BRAD BLOG commenter “Arias” recently asked…
I couldn’t be more proud of how calmly and logically they destroyed every argument the recruiters put forth.
No, we hadn’t! But we have now. And it’s great listening. Always enjoy citizens smartly challenging authority, even if we actually do feel a bit sorry for the NSA recruiters here. The lousy government policies aren’t their fault. Still, it’s as close as most Americans are likely to get to trying to see some accountability from “the NSA”, and it’s great to hear folks standing up, asking tough questions and trying to demand accountability in any way they can.
The Guardian’s headline for their coverage is “NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong”. We’d say it went great!
Here’s the sound file…
It’s all worth listening to, but some of the “highlights”, as selected and transcribed by The Guardian, follow below…
Recruiter 1: “You can define adversary as ‘enemy’ and, clearly, Germany is not our enemy. But would we have foreign national interests from an intelligence perspective on what’s going on across the globe? Yeah, we do.”
Tahir: “So by ‘adversaries’, you actually mean anybody and everybody. There is nobody, then, by your definition that is not an adversary. Is that correct?”
Recruiter 1: “That is not correct.”
Recruiter 2: “… for us, our business is apolitical, OK? We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They are levied on us … We might use the word ‘target’.”
Tahir: “I’m just surprised that for language analysts, you’re incredibly imprecise with your language. And it just doesn’t seem to be clear.”
Later …
Tahir: “… this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren’t true. And we also know that the NSA took down brochures and factsheets after the Snowden revelations because those factsheets also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them, right? So how are we supposed to believe what you’re saying?”
Even later …
Tahir: “I think the question here is do you actually think about the ramifications of the work that you do, which is deeply problematic, or do you just dress up in costumes and get drunk?” [A reference to an earlier comment the recruiter made about NSA employees working hard and going to the bar to do karaoke.]
Recruiter 2: “… reporting the info in the right context is so important because the consequences of bad political decisions by our policymakers is something we all suffer from.”
Unnamed female student: “And people suffer from the misinformation that you pass along so you should take responsibility as well.”
Later still …
Male student: “General Alexander [head of the NSA] also lied in front of Congress.”
Recruiter 1: “I don’t believe that he did.”
Male student: “Probably because access to the Guardian is restricted on the Department of Defence’s computers. I am sure they don’t encourage people like you to actually think about these things. Thank God for a man like Edward Snowden who your organisation is now part of a manhunt trying to track down, trying to put him in a little hole somewhere for the rest of his life. Thank God they exist.”
And finally …
Recruiter 2: “This job isn’t for everybody, you know …”
Tahir: “So is this job for liars? Is this what you’re saying? Because, clearly, you’re not able to give us forthright answers. I mean, given the way the NSA has behaved, given the fact that we’ve been lied to as Americans, given the fact that factsheets have been pulled down because they clearly had untruths in them, given the fact that Clapper and Alexander lied to Congress – is that a qualification for being in the NSA? Do you have to be a good liar?”
Recruiter 1: I don’t believe the NSA is telling complete lies. And I do believe that you know, I mean people can, you can read a lot of different things that are, um, portrayed as fact and that doesn’t make them fact just because they’re in newspapers.”
Unnamed female student: “Or intelligence reports.”
Recruiter 1: “That’s not really our purpose here today and I think if you’re not interested in that … there are people here who are probably interested in a language career.”
I had seen the article and listened to the audio previously, Brad.
Political scientists should derive two profound points from the colloquy between Tahir and the two NSA recruiters.
The first point arises from the recruiters’ use of the word “customers” to describe those who receive the NSA-collected data — something Tahir describes as an odd word for a government agency to use.
Perhaps not as odd as one might think, given the privatized nature of NSA surveillance and the prospect that it is being carried out both by and on behalf of major corporations.
The second point arises from the NSA recruiter’s effort to suggest that the agency’s Orwellian level of surveillance is justified because it is “apolitical”; that it is not simply directed at “adversaries†but at “targets.â€
That statement calls to mind what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil†– a concept she arrived at after watching the 1963 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her thesis was that “the great evils in history…were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.”
In Eichmann, Arendt saw not a vicious monster but a technocrat whose concern was focused on the efficiency of the apparatus used by the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust rather than with the madness of genocide.
While the evil embodied in the NSA’s virtual elimination of the right to privacy, both domestically and abroad, is by no means as horrible as that which resulted in mass genocide during the Holocaust, the principle is the same. In these recruiters, one can see two bureaucrats who have internally accepted the validity of mass NSA surveillance.
Having accepted its validity, the recruiters pay no attention to the fact that such massive surveillance could prove the harbinger of a totalitarian state. In their bureaucratic minds, the surveillance is “apolitical.” Their reduction of the victims of surveillance to “targets” entails the use of a seemingly neutral concept that, in reality, dehumanizes those whose privacy has been invaded.
Like Eichmann, their statement that they “do not generate the intelligence requirements [which are] levied upon [them],” entails that of a form of “I was only following orders” — as if they can evade their own personal responsibility for carrying out the illegal schemes of others.
It is here that we see the fundamental distinction between the high moral conscience displayed by Edward Snowden in exposing the illegal scheme and those who try to create a psychic distance between themselves and the illegal policies they continue to carry out.
Oh God, that tape is glorious!!!
Those students are brilliant. And all there doing is using the simple facts of the matter and an ability to think on their feet to leave absolutely no wiggle room for a disingenuous presentation of an illegal and unconstitutional program.
This is exactly what the citizens of this nation should learn to do to the hordes of disingenuous lying politicians and media figures across the country, with perhaps a special focus on Washington.
Adding to Ernie’s comment–
The recruiters state that the government has an interest in what they are being asked to surveil. This is another unspoken, unacknowledged frame loaded with hidden value.
As Howard Zinn pointed out–the powers that be, whether corporate, military, governmental, or media have “interests” and values not necessarily representative or in synch with those of we, the people.
Public polling shows that WE are very much in favor of getting the money out of politics, serious action on climate change, a single payer health system etc., etc.
But to the realpoliticians and the fawning/complicit media that cover them these sorts of goals/desires are inconceivable.
They will from time to time pay lip service to our values and wishes(Obama is particularly adept at this). But when it comes do what they actual set out to do and support, their interests are very different from ours.
All military recruiters, including the military NSA recruiters here, report to the Pentagon because NSA is a military outfit.
Military recruiters lie about as often as they drink water.
Their mission, which gets into their genetic structure, is to indoctrinate and make it appear as if it is enlightenment.
Ultimately they plan to fully replace in incompetent civilian government.
Yes, Dredd, and the Pentagon reports to the military-industrial complex.
With the revolving door in place between the generals and the weapons industry, what we see is the realization of the privatized, corporate security state. The military, in general, and the NSA in particular, are simply components of that state.
The true masters of war are the civilian heads of the weapons manufacturers who are the top point one percent.
I especially loved the part when the recruiter protests that he doesn’t believe Alexander lied to congress and the student totally broke him off with the Guardian being censored by DoD. PWNED!
Going back to what Ernie was talking about with the incestuous relationship between private and government intel agencies, it reminds me of the Stratfor scandal when this private intel firm had its servers hacked by Anonymous and internal emails publicly dumped. One of the interesting nuggets that perfectly illustrates the problem is when Coke hired Stratfor to investigate PETA and one of the firm’s private analysts who had come from the CIA mentions in an email that he would see about getting the CIA file on PETA.
The implication of these private intel firms having access to government intel *should* be terrifying to everyone.