What’s the Relationship Database About?
Atrios asks what the whole dragnet is about.
It’s actually a serious question. Maybe it’s just a full employment program for spooks. Maybe they just do it because they can. But the only “real” point to such an extensive surveillance system is to abuse that surveillance (the surveillance itself is already an abuse of course).
At best it’s a colossal fucking waste of money. At worst?
I actually think there are understandable answers for much of this.
Since Michael Hayden took over the NSA, contractors have assumed an increasingly dominant role in the agency, meaning you’ve got a former DIRNSA at Booz Allen Hamilton pitching future Booz VPs on solutions to keep the country safe that just happen to make them fabulously profitable and don’t happen to foreground privacy. As Thomas Drake showed, we’re pursuing the biggest and most privacy invasive solutions because contractors are embedded with the agency.
I think there’s the One Percent approach we got from Dick Cheney, that endorses maximal solutions to hunt terrorists even while avoiding any real accountability (both for past failures and to review efficacy) because of secrecy. We’re slowly beginning to wean ourselves from this Cheney hangover, but it is taking time (and boosters for his approach are well-funded and publicized).
And, at the same time, criminals and other countries have attacked our weak network security underbelly, targeting the companies that have the most political sway, DOD contractors and, increasingly, financial companies, which is setting off panic that is somewhat divorced from the average American’s security. The accountability for cybersecurity is measured in entirely different ways than it is for terrorism (otherwise Keith Alexander, who claims the country is being plundered like a colony, would have been fired years ago). In particular, there is no punishment or even assessment of past rash decisions like StuxNet. But here, as with terrorism, the notion of cost-benefit assessment doesn’t exist. And this panicked effort to prevent attacks even while clinging to offensive cyberweapons increasingly drives the overaggressive collection, even though no one wants to admit that.
Meanwhile, I think we grab everything we can overseas out of hubris we got while we were the uncontested world power, and only accelerated now that we’re losing that uncontested position. If we’re going to sustain power through coercion — and we developed a nasty habit of doing so, especially under Bush — then we need to know enough to coerce successfully. So we collect. Everything. Even if doing so makes us stupider and more reliant on coercion.
So I can explain a lot of it without resorting to bad faith, even while much of that explanation underscores just how counterproductive it all is.
But then there’s the phone dragnet, the database recording all US phone-based relationships in the US for the last 5 years. Read more →