4 ms·

The War on Terror's Jedi Mind Trick

105 points by dkasper 13y ago

pykler 13y ago
The whole thing is a Jedi mindtrick. NSA, TSA, Patriot Act, Guantanamo not closing, Afghanistan, Iraq ... all because of said Bedouins with slippers taking over planes (how believable)
joe_the_user 13y ago
Well, It would comforting to think that all bullshit of NSA just comes because the "War On Terror" gave them a free pass and as that fades, things will get back to normal. Sorry, it is more like "entrenched interests are entrenched". Should the War On Terror(TM) rhetoric seem to fade, our fearless will put their think tanks to work and find an appropriately deceptive other trick. The point where the horse left was pretty at the point the CIA was created. As soon as convince people that "there are thing that in this democracy we have to able to hide from, the democratic public", you have a point of leverage you can push harder and harder and harder till you have all the coconuts in the watering hole. And that's pretty how thing all now. Could this change? Not without more than a little "surgery".
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  > Should the War On Terror(TM) rhetoric seem to fade (...) I don't think it will, at least not anytime soon. Americans have pissed off enough people, whose fathers, mothers, wives, daughters and sisters were killed in drone strikes, that at some point someone will try to take revenge. And at this point the government will just spin it into "terrorists are here, even more dangerous than ever", and we'll be back to square 9/11.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
Is it the NSA just doesn't want to profile for terrorists? It would seem to me, that would be much more successful than trying to monitor every single person in the country. And yeah, if they actually did profiling, they would've gotten the Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, Richard Reid, and the Boston Bombers. Instead of focusing on the obvious, the NSA chose to try and monitor every single citizen. Not effective at all and it allowed at least four terrorist attacks to take place on American soil.
- mikeash 13y ago
  What makes you think the NSA's ineffectual dragnet would suddenly have been super effective if they had done "profiling"? And why are you including Richard Reid, whose plan failed miserably, in your list? Furthermore, given your examples, "profiling" only appears to work because "terrorism" is informally defined partly based on the religion/ethnicity of the attackers. Aside from those aspects, James Holmes, Aaron Alexis, and Adam Lanza would be perfectly at home on your list, but they don't count as "terror attacks" because our definition of the word is idiotic. And the fact that "profiling" would completely miss attackers like these is ignored, because we don't consider them to be important.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    >>>> What makes you think the NSA's ineffectual dragnet would suddenly have been super effective if they had done "profiling"? Because all of the warning signs were there in every case and and were still blatantly overlooked. For example, in the Hasan case: "Intelligence agencies learned that Hasan had contacts with an Islamist sympathetic to al Qaeda and relayed the information to law enforcement, but no action was taken, the report noted." "The report said evidence of Hasan's "radicalization to violent Islamist extremism" was on display to his colleagues during his military medical training and he was referred to as a "ticking time bomb" by two of them." For example in the Boston Bombings: "Federal Bureau of Investigation officials ignored warnings about the radical origins and nature of the mosque frequented by the Tsarnaev brothers for years before this April’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings." "After tough questioning by the highly perturbed Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, Mueller confessed that he had absolutely no idea the Tsarnaevs’ mosque was founded by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who was convicted in 2004 of plotting with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz." In the case of Richard Reid, had he not been so inept, he would have been successful, and yes there were warning signs there too: "The Government ignored specific warnings more than a year ago that Muslim extremists were infiltrating prisons and recruiting inmates, The Telegraph can reveal. Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, and Martin Narey, the director general of the Prison Service, were told by mainstream Muslim leaders that "bad practices" meant that untrained, radical imams could operate in prisons." Richard Reid was recruited in jail, then sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan to train with Al Qaeda. He was also a member of a very radical mosque in North London. As for the Holmes, Alexis and Lanza, you make a good point, but they could've been stopped had there been proper mental health resources in place to help these people. Holmes had clear mental health issues that have been well documented throughout his case. Alexis thought he was being controlled by ultra low frequency radio waves and the government was trying to control his mind. Lanza was said to have a personality disorder and had trouble socializing and didn't have any friends in school. You can blame the Lanza shooting on his mother for not keeping her guys locked up and controlled properly so they would be out of reach of her son.
rdtsc 13y ago
At some point they do it because they are doing it. In other words they learned to regurgitate some basic "War On Terror" lines when asked about they are doing it, but really they do it because there are jobs, resources, servers, infrastructure, support, billable hours, resumes, training, sunk into doing it. And stopping it is just not profitable. They can never make that as the official reason (although, for example, the private prison lobbyists are not shy about why they advocate for maintaining War on Drugs, it is simply bottom lines for their clients). Here it might one layer lower, on top wrapped in some idealistic War On Terror / Keeping Americans Safe rhetoric. But almost everyone in the chain knows it is about just keep going.
- mathattack 13y ago
  It is emotionally difficult to back out of decisions. Many doomsday cults find their fanatics get even more enthusiastic after the predictions are false.
  - rdtsc 13y ago
    Good point. Yeah sometimes the fiercest apologists are those that start seeing or having a little doubt, so they double down on the effort in hopes to explain it away, and that is not just for the others but for their own minds as well.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Sunk Costs Fallacy + Cognitive Dissonance = Stronger Belief What you describe goes beyond cults to popular religions as well. When you've sacrificed much of your life being good to get into heaven, the cognitive dissonance of new evidence that should shake your belief actually leads you to seek out new equivocations justifying the effort you've sunk into your faith.
- pablovidal85 13y ago
  Ah, classic capitalism. Once somebody makes anything profitable, there is no way to stop doing it.
  - 13y ago
caprad 13y ago
This is the problem when agencies are allowed to govern themselves, with no proper over site. > Perhaps most egregious is the case of Magdy Mahmoud Mostafa el-Nashar, a former acquaintance of the perpetrators of the 2005 London transit-system bombings....The FBI had, in other words, created its own unnecessary delay, then used the story to claim it needed more power. Rather than accept responsibility, they turned this embarrassing case into a win by spinning the story to show they did not have enough access.
- sixothree 13y ago
  Checks an balances seems to be a concept completely ignored so many ways in modern America.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
The most interesting part of the article, in my eyes. > Yet it later came out that an FBI agent had quickly obtained the records under a traditional grand-jury subpoena—then, with the documents in hand, been ordered over the phone to return them and try again with an NSL, even though NSLs clearly didn’t apply to education records. The FBI had, in other words, created its own unnecessary delay, then used the story to claim it needed more power.
joelrunyon 13y ago
Desktop version - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-war-on-terrors-jedi-mind-trick/282620/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-war-...
SkynetSystems 13y ago
The problem is that without prosecutions and serious jail time, nothing is going to change. If the government has a precedent where it can violate the highest laws of the land and do whatever it wants in the name of national security, and create its own secret readings of laws that contradict other laws, there is nothing stopping them from carrying out new secret programs while they pretend to end the ones that were exposed. They will say they stopped mass wiretapping and just create a new ultra-secret designated program that does the same thing because there was no consequences for the previous law breaking.
netfire 13y ago
Besides the obvious violation of individual rights, I worry about the enormous potential for abuse in these programs that could quickly turn our democracy into a dictatorship. Systems designed to identify terrorists could easily be used to identify political opposition and supress them once they've been labeled as "terrorists". The lack of due process, transparency and checks and balances here is concerning.
- sixothree 13y ago
  It almost seems like the system was designed to be used in a political manner.
ams6110 13y ago
[Judge Leon] found the program’s invasion of privacy especially troubling given the “utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented" I find it troubling that judges are considering a benefit such as crime reduction in considering right-to-privacy issues. Certainly many crimes might be prevented if we did away with the constitutional rights of the accused, restrictions on search and seizure, etc. but is that the world we want to live in? Do we all want to be subject to random, warrantless searches of our homes, computers, or bodies, or warrantless arrest and interrogation, if the net result is a reduction in crime? The classic Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind here.
- nitid_name 13y ago
  There is a balance between privacy and crime reduction already codified into law and common law. See: the use of snoopers and other IR devices to look for grow houses (generally accepted as unreasonable) and the use of airborne BAC sensors to look for drunk drivers (generally accepted as reasonable) Legal decisions are about balance between individual rights and group rights. Free speech vs "fire in a crowded theater" is a classic example of this balancing act.
dev1n 13y ago
I am not in defense of the NSA's mass surveillance program. However it would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if, instead of caching metadata, the NSA required people to submit reports of suspicious behavior on their neighbors. What would happen then? Is it possible people would become so suspicious of their neighbors that they would be reporting even the slightest oddity? We already have a deep trust issue in America as it is between citizens and the government. Imagine no trust at all between citizens?
- alecdbrooks 13y ago
  East Germany already tried that — you are basically describing the Stasi program of "unofficial collaborators." From The Legacy of Surveillance[0]: "For every 1,000 GDR citizens there were approximately 5.5 state security personnel and another 11 unofficial informers. About 1 in 50 of the country’s adults were working for the Stasi and enabled the ministry to conduct an almost blanket surveillance of society." The movie The Lives of Others is an acclaimed look at living under such ubiquitous surveillance. Without spoiling the plot, agents bugged apartments, blackmailed family members and tapped phones. Not every citizen was looked at intensely as the characters in the film, but millions of East Germans made it into the agency's files. Wired reported in 2008 that the Stasi had indexed their records by 5.6 million names. [1] Even people who hadn't been overtly persecuted by the Stasi are often concerned their friends were spying on them. There's concrete evidence of grossly undermined trust, too: The paper I cite above suggests that East Germany's economic problems are partly due to distrust caused by the unofficial collaborators. [0]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1554604 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1554604 [1] http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_sta...
- mikeash 13y ago
  It's neither "required" nor "neighbors", but consider the ubiquitous command: "If you see something, say something."

105 points by dkasper 13y ago

The whole thing is a Jedi mindtrick. NSA, TSA, Patriot Act, Guantanamo not closing, Afghanistan, Iraq ... all because of said Bedouins with slippers taking over planes (how believable)

joe_the_user 13y ago

Well, It would comforting to think that all bullshit of NSA just comes because the "War On Terror" gave them a free pass and as that fades, things will get back to normal. Sorry, it is more like "entrenched interests are entrenched". Should the War On Terror(TM) rhetoric seem to fade, our fearless will put their think tanks to work and find an appropriately deceptive other trick. The point where the horse left was pretty at the point the CIA was created. As soon as convince people that "there are thing that in this democracy we have to able to hide from, the democratic public", you have a point of leverage you can push harder and harder and harder till you have all the coconuts in the watering hole. And that's pretty how thing all now. Could this change? Not without more than a little "surgery".

TeMPOraL 13y ago
> Should the War On Terror(TM) rhetoric seem to fade (...) I don't think it will, at least not anytime soon. Americans have pissed off enough people, whose fathers, mothers, wives, daughters and sisters were killed in drone strikes, that at some point someone will try to take revenge. And at this point the government will just spin it into "terrorists are here, even more dangerous than ever", and we'll be back to square 9/11.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

Is it the NSA just doesn't want to profile for terrorists? It would seem to me, that would be much more successful than trying to monitor every single person in the country. And yeah, if they actually did profiling, they would've gotten the Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, Richard Reid, and the Boston Bombers. Instead of focusing on the obvious, the NSA chose to try and monitor every single citizen. Not effective at all and it allowed at least four terrorist attacks to take place on American soil.

mikeash 13y ago
What makes you think the NSA's ineffectual dragnet would suddenly have been super effective if they had done "profiling"? And why are you including Richard Reid, whose plan failed miserably, in your list? Furthermore, given your examples, "profiling" only appears to work because "terrorism" is informally defined partly based on the religion/ethnicity of the attackers. Aside from those aspects, James Holmes, Aaron Alexis, and Adam Lanza would be perfectly at home on your list, but they don't count as "terror attacks" because our definition of the word is idiotic. And the fact that "profiling" would completely miss attackers like these is ignored, because we don't consider them to be important.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  >>>> What makes you think the NSA's ineffectual dragnet would suddenly have been super effective if they had done "profiling"? Because all of the warning signs were there in every case and and were still blatantly overlooked. For example, in the Hasan case: "Intelligence agencies learned that Hasan had contacts with an Islamist sympathetic to al Qaeda and relayed the information to law enforcement, but no action was taken, the report noted." "The report said evidence of Hasan's "radicalization to violent Islamist extremism" was on display to his colleagues during his military medical training and he was referred to as a "ticking time bomb" by two of them." For example in the Boston Bombings: "Federal Bureau of Investigation officials ignored warnings about the radical origins and nature of the mosque frequented by the Tsarnaev brothers for years before this April’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings." "After tough questioning by the highly perturbed Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, Mueller confessed that he had absolutely no idea the Tsarnaevs’ mosque was founded by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who was convicted in 2004 of plotting with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz." In the case of Richard Reid, had he not been so inept, he would have been successful, and yes there were warning signs there too: "The Government ignored specific warnings more than a year ago that Muslim extremists were infiltrating prisons and recruiting inmates, The Telegraph can reveal. Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, and Martin Narey, the director general of the Prison Service, were told by mainstream Muslim leaders that "bad practices" meant that untrained, radical imams could operate in prisons." Richard Reid was recruited in jail, then sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan to train with Al Qaeda. He was also a member of a very radical mosque in North London. As for the Holmes, Alexis and Lanza, you make a good point, but they could've been stopped had there been proper mental health resources in place to help these people. Holmes had clear mental health issues that have been well documented throughout his case. Alexis thought he was being controlled by ultra low frequency radio waves and the government was trying to control his mind. Lanza was said to have a personality disorder and had trouble socializing and didn't have any friends in school. You can blame the Lanza shooting on his mother for not keeping her guys locked up and controlled properly so they would be out of reach of her son.

rdtsc 13y ago

At some point they do it because they are doing it. In other words they learned to regurgitate some basic "War On Terror" lines when asked about they are doing it, but really they do it because there are jobs, resources, servers, infrastructure, support, billable hours, resumes, training, sunk into doing it. And stopping it is just not profitable. They can never make that as the official reason (although, for example, the private prison lobbyists are not shy about why they advocate for maintaining War on Drugs, it is simply bottom lines for their clients). Here it might one layer lower, on top wrapped in some idealistic War On Terror / Keeping Americans Safe rhetoric. But almost everyone in the chain knows it is about just keep going.

mathattack 13y ago
It is emotionally difficult to back out of decisions. Many doomsday cults find their fanatics get even more enthusiastic after the predictions are false.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  Good point. Yeah sometimes the fiercest apologists are those that start seeing or having a little doubt, so they double down on the effort in hopes to explain it away, and that is not just for the others but for their own minds as well.
- malandrew 13y ago
  Sunk Costs Fallacy + Cognitive Dissonance = Stronger Belief What you describe goes beyond cults to popular religions as well. When you've sacrificed much of your life being good to get into heaven, the cognitive dissonance of new evidence that should shake your belief actually leads you to seek out new equivocations justifying the effort you've sunk into your faith.
pablovidal85 13y ago
Ah, classic capitalism. Once somebody makes anything profitable, there is no way to stop doing it.
- 13y ago

caprad 13y ago

This is the problem when agencies are allowed to govern themselves, with no proper over site. > Perhaps most egregious is the case of Magdy Mahmoud Mostafa el-Nashar, a former acquaintance of the perpetrators of the 2005 London transit-system bombings....The FBI had, in other words, created its own unnecessary delay, then used the story to claim it needed more power. Rather than accept responsibility, they turned this embarrassing case into a win by spinning the story to show they did not have enough access.

sixothree 13y ago
Checks an balances seems to be a concept completely ignored so many ways in modern America.

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

The most interesting part of the article, in my eyes. > Yet it later came out that an FBI agent had quickly obtained the records under a traditional grand-jury subpoena—then, with the documents in hand, been ordered over the phone to return them and try again with an NSL, even though NSLs clearly didn’t apply to education records. The FBI had, in other words, created its own unnecessary delay, then used the story to claim it needed more power.

joelrunyon 13y ago

Desktop version - http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-war-on-terrors-jedi-mind-trick/282620/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-war-...

SkynetSystems 13y ago

The problem is that without prosecutions and serious jail time, nothing is going to change. If the government has a precedent where it can violate the highest laws of the land and do whatever it wants in the name of national security, and create its own secret readings of laws that contradict other laws, there is nothing stopping them from carrying out new secret programs while they pretend to end the ones that were exposed. They will say they stopped mass wiretapping and just create a new ultra-secret designated program that does the same thing because there was no consequences for the previous law breaking.

netfire 13y ago

Besides the obvious violation of individual rights, I worry about the enormous potential for abuse in these programs that could quickly turn our democracy into a dictatorship. Systems designed to identify terrorists could easily be used to identify political opposition and supress them once they've been labeled as "terrorists". The lack of due process, transparency and checks and balances here is concerning.

sixothree 13y ago
It almost seems like the system was designed to be used in a political manner.

ams6110 13y ago

[Judge Leon] found the program’s invasion of privacy especially troubling given the “utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented" I find it troubling that judges are considering a benefit such as crime reduction in considering right-to-privacy issues. Certainly many crimes might be prevented if we did away with the constitutional rights of the accused, restrictions on search and seizure, etc. but is that the world we want to live in? Do we all want to be subject to random, warrantless searches of our homes, computers, or bodies, or warrantless arrest and interrogation, if the net result is a reduction in crime? The classic Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind here.

nitid_name 13y ago
There is a balance between privacy and crime reduction already codified into law and common law. See: the use of snoopers and other IR devices to look for grow houses (generally accepted as unreasonable) and the use of airborne BAC sensors to look for drunk drivers (generally accepted as reasonable) Legal decisions are about balance between individual rights and group rights. Free speech vs "fire in a crowded theater" is a classic example of this balancing act.

dev1n 13y ago

I am not in defense of the NSA's mass surveillance program. However it would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if, instead of caching metadata, the NSA required people to submit reports of suspicious behavior on their neighbors. What would happen then? Is it possible people would become so suspicious of their neighbors that they would be reporting even the slightest oddity? We already have a deep trust issue in America as it is between citizens and the government. Imagine no trust at all between citizens?

alecdbrooks 13y ago
East Germany already tried that — you are basically describing the Stasi program of "unofficial collaborators." From The Legacy of Surveillance[0]: "For every 1,000 GDR citizens there were approximately 5.5 state security personnel and another 11 unofficial informers. About 1 in 50 of the country’s adults were working for the Stasi and enabled the ministry to conduct an almost blanket surveillance of society." The movie The Lives of Others is an acclaimed look at living under such ubiquitous surveillance. Without spoiling the plot, agents bugged apartments, blackmailed family members and tapped phones. Not every citizen was looked at intensely as the characters in the film, but millions of East Germans made it into the agency's files. Wired reported in 2008 that the Stasi had indexed their records by 5.6 million names. [1] Even people who hadn't been overtly persecuted by the Stasi are often concerned their friends were spying on them. There's concrete evidence of grossly undermined trust, too: The paper I cite above suggests that East Germany's economic problems are partly due to distrust caused by the unofficial collaborators. [0]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1554604 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1554604 [1] http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_sta...
mikeash 13y ago
It's neither "required" nor "neighbors", but consider the ubiquitous command: "If you see something, say something."