Critics of Spying on Allies Need a Better Narrative
tags: surveillance
Seriously, though, I really was shocked to hear the U.S. Director
of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admit the espionage publicly. Our
allies spy on our leaders just as we spy on theirs, he
explained to the House Intelligence Committee: "It's one of the first
things I learned in intel school in 1963, that this is a fundamental given in
the intelligence business is leadership intentions, no matter what level you're
talking about."
Racking up more points for honesty, Clapper pointed out the
hypocrisy of the legislators, who know perfectly well what goes on yet are
treating this as some scandalous new revelation. Like me, he couldn't
resist the obvious film cliché: “Some of this reminds me of the classic
movie Casablanca -- ‘My God, there’s
gambling going on here.’”
Of course U.S. intelligence agencies want to know everything
that's done and said, everywhere, even on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's
cell phone. That's their job, as they see it. Why else would they get those
uncounted (literally uncounted, hidden in a blacked out budget) billions of our
tax dollars every year? What's more, if the members of the House Intelligence
Committee (or the Senate Intelligence Committee) don't know what's going on,
they obviously aren't doing their own jobs competently.
Yet here is Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, who generally defends all kinds of government surveillance,
expressing her own shock: She does “not believe the United States should be
collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime
ministers.”
It seems like everyone inside the Beltway is shocked about
something or other.
What's really going on is a tangle of conflicting
narratives, all evoking strong passions because they hold such deep mythic
meanings.
For Clapper and the humongous intelligence bureaucracy he
supposedly runs (though it's far too big for him to know even a fraction of
what's really going on), the story is simple: Since September 11, 2001, we have
been at war. And in wartime spying is a totally acceptable, indeed
indispensable, weapon.
It's a story at least as old as the days of ancient Israel,
when biblical writers didn't hesitate to say that their ancestors had used
spies to conquer the land they now lived in (see Joshua 2:1-7). The Roman
empire had
its spies, and it's safe to assume that every later empire did the same.
The fledgling United States of America relied on spies to
help win its first war, against Great Britain. Nathan Hale is the most famous
of those spies. But when the Military Intelligence Corps Association set up an award to
"recognize individuals who have contributed significantly to the promotion
of Army Military Intelligence in ways that stand out," it didn't name the
award for Hale. It created the Knowlton Award, commemorating Hale's commander,
Thomas Knowlton. He was picked by George Washington in 1776 to create America's
first spy unit, commonly known as "Knowlton's Rangers." Espionage in
wartime has been de rigueur for the U.S. military ever since.
But why spy on allies? The simple answer is the obvious
imperative to gather as much information as possible, from every source
possible. Ideally, every military commander would like to be omniscient,
because in wartime, especially, knowledge is power.
But things got more complicated during the cold war. Americans
learned to expect an endless war as the new normal; the old line between
wartime and peacetime disappeared. The battle was waged by economic,
diplomatic, and cultural as well as traditional military means, so the line
between civilian and military was blurred, too. Hence intelligence gathering
became a constant responsibility shared across that line.
Yet another line was blurred by the cold war, the most
important of all: There was no longer any conventional front line between
friend and foe. "The commies" could be anywhere -- even behind the
desk at your local library, Senator Joseph McCarthy said. And certainly they
might have infiltrated the highest levels of allied government offices. So it
only made sense to spy everywhere.
The U.S. still spies on allies all over the world, as the New York Times points
out, and not just on government leaders but on "their top aides and
the heads of opposing parties" too. "It is all part of a
comprehensive effort to gain an advantage over other nations, both friend and
foe," the Times bluntly
concludes.
That's all the explanation needed for foreign policy elites and
their journalistic scribes, who live within the narrative of political "realism."
That view had already grown ascendant in Washington before World War II, and it
was firmly entrenched by 1962, when James Clapper learned it: In the "great
game," every major power is jockeying for advantage. So everyone spies on
everyone, as they always have and always will, during times of cold as well as
hot war.
Why, then, is so much criticism leveled inside the Beltway
at Clapper, the whole establishment he heads, and its ultimate boss, the
president. Why would members of Congress, or anyone else, deny what seems so
obvious to intelligence professionals and "realists" everywhere?
Much of the answer, I think, comes from the cold war's
unique contribution American political mythology. By 1962 the distinctively
American mythology
of homeland insecurity had become institutionalized as the dominant
narrative of the nation. It demanded that official voices in government and
media express deep ambivalence toward "realism," embracing it while
also rejecting it.
The mythology of homeland insecurity assumes that America is
always the innocent nation, trying only to make the world better. So it must reject
the idea that America should do what everyone else does. America, it insists,
is more moral than everyone else. We have a higher set of national values. We
are the standard-bearers of virtue and civilization in a world always threatened
by savage evil.
That virtue alone gives us the right to fight evil wherever
it appears, by any means necessary. That's the only reason we can use
"realist" tactics -- because our goals are definitely not those of
the "realist." We want to build up the nation's moral standing, not
its brute power.
At least that is our prevailing public narrative. And
anything that undermines our public appearance of unique virtue -- like
snooping in allies' offices and tapping their phones -- must be denounced, at
least in public.
There's another side of the myth involved, too. If our
homeland is constantly insecure, we'd better have a leader who is powerful
enough to defend us against all the unpredictable threats that may pop up
anytime, anywhere -- even inside his own executive branch.
That's one reason the question "What did the president
know and when did he know it?" is so urgent. A president, who is the
nation's highest military commander, is like a god. He cannot be omnipotent unless
he is omniscient.
To be sure, there's yet another time-honored American myth at
play here: The narrative of a government consisting of three coequal branches,
each jealously guarding its own powers. Congress must have something to
criticize the president about, if only to assert itself.
That's especially true at a time when so many headlines have
been trumpeting, in one way or another, the story, "President defeats
House." As pundit David Gergen points
out, "this is a important turn in the Obama administration's position
within American politics. They were really riding high coming out, because the
Republicans were on the defensive, you know, and the extremism over the
government shutdown. And that narrative has now been replaced by narrative of
what did the president know and when did he know it."
Gergen was talking about the question of what the president
knew about the weaknesses in the Obamacare software. But his words shed just as
much light on the controversy about spying on allies.
As members of Congress know, the mass media are eager right
now to magnify any controversy between the president and anyone else. The mass
media need their own story, one that will sell. And they know that any
narrative of conflict revolving around the president is a guaranteed good draw.
It will boost media ratings more than Congress' ratings.
If narrative is the key issue, though, the administration is currently in a stronger place than its critics on the
spying-on-allies issue. If the best narrative that the critics can come up with
is, "America should be more virtuous than others and the president should
know everything that's going on," James Clapper can justly reply:
"I agree. Absolutely. That's what I said, too. We all
know that the intelligence community, including the Senate and House
committees, is a kind of old boys (and girls) club, much like the casino at Rick's
café. We all share those same basic premises. We all know that espionage has
always been part of the game. We all know what we can talk about publicly and
what we're supposed to keep secret. We've just got a little quarrel about
tactics going on here. It's merely a question of how we, and especially our
president, can best safeguard our virtue in a world full of evildoers."
When the quarrel is only about tactics, the professionals in
the executive branch are likely to best their critics, in Congress as well as
outside of it, just about every time.
If the critics hope to gain any real traction in this
debate, they'll have to take it to a deeper level and challenge the basic
premises of the intelligence community's narrative. They'll have to join the ad
hoc coalition of left and right who are challenging the whole idea of
government spying.
That coalition has its own narrative, which also goes back
to Revolutionary War times. Why did we fight that war in the first place? One
big reason, they say, was to get rid of a monarchical system that could invade
and control our private lives at any time, on any whim. The glory of the new
system was enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing
everyone the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
Our "effects" surely now include our digital
communications. And we didn't fight selfishly just for our own rights, the
traditional story says. We claimed those rights in the name of all humanity. So
every human, everywhere, is entitled to the same right of privacy in their
digital communications, no matter what political roles they might play.
Yet the "right to privacy" narrative itself will
face an uphill struggle as long as the mythology of national insecurity dominates
our public conversation. If we are an innocent nation, constantly threatened by
"evildoers" who might pop up anywhere, it only makes sense that we
must always be on our guard. After all, eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty, right? Always has been; always will be. And if we now have digital
technology to be vigilant for us, why not use it?
As long as fear of unseen "evildoers" haunts the
land, that argument will be hard to refute.
If advocates of the right to privacy want any chance to set
meaningful limits on government spying, on allies or anyone else, they will
have to challenge the basic premises of the national insecurity state. They
will have to argue not only that privacy trumps security, but that the demands
for security have been far exaggerated in an American society that has never
really escaped the cold war narrative of constant danger and fear.
Some critics of spying are already making that case, to be
sure. But their voices will have to grow a lot louder if anything is really
going to change.