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      in World Politics

      The New Police State

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      The world Americans now live in has acquired all the trappings of a police state. But unlike police states of the past, with soldiers at every street corner, the police and their policing techniques have become invisible. Invisibility is the key to their efficacy. We mustn’t see what is ensuring our security.

      William M. Arkin, writing for Newsweek, describes it as a vast, secret underground force. “The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies,” he writes. 

      Media: How Debunked Stories Continue to Thrive

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      Here is a rare instance of the independent press living up to its mission of informing the public of what is deliberately hidden from its view. Arkin highlights its historical significance: “The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world.” In the security state, the name of the enemy is “transparency.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      False identities:

      The only meaningful and useful identities in hyperreality

      Contextual Note

      Arkin describes in lurid detail the “completely unregulated practice” of fabricating for deceitful purposes superficially credible false identities. The science and art he describes is called “signature reduction.” This means that the ability to identify real people executing a variety of illicit tasks becomes exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. The aim is to protect such people from being exposed, a practice that may be frowned upon in normal circumstances, but must be applauded when done in the name of national security. 

      The belief that national security has become the fundamental mission of nations — practically to the exclusion of all others — implies a radical change in political culture. Rather than suspecting such practices of having the power to undermine the idea of trust that any society requires to maintain its social coherence, it puts the highest value on what is both secret and unregulated, and therefore simply fake. When a culture evolves in this direction its members spontaneously stop asking questions about such things. Fakeness becomes the accepted norm. Knowing that hyperreality has been implemented to protect us from dangers we are told are lurking in the shadows, we instead feel grateful.

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      Those who practice this new art and science of “signature reduction” refuse to recognize even its formal designation. Doing so would amount to admitting that the Pentagon’s game is to deceive the public rather than ensure the defense of a democratic society. That would be tantamount to heresy in a democracy as well as a betrayal of the principle of hyperreality: Everything must look real but remain unreal enough to permit plausible denial.

      Deep secrecy of this type has numerous advantages. By obscuring our perception of a phenomenon we know exists, the public stops believing in its existence, even after reading an exposé in Newsweek. “No one knows the program’s total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture,” Arkin writes. “Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.”

      Signature reduction means that the risk of being caught out for violating fundamental laws and ethical codes is also reduced. The practice should draw our attention to one of the most effective strategies of the new security state. It is the trend that consists of privatizing what were formerly government functions, a key to invisibility. The signature reduction program “engages some 130 private companies to administer the new clandestine world. Dozens of little known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations.” The military fully understands the principle. When soldiers are replaced by mercenaries, people stop noticing that a war is still going on. 

      For the past five years, the Democrats have successively persuaded the respectable media that Russia’s meddling in US elections should be considered the most heinous crime of the century and the greatest threat to democracy. Newsweek’s article tells us that the massively funded “undercover force” of indeterminate size that has managed the question of reduced signature may “even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

      Is the Pentagon imitating the Russians or were the Russians imitating the US? What propaganda outfit or commercial entity today would not seek to “engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media”? That happens to be the only way anyone with a modicum of ambition can hope to get ahead, either individually or collectively? The culture of hyperreality rewards deception and manipulation. It also undermines social identity.

      We have entered an age in which disguise trumps — and possibly abolishes — reality. Newsweek tells us “a major task of signature reduction is keeping all of the organizations and people, even the automobiles and aircraft involved in the clandestine operations, masked.” Speaking of masks, some may begin speculating that there may be a connection between “signature reduction” and the COVID-induced campaign to persuade everyone to live in society behind a mask. In an age marked by the growing trend to define one’s image through cosmetic surgery, life itself becomes a struggle to define the mask behind which one will live and interact with others.

      Historical Note

      At the beginning of his article, William Arkin points to the phenomenon’s significance in recent history: “The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade.” He calls it “an unprecedented shift.” But the movement of what amounts to not just signature reduction, but signature erasure began much earlier than a decade ago.

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      The 20th-century consumer society produced generations of Americans who, in the first instance, sought to base their identity not on who they were, but what they could buy and display. This was the era early in the century of what economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen described as “conspicuous consumption.” As the consumer society began to create new distinctions of status, the question of every individual having the right to create a personal “signature” began to become associated less with social relations and more with the kind of job one had, which in turn was linked to what one conspicuously consumed. This spawned a culture of consumerist prosperity that encouraged the development of what the late anthropologist David Graeber called the trend toward “bullshit jobs.”

      Graeber saw most of the jobs in the past half century as unjustified for any reason other than supporting the consumer society’s ideology and avoiding the “mortal danger” represented by people with too much free time to think about things and eventually act on them. Graeber defined five categories of bullshit jobs: flunkies, who serve essentially as foils to their superiors; goons, who deceive others for the sake of their employer’s immediate interests (maximum profit); duct tapers, who intervene to provide a temporary fix to problems rather than solving them; box tickers, who validate processes; and taskmasters, who manage and create a sense of usefulness for the others.

      The work described as “signature reduction” in Newsweek’s article consists of manipulating information and official documents to hide the real identity of people engaged in what would normally be considered illegal and antisocial activities. Are these also bullshit jobs? This description could be justified in a literal sense. They produce something resembling social excrement. They are designed for one purpose: to make the fake look real and the real look fake. The bull in the pasture chomps on, chews and digests the fresh green grass only in the end result to excretes in an unrecognizable form. The grass’ signature has been singularly and definitely reduced.

      The consumer society’s greatest achievement has been the reign of hyperreality. Hiding an invisibly growing police state is just one of its features. As a retired military officer cited in the article observed, “modern life is not as transparent as most of us think.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      Kevin Clinesmith, Ex-F.B.I. Lawyer, Is Sentenced to Probation

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEx-F.B.I. Lawyer Who Altered Email in Russia Case Is Sentenced to ProbationA judge rebuffed a request by prosecutors to impose a prison sentence on Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted doctoring an email used to help authorize a wiretap on a former Trump campaign aide.The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The judge overseeing the case against a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, said the destruction of his career had already provided significant punishment.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesJan. 29, 2021Updated 6:45 p.m. ETA former F.B.I. lawyer who has admitted doctoring an email during preparations to seek renewed court permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide during the Russia investigation was sentenced on Friday to one year of probation and 400 hours of community service — but no prison time.Prosecutors led by John H. Durham, a special counsel scrutinizing the government’s actions in the Russia investigation, had asked the judge overseeing the high-profile case against the former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, to impose several months of prison time.But the judge, James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, said the destruction of Mr. Clinesmith’s career — and being vilified in a “media hurricane” — had already provided significant punishment and sent a deterrent message.“Anybody who has watched what Mr. Clinesmith has suffered is not someone who will readily act in that fashion,” Judge Boasberg said. “Weighing all of these factors together — both in terms of the damages he caused and what he has suffered and the positives in his own life — I believe a probationary sentence is appropriate here and will therefore impose it.”The surveillance of the former aide, Carter Page, in 2016 and 2017 was a minor part of the overall Russia investigation. But it has become a political flash point because the Justice Department’s inspector general uncovered numerous errors and omissions in its four court applications, flaws that President Donald J. Trump and his allies used as fodder in portraying the Russia inquiry as a plot by the so-called deep state.Mr. Clinesmith’s misdeed was the most egregious of the problems uncovered by the inspector general. In June 2017, as the F.B.I. was preparing to seek the final renewal of the order, an F.B.I. official who was going to sign a sworn description of the facts asked Mr. Clinesmith to seek clarity from the C.I.A. about whether Mr. Page was a source for the agency, as he had claimed.In fact, Mr. Page had spoken to the C.I.A. in the past about his interactions with Russian intelligence agents — a material fact that all four wiretap applications omitted, and that might have made him look less suspicious had the court been told about it. But Mr. Clinesmith inserted the words “and not a ‘source’” into a C.I.A. email and showed it to his colleague, which satisfied him and prevented the problem from coming to light internally.The inspector general referred Mr. Clinesmith for a criminal investigation, and the matter was assigned to Mr. Durham, a United States attorney from Connecticut whom the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, had assigned to investigate the Russia investigation. The Clinesmith case is the only criminal prosecution Mr. Durham’s team has brought.When Mr. Clinesmith pleaded guilty last year to making a false statement, he acknowledged that he had intentionally altered the email and created a false record. But he also claimed that he did not intentionally mislead his colleague because at the time he believed the words he inserted were accurate. He had separately told his colleague by text that Mr. Page was not a C.I.A. source, but rather a subsource of someone else who had talked to the agency.In arguing for prison time on Friday, prosecutors suggested that Mr. Clinesmith’s explanation made no sense and that he must also have known he was misleading his colleagues, pointing to evidence that he wanted to avoid the F.B.I. having to explain to the court why it had omitted that fact of Mr. Page’s help to the C.I.A. from all the applications.But Judge Boasberg said that based on the record, he believed Mr. Clinesmith’s version.Judge Boasberg is also the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handled the disputed wiretaps of Mr. Page, although he did not personally sign off on any of them. After the disclosures, Judge Boasberg ordered the F.B.I. to review all other wiretap cases Mr. Clinesmith had been involved with and the bureau adopted more stringent rules for its national security wiretap applications.Mr. Page spoke at the hearing, which was conducted by video and teleconference because of the pandemic. Mr. Page said he had been harmed by the invasion of his privacy and public knowledge that he was under scrutiny as part of the Russia investigation, including losing friendships and receiving death threats.Mr. Page emphasized that it became publicly known that he was being investigated as part of the inquiry into whether Trump associates had conspired with Russia in its 2016 election interference — which Mr. Page termed a “manufactured scandal.”Judge Boasberg later suggested that the intelligence court may well have approved the last wiretap extension even if it had been told about the C.I.A. issue, citing the numerous other flaws in the applications.Notably, Mr. Page did not ask Judge Boasberg to impose prison time on Mr. Clinesmith. He also volunteered to serve as a “friend of the court” in future surveillance court matters, citing his own civil liberties experiences as a target of surveillance since deemed improper. (The Justice Department has said it no longer believes the full range of evidence available to it by the final two extensions met legal standards to invade Mr. Page’s privacy.)Mr. Clinesmith also spoke, expressing contrition for what he portrayed as a failure of judgment and talking about the effect of losing his job and reputation. His list of apologies included one to his wife — who is pregnant with their first child — for the stress and loss of his $150,000 income, and one to the F.B.I. for bringing public opprobrium upon it and for the extra work colleagues had to do in remedial actions.“I apologize to everyone,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Elections

      Trump Administration Politicized Some Intelligence on Foreign Election Influence, Report Finds

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      Election Results: Biden Wins

      Electoral College Votes

      Congress Defies Mob

      Georgia Runoff Results

      Democrats Win Senate Control

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      in Elections

      Biden to Tap More Former Obama Officials for Top National Security Jobs

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      Trump Was Briefed on Uncorroborated Intelligence About Chinese Bounties

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Was Briefed on Uncorroborated Intelligence About Chinese BountiesThe unverified intelligence echoes a similar report, deemed credible by the C.I.A. but dismissed by the president, that Russian military agents had offered payments for attacks on Americans in Afghanistan.President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, this month at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.Credit…Erin Scott for The New York TimesDec. 30, 2020President Trump was briefed this month about intelligence reports that China had offered to pay bounties to fighters in Afghanistan who attacked American soldiers there, but the information was uncorroborated and comes months after Mr. Trump dismissed as a “hoax” a C.I.A. assessment that Russia had paid for such attacks.It is unclear whether the intelligence on China shows that any bounties were paid, or whether any attacks on American personnel were even attempted. United States intelligence agencies collect enormous amounts of information, much of which turns out to be false or misleading.The information, included in the president’s written briefing on Dec. 17 and relayed verbally by the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien — was earlier reported on Wednesday night by Axios and confirmed by U.S. officials.It comes at a time when Trump administration officials, including the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, have sought to put more pressure on China, partly in the hope of limiting any plans by the incoming Biden administration to ease tensions with Beijing.Mr. Trump, Mr. Ratcliffe and other officials have also sought to direct attention toward Chinese misbehavior in areas where other American officials consider Russia to be a greater threat, including computer hacking and the use of disinformation to disrupt American politics.After the disclosure this month that the United States government had been subjected to a huge cyberbreach that American officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, confidently attributed to Russia, Mr. Trump angrily cast doubt on that notion and sought to implicate Beijing. “Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, charging that the news media avoids “discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”The Axios report said on Wednesday that the underlying intelligence on the bounties, about which it obtained no further details, would be declassified, although it was unclear why or for whom. White House officials would not elaborate but did not dispute that the intelligence was uncorroborated.Although tensions between the United States and China have escalated significantly during the Trump era, Beijing is not known to provide substantial support to anti-American proxies in combat zones like Afghanistan, and some national security experts were initially skeptical that Beijing would support attacks on Americans. By contrast, many considered similar reports about Russian bounties to be credible.If confirmed, and particularly if traced to political leaders in Beijing, such an action by China would constitute a grave provocation that might demand a response by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. after he takes office in January.A Biden transition official would not say on Wednesday night whether Mr. Biden, who now receives official daily intelligence briefings, had been presented with the same information as the president.But the official said that the Biden team would seek to learn more about it from the Trump administration and that it underscored the importance of a fully cooperative transition process, including with the Defense Department, which Mr. Biden on Monday accused of “obstruction.”“Right now,” Mr. Biden said in Wilmington, Del., “we just aren’t getting all the information that we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas.”Months before the report involving China, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating reports collected this year, and first reported by The New York Times, that Russian military intelligence agents had offered to pay Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for the killing of American soldiers there.The C.I.A. assessed with medium confidence that Russia had covertly offered and paid the bounties to a network of Afghan militants and criminals. The National Security Agency placed lower confidence in the intelligence. But Mr. Pompeo, for one, took the reports seriously enough to issue a stern face-to-face warning this summer to his Russian counterpart.Mr. Trump was similarly provided with a written briefing on that intelligence, but publicly he dismissed it as “fake news” and an extension of what he called the “Russia hoax,” including the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to the Kremlin. At the same time, the president suggested that subordinates had not done enough to draw the report about Russia to his attention.“If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it,” Mr. Trump said in July. United States officials have said that the assessment regarding Russia was included in his written intelligence brief in February, but that he rarely reads that document.In multiple subsequent conversations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump did not raise the matter.Many questions are outstanding about the unverified intelligence regarding China, including when such bounties were said to be offered, by whom and to whom. The United States and its coalition partners in Afghanistan are fighting not only the Taliban but also Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and various other militant and criminal groups.The reportedly planned release of more information comes at a time when Democrats and many career intelligence officials are concerned that Trump officials like Mr. Ratcliffe have sought to selectively declassify intelligence for political purposes, like the Russia investigation and election interference.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barr Says C.I.A. ‘Stayed in Its Lane’ in Examining Russian Election Interference

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarr Says C.I.A. ‘Stayed in Its Lane’ in Examining Russian Election InterferenceIn an interview with a Wall Street Journal columnist, the attorney general defended his legacy and criticized the special counsel’s investigation.Attorney General William P. Barr will depart the Justice Department next week.Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesDec. 18, 2020, 7:15 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s examination of the investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has cleared the C.I.A. of suspicions that it targeted President Trump and his associates, Attorney General William P. Barr said in an interview published on Friday.“The C.I.A. stayed in its lane” and he did not “see any sign of improper C.I.A. activity,” Mr. Barr told the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley A. Strassel. His comments made more explicit his disclosure this month that the investigation by John H. Durham, a prosecutor whom Mr. Barr appointed as a special counsel in the case, had narrowed to focus on the F.B.I.Mr. Barr stopped short of fully absolving the C.I.A.; he confirmed that Mr. Durham was reviewing the early 2017 assessment by the agency and other parts of the intelligence community that concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had favored Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.Mr. Barr has drawn criticism for his previous uses of the term “spying” to describe investigative activities, though he has applied it more generally to the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation than to the C.I.A.’s scrutiny of the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference campaign. Mr. Barr reserved harsh judgment for the F.B.I.’s investigation, calling parts of it “outrageous.”Mr. Barr, who will depart office next week, sought to burnish his legacy in the interview. He has been widely criticized for his interventions in cases involving Mr. Trump’s associates, his portrayal of the Mueller report that a judge called “distorted” and “misleading” and other efforts to advance the president’s political agenda, but he insisted he was an impartial arbiter of justice who stopped the Justice Department from being used as a “political weapon.”Mr. Barr said he had planned to stay on as attorney general if Mr. Trump had won re-election but his relationship with the mercurial president had frayed at times, making his continued role as the nation’s top law enforcement officer tenuous.Mr. Barr did not assert that election fraud had played a role in Mr. Trump’s election loss and brushed off the president’s repeated criticisms that he should have disclosed a federal investigation into President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, which would have violated Justice Department guidelines.While apparently clearing the C.I.A. of any wrongdoing, Mr. Barr has been deeply skeptical of the F.B.I.’s reasoning for opening a counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 into whether any Trump campaign associates were secretly conspiring with Russia to tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor.The investigation should never have been opened, Mr. Barr said. “The idea that this was done with the collusion of the Trump campaign — there was never any evidence. It was entirely made up.”The investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, has fueled similar unfounded accusations that a so-called deep state of government officials were working together to hobble Mr. Trump’s campaign and the administration.But an independent review by the Justice Department’s inspector general determined that officials had sufficient reason to open the investigation and found no evidence that agents acted with political bias. But agents also made serious mistakes in parts of the investigation, including some involving documents related to a wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, which have been amplified by right-wing media and wielded as proof that the F.B.I. was on a witch hunt.Mr. Barr told The Journal that the F.B.I.’s use “of confidential human sources and wiretapping to investigate people connected to a campaign was outrageous.”The inspector general concluded that the use of informants and undercover agents complied with Justice Department and F.B.I. policies but suggested those steps lacked oversight.Mr. Barr’s appointment of Mr. Durham as a special counsel grants Mr. Durham the kind of authorities given to Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel who eventually oversaw the Russia investigation. That should ensure that any report written by Mr. Durham is made public, Mr. Barr said.Mr. Barr said that Mr. Durham was focused on a “small group at the F.B.I.” — an apparent reference to the former senior officials who played a role in authorizing Crossfire Hurricane.Mr. Barr said Mr. Durham was also looking at “the activities of certain private actors,” a possible reference to Christopher Steele, a British former spy who helped assemble a dossier of anti-Trump material that was passed to the F.B.I. and used as part of the application to wiretap the former Trump adviser, Carter Page.Mr. Durham has spent significant time examining the dossier, including the actions of F.B.I. officials who came later to understand that it had significant problems but failed to convey that to the secret court that approves the highly classified wiretaps, people familiar with Mr. Durham’s investigation said.As part of his investigation, Mr. Durham prosecuted a former F.B.I. lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that an agent relied on to renew one of the Page wiretap applications. The inspector general had found the document and referred it to prosecutors.In the interview, Mr. Barr also criticized the appointment of Mr. Mueller, the former F.B.I. director whom Mr. Barr once closely worked with in the early 1990s when he first ran the Justice Department.Mr. Barr said Mr. Mueller should have looked at the information the F.B.I. provided him more critically. “The Mueller team seems to have been ready to blindly accept anything fed to it by the system,” he said.The attorney general derided Mr. Mueller’s prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty twice to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with the then Russian ambassador in late 2016 and admitted to illegally lobbying for Turkey.After a federal judge had dismissed Mr. Flynn’s many claims of prosecutorial wrongdoing and F.B.I. abuses in late 2019, Mr. Barr then appointed a U.S. attorney to review the case.Prosecutors then sought to drop the criminal case against Mr. Flynn but before a judge could rule on the matter, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Flynn, ensuring the Justice Department under the Biden administration could not prosecute him for violating the lobbying laws too.Mr. Barr said the case against Mr. Flynn was “entirely bogus.”The judge overseeing the Flynn case, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, disagreed with Mr. Barr’s sweeping conclusion. In an opinion this month, Judge Sullivan said that the Justice Department’s arguments for dropping the case were dubious and that he likely would have rejected them.The judge also rejected evidence that the department had supplied to the court in an attempt to show that the F.B.I. had tried to entrap Mr. Flynn.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in World Politics

      Who Doesn’t Love the Sacred Freedom to Spy?

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      In July, Yahoo News revealed that US President Donald Trump issued a secret order in 2018 authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct offensive cyber operations against various nations deemed to be adversaries of the US. Trump generously invited the CIA “to both conduct cyber operations and choose its target, without the White House’s approval.” 

      Bobby Chesney, writing for the website Lawfare, describes the order as a “blanket authorization for the CIA to conduct cyber operations against certain named adversaries—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—and potentially others.” Chesney remarks that some commentators cited expressed concern “that the reduced external scrutiny of CIA covert activities and the sped-up timeline for approvals will result in undue or unwise risk-taking.”

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      According to the authors of the Yahoo article, the directive was “driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA” but not subjected to political review. They cite a “former U.S. government official” who called the order “very aggressive.”

      The article tells us that once it had the authorization, the CIA went into action. “Since the [order] was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list,” Yahoo reports. 

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Wish list:

      The designation of actions whose implementation by any normal human being is theoretically unrealistic, unaffordable or that would be considered immoral if carried out, but which can be immediately converted into an operational action plan by those who are given unlimited resources and held to zero accountability

      Contextual Note

      The scope of this secret order should not be underestimated. Yahoo cites “former officials” who explain that “it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations.”

      That is a serious innovation that potentially redefines and constrains the very idea of freedom of expression. According to Yahoo, the new powers granted to the CIA “open the way for the agency to launch offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program.

      Not only does this mean that the CIA may do whatever it chooses with no oversight and absolute impunity, but it also means that it can decide what type of expression can be suppressed and which people or groups can be either silenced or disrupted. Theoretically, the CIA’s brief is confined to overseas operations, but by including the right to target everything from media and charities to “individuals affiliated with these organizations,” the scope of such opaque operations appears limitless.

      Historical Note

      At a moment in history when the Democratic Party, despite a lack of any serious evidence, has not stopped its four-year-old campaign of complaining about real or imaginary Russian meddling in US elections via social media, this story about US meddling apparently proved embarrassing enough for its preferred media to largely ignore it.  

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      And yet the fact that Donald Trump, the incarnation of political evil, granted the CIA the power not just to disseminate propaganda or spread lies — as Russia is accused of doing — but to conduct “aggressive offensive cyber operations” against media, charities and individuals suspected of any form of complicity with an adversary should shock any American who still believes in democratic principles and that antique notion of “fair play.”

      Lawfare calls it “a major story.” But the revelation doesn’t seem to have shocked many people in the mainstream US media. Bonnie Kristian in Newsweek picked up the story and worried, with good reason, that the unaccountable actions of the CIA “could tip the balance of U.S. relations with one of these targeted nations into outright war.” Fox News also reported it, with a tone of general approval, seeing it as part of a “strategy to bolster the government’s defenses against foreign adversaries.” 

      The major outlets identified as the “liberal mainstream” preferred to let the story rot on the sidelines. The New York Times apparently thought it wasn’t news fit to print. The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC treated the story with benign neglect, having more urgent news to promote. This may seem paradoxical since these outlets will usually jump on any item that reveals Trump to be a dangerous wielder of absolute power. In this case, he specifically overturned a safeguard the previous administration had put in place.

      In its permanent campaign to undermine President Trump, the liberal media might have been tempted to pounce on the story for another reason linked to electoral politics. Siladitya Ray, in an article for Forbes, cites a former State Department attorney and national security expert, Rebecca Ingber, who complains of Trump’s hypocrisy. “It’s rich that the President who claims the ‘deep state’ is working to undermine him is happy to delegate such broad authority to cause destruction — it’s almost as though he’s not *really* all that concerned with tight presidential control over the national security state when it’s not about his own personal interests,” Ingber tweeted.

      Ingber is right to point to the paradox, but she unwittingly reveals why the liberal media preferred to ignore the story. The big four mentioned above (The Times, The Post, CNN and MSNBC) have become active promoters of the intelligence community, to the point of complicity, if not hero worship. The two cable TV channels employ former heads of the CIA (John Brennan) and National Intelligence (James Clapper) as their “experts” on everything to do with intelligence, including assessing risks coming from abroad. This of course means that the last thing they would be inclined to warn about or even deign to mention is accrued power to the intelligence agencies.

      In an article for Axios, Zach Dorfman, who is the lead author of the Yahoo story, offers what he sees as the historical perspective. “The big picture: Some officials emphasize that Trump-era shifts in U.S. offensive cyber operations are part of a natural evolution in U.S. policies in this arena, and that many changes would have been granted under a new Democratic administration as well,” he writes.

      This can be interpreted in two ways. One reading is that Dorfman wants us to believe that we have entered a troubled period of history in which people’s democratic rights have been canceled and therefore action may be needed to return to true democracy. The other is the idea that we simply must accept the fatality of a “natural evolution.” 

      This suggests that it has little to do with Trump. Any responsible president from either party would, for the sake of security, do the same thing. It’s the logic of what Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter in the Harvard Business Review describe as “the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.”

      By now we know how this plays out. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader at the time, remarked in 2017 about what Americans believe concerning the political economy. “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” she said. National security merits a similar remark: We’re cybercriminals, and that’s just the way it is.

      Dorfman’s second conclusion is probably close to the truth — or, as Trump likes to say when referring to embarrassing facts, “It is what it is.” Any president would do the same thing. It’s the system that requires it, not the chief executive. The same is certainly true in Moscow. Some may describe that as proof of the fact that it is pretty much a level playing field, which is probably true. It’s just that it’s a very brutal sport.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More