Ethical Espionage

NYRB, Feb 8th 2024 Edition

What moral principles should guide our intelligence-gathering agencies?

On October 7, as Hamas fighters roared into southern Israel from Gaza, bringing terror and death to anyone they encountered—Israeli soldiers, Bedouins, young people dancing and getting high together, kibbutzniks scooping up small children into desperate arms—I was sleeping in a comfortable hotel room in Georgia. All around me in the sultry darkness of a beautiful resort, many of the US intelligence community’s finest minds were also slumbering. We awoke with the expectation that we would be addressed by CIA director William Burns at the opening of the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference, a yearly gathering of national security professionals from the private and public sectors, plus a few academics and journalists.

Burns didn’t board his flight from D.C. that day. The mood in the carpeted ballroom was somber. Aside from the shock and horror everyone felt at the attacks and the terrible anticipation of what would befall Gaza in response, there were dumbfounded silences as people asked one another versions of the same question. Israel’s legendary security services, Mossad and Shin Bet, were reputed to be the best of the best, the “gold standard,” as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden put it. Why hadn’t they known?

These are the moments, in the astonished silence after catastrophes, when most people suddenly become hyperaware of intelligence agencies in their all-too-human reality. For the most part we seem not to like to think about them much unless it’s through the grit-gray, jump-cut, shaky-cam world of spy movies and television. In America in particular, the attitude toward them has always been uncomfortable.

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How Social Media Influences Our Behaviour and Vice Vera

“In Max Fisher’s authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media, “The Chaos Machine,” he repeatedly invokes Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1968 movie, in which a supercomputer coldly kills astronauts on a ship bound for Jupiter, was in Fisher’s thoughts as he researched the book. Its stark, ambiguous aesthetic is perfectly poised between the utopian and the dystopian. And as a story about trying to fix a wayward technology as it hurtles out of control, it is beautifully apt.”

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The Morally Troubling ‘Dirty Work’ We Pay Others to Do in Our Place

New York Times, Aug.17th, 2021

DIRTY WORK
Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America
By Eyal Press

“Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America,” a disturbing and necessary new book by Eyal Press, describes with great empathy the lives of workers who do jobs that they themselves find morally horrifying. Press acquaints us intimately with the trauma suffered by a participant in a drone strike who watches a child slowly reassemble his father’s exploded remains into human shape; by a worker in a slaughterhouse who is nuzzled affectionately by pigs only to have to kill them moments later; and by a psychologist who is supposed to provide therapy to psychiatric patients in one of the correctional facilities where America often confines the severely mentally ill, but instead witnesses daily brutality including a homicide so gruesome it will be seared in any reader’s memory.

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Flacking for Facebook

From NYBooks.com April 13th 2021

It wasn’t always this way for Mark Zuckerberg. These days, we take almost for granted that when there’s organized political violence in the world, there will be an apparent Facebook connection—whether it involves groups and pages that played a part in fomenting the Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C., or the social media incitement of genocide in Myanmar, where the military, which backed that effort to eliminate the Rohingya, has now seized power in a coup. These days, the platform is routinely associated in the public mind with secretive extremist hate groups, divisive foreign propaganda, sick conspiracy theories with cultlike followings, and forums for plotting armed uprisings against legitimate governments. Many critics have come to see Facebook itself as a threat to liberal democracy.

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Trump’s Impact on Nuclear Proliferation

From Justsecurity.org, November 18th 2020

Donald Trump has never been known for his visionary foreign policy and yet his presidency will leave the world transformed. In an age of disinformation, the precise nature of the changes he has brought about in global affairs can be elusive, particularly when those changes have resulted from his administration’s clandestine negotiations with Russian officials and businessmen. While America has been focused on the ways in which the Kremlin interfered to support Trump in the 2016 election, too little attention has been paid to what Moscow intended to get out of a Trump presidency or indeed what they got.

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The Folly of ‘America First’ in the Race for Biodata Amid a Pandemic

From NYRDaily, May 13th 2020

America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a shocking lack of preparedness for public health emergencies. But it has also revealed what must be, for the aspiring strongman in the White House and his coterie, a more embarrassing fact: if America were to move in an authoritarian direction, it would be shedding international allies in order to enter into a competition with nationalistic authoritarian states that it probably can’t win.

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William Barr: The Carl Schmitt of Our Time

From NYRDaily January 15 2020

US Attorney General William Barr’s defense of unchecked executive authority in his recent speech to the Federalist Society had an unpleasant familiarity for me. It took me back to a time in my life—during the late 1990s, as a graduate student in England, and the early 2000s, teaching political theory in the politics department at Princeton University—when I seemed to spend altogether too much time arguing over the ideas of a Nazi legal theorist notorious as the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich.

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The Axis of the Oligarchs

The Oligarch Threat

From NYRDaily, August 27th 2019

On July 24, 2019, a buoyant Boris Johnson swept past crowds shouting “Bollocks to Brexit! Bollocks to Boris!” and was ushered into the hushed splendor of Buckingham Palace. There, he shook hands with the antique, bejeweled Queen Elizabeth II, and became the prime minister of Great Britain, elected not by popular mandate but by members of his Conservative Party. That same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, a frail and reluctant Robert Mueller took his oath before giving public testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, and later the House Intelligence Committee, on a controversial and difficult twenty-two-month-long investigation—made more challenging by multiple witnesses’ lying under oath—in which he had painstakingly examined Russian interference in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. 

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Edward Snowden Reconsidered

From NYR Daily, 13th September 2018

“This summer, the fifth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance passed quietly, adrift on a tide of news that now daily sweeps the ground from under our feet. It has been a long five years, and not a period marked by increased understanding, transparency, or control of our personal data. In these years, we’ve learned much more about how Big Tech was not only sharing data with the NSA but collecting vast troves of information about us for its own purposes. And we’ve started to see the strategic ends to which Big Data can be put. In that sense, we’re only beginning to comprehend the full significance of Snowden’s disclosures.”

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