Cole in Salon: FBI Plan to Profile Muslims Unconstitutional
My column in Salon.com:
'The FBI's plan to "profile" Muslims': It's unconstitutional, un-American -- and it might hurt, rather than help, the FBI's effort to stop real acts of terror.
Excerpt:
' The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask "open-ended questions" concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person's travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation. '
Read the whole thing.
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/10/2008 12:21:00 AM
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12 Comments:
Dear Professor Cole
You might find the book by Ross Anderson the outspoken and insightful Professor of IT at Cambridge University adds value to the debate, particularly his views in chapter 24 of the second edition.
Security Engineering
I suspect we are seeing the rush to order things before the election whose efficiency will never be known until well after the election.
As Ross points out the incidence of false positives is the key criterion that needs to be evaluated in terms of legal costs and opportunity cost of lost man hours.
This can be evaluated against the incidence and consequence of false negatives which are illustrated in this fictionalsied account of the nightmare.
Unknown Soldier
From years of observation, it's clear that American terrorists are mostly white, wear business suits, and are mostly found in Washington D.C., with many in the current administration. If the FBI wants to reduce terrorism and its causes, that's the place to start.
I don't get it. I see no evidence that targeted investigations failed to protect us from terrorism, or that there is so much terrorist plotting going on that American Muslims in general are legitmate targets. What is going on here?
First they came for the terrorists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a terrorist.
Then they came for the Muslims,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Muslim.
Then they came for the homosexuals,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was heterosexual.
Then they came for the Democrats,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Republican.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
With apologies to Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
It seems that the U S Constitution as written by the founders of this country and subsequently amended is not a valid document in the Bush Crime family administration. They have said that it is only a piece of paper, and I guess they meant it. I am very sad that neither the Democrats or Republicans in the House and Senate have any respect for the rule of law anymore. I would like it if they all could have a course similar to what I took many years ago in High School about how the US government is to function.
Dear Professor Cole
For those daunted by the thought of plunging into a book on an abstruse subject like security engineering here are a few extracts to give a flavour of the rest.
Terror, Justice and Freedom
Al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its
aftermath, lost — according to the lowest estimate — more than $500 billion.
— Osama bin Laden
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the
government’s purposes are beneficient . . . The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in
insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
— Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety.
— Benjamin Franklin
As everyone
has surely realised by now— and as the quote from Osama bin Laden bluntly
spells out — modern terrorism works largely by provoking overreaction......
Our common heritage of democracy and the rule
of law, built slowly and painfully since the eighteenth century, might have
769
770 Chapter 24 ? Terror, Justice and Freedom
been thought well entrenched, especially after we defended it successfully in
the Cold War. Yet the aftermath of 9/11 saw one government after another
introducing authoritarian measures ranging from fingerprinting at airports
through ID cards and large-scale surveillance to detention without trial and
even torture. Scant heed has been given to whether these measures would
actually be effective: we saw in Chapter 15 that the US-VISIT fingerprinting
program didn’t work, and that given the false alarm rate of the underlying
technology it could never reasonably have been expected to work. We’ve not
merely compromised our principles;we’ve wasted billions on bad engineering,
and damaged whole industries. Can’t we find better ways to defend freedom?
Second, there’s the economic question: why are such vast amounts of
money spent on security measures of little or no value? America alone has
spent over $14 bn on screening airline passengers without catching a single
terrorist— and it’s rather doubtful that the 9/11 tactics would ever work
again, as neither flight crew nor passengers will ever be as passive again
(indeed, on 9/11, the tactics only worked for the first 71 minutes). As I noted
in Chapter 1, well-known vulnerabilities in screening ground staff, reinforcing
cockpit doors and guarding aircraft on the ground overnight have been
ignored by the political leadership. Never mind that they could be fixed for a
fraction of the cost of passenger screening: invisible measures don’t have the
political impact and can’t compete for budget dollars. So we spend a fortune
on measures that annoy passengers but make flying no safer, and according
to a Harvard study don’t even meet the basic quality standards for other,
less-political, screening programs [801]. Is there any way — short of waiting
for more attacks — to establish protection priorities more sensibly?
Third, there are the effects on our industry. President Eisenhower warned
in his valedictory speech that ‘we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists
and will persist’. In the wake of 9/11, we saw a frantic stampede by security
vendors, consultancy companies, and intelligence agencies hustling for publicity,
money and power. We’re seeing the emergence of a security-industrial
complex that’s capturing policy in the same ways that the defense industry
did at the start of the Cold War. One might have thought that technological
progress would have a positive effect on trade-offs between freedom and
security; that better sensors and smarter processing would shift thr ROC curve
towards greater precision. Yet the real-world outcome seems often to be the
reverse. How is the civic-minded engineer to deal with this?
Fourth, technical security arguments are often used to bolster the case for
bad policy. All though the Irish terrorist campaign, the British police had to
charge arrested terrorist suspects within four days. But after 9/11, this was
quickly raised to 28 days; then the government said it needed 90 days, claiming
they might have difficulty decrypting data on PCs seized from suspects. That
24.2 Terrorism 771
argument turned out to bemisleading: the real problem was police inefficiency
at managing forensics.Nowif the police had just said ‘we need to hold suspects
for 90 days because we don’t have enough Somali interpreters’ then common
sense could have kicked in; Parliament might well have told them to use staff
from commercial translation agencies. But security technology arguments are
repeatedly used to bamboozle legislators, and engineers who work for firms
with lucrative government contracts may find it difficult to speak out.
Finally, there is the spillover into public policy on topics such aswiretapping,
surveillance and export control, that affect security engineers directly, and the
corresponding neglect of the more ‘civilian’ policy issues such as consumer
protection and liability. Even before 9/11, governments were struggling to
find a role in cyberspace, and not doing a particularly good job of it. The attacks
and their aftermath have skewed their efforts in ways that raise pervasive and
sometimes quite difficult issues of freedom and justice. Authoritarian behaviour
by Western governments also provides an excuse for rules in places
from Burma to Zimbabwe to censor communications and spy on their citizens.
Now the falling costs of storage may have made increased surveillance
inevitable; but the ‘war on terror’ is exacerbating this and may be catalysing
deeper and faster changes that we’d have seen otherwise.
....and once it's OK to investigate Muslims for no particular reason, that authorisation will quietly be extended to allow anyone else to be investigated for no particular reason.
This is clearly unconstitutional and I am sure no Judge in the US will allow such open discrimination unless Justice Scalia is judging it by himself.
If I'm reading the article correctly, it's not just muslim americans, but also arab americans, who regardless of religious affiliation, will become targets of FBI investigations and surveiilance.
What is going on here?
The US is becoming a totalitarian/fascist state. Everything is there :
-Telling lies in order to aggress a foreign country;
-Adopting a binary ideological discourse : it's "us or them" and all those who disagrees are "evil"
-Declaring all opponents as "unpatriotic";
-Imprisoning people without any prooves (and holding them behind bars wihtout trials for many years (Guantanamo);
-Continually inventing new words in order to mask the misdeeds committed by the government and its army;
-The lack of transparency in the action of the government and the continual practice of secrecy : for instance hiding the true cost of war to the Americans, hiding the extent of Iraqi losses and the carnage succeeding in every wars, the practice of embedded journalists imposed to the media; but also the creation of special offices in the government, doubling normal structures and shortcircuiting the normal hierarchy and usual distribution of power (like the Office of special plans, who used hiped intelligence in order to push for the Iraq war);
-Stigmatizing special groups of population : in this case Muslims, but who will be next ? Political opponents ?
-Allowing police inquiries without any evidence of wrongdoing...
Conclusion : here in the EU during the seventies, history students were all busy studying nazism and fascism and totalitarianism. We were all wondering how these horrible political systems could win over democracy and threat all Europeans countries. Now, after observing what succeeded in the US since 2000 (aka after the first Bush's election), I know. These guys, they should be tried in a new Nuremberg trial, they are criminals whom the US folk isn't able to impeach. These situations occurs among the indifference of the crowds : every one minds for his own business. We are now accepting the US aggressive behaviour out of fatalism, because they are the strongest and we feel powerless.
Remember the PC game entitled "SimCity" ? in order to declare a war to another country which wasn't aggressing you, you had first to make a coup and change the political system into a dictature. But there seems to be a middle way : the soft dictature model of the US (soft, because the dictature is based more on the media and the effectiveness of propaganda rather than on the police and terror. But if the republicans were to win one more election, you have to wonder whether the US couldn't slide few and few into a true "police state".
Anyone who has studied the periods of totalitarianism in the EU can see how many many of their characteristics can actually be found in the XXIth Century American empire now.
What's going on is the demonisation of Muslims. It's quite intentional. It's utterly cynical. And it's got nothing whatsoever to do with what's in America's best interests.
If you'd like to see what the future has in store for all of us, not least the Muslims amongst us, meditate on BO's betrayal du jour :
US Senate passes surveillance law
' President Bush - backed by Republicans in Congress - wanted to ensure that firms which had helped his administration would not be liable for prosecution.
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama voted in favour of the measure.
"I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this," said Mr Obama, in a statement on his website.
However, he added, "in a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people". '
It would be a "dangerous world" for corporations if an unknown, unowned, quantity - like say, Mike Gravel - ever got into power in the USA. So they were prepared to invest a few hundred million up front for "insurance" against "untoward" things happening to them.
And Obama is their water boy.
The only people who might be surprised by any of the record number of turn-around, about-faces Obama's taken since his "victory" in the primaries are the folks who pulled so heavily on his pipe and supported "Change" with out changing.
And they're not surprised, they're still in denial. Obama's still their fair-haired lad.
The people who voted for George Bush are responsible for the last eight years and the people who vote for Obama will be responsible for the next eight... if there are enough addicts in denial to actually elect him.
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