It could possibly have been intended to intimidate others who are helping Greenwald and Poitras, or the Guardian and its advertisers. This will have some effect. Lavabit, Silent Circle, and now Groklaw have all been successfully intimidated. Certainly others have as well. But public opinion is shifting against the intelligence community. I don’t think it will intimidate future whistleblowers. If the treatment of Chelsea Manning didn’t discourage them, nothing will.

This leaves one last possible explanation—those in power were angry and impulsively acted on that anger. They’re lashing out: sending a message and demonstrating that they’re not to be messed with—that the normal rules of polite conduct don’t apply to people who screw with them. That’s probably the scariest explanation of all. Both the US and UK intelligence apparatuses have enormous money and power, and they have already demonstrated that they are willing to ignore their own laws. Once they start wielding that power unthinkingly, it could get really bad for everyone.

And it’s not going to be good for them, either. They seem to want Snowden so badly that that they’ll burn the world down to get him. But every time they act impulsively aggressive—convincing the governments of Portugal and France to block the plane carrying the Bolivian president because they thought Snowden was on it is another example—they lose a small amount of moral authority around the world, and some ability to act in the same way again. The more pressure Snowden feels, the more likely he is to give up on releasing the documents slowly and responsibly, and publish all of them at once—the same way that WikiLeaks published the US State Department cables.

Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported on some new NSA secret programs that are spying on Americans. It got the information from “interviews with current and former intelligence and government officials and people from companies that help build or operate the systems, or provide data,” not from Snowden. This is only the beginning. The media will not be intimidated. I will not be intimidated. But it scares me that the NSA is so blind that it doesn’t see it.

This essay previously appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

EDITED TO ADD: I’ve been thinking about it, and there’s a good chance that the NSA doesn’t know what Snowden has. He was a sysadmin. He had access. Most of the audits and controls protect against normal users; someone with root access is going to be able to bypass a lot of them. And he had the technical chops to cover his tracks when he couldn’t just evade the auditing systems.

The AP makes an excellent point about this:

The disclosure undermines the Obama administration’s assurances to Congress and the public that the NSA surveillance programs can’t be abused because its spying systems are so aggressively monitored and audited for oversight purposes: If Snowden could defeat the NSA’s own tripwires and internal burglar alarms, how many other employees or contractors could do the same?

And, to be clear, I didn’t mean to say that intimidation wasn’t the government’s motive. I believe it was, and that it was poorly thought out intimidation: lashing out in anger, rather than from some Machiavellian strategy. (Here’s a similar view.) If they wanted Miranda’s electronics, they could have confiscated them and sent him on his way in fifteen minutes. Holding him for nine hours—the absolute maximum they could under the current law—was intimidation.

I am reminded of the phone call the Guardian received from British government. The exact quote reported was: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” That’s something you would tell your child. And that’s the power dynamic that’s going on here.

EDITED TO ADD (8/27): Jay Rosen has an excellent essay on this.

EDITED TO ADD (9/12): Other editors react.

Posted on August 27, 2013 at 6:39 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.