INTRODUCTION
During the year-long reporting of the Edward Snowden leaks, some numbers and facts have been given short shrift. That is, we might hear some trivia about how the NSA obtained four million communications out of Poland during the first three weeks of December 2012, but we haven't heard all of the numbers, certainly not the numbers that might tend to balance out the equation.
For example, do you know how many hate groups exist, right now, in the United States? How does that number compare to the number of Americans who face "enhanced screening" when boarding an airplane? How many telephone numbers of suspected terrorists did the NSA use to query the telephone metadatabase the year before Snowden surfaced? How many international terrorists are there? When those numbers are compared, the result is pretty shocking.
What portion of the American population has a set of fingerprints in the federal "IAFIS" database? Do you? If so, how often are your fingerprints "searched" when law enforcement agencies across the nation query that fingerprint database looking for the criminal who left evidence at the scene of a crime? How is that different from a search of anonymous telephone numbers?
In all of the reporting on Snowden, have you read anyone mention the human and economic costs of 9/11? The human and economic costs of Benghazi? You may have heard that there were thirteen "Benghazis" during the Bush Administration, but you likely heard that in response to the latest Republican hearing on that specific terrorist attack and not in relation to the Snowden leaks.
Combining 9/11 with Benghazi gives you 3,000 dead people. It also gives you what New York Magazine reported as 488,000 estimated cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In The New York Times, there is an estimate putting the economic cost of 9/11 at $3.3 trillion dollars. That's one-fifth of the national debt.
According to USA Today, House Republicans requested a budget of $3.3 million for this year's Benghazi Select Committee. The article also noted that the "budget for the Benghazi committee does not include the costs of other Benghazi investigations that have already been done by four other House committees." To give you some idea of additional expenditures, including opportunity costs, ThinkProgress reported the following:
"The Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to fulfill requests from Congress’s six investigations into Benghazi, according to a letter from the Pentagon to a top-ranking Democrat.
'The Department has devoted thousands of man-hours to responding to the numerous and often repetitive congressional requests regarding Benghazi,' Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs Elizabeth King said in a letter to Congress dated earlier this month. That estimate includes 'time devoted to approximately 50 congressional hearings, briefings, and interviews which the Department has led or participated in.' While no total calculation has been completed yet, King estimated that total cost of compliance with Congress’ requests to the Pentagon and other agencies runs 'into the millions of dollars.'”
Those are a few numbers that have been given short shrift. But there are many others. A few of those appear in the following paragraphs.
Number of Intentional Violations of the Constitution by the Government Proved by Snowden or Greenwald: 0
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After more than a year of multiple reporters sifting through tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of Top Secret files, and a year to report on them, and despite having a mole who had worked inside the CIA for years, who had also worked for two NSA contractors, who claims to have been trained to be a real spy (and real spies know how to break in and steal important things), who had worked with
Admin privileges on NSA computers, who had appropriated the Admin privileges of others to have even more access, and who had worked patiently over many months stealing as much classified information as he could, the scorecard shows "0" in the column devoted to intentional violations of the Constitution by the Government.
The most controversial of the programs, the NSA telephone metadata collection program is based on a Supreme Court case that held Government could obtain the telephone metadata from even known, specifically targeted individuals with only a court order ... back in 1979. That case is still good law, which is why, in the court system, the NSA metadata program is approximately 39-0-1, with only one court holding that the program is "likely" unconstitutional. That one court didn't reach the merits of the case and refused to enjoin it.
If anything, Snowden and Greenwald and Poitras and Gellman and Applebaum and all of the others have established that there is an exceedingly functional oversight mechanism in place that is three branches wide, thousands of regulations and laws deep and millions of miles of red tape tall. On top of the three branches of Government providing oversight, we have whistleblowing procedures, Inspectors General and the Office of Special Counsel, and piled over that you have the media, a Civil Liberties Protection Officer and the Obama Administration's new Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board ("PCLOB"). That's a seven-layered bean dip of privacy protection that we wouldn't know about without Snowden.
Number of Unique Telephone Numbers Queried by the NSA's Metadata Collection Program in 2012: 300
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That's no mis-print. During all of 2012, the year
before Snowden surfaced, the NSA queried the telephone metadatabase with a total of three hundred unique telephone numbers. The Government wanted to know who, inside the borders of the United States, was calling or being called by those 300 suspected terrorists or hostile foreign agents. Moreover, every six months the NSA provides a report to Congress about the metadata program. As the PCLOB noted in their report:
"For the preceding six-month period, the Attorney General's report [to Congress] also must set forth the aggregate number of persons targeted for orders issued under FISA, including a breakdown of those targeted for access to records under [the NSA's telephone metadata collection program] Section 215."
If the Government can find out who terrorists are calling within the country without violating the privacy rights of Americans, shouldn't it do so? Wouldn't the Government be negligent if it didn't? Actual facts show that the NSA operated with restraint and reported to Congress on a periodic basis. This is especially true when you measure the 300 unique foreign telephone numbers against the number of suspected foreign terrorists identified by the Government as reported by
The Intercept, to include 73,189 members of al Qaeda in Iraq, 62,794 Taliban, another group of 40,446 in al Qaeda at large, 21,913 in Hamas, 21,199 in Hezbollah, 12,491 in the Haqqani Network, 11,275 in the Colombia-based FARC, 11,547 in the Somalia-based al-Shabab and 8,322 individuals identified with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Number of Suspicious Telephone Numbers Put into Reports in One Three-Year Period: 2,700
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During a three-year period from 2006 to 2009, the NSA identified a grand total of 2,700 telephone numbers through their metadata collection program that may have merited further investigation. Remember all those columns and articles and posts and blogs and comments and diaries that speculated about how the NSA could identify millions or tens or hundreds of millions of telephone numbers because the agency was allowed to go up to three "hops" from a suspected foreign terrorist's telephone number in collecting domestic calls?
(A "hop" is what the NSA uses to describe the process of identifying the telephone numbers called by the person who received a call from a suspected foreign terrorist. In turn, all of the people that that person called would be another hop. The idea is to not only catch the lead terrorist operating stateside, but to also locate others in his or her cell.)
Again, when nobody was looking--and when nobody was supposed to find out for at least another forty or fifty years--the Government was acting responsibly and with restraint behind closed doors, obeying the Rule of Law. When you get past the speculations, the assumptions, the "Government could ..." and the "NSA is capable of ...," you find that the actual facts show the state obeying the law and protecting privacy.
Number of Fingerprint Samples in the Federal Fingerprint Database: 104 Million+
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The Government maintains a huge database of fingerprints in its "Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System" or "IAFIS," and it is available "24 hours a day, 365 days a year." The database houses "the fingerprints and criminal histories of more than 70 million subjects in the criminal master file." Additionally, there are "34 million civil prints."
In total, that's a little less than one-third of the population, including the fingerprints of everyone who's been arrested, everyone in and retired or discharged from the military, everyone who has worked for the Federal Government, most state governments and some local governments, people who have become naturalized citizens, resident aliens and everyone who has ever been issued a security clearance or received a background check that included a trip to the local police station. They use the database to match fingerprints on file with prints found at a crime scene. It has been computerized and has gotten more technologically advanced over the years.
Is it a constitutional violation to search the fingerprint database? No. Still, other than the people arrested--and many of those folks are innocent--everyone else has more or less voluntarily agreed to provide their fingerprints, even if it is only to the local or state police. That's how the Supreme Court sees telephone metadata. You have voluntarily provided a third party--the telephone company--the information about when you called and what number you called. Similarly, when you give your fingerprints to law enforcement, they belong to law enforcement just like when you dial a call, that information belongs to the telephone company as a business record.
If your fingerprints provide a "hit" to the police, they will automatically know your name and last known address, your age, hair and eye color, approximate height and weight, and the location and a description of any birthmarks, tattoos or scars. If you called a terrorist, on the other hand, and your call provided a "hit" in the NSA database, the Government would not automatically know your name. The NSA would still have to get a warrant. Fingerprints are not "metadata." They are absolute identifiers.
Still, if you are an innocent civilian employee of the Government who has never been arrested and only provided your fingerprints to get a job, is the search for someone else's fingerprints in a database that contains your prints a violation of your rights? Nobody has raised that issue, apparently because nobody cares. Yet, metadata searches of anonymous telephone numbers are supposed to be an egregious violation of the Constitution.
Most people understand that there are wolves who hide within the flock, and to find them, Americans have agreeably submitted to this kind of incidental "search." It is an aphorism, but nevertheless true in 99.99% of the cases: If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. How can you best avoid being arrested for bank robbery? Don't rob a bank.
Most people would probably have no problem with the similar kind of incidental non-search run by the NSA if they were properly informed that (a) there are reasons for this particular non-search, (b) there are privacy protections put in place, and (c) there is an obvious analogy with the fingerprint database.
Most of us want to help the Government do its job in protecting the nation. My fingerprints have presumably been in the database since 1984 when I joined the Army. How many times do you think they have been "searched" during the last thirty years? Millions of times? Tens of millions? There will still be some of our more tense fellow citizens who will vigorously protest. Yet, those folks seemingly have no problem with the Federal fingerprint database, which provides not just metadata, but absolute identifiers.
Number of Americans Who Receive Enhanced Screening Before Flying: 1,200
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According to a recent blog at
The Intercept, "16,000 people, including 1,200 Americans, have been classified as “selectees” who are targeted for enhanced screenings at airports and border crossings." Seems like a pretty large number, until you consider some rather larger numbers.
Number of US Groups Involved in Domestic Hate, Supremacist, Militia, Sovereign Citizen and "Patriot" Movements: 2,035
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The Southern Poverty Law Center claims that there are 939 known hate groups that operate within the United States. Not individuals, but hate
groups. These include "neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes and others." As the SPLC goes on to note:
"Since 2000, the number of hate groups has increased by 56 percent. This surge has been fueled by anger and fear over the nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president.
These factors also are feeding a powerful resurgence of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement, which in the 1990s led to a string of domestic terrorist plots, including the Oklahoma City bombing. The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, skyrocketed following the election of President Obama in 2008 – rising 813 percent, from 149 groups in 2008 to an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012. The number fell to 1,096 in 2013.
When you add up the 1,096 "Patriot" factions with the 939 hate groups, you get the number 2,035. That's just in the United States. The 1,200 on the enhanced screening list seems less significant with that perspective. Additionally, that fails to take into account the "Lone Wolf" who writes a manifesto on his or her public Facebook page inciting to violence or threatening to do violence.
What about the world? Again, 16,000 on the global enhanced screening list seems like a lot, but how many crazy hate-filled orgainizations are found across the globe? How many want to strike in the United States? The Intercept reported that the Top Ten international terrorist organizations had 263,176 individual members. That, again, doesn't include the international "Lone Wolf" who is crazy enough to write or speak publicly about his bad intentions for the United States.
Number of Diaries on Daily Kos Calling for the Imprisonment of General James Clapper: Between 95 and 259
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That's not surprising, as Glenn Greenwald led his readership astray early on with his reporting. On July 3, 2013, Greenwald made a massive error of fact that he still has not corrected, even though, by now, he
must know that he was wrong. In reporting on the testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and specifically Clapper's response to Wyden's Catch-22 question about collecting information about millions of Americans, Greenwald wrote:
"That Clapper fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute."
Of course, the people being misled were Greenwald's readers. That includes his readers at
The Guardian and the readers of his book, published almost a year later, which implied the same claim in the first chapter. Congress was fully aware of the Section 215 telephone metadata collection program, as all Members had been briefed or offered briefings on it in 2009, 2010 and again in 2011. Congress voted to reauthorize the program after the briefings. On top of all that, Congressional Intelligence and Justice Committees received reports every six months about what the Section 215 program was doing. Digging an even deeper hole in his June 2013 article, Greenwald wrote:
"How is this not a huge scandal? Intentionally deceiving Congress is a felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense."
In his zeal, Greenwald demanded the imprisonment of an innocent man in the pages of
The Guardian. But he didn't stop there. Greenwald used the allegation as a scare tactic to frighten the public:
"Beyond its criminality, lying to Congress destroys the pretense of oversight. Obviously, members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security officials.
... Those people who have been defending the NSA programs by claiming there is robust Congressional oversight should be leading the chorus against Clapper, given that his deceit prevents the very oversight they invoke to justify these programs."
An off-the-rails intelligence community that deceives Congress about what it is doing would indeed be terrifying. Unfortunately for Greenwald, it wasn't true. He demanded in that second paragraph a "chorus against Clapper." Again, Greenwald used his pulpit, as a supposed journalist and a Civil Libertarian, to lead the charge to prosecute an innocent man who was just doing his duty to protect national secrets.
Moreover, there is no way General Clapper would be prosecuted under the federal perjury statute. As a lawyer, Greenwald could locate the federal perjury statute, analyze it and reach that conclusion in minutes ... if he wanted to. To be convicted of perjury, Clapper's testimony would have to have been "capable of influencing the decision-making body to which it was addressed.” As you know, all the Members on that panel of the Senate Intelligence Committee knew what the NSA metadata program did, so the General's testimony had no chance of influencing the decision-making body as they had already been briefed on the program multiple times and voted to re-authorize it on at least two occasions.
Greenwald, the pied piper of misinformation called for a "chorus against Clapper," and he got one. A year too late, Snowden, at least, seems to have finally realized his mistake. In a June 2014 interview, he finally acknowledged that at least Congressional Intelligence Committees were informed about the programs. Snowden said:
"[T]he NSA is playing games ... interpreting laws in secret, without asking public [sic], without talking to the majority of Congress, and the only people that the public has [sic] to rely on as advocates, are two intelligence committees...."
(emphasis added). He has yet to admit his ignorance of the fact that all Members of Congress were briefed or offered briefings on the metadata program multiple times, and a majority of them voted to reauthorize it on multiple occasions. Even his
mea culpa above is misleading in that there are four Congressional Committees that receive reports about the metadata program. Moreover, those committees were allowed to make those briefings available to every member of Congress. If you are going to act as a vigilante, you better have your facts damn straight. The same goes for Information Vigilantes.
As noted above, there were between 95 and 259 diaries published on Daily Kos from June 6, 2013 to the present calling for the imprisonment of a demonstrably innocent man. A total of 95 diaries demanded "prison" for General Clapper, 60 argued for "jail," another 31 said he should be "behind bars" and so on until you get to 259. Since some of those diarists may have been redundant, calling for General Clapper to be "imprisoned" and "locked up" in "jail," the total number of diaries is almost certainly less than 259, but more than 95. So much for the basic civil liberty precept of innocent until proven guilty.
Number of Diaries on Daily Kos Since 6/6/13 Calling the USA or the NSA "Nazis," "Orwellian," "Stasi," "Security State" or "Big Brother": 2,506
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What should one expect when all of the initial major stories about the NSA were misleadingly frightening and many defcon levels more terrifying than actual reality. The misleading stories from Glenn Greenwald included articles about the NSA metadata collection program (NSA does
not use location information of Americans as he implied and is constitutional based on a 1979 Supreme Court case), the PRISM Program (NSA does
not have agents stationed inside inside Internet Service Providers' offices to milk routers in real time like they were information cows) and General Clapper's testimony before Congress (NSA wasn't deceiving Congress and going behind its back at all; Congress had been briefed on the metadata program multiple times, received periodic "wellness checks" and voted to re-authorize it at least twice).
Those were Greenwald's first three major stories. He got each one of them fantastically wrong.
Moreover, neither Greenwald nor Snowden have changed their stories much. Greenwald implied in Chapter One of his recent book, No Place to Hide, that Clapper deceived Congress. He has never corrected his PRISM story, even after the Washington Post corrected its story about the program. Greenwald has yet to admit that he found the metadata program likely constitutional back in 2006 as long as the Government obtained a court order before seeking the metadata (which has been the practice under the Obama Administration).
When the most important information dealing with the Snowden leaks has been reported so misleadingly, it is no wonder that a HuffPost/YouGov poll in July 2014 found that "[f]orty-one percent of Americans ... said the government is likely to have recorded their own emails or telephone calls." Great. Snowden and Greenwald have a large segment of society believing in conspiracy theories.
The same is true on Daily Kos. Since June 6, 2013, there have been 70 NSA diaries that have used the term "Stasi" in it. Another 162 NSA diaries have used the word "Nazi," 340 have used the term "Big Brother," 141 have gone with "Orwellian" as their hyperbolic term of choice, and a whopping 1,793 NSA diaries have used the "Security State" appellation that Greenwald first trotted out one day after "breaking" the metadata collection story. Now, it's true that some of those "Security State" diaries probably also used one of the other hyperbolic words and phrases, so the actual number of diaries using those terms is somewhere between 1,793 and 2,056.
But the winner of the award for most copious usage of hyperbolic terms in a story about the NSA is ... an internet outlet called TomDispatch, which hosted a sneak peak at Greenwald's book about Snowden and the NSA. There you will find this tribute to scare tactics:
"[W]ho hasn’t been thinking about the staggering ambitions of the National Security Agency, about its urge to create the first global security state in history and so step beyond even the most fervid dreams of the totalitarian regimes of the last century?"
The author, having accounted for the Nazi, Stasi, Khmer Rouge, Chinese, Libyan, pre-war Iraqi, Syrian, Eastern Bloc and Iranian regimes, Central and South American dictatorships, not to mention the actions of Spanish and Italian Fascists and Stalin, among others, still managed to use words and phrases such as "nightmare," "dystopian," "complete global omniscience," "Orwellian," "security state" (a second time), the "free world" (mockingly and in quotation marks) and "our ignorance is our strength" (an Orwell quote) sprinkled throughout the rest of his piece. He did that in a writing of only 699 total words. No mean feat! The Academy of Hyperbole rises and gives you a standing ovation!
Besides proving no intentional violations of the Constitution by the Government, and besides establishing, for all the world to see, the exceedingly rigorous privacy protections in place, Greenwald and Snowden have also proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that not only is there Freedom of the Press to question the Government, but there is also Freedom of the Press to Lie about the Government. You can even call them "Nazis."
Number of Telephone Numbers (by Percentage) in the Metadata Program Ever Seen by Human Eyeballs: (< .0001)
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You have to go deep into the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's Report on the metadata collection program to find this information.
Page 216 to be exact, but it's there. You have a 3X better chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime, and a significantly better chance of giving birth to triplets, naturally, than you have of any human being ever laying eyes on your telephone metadata.
Of course, hanging around outside in a thunderstorm will increase your odds of being struck by lightning; calling or taking calls from known terrorists will increase your odds with the former. In fact, it may well make your odds a virtual certainty if the Government has that terrorist's telephone number. It is, after all, a computer matching numbers, and they're pretty good at that.
Number of Dollars Glenn Greenwald Has Parlayed Edward Snowden Into: (>$250,000,000.00)
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As reported in
The New York Times, Greenwald "announced he was joining a new journalistic venture, backed by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who has promised to invest $250 million and to 'throw out all the old rules.'" Granted, Greenwald has to share that prize with a few other journalists, but he has already been throwing thousands of dollars in grant money to his life partner, David Miranda, and a media outlet, Electronic Frontier Foundation, that favorably reviewed his book. Then, there's the movie deal with Sony Pictures and the book deal for his Snowden fiction entitled
No Where to Hide. Should it pay so much to mislead your readership?
Number of Pieces of Mail for Which the USPS Collects Metadata Each Year: 171,000,000,000
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That's 171
billion, which is the number of "mailpieces" the United States Postal Service handled in 2010, or as they claim, "563 million ... processed each day" or "6,516 ... processed each second." The USPS takes a digital image of each one.
Those digital images helped put away Shannon Richardson for fourteen years for sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama. Metadata strikes again! The program has been known to have caught drug smugglers, fraud and prostitution rings.
Yet, journalists covering the Snowden saga have virtually ignored the nearly-perfect comparison between our telephone communications systems and the United States Postal Service. Why? It is probably because any comparison between the two would make the NSA seem less scary and ominous.
Take, for example, the letter. Where does it go after you drop it off at the post office? Even the lowly Post Office, that most American of institutions, could be ordered to read all of the 171 billion pieces of mail that have gone through it over a year's time. Have you been in the back of a Post Office? Those are secret rooms, kept secure, with you on the outside. Inside, the Post Office has complete control of your mail.
In fact, the Supreme Court has passed on hearing a multitude of cases regarding the Post Office obtaining metadata. In United States v. Choate, 576 F.2d 165 (9th Cir.), cert.denied, 99 S.Ct. 350 (1978), the Federal Circuit Court held that postal inspectors could copy and maintain records of the information on the outside of sealed envelopes.
Other circuits have agreed with the ruling, which is probably why the Supreme Court has passed on the issue, denying certiorari every time. See United States v. Leonard, 524 F.2d 1076 (2d Cir. 1975), cert. denied, 425 U.S. 958 (1976); United States v. Balistrieri, 403 F.2d 472 (7th Cir. 1968), cert. denied, 402 U.S. 953 (1971). By "denying certiorari," the Supreme Court is simply indicating that it does not want to hear the case. Basically, postal inspectors can keep track of the "metadata" of letters mailed in the United States; they just cannot open the letters and view the contents.
Postal "metadata" includes not just the "when" of the communication, but also, written on the envelope, the "who," including the author and addressee. That, it seems, is about a hundred times more invasive of privacy than the current, anonymous NSA telephone metadata program.
The outside of envelopes normally include names and physical locations. The decision in Choate was rendered thirty-six years ago. Like the Smith v. Maryland case dealing with telephone metadata, Choate is still good law.
Number of Years From the Time the NSA Metadata Program Was First Outed to Snowden's "Breaking" Story: 7
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The NSA metadata program was initially outed in a
USA Today exclusive in 2006, seven years before the world had heard of Edward Snowden. It was a big story at the time, but a story that the public seemingly forgot. Glenn Greenwald reported on that breaking story in 2006 on his personal blog called "Unclaimed Territory."
In his 2006 blog piece, Greenwald implied that the Bush Administration's metadata program would be constitutional if the Government only got a court order before obtaining the metadata. Of course, the Obama Administration's metadata program did get a court order before obtaining the metadata.
Greenwald also had a problem with the Bush Administration's use of raw Article II powers as the basis for maintaining the program was legal. The Obama Administration, of course, did not rely on Article II powers because it was obtaining a court order for the metadata, which made the program legal under the Smith v. Maryland case. (Additionally, the FISA Act was amended to make the program legal in the interim between 2006 and 2009).
Finally, Greenwald had a problem with the Bush Administrations "minimization procedures" as they apparently didn't protect the privacy rights of Americans strongly enough. Of course, those procedures were strengthened under President Obama's watch.
In fact, if you go back and read Greenwald's blog piece from back in 2006, you can see how he basically and unintentionally proves that the 2013 metadata program is constitutional and legal. Here's a link to his 2006 post on blogspot.com. Here's a recent diary explaining how hypocritical and misleading Greenwald has been with his 2013 reporting.
Number of Years During Which Government Collection of Metadata Has Been Constitutional: 35
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It was way back in 1979 that the United States Supreme Court heard the
Smith v. Maryland case, in which the court first dealt with the issue of whether the state should be allowed to obtain a person's telephone metadata without a warrant. In
Smith, the Government wanted to find out who a suspected criminal, alleged purse-snatcher Michael Lee Smith, was calling.
The police suspected that Smith was calling a purse-snatching victim with the information that he had obtained from inside the victim's purse. To do that, the Government obtained a court order which allowed it to access Smith's telephone metadata as it was transmitted to the telephone company. Telephone metadata is what you might find on your old-fashioned telephone bills, including the number calling, the numbers called, the time of the calls and their duration.
With the information provided by the telephone company, law enforcement determined that Smith was the person calling the purse-snatching victim. He was arrested and convicted. Smith appealed the decision, claiming that the metadata search was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment basically provides that Americans are to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures by the Government.
The Supreme Court held that the Government could obtain that information as long as they provided the telephone company with a court order. Now, a court order is the warrant's little brother. You need probable cause that a crime was committed and that the person you are searching probably committed it to obtain a warrant. The hurdle is not nearly so high for a court order.
The Supreme Court reasoned that we do not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" to telephone metadata because we voluntarily hand the information over to the telephone company (by dialing the number), and, on top of that, this type of billing data belonged to the telephone company and not to the telephone user.
Number of Dollars Lost to American Companies Due to Snowden's Disclosures and Hyperbolic Circus tour: 35B+
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It is impossible at this time to calculate with any measure of reliability the economic damage caused by Snowden's theft and then publication of classified material, but one estimate puts the loss to American business at 35 billion over the next couple of years. This could increase significantly. There have been calls to set up an entire separate internet. There have been calls to boycott American hardware and software manufacturers. There has already been a movement away from American-owned cloud computing services. All of that based on scare tactics and hysterical speculation from Snowden and his reporters.
One example of many is Glenn Greenwald, on the television show The Colbert Report, stating that international customers of American businesses that sell routers are subject to having their products implanted with an NSA beacon. That sounds like an awfully good reason to purchase your routers from European or Asian businesses.
Well, until you read the "Greenwald fine print." There you learn that the operation has only had one success in which a beacon actually transmitted data from a target's computer. Moreover, the NSA isn't installing beacons in all routers for the international market, but just a few intended "targets" such as known terrorists or hostile foreign agents, and even then, only one of those has proved to be operational.
Snowden tried to shirk from any blame by pointing his finger at the NSA in a recent interview:
"Our tech sector has been devastated by the activities of the NSA, where they're reducing the trust in our products, they're reducing the trust in our government, in our country."
Would this damage have occurred if Snowden had followed the whistleblowing process and copied only the files that he claimed were a violation of American laws? European and Asian competitors would be remiss not to exploit the unreasonable fear caused by a year of hair-on-fire reporting.
Two large companies that may be damaged include Microsoft and IBM. They are perfect examples of a software company and a hardware company. Foreign buyers might opt for foreign products instead of purchasing from Microsoft and IBM for fear that the NSA had left a coded backdoor in the software or added a spy device to the hardware's inards.
How many of the 18,000 workers laid off by Microsoft, if any, owe the loss of their jobs to Snowden? It is reported that most of the layoffs are due to the acquisition of the Nokia brand, but there was other bad news out of Seattle as up to another 80,000 contract employees will receive a six-month forced furlough. Likely, the contractor hiatus number will be much smaller, but altogether, this represents the greatest shrinkage in Microsoft history.
We will likely never know the answer to that question. However, it is likely that there will be American IT workers who are currently praising Snowden who will change their tune when their paychecks start going to Brazilian, Indian, Malaysian or German tech employees. As we see in the next paragraph, Microsoft has already felt an effect from the misleadingly bad publicity.
Business Insider pointed the finger directly at Snowden with their July 2014 headline, "New Report Shows Edward Snowden's Revelations Are Seriously Damaging U.S. Tech Firms." The biggest losers, according to the report cited in the story, were companies offering "cloud computing" services. Cisco, IBM, HP and Microsoft, among a number of others, have already seen a decline in sales, especially overseas, and are predicted to lose billions in the next few years. How many American jobs will be lost because Edward Snowden thought he was smarter than the Supreme Court, could tell the President of the United States what to do and write legislation for Congress?
According to Wired, Germany terminated a lucrative network contract with Verizon on account of the Snowden leaks. A Cisco spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the company is expecting a ten-percent drop in quarterly revenue on account of the "Snowden effect." The policy director for a trade group told the same paper that the "immediate pain point is lost sales and business challenges,” That trade group, The Software Alliance, represents companies like Oracle and Apple. The Journal went on to report:
"ServInt Corp., a Reston, Virginia-based company that provides website hosting services, has seen a 30 percent decline in foreign customers since the NSA leaks began in June 2013, said Christian Dawson, its chief operating officer.
International cloud providers [US competitors] are using the NSA revelations as a marketing tool, said Dawson, who also serves as chairman of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, which represents Dell Inc., ... and other companies.
ServInt clients told Dawson they no longer have the tolerance to allow their data to be hosted by a company based in the U.S."
Even if the impact on jobs and sales in minimal, Snowden's hyperbole has given the Mitt Romneys of the IT world the excuse to off-shore more and more American jobs. Data storage as a commodity, a service that the United States had pioneered and led in from its inception, is endangered as countries begin to store their digital information inside their own physical and electronic borders.
These "data localization" movements seen in foreign countries are due to the public airing of the stolen documents as well as Snowden and Greenwald's year-of-hyperbole tour. Very likely, none of this damage to the American economy would have occurred if Snowden had not stolen the whole store, including all of the foreign surveillance files that had nothing to do with whistleblowing or the Constitution.
Number of Whistleblowers Prosecuted by Government Who Were Using the Legitmate Whistleblowing Process: 0
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There's a false meme on the internet that the Government is waging some kind of "War on Whistleblowers." When you dig into the facts, the meme falls apart almost immediately. For example, most of the people using this meme claim that Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were whistleblowers. How can Snowden claim to be a whistleblower when he sent one email, at the most two, that never mentioned any specific NSA programs or the Constitution or that anyone was using the former to violate the latter?
The answer is that he can't. Neither Edward Snowden nor Chelsea Manning can be called whistleblowers because of the indiscriminately large number of files stolen, the irrelevance of a vast portion of them, their potential for harm to the country, and the fact that neither made even a half-hearted attempt to avail themselves of real whistleblowing procedures.
Chelsea Manning was the Army soldier, formerly known as Private Bradley Manning, who handed over millions of Department of Defense and Department of State files to WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. To be a whistleblower one must follow the whistleblower procedures. Otherwise, you are a thief or a spy. In the case of Manning, she had a Chain of Command, but she also had other avenues to blow the whistle, including the Office of Special Counsel, the Inspector General or Congress. Snowden's claim that whistleblower laws wouldn't protect him received a "Pinocchio" from the Washington Post's fact checker.
Moreover, Snowden had many options for blowing the whistle that can be found in regulations; other options are just common sense. He could have begun the process before he did. The one email that has been divulged was sent in April 2013, four months after Snowden had contacted journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. If he was really interested in blowing the whistle, he could have managed to send an email before he had told journalists he was ready to spill all the beans.
Next, take the cases of John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake. Kiriakou was the first person to blow the whistle on waterboarding torture. That was an important and necessary matter that should have been brought to the attention of the Government and the media. Some time later, though, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison after pleading guilty to disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer to a member of the media. That's a secret that must be kept.
Thomas Drake blew the whistle on the NSA's Trailblazer project, which was reportedly a huge waste of money. He followed the proper procedures, and the Government eventually terminated the project. Drake reportedly "complained internally to the designated authorities: to his bosses, the NSA Inspector General, the Defense Department Inspector General, and both the House and Senate Congressional intelligence committees," a lesson that Edward Snowden should have followed. This was all basically done by 2002.
Subsequently, though, in 2007, Drake was on the phone with a Baltimore Sun reporter and was found to have material stored at his home that shouldn't have been there. His attorneys argued that he brought home the material accidentally, not "willfully." He pled to a misdemeanor charge for exceeding the authorized use of a computer. Claims that the charges brought against him for his 2007 actions related to his pre-2002 whistleblowing are not corroborated in this respect: His three pre-2002 co-whistleblowers were not charged with crimes.
In the cases of Drake and Kiriakou, proponents of the "War on Whistleblowers" meme apparently believe that a one-time whistleblower is cloaked in some kind of Hogwarts-like forever-immunity from Government for any future wrongdoings. Kiriakou later outed a covert CIA officer. What was the Government supposed to do? Ignore it? After the Valerie Plame incident?
This is text from the Indictment handed down by a Grand Jury in the Kiriakou case:
2. On or about July 11, 2008, defendant JOHN C. KIRIAKOU received an email from Journalist A, a person known to the Grand Jury and who was not authorized by the United States Government to receive classified information. Journalist A asked, “Can you remember the name(s) of any of the [specific CIA office] branch chiefs?” KIRIAKOU replied, “Sorry, [first name of Journalist A]. I never met any of those guys. And we never, ever dealt with them in [overseas city].”
3. On or about the same day, defendant JOHN C. KIRIAKOU responded separately to two emails that Journalist A sent in reply to KIRIAKOU’s email of earlier that day:
a. In one email, Journalist A stated, “Presumably, [first name of Covert Officer A].” KIRIAKOU replied, “He had been my branch chief in [specific office,] [b]ut he’s the only one I ever came into contact with.”
b. In a second email, Journalist A asked, “Presumably [first name of Covert Officer A] worked in that group though, right?” KIRIAKOU replied, “I assume he did. And actually, I’m not sure he was the chief of it. He was the team leader on [specific CIA operation], though.”
That's very explosive material, and the reason why Kiriakou pled guilty to some of the charges, with the Government agreeing to drop others.
Two other "non-whistleblowers" include Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, who was a Department of Defense contractor who "leaked classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen, which appeared in [a] 2009 Fox News article that appeared to have little news value, other than to inform the North Korean government that the United States had managed to develop an intelligence source in the North Korean government" and Jeffrey Sterling, who was indicted in 2010 "for allegedly leaking information about the Agency's efforts against Iran's nuclear program, to New York Times reporter and State Of War author James Risen." This is apparently the whistleblower that Edward Snowden wanted to shoot "in the balls."
How does information about American covert operations directed at the Iranian nuclear program come under any kind of "whistleblowing" umbrella? It doesn't. The same goes for covert spying operations in North Korea.
CONCLUSION
Numbers usually never tell the whole story. On the other hand, as a political scientist and a Democrat, you have an obligation to look at the numbers. You have to come to some kind of peace with the numbers and the facts because that's what we do. Since we are also amateur mathematicians, we know that if we only look at the numbers on one side of the equation, we will never get a proper result.
Did you know that the difference between the Fox News Channel and, say, Chuck Todd, Glenn Greenwald, David Gregory and Andrea Mitchell is that there really is no difference? That was a trick question. If your measure is proper reporting, then reporting that gets the picture wrong while transmitting it is improper no matter the form of the rhetoric, the reporter or the media outlet.
On another scale, there is a huge difference between Fox News and Glenn Greenwald, on the one hand, and Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell on the other. One of those groups concentrates, in almost every instance, only on the numbers and the facts on one side of the equation. The other group looks at the numbers and facts on both sides of the equation and then gives them equal weight even if they don't deserve it.
As political scientists--and you are all political scientists--it is incumbent upon you to find out the relevant numbers and facts on both sides of an issue and give them the appropriate weight.