Author: Lucy Steigerwald

According to documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 2010 the Department of Homeland Security considered the possibility of arming their border drones with “expendables or non-lethal weapons.”

There are currently ten Border Patrol drones, the majority on the Mexican border. They are used only for surveillance-related actions, though a lot more often than previously admitted or expected before the release of flight logs and other documents to EFF. Some of the information gleaned by EFF about drone usage includes the fact that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have sent drones far into the Southwest and Northern corners of the U.S.. Also,  they’re also lending out their drones to the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals, and various state agencies. In 2012, CBP flew drones for other agencies 250 times, a rapid increase from the last few years. (The question of FBI-specific drone usage has been raised recently as well, by Sen. Rand Paul and others.)

According to, EFF, CBP already use drones for

“specific drug-related investigations, searches for missing persons, border crossings and fishing violations to general “surveillance imagery” and “aerial reconnaissance” of a given location.”

They have also been used for environmental and geographic surveillance. Check out EFF’s report for some details, but mostly a lot of unanswered questions about privacy and accountability or lack thereof.

Customs and Border Patrol and DHS assure us that they have no current plan to arm drones. But how long will that last? We may be a long way away from a dystopia where Hellfire missiles rain down on American citizens (okay, Hellfire missiles that rain down on American citizens while they’re within the border of the United States) but a world where drones carry Tazers, sound cannons, rubber bullets, or mostly-not-deadly law enforcement favorites may be a lot closer. And throwing money at the border “problem” will no doubt make all of this worse.

Last week the Senate passed a long-awaited immigration bill that includes some good stuff for immigrant amnesty. It also unfortunately allows for nearly $47 million billion to be spent on border “security”, adds 300-odd miles of border fence, and, notes Arizona Central:

calls for the [Customs and Border Patrol] and its subagency, the Border Patrol, to operate drones 24 hours a day, seven days a week along the southern border. If some version of that bill passes the House, as many as 24 additional drones could be deployed.

Nathan Goodman writing at Counterpunch points out that it’s already bad on the border, and:

this money will be used to create what John McCain calls “the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” staffed by at least 38,405 Border Patrol agents. That’s a larger force than George W. Bush had stationed in Afghanistan when he left office. No wonder it’s been called the “border surge.”

Those agents will be armed with billions of dollars worth of equipment from America’s leading war profiteers. According to the Washington Post, the bill demands “among other items, six Northrop Grumman airborne radar systems that cost $9.3 million each, 15 Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters that average more than $17 million apiece, and eight light enforcement helicopters made by American Eurocopter that sell for about $3 million each.” As usual, militarization means obscene corporate profits at taxpayer expense.

Moreover, increasing “border security” funding means expanding an agency whose members routinely violate civil liberties and have even committed murder. John Carlos Frey has documented 10 instances where Border Patrol agents have shot innocent Mexicans on Mexican soil. In one case, 16-year old José Antonio Rodríguez was shot eight times when he went to buy a hot dog in the border town of Nogales.  In another incident, Frey explains, “a husband and wife were celebrating the birthday of their two daughters. The husband got shot and killed, shot in the heart.” This is what Border Patrol agents do to peaceful people who haven’t even crossed the border.

The level of militarization within federal, state, and local law enforcement in America is staggering. Adding 20,000 more people whose job it is to stop nearly entirely peaceful immigrants from finding work is not a just, or free, or merciful solution to the supposed problem of their movement into the U.S.. Adding more drones, with or without non-lethal weapons, will make things worse. At the very least because of how much each step like this normalizes the warped state of policing in America.

The bill will most likely wither in the House because Republicans think it’s too soft on immigrants, and “amnesty” is unpopular in many districts. But honestly, if the plight of poor migrants doesn’t concern you, consider Ron Paul’s frequent warnings about what a border can mean to the people within that nation. East Germany and North Korea are the most obvious examples of a man-made border that kept their people from leaving. The people of America have a lot more exit options in this big old country, but the point and the principle still stands. You don’t want the people with all the power and the military tech serving as doormen in either direction.

Within his July 1 Time cover story, you almost wish Joe Klein would just say it — how he yearns for one of those national service programs always suggested as the answer, at least among the chewy authoritarian center, to all of America’s problems.

He never does, though. But the implications throughout his piece — even starting with the headline — suggest no reason why Klein should object to such a grand project.

The headline: “Can Service Save Us?” — the subhed: “It just might. By helping returning troops regain their sense of purpose, veterans’ groups are proving that public service is therapeutic.” The start of the pieces looks at how initial reports suggest that hands-on community helping diminishs the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in American veterans. Good. Awesome. Doctors and veterans’ groups should pursue that, as a few have begun to. And it’s annoying to be told that helping people is nice! by a magazine, but at least Klein’s piece thinks helping people after disasters is a nice thing to do. Which it is. So yippee for him. No problems there.

But this is Time magazine. Worse still, this is Joe Klein. And Klein is just one man among that special breed of soft-sounding authoritarian pundits who are convinced that we, as a nation, have lost our way in a haze of people doing what they want. The only solution to that imaginary fog is that something that may work for veterans (who have been trained to work as a unit and to derive their worth from working in a group) should — maybe — be put on all people of this could-be-great nation. Or, more likely, all young people. Because young people, in Klein’s words are “couch dwellers.”Yet, there seems to be within them “a general hunger for service”.  But that’s not enough because we in America have “slouched from active citizenship to passive couch potato-hood.”

Worst still is “…our waning sense of civil engagement, our weirdly hollow democracy in which active citizenship has been displaced by marketing and political sloganeering.”  Weirdly hollow like, say, spouting off Robert Putnam-style fearmongering without a shred of evidence to back your accusations of American decline  as either some new problem, or even a definition of what that problem is in the world beyond Time magazine? What the hell, Joe Klein, is “active citizenship”?

This all builds up to Klein’s big question — “Would it be so bad if the rest of us became more attuned to the values and can do spirit our veterans have brought home from the military?”

Klein obviously thinks not, but under his thin veneer of semi-objectivity, he never even answers his own query. But the song of military greatness runs all through this piece. Their brotherhood, their sorrow and injury over their lost (mostly) brothers, the complete lack of critical thinking on just what the military does… Nobody is expecting Time to write a searing, anti-military article. But by subscribing to the dominant narrative of troops as heroes — albeit broken ones — Klein gets to have his cake and eat it. He can frame his piece in an a-political manner, he can tip-toe around national service, while still getting across a fundamentally political message: the troops are there to save us all, let’s be more like the troops.

A scrap of questioning, one sentence that admits that PTSD may not just stem from seeing the blood of your own side spilled, would have helped Klein. But there is nothing but praise for these damaged patriots who helped people abroad, and are now learning to help them here. Hell, if you didn’t know anything about the military before reading Klein’s piece, you might come away with the idea that it’s some sort of occasionally dangerous, international Scouting adventure. Even those who wish to argue the merits of a standing army — or one constantly adventuring abroad — should have the intellectual honesty to clarify just what soldiers do.

This is not to say anyone antiwar should revel in the PTSD in soldiers coming back from war. Maybe helping out in disaster zones will improve their health. Great! Though it’s hard not to wish they had done that in the first place. But why, again, must this good mental health news translate to a greater national purpose for the rest of us un-Great slobs?

Because people like Klein do not trust individuals to live their own lives. America is not a humming, chaotic mess of people loving and living and working to them. At least it shouldn’t be. When individuals are left to their own devices, some elusive, abstract notion of “Greatness” is not being pursed. And that is intolerable to such people. Especially when it comes to the younger generations.

Why not just have a draft then, if these young people owe something to the nation, and need to be molded by its Greatness?

Why don’t the elderly have a similar obligation? Why is always the young who are so green that they demand the fine-tuning of the Nation’s Hand to make them blossom into “active citizens”? Indeed, why are the supposed attributes to be found in the military, or “service” so apolitical as to be not worthy of discussion? Is serving Obama’s America as worthy as serving Bush’s which is just as good as serving Nixon’s or Wilson’s? And if so, what does it matter what the government or the military does — what wars they fight and why and how — if serving them is always the highest ideal?

But really, a draft! Why not if we’re in such miserable shape? I’m sure that that’s the ideal method of imparting the military’s “can do spirit”.

Because, thank God, that notion remains unpopular. The article’s side-graph reassures the reader that only 22 percent of respondents support the idea of “mandatory” national service. So that’s comforting, as is Rep. Charlie Rangel’s constant failure to bring back conscription. We’re in difficult shape in America when it comes to freedoms, but at least there seems to be a lingering aversion to the idea that young people belong to the government to quite this extent. Maybe that’s one lesson from Vietnam that stuck.

So my prayer is that the Kleins, the David Brooks, the Thomas Friedmans, and the Aaron Sorkins of the world remain forever frustrated that America is not all it could be. And that the government continues to allow too many young people to follow their own paths, pursue their own interests, and even help people – -all without the military or the clunky, bureaucratic mess sure to come out of any official institution of “national service.”

Libertarian television show host John Stossel, and liberal creator of the acclaimed HBO series The Wire David Simon have reacted to the National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal in a similar fashion – -namely, they suggest we stop worrying about it so much since there are worse things in the world.

This reaction is almost understandable given some of the salient points they raise after this terrible one.

On occasion, libertarians and rabble-rousing peaceniks are criticized for, say, reacting to a domestic tragedy such as the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting by pointing out how little Americans seem to care about such bloodshed when it happens abroad — and worse, when it happens because of their own government’s actions. This is an arguably callous reaction, but it raises an unquestionably important question — why are some tragedies, atrocities, or oppressions worse than others?

The news media will — thankfully — cover something as undeniable as the NSA spying when the story falls into their laps. They are much worse at covering policy-evil. That is, much of what the federal government does every day. Wars, scores of thousands of troops all over the world, the drug war and the prison industrial complex at home; all of these are a constant in the world, and the harm they do is much more clear-cut than even the most insidious spying program.

And so, it’s not a bad thing that Stossel and Simon used the NSA scandal to remind readers about the constant misery of the drug war. You know, that monstrous policy which, in spite of Gil Kerlikowske, Eric Holder, or Bill Maher’s pronouncements, is far from over. Simon, whose The Wire is beloved by libertarians due to its bleak portrayal of policing, political corruption, and the war on drugs has written a great deal about the NSA revelations. Much of it was…weird. The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf has been deftly responding to some of the more muddled, communitarian, NSA-and-government-trusting nonsense coming from Simon.

But within his tidal wave of text, Simon also points out that the kinds of violations that your average middle class white person may suddenly worry over with this spying have been rampant for decades thanks to the war on drugs — and the victims there have largely been poor minorities.

On this same topic of not caring about the NSA scandal, John Stossel last week wrote a bizarre, weak piece about how he already assumed his privacy was gone so he can’t summon the energy to care about this spying. (Stossel also added that the U.S.’s shaky economic situation is also more serious than the scandal. Which one could argue is true, but that too is a subtle slide into disaster. War and prisons are happening right this second, and their victims are suffering in ways that don’t require an understanding of free market fundamentals to comprehend.) Two days ago the mustached Fox Business host followed that up with a piece on how “The Drug War Is Worse Than NSA Spying”. Within that column Stossel’s most relevant point is that “we’ve become accustomed to the older abuses” like the war on drugs. True, and so important. Maybe it’s okay to use current outrages to remind people of older, more entrenched ones, no?

(Sadly Stossel, like Simon, could use some more general distrust of government. In his first NSA piece he managed to disparage the government, scorn excessive military spending, and still lazily write “terrorists do want to murder us. If the NSA is halfway competent, Big Data should help detect plots.”)

And so when Simon, with understandable frustration, asks where white people’s rage over privacy was for the past forty years while minorities were drowning under the war on drugs, we should sympathize. But if Simon cares about that,  he might remember that plenty of minorities also suffer under the war on terrors’ clunky dragnets. Ask Muslim communities in New York City how much they value their lost privacy in the wake of the NYPD’s massive spying campaign. Hell, ask the people lingering in Gitmo after more than a decade whether worry over spying is the privilege of white, middle-class Americans. No matter how many Johnny-come-latelys appear, full of righteous Fourth Amendment-loving outrage, due to Eric Snowden and others’ leaks, and no matter how tempting it might be to yell, “where the hell have you been?!” the point still stands — we’re all going to suffer from the powers of the NSA if we don’t check them now. The existence of worse violations is not a reason to dismiss pretty-damn-bad ones. Libertarians and people empathetic enough to write about the nastiness of the drug war should know this better than anyone.

Today Edward Snowden, a former computer analyst for the CIA recently employed at the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, voluntarily revealed his identity as the source of The Guardian and The Washington Post‘s massive scoops about the NSA’s PRISM program, as well as its system of logging the metadata from every single call made from Verizon phones (and Sprint and AT&T, turns out).

Snowden fled to Hong Kong on May 30, and was interviewed there on June 6 by Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. In the interview he is amazingly well-spoken about the principles surrounding his decision to leak top-secret documents.Until late last month, the 29-year-old seems to have had a comfy life in Hawaii with a girlfriend and a $200,000 a year job with Booz Allen. But the reported Ron Paul supporter who voted for “a third party candidate” in 2008, wasn’t interested in keeping that level of coziness while possessing information that he believed the public has a right to know.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” Snowden told Greenwald.

Snowden also seems eerily resigned to the likely consequences of his actions — namely that he may never see his home country again, and that government officials may come for him at any time.

So far the official response to this revelation has been limited. The White House didn’t comment. The NSA and Booz Allen were predictably outraged. Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) suggests that we prosecute Snowden “to the fullest extent of the law.” King, chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism, also said that no other countries should grant Snowden asylum. Predictable hawks such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have yet to comment, but the up-coming work week will no doubt bring about a smorgasbord of outrage.

Meanwhile, whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning continues his trial for 22 charges, including violation of the Espionage Act, with the potentially life sentence-bringing crime of “aiding the enemy.” Though Manning has garnered heartening amounts of support support for his actions, initially it seems that Snowden could be a more compelling case for whistleblowing as heroism. Manning messed with the military, and was a member of (and therefore a “traitor” to) the armed forces. He dumped massive amounts of documents in what some claim was a less-than-careful manner, and he shared them with Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Contrast this with Snowden who claims to have combed through and made sure only to release things that were in the public interest, and who shared documents with reputable newspapers. (Though even officials have admitted that they can’t point to anyone in particular that Manning endangered with his releases, only a vague worry that he could have.)

Though the NSA and the CIA can be looked at as fighters in the war on terror (thereby counting as protectors of Americans), they don’t have the same cultural clout as do soldiers. There are no bumper stickers demanding that we all support NSA agents, no ribbons for them.. There’s that, and the unfortunate truth that most Americans care more about an injury to them (in the form of domestic spying) than they do about the ugly face of a war that their government started. Hell, it’s hard enough to get Americans to care about the surveillance state, getting them to object to war — especially when a soldier “betrays” his fellows is even harder. Manning is not the perfect everyman for this cause of transparency and antiwar activism (his tiny stature, his emotional difficulties even before his grim treatment in prison, and his sexual orientation unfortunately don’t help, either).

By all means, if people on the fence before re Manning decide that Snowden is speaking the truth, that’s great. Any catalyst for people joining in and saying enough is enough is a great thing. But if  Snowden becomes (and it’s very early yet, this is a lot of speculation) a better face for the noble art of whistleblowing, that doesn’t mean that Manning should be forgotten. Manning may have been impulsive and even reckless, but he acted in good faith, same as Snowden seems to have done.

Both men are heroes. They both risked their lives and their freedom to cast light into the nastiest, darkest corners of the powerful. And they’re both in serious trouble.

Please check out the full Greenwald/Guardian interview with Snowden, keep watching the Bradley Manning trial, and on Monday, when the usual suspects start howling about national security, don’t believe them.

And if you ever find yourself in possession of classified documents that show something wrong, leak them.  Be like Manning and Snowden, and leak them.

Suddenly members of the media (thanks to some heroic, anonymous leakers) are doing what we wish they did every day — they’re enthusiastically skewering the state, and reporting in outraged detail all that the government has done to violate the sacred rights of the people. Maybe we should back a federal media shield law, to protect brave journalists like Glenn Greenwald and the folks at The Washington Post, as well as their sources.

But first, check out a few of the supporters of such a bill. President Barack Obama is a fan of the idea. So is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). He co-sponsored the return of a dead 2009 law — the so-called Free Flow of Information Act — along with no-intervention-in-your-life-is-too-small Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Earlier this week Graham told a collection of reporters that he supported such a law, because it’s important to suss out who deserves protection from federal prosecution. Said the Senator:

“Is any blogger out there saying anything — do they deserve First Amendment protection? These are the issues of our times.”

Graham suggested that yes, media giants get that. But “So, if classified information is leaked out on a personal website or [by] some blogger, do they have the same First Amendments rights as somebody who gets paid [in] traditional journalism?”

Why wouldn’t they?

If there is any group dragging their foot more than traditional media over just who counts as the press, it’s lawmakers. In a world of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and kick-ass, semi-“official” bloggers of all stripes, it would be incredibly convenient (yet would look magnanimous) for government officials to decide that yes, of course The New York Times deserves some protection when they publish leaked documents, but your average scrappy blogger does not. And Julian Assange definitely does not, nor does Bradley Manning.

Atlantic Wire notes that the dead 2009 Federal law that Obama is keen on resurrecting would, by their own interpretation, cover bloggers. But we’re already past the age of the long-form blogger. The next big question is social media — Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr — all the ways millions of people now spread information without even the formality of blogging.

And are those who deserve added protection to be protected because they’re news reporters, or because they work for news organizations? Muses The Atlantic:

Let’s say that a person regularly shares news stories over Twitter. He looks for interesting articles, composes a summary and a link, tweets it out. One day, a friend who works for the government sends him a classified document. The person puts that up on a file sharing site and tweets a link with a description of the file. Does that person deserve protection as a journalist? If he posted it to his blog where he comments on news items, would he then? What if he worked for Fox News, but not as a reporter?

Another example: A woman who doesn’t usually tweet about the news shares a photo of the failure of a top secret weapon, sent to her by a friend in the military. Should she be protected? Is a person who stumbles onto something newsworthy a journalist?

And even within official outlets, there’s going to be a hierarchy. Huffington Post is official enough to warrant an invite to Eric Holder’s off-the-record chats about the press and the Department of Justice. But, what about student media? Or bloggers who have other jobs ? According to a U.S. A. Today, the House version[pdf] of the shield law wouldn’t protect either of those. They highlight the case of student journalist Josh Wolf who was jailed for 226 days when he refused to hand over protest footage he had taken.

Like any other institution, the press too often seems to feel that if everyone is the press, then it somehow diminishes their unique power and responsibility as gatekeepers of information.

Wall-Street Journal columnist James Taranto was a recent exception to this jealous rule, noting his deep discomfort with the prospect of government legally differentiating between “real” reporters or not. Fox News reporter James Rosen, Taranto notes, is currently in trouble because he is being accused of being a “co-conspirator” with his source, not because he was attempting to protect that source.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum also wrote that Graham — who at least Tweeted a follow-up clarification that yes, bloggers deserve free speech protection —  is still wrong about the First Amendment on a basic level. The press:

refers to a technology, not a profession or an industry. “The press,” like “speech,” is a means of communication that all citizens have an equal right to use, regardless of their occupation. Today the press should be understood to mean any medium of mass communication, including the Internet. Freedom of the press in this sense is not a special privilege that belongs only to officially recognized members of the Fourth Estate.

It’s hard to know what should be done about protecting dispensers of news, besides a futile prayer that the government stop haranguing those folks. But stronger protections for whistleblowers and distributors of information, period, would be a better solution than a limited, potentially dangerous law like this.

At least it pays to approach such feel-good legislation with caution. After all, it’s hawks and big government advocates clammering loudest to “fix”  the awful — but supposedly “limited” — Authorization for Use of Military Force; similarly, it’s power-hungry politicians touting a media shield law as the solution to (sometimes their own) spying on and harassment of the press.

Today Attorney General Eric Holder held a meeting — the second of three — with journalists from high-profile organizations including the ABC, The Wall Street Journal, and POLITICO, in order to discuss how to placate them during any potential, future Department of Justice wiretapping. Or something. It’s hard to know exactly what was discussed, since the meeting was off the record. This fact raised the hackles of  several outlets including the AP (well, yeah, guys), The New York Times, CNN, and the Huffington Post, all of whom decided to officially skip the whole thing if they weren’t free to report on what was said.

CNN and Huffpo said they would certainly go if the meeting were on the record. And NY Times executive editor Jill Abramson said, “It isn’t appropriate for us to attend an off-the-record meeting with the attorney general.” Huffington Post Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim added, “A conversation specifically about the freedom of the press should be an open one. We have a responsibility not to betray that.” Grim must not be a fan of the Obama administration’s long series of ironic moves designed to make their puffery about “openness” more and more hilarious. (One of the best was Obama accepting an award for transparency in a private meeting….)

Now ABC can dish on a few of the things that they are allowed to discuss:

Both ABC and Thompson Reuters representatives expressed deep concern over recent probes of the Associated Press and a Fox News reporter that occurred as the department investigated potential leaks of classified information.

Both ABC and Reuters expressed the need for change in the 1972 Department of Justice guidelines for issuing subpoenas to and investigating members of the news media.

“The meeting was productive. There was a frank discussion of the challenges facing both the government and the news media in protecting the public’s right to the free flow of information,” ABC’s [Washington bureau chief Robin] Sproul said afterward. “A good result would be modified Department of Justice guidelines that set a higher bar for when and under what conditions the government can subpoena journalists.”

I’m very happy for ABC that it was a productive meeting (POLITICO seemed a little less jazzed). But a terrific way to enhance “the public’s right to the free flow of information” might be for the public to be able to know exactly what was said in a meeting with a high-ranking official which included discussions with enormous implications for the freedom of the press in this country.

Also, much of the media is disinterested in protecting “unofficial” journalists, but the rules have changed in this here internet age — it’s not just the AP who deserves to have their phone records untapped. Arguably it’s worse with them, because of the chilling effect on investigative reporting. But what about the chilling effect on political dissent that might come from the allegation that every phone call in the US is being recorded? And much has been said about the Obama administration’s alarming war on whistleblowers, which is more or less another arm of its war on the press (only the press is a lot less interested in the former) but again — if the AP wiretapping is the Rubicon on acceptability, that’s great the press has finally had enough. But that line was there and ignored since, oh, let’s say the moment Candidate Obama voted for telecom immunity for companies that helped the Bush administration in their wiretapping. In short, we’ll see how long the press outrage lasts.

And it’s almost understandable that the media who declined to boycott would tell themselves that some information is better than none, but that’s how we got the media we have. It would have sent a much stronger message to Holder about his Department’s unacceptable behavior, if everyone had just stayed at home.