It’s painful to watch President Obama stretched over the Syrian rack. His basic dilemma is that with Russia’s entry onto the scene he can’t afford to cede ground to Moscow or Teheran. But with al-Qaeda affiliated forces now making up 7 of the 9 main rebel groups he can’t afford to win either. Plus no matter who “wins” in Syria Obama will be left to clean up the mess.

An administration that promised voters never to intervene abroad or get dragged into post-conflict stabilization operations may eventually be forced to do both. There’s apparently a price to pay for everything.  The promise to control terror groups by intelligence warfare and drone strikes has revealed its hidden cost:  a massive surveillance apparatus whose vast extent is only slowly being discovered. And yet the President’s defenders ask, with some justice, ‘what was his alternative?’

The alternative was finish Assad’s hash when Saddam was done. Ok, so never mind. That’s a nonstarter with half the population, but it was worth mentioning just so it could be excluded. Then there’s diplomacy? Well that’s what internationalized the war in the first place. The process of forging regional coalitions with Sunni powers and getting everyone involved resulted in — everyone getting involved — including Russia.

Maybe there was a time when America could have handed everyone a fait accompli in the region. “There you are, take it or leave it”. But that opportunity was lost and there now no good alternatives. What is worse, Obama’s is starting to lose his core base.

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The world is simultaneously less solid and more durable than we think. Take the EU. It isn’t forever. It didn’t even exist at the end of the Second World War. It had a beginning and perhaps it may even have an end.  Thus, joining it isn’t equivalent to ‘making it’.

A ratings agency has made Greece the first European country to be an ex-developed nation. “Greece’s long-running crisis has culminated in its downgrade to emerging-market status and its exit from the club of developed nations, according to one index provider.” Erin McCarthy and Prabha Natarajan of the Wall Street Journal say it is an insult to emerging markets.

Countries deemed to be emerging markets by Bank of America-Merrill Lynch are expected to grow an average of 4.9% this year, according to the bank’s analyst. In contract, the International Monetary Fund predicts Greece’s economy will contract by 4.2%….

“You don’t think of a submerging market like Greece when you think of emerging markets,” says Brian Jacobsen, chief portfolio strategist for Wells Fargo Funds Management, which advises on assets worth $225 billion. “Greece is a bit of a sore thumb that will stick out in the index.”

In some universe, probably the present one, it is possible for China and South Korea to overtake Europeans countries.  Rudyard Kipling once wrote that to be born British was to “win first place in the lottery of life.” A recent poll says Britain has fallen to 27th place, behind South Korea and Chile, in the current rankings of where people want to be born. It’s entirely possible for the words “I’m an American” to eventually become the equivalent of “I’m from India” someday.

The present changes.  Greece has become poor. The Atlantic has a photo gallery of homelessness in Greece set amidst abandoned theaters, public parks. They are  former hotel clerks, painters, small businessmen, chefs — not exactly the kind of alcoholic and dysfunctional crowd one might expect;  the detritus of an assured future that never was.

And yet Greece may become rich again.  The Economist argues that the fires of recession have burned out the fevers and leeched out the bad blood. The Germans are coming back to a cheapened Greece and the Russians are buying up everything in sight. “WHAT a difference a year makes.”

This summer should see a record 17m tourists crowding Greek beaches. Bookings from Germany and Russia are soaring, say travel agents. A projected rise of €1.5 billion-2 billion in tourist revenues will give the budget a boost, even though many hoteliers are struggling to service bank debts. Greek contractors expect to resume work in the autumn on €6 billion of EU-financed motorway projects stalled since the crisis. They could create 30,000 jobs.

Privatisation is under way after several false starts. Opap, the state gambling monopoly, has been sold for €712m to a consortium of Greek and east European investors. Gazprom is expected to bid for Depa, the natural-gas monopoly. Sintez, a private Russian energy company, and Socar, Azerbaijan’s state gas producer, are vying for the gas distributor Desfa.

Well who knows? Greece has been a long time dying. Byron famously wondered what had become of classical Greece when he saw its debased state in the 19th century.

THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set

Yet Greece even after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the World Wars and the crash of the EU lives still after a fashion. Perhaps the moral of the story is that the world keeps turning. You and I might not survive, but time marches on.

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Most of us will be familiar with Arthur Clarke’s famous observation about ships.

If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs—those creatures whom we often deride as nature’s failures—then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word ‘ship’ will mean— ‘spaceship.’

Spare a thought for computers. Today we mostly think of computers as electronic brains. But for nearly 2,000 years people computed using mechanical representations of the virtual things. Wikipedia reviews some of the history.

The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BC and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer[citation needed] and gear-wheels was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan in 1235. Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe, an early fixed-wired knowledge processing machine with a gear train and gear-wheels, circa 1000 AD.

Some of the older readers of the Belmont Club may have actually used mechanical computers themselves in the form of the Slide Rule. Collectors among you can obtain the K+E MODEL 4081-3, as used in Los Alamos to design the A-bomb. Here’s what Slide Rules looked like.

Let’s design an A-bomb

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One of the conundrums of delegated power is that to be effective, it also has to be capable of potential abuse. Deprive an agent of discretion and the point of hiring him disappears. He may be able to do many things, but not everything he can legally do should be done. Take the question of whether the NSA has too much power. Commenter RWE3  compared it to the USAF’s even more awesome power. “The question in reality is not whether the NSA is accessing such data. Of course they have the capability to do so; it’s their job. It’s like asking if the USAF has the capability to nuke Chicago; if they cannot they better well explain why the hell not.”

We grant agents enormous power but on the implicit understanding that they selectively use it.  Andrew McCarthy makes a similar argument. He says the problem with arguing the NSA has too much leeway is that they simply had a larger version of the power granted to every prosecutor. The problem is not with the grant of power, but the abuse of power.

Again, as noted above, usage records for services, like telephone service, to which a customer subscribes do not belong to the subscriber. They are the property of the service provider. As a result, they have never had any Fourth Amendment protection, and they have precious little statutory protection. Again, we on the national security right wanted this legal reality, long ingrained in routine law-enforcement, to be reflected in national security investigations.

When I was a federal prosecutor, if I wanted phone records for an investigation, I wrote a subpoena and had an agent serve it on the relevant phone company. I did not have to go to court. I did not have to make any showing to a judge that the records were relevant, much less that I had probable cause to believe the customer whose records I wanted was suspected of committing a crime….

It has long been the law that grand juries do not have to suspect a crime in order to conduct an investigation; they can investigate, if they wish, just to satisfy themselves that no crime has been committed. As a practical matter, that never happens. Grand juries, agents, and prosecutors are too busy with real crime to conduct witch-hunts….

I could have compelled the production of phone records of countless innocent people. If I did not have a good reason for doing so, it would have been an abuse of my power. But it would not have been a violation of laws that, quite intentionally, allow the executive branch to compel non-privileged records with virtually no oversight. It would mean we’d need a new, more responsible prosecutor, not new laws.

Of course the USAF is not in the business of nuking American cities, even if it could. Though that does not prevent Hollywood from imagining scenarios where the President orders New York destroyed, usually to prevent the Zombie apocalypse from spreading or as a last ditch measure against Space Aliens. But the fact remains that as with a guns anything powerful enough to do the job on enemies can do a job — on civilians.

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Before he went to the Guardian, Edward Snowden went to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post with 41 slides and a “demand that the Post publish all 41 slides within 72 hours of receipt”. Calling himself “Verax”, Snowden approached the Washington Post through an implied intermediary. Gellman writes:

A series of indirect contacts preceded our first direct exchange May 16. Snowden was not yet ready to tell me his name, but he said he was certain to be exposed — by his own hand or somebody else’s. Until then, he asked that I not quote him at length. He said semantic analysis, another of the NSA’s capabilities, would identify him by his patterns of language.

The Post dithered and the Guardian got the scoop. In the event, not even the Guardian published all the slides. “The Guardian also refused to publish the complete set. Why? If you saw them, you’d know, Gellman told the New York Times’ Charlie Savage.”

The slides remain in the possession of both the Washington Post and the Guardian, not to mention Snowden himself. Perhaps they’ve been glimpsed by the Chinese in whose territory the Snowden was last seen and  may possibly come into the hands of Vladimir Putin, who announced he’d consider granting Snowden asylum if asked. Twitchy rhetorically wonders who decides whether the other 36 slides will be published:

The Post, together with the Guardian, published five PowerPoint slides regarding the government’s PRISM program. However, both papers chose to withhold 36 more slides leaked to them by Snowden. That puts both papers, rather than the government, in the position of deciding what the public needs to know, and what it shouldn’t know about the government’s Internet surveillance infrastructure. Is everyone comfortable with that?

The answer is obvious: Snowden, Russia and/or China get to decide if the 36 slides get released. Nor is it to be discounted that Snowden has more in his possession than just the slides. A little noted detail in Politico hints there may be more: “additionally, according to Gellman, Snowden requested that the Post publish online a ‘cryptographic key’ so he could prove to a foreign embassy he was the source of the document leak.”

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The latest scandal story about the State Department coverup of a US ambassador who was allegedly soliciting prostitutes in a public park brought two things to mind. The first, unbidden and unsupported, was that factions in the bureaucracy were at war with each other and the target of the one faction was Obama and the target of the other was She Who Must Not Be Named.

But that was speculation. The more tenable line of thought was a reminder that humans are fallible and often corrupt. This has always been true so how do we live with ourselves? At first simply by surviving the worst we could do to ourselves.

For much of history our ability to harm ourselves was fortunately limited by the crude nature of our means. But by the dawn of the 19th century it became obvious that the lack of technology alone could not forever protect us. Men were inventing more and more lethal devices. Dynamite, when it was first introduced, produced almost the same fear in futurists as the atomic bomb. It is widely believed that Alfred Nobel endowed the ‘Nobel Prize’ to assuage a guilty conscience.

In 1888 Alfred’s brother Ludvig died while visiting Cannes and a French newspaper erroneously published Alfred’s obituary. It condemned him for his invention of dynamite and is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death. The obituary stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort (“The merchant of death is dead”) and went on to say, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Alfred was disappointed with what he read and concerned with how he would be remembered.

The same kind of apocalyptic powers were ascribed to the machine gun, poison gas and the bomber. In 1932 Stanley Baldwin wrote “the time has now come to an end when Great Britain can proceed with unilateral disarmament … the bomber will always get through.” But it remained for J. Robert Oppenheimer to put the thought in its iconic form. Looking on his own creation Oppenheimer described how he was mentally transported back to ancient battlefields of the Bhagavad Gita to face the inevitable fruit of his inventiveness: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”.

That was nearly 70 years ago and the world is still here. What happened to keep it going?

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Bruce Schneier, who writes prolifically on computer security issues, argues on CNN that revelations about NSA data mining programs prove that ‘resistance is futile’. He cites the case of two individuals, manifestly more computer savvy than the average Joe, who were ultimately unable to escape the toils of the FBI.

Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up. …Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels — and hers was the common name…

Schneier concludes, “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.”

Well I wouldn’t say that.

Governments have been fighting over the information owned by civilians for a long time. China has been engaged in reading data and metadata (which Drudge intentionally misspells as “megadata”) for a long time. The Financial Times  has just described a 21st century instance of war. It’s no longer conducted by sweaty armies marching on leather boots. It’s done virtually.  Think about it. The President of the US just met with the President of China, not to talk about ships, artillery or planes. They were talking about bits.

Beijing is engaged in systematic cyber spying on the US military and private businesses to acquire technology to boost military modernization and strengthen its capacity in any regional crisis, according to the Pentagon. …

In its report, the Pentagon paints a picture of a formidable and highly organised adversary which is using multiple methods to acquire technology, ranging from state businesses to students to old-fashioned human espionage.

“China continues to leverage foreign investments, commercial joint ventures, academic exchanges, the experience of repatriated Chinese students and researchers, and state-sponsored industrial and technical espionage to increase the level of technologies and expertise available to support military research, development, and acquisition,” the report says.

Like a old-time striptease show we see a little more with each wave of the fan. The next big revelation is probably going to be about financial wiretapping. PBS says “Obama Defends NSA’s Surveillance of Phone, Web and Credit Card Use”. Well why not? It’s a very short distance from “you didn’t build that” to “you don’t own that”. In fact they are equivalent statements. But whether there will be anything left to own after the vultures have their way is another question.

The world economy depends to a very great extent on information. And our great leaders are doing everything they can to make us mistrust it. As every applications developer and network professional understands, information flows demand some level of trust.  That is why billions of dollars are invested on security systems. A currency is largely about trust. Proven insecurity will certainly undermine a financial institution or communications system, as Michael Bloomberg learned.

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In the halcyon days before the Verizon and PRISM revelations gave the subject a sinister cast, the New York Post examined President Obama’s attempt to end the War on Terror by declaring peace. The signed editorial read: “President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University calling for an end to the war on terror forces the question of who gets to declare peace.” Could he actually do that?

The Left wing in our political debate has been agitating for some time to repeal the authorization to use military force that the Congress passed after 9/11. The President boarded the bandwagon yesterday. He vowed he would sign no laws designed to expand the mandate and declared outright that he looks forward “to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal” the congressional mandate to use force. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said, declaring: “That’s what our democracy demands.”

“Suppose”, the NY Post asked further, “the President or the Congress do want to end the war with al-Qaeda but al-Qaeda doesn’t want to end its war against us. Is it constitutional for the president or the Congress to declare an end to the war if our enemy is still in the field levying a war against us?”

The problem of  declaring victory against an enemy who refuses to concede defeat is not new. The World War 2 generation solved the problem by continuing until the foe threw in the towel. Although President Obama may believe that victory consists in convincing one’s countrymen that “we won”, historically it  consisted of convincing the enemy that he lost. In World War II for example, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated as a military fact by early 1944. But they were not convinced of the fact. The remainder of the war was spent knocking the idea into their consciousness.

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At a recent dinner with friends last month, some of whom were writers, I was asked for a developer’s opinion on the security of various cloud-based products. I told them that ultimately, they had no security at all.  We were so thoroughly spied on, I suggested that “you have to regard yourself as potentially sharing every keystroke, every search, every message with the NSA. If you want security, encrypt. Or better still, buy untraceable clothes and while disguised send one time messages via disposable or public devices.”

My answer elicited a nervous laugh, but I meant it. And besides, who’s laughing now? Recent revelations have shown that the Obama administration is collecting traffic analysis data on Verizon’s customer base (and by implication has similar arrangements with every other provider) and is mining data straight from the servers of companies providing Internet services. The Washington Post reports on codename PRISM:

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

For those who don’t know what this means, it means that the administration is able to draw a graph (like a network chart) of who is talking to whom. It is able to say what are the key nodes through which any business passes, find all its Internet ‘friends’ and interlocutors and potentially drill down into the comms themselves — in time series.

This would pick up every organization of significance, whatever its purpose. Medical associations, pedophile rings, prayer groups, Tea Party groups, lesbian sororities, gay date swapping groups, business networks, professional networks, spy rings and terrorist cells. The works. It picks up the civilians more easily than the players, because the players use encryption, buy untraceable clothes and while disguised send one time messages via disposable or public devices.

The civilians don’t.

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The Guardian writes that “the National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.” That would be in April of this year. After the obligatory mention of President Bush the Guardian goes on to admit that it might have something to do with President Obama.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

A copy of the court order is here. The question of who is in power often matters less than what power he has.  Once the definition of enemies is expanded sufficiently to include people with contrary political view then eventually the necessary trawl must include everything.  It was Gerald Ford who put his finger on the paradox at the heart of the big government agenda.

The first seven words of the Constitution and the most important are these: “We the People of the United States …. “We the people ordained and established the Constitution and reserved to themselves all powers not granted to Federal and State government. … They know that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

And yet somehow there remains on the Left the belief that the process of expanding government power can continue indefinitely — for good causes like regulating 16 ounce softdrinks  and ensuring that none but bureaucrats can possess firearms, to be sure — without ever getting to the point where it can seize telephone records, wiretap news agencies or use the IRS to crackdown on political opponents.

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