Homeland, p.50
Homeland, page 50
It may sound like I’m about to start talking about cancel culture. I’m not. For one thing, the idea that cancel culture represents an existential threat to U.S. freedom of speech is fundamentally a product of right-wing grievance politics, promoted by conservatives who became upset during the politically acrimonious Trump administration that they could no longer say things like “Black people are less intelligent than white people” without having to fear professional or social consequences. For another, the cancel culture framework mostly revolves around and is fueled by professional political commentators, politicians, and celebrities, adults with professional standing to defend and prestige to preserve. I’ve been primarily interested in young people here, and not because the young are more politically or intellectually virtuous than the generations that preceded them. My focus on millennials and zoomers is due to the fact that those are the only generations of Americans who had to become citizens while the war on terror was under way, and my concern with the effects of surveillance on their ability to speak freely has more to do with how people figure out what their political views are than with how they express views about which they are already certain.
Allowing young people to explore, revise, and experiment with their views on how the world works is an indispensable prerequisite for a functioning public sphere. “Allowing” might be the wrong word to use, because teenagers are going to figure out what they think about the world whether or not they get permission. But post-9/11 surveillance, with its synthesis of widespread social anxiety and paranoia, aggressive government intelligence gathering, and Silicon Valley’s money-driven hunger for personal information, has shaped the spaces teenagers inhabit in ways that make political self-determination much more difficult. Even as crime, substance abuse, and sexual assault rates extended declines that had begun in the last decades of the twentieth century, overblown fears of terrorist attacks allowed parents to feel justified in cutting off their children from public life. At the same time, the government worked with Silicon Valley to develop tools to keep a close watch over the daily lives of most Americans, with teenagers receiving special attention due to their supposed susceptibility to radicalization. The government used these tools for law enforcement, while tech firms used them to make money, but the effects were similar. They produced a social world founded on suspicion, one in which it is safer to be alone than to be with others, easier to go along than to object, and simpler to be quiet than to ask a question in good faith that might nevertheless attract the wrong kind of attention, whether from cops, peers, parents, or strangers.
Even in 2015, before the Trump presidency and before the media began fixating on cancel culture—before the term “cancel culture” had been invented, in fact—surveys were indicating that roughly half of college students felt unable to freely voice their opinions and beliefs in campus debates. Today’s cancel culture watchdogs in the Republican Party and the right-wing media would have you believe that this is entirely a phenomenon of conservative students being bullied into silence by the intolerant left-wing ideology that dominates colleges and universities. But barely more than a third of the students surveyed by the polling company McLaughlin & Associates said their schools were more tolerant of liberal than conservative beliefs, and Republicans were only slightly more likely than Democrats to report feeling intimidated in the classroom.[55] That’s not to say that campus debates are balanced perfectly in the center of the ideological spectrum, but the survey broadly paints a picture of a higher education environment in which anxiety about political self-expression had become generalized. That doesn’t sound like a strategic campaign of political intimidation carried out on behalf of one political party. That sounds like a more pervasive social climate in which telling people what you really think carries heavier costs than it did before. It sounds like a society that views the truly free development of political ideas—that is, ideas not sanctioned in advance by one of the two ruling parties—as a threat rather than a source of strength and renewal.
Intelligence officials and the Washington political class have always insisted that the only intended purpose of mass surveillance was to catch terrorists, as though any other potential effects, like the collection of non-suspect Americans’ personal data, were “incidental.” One may take them at their word while still finding it curious that Washington has refused to abandon large-scale, tech-driven surveillance despite the growing pile of evidence that it doesn’t catch terrorists after all. In 2020, seven years after the Snowden leaks, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA’s warrantless collection of Americans’ phone records was illegal. What’s more, the opinion found that NSA surveillance had contributed nothing of significance to the government’s successful prosecution of four Somali migrants who had been charged with fundraising for terrorism, a case the government had often cited as an example of the program’s importance to national security. Reviews conducted over the prior fifteen years confirmed this finding: In more than two hundred cases where the government had successfully charged extremists with an act of terrorism since 9/11, the NSA’s bulk surveillance program had contributed next to nothing of use, and “traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations” had been much more important. In some instances, the program was worse than useless. FBI field offices were inundated with tips about “suspicious” phone numbers and email addresses, and agents became so frustrated with the amount of time they were wasting running those tips to ground that they told the NSA, “You’re sending us garbage.”[56] The NSA was in possession of the most sophisticated data sorting technology in the world, but the technology’s promises have far exceeded what a CEO might call its deliverables. The network analysis tools used by the NSA as part of STELLARWIND, for example, were supposed to sift through phone and email records to find the nodes around which other suspicious characters revolved. But whenever the NSA identified such a node and looked more closely, it tended to find a pizza place rather than a radical mosque or an arms dealer.[57] Information is not the same thing as knowledge, and the idea that the two are equivalent is a lie that benefits no one who isn’t working for Silicon Valley or the government’s intelligence agencies.
The motivations behind Silicon Valley’s pursuit of mass surveillance and bulk data collection don’t need investigating: They did it for the money. So long as the venture capital funding continues to flow and the customers don’t get too uncomfortable about handing over their personal information, the tech industry’s collection of personal data will continue.
The dynamics underlying the government’s surveillance program in spite of its uselessness, however, might be illuminated by Kat, a Massachusetts fifteen-year-old who spoke with danah boyd. “When I’m talking to somebody online, I don’t like when [my parents] stand over my shoulder,” Kat said. “I’ll be like, ‘Mom, can you not read over my shoulder?’ Not that I’m saying something bad. It just feels weird. I don’t like it.” Kat didn’t resent her mother’s surveillance because she felt that any of her online activity needed concealing. She resented it because it communicated her mother’s lack of trust in her judgment. In a relationship of equals, which is what democracy is supposed to be, trust has to go both ways. Instead, mass surveillance has primarily communicated the government’s lack of trust in Americans. In the fall of 2001, 60 percent of Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing most or all of the time, the highest figure recorded since 1969. The government did not reciprocate that trust over the following eight years, and Americans adjusted their views of the government accordingly. By 2008, just 17 percent of Americans said they trusted the government, and the average survey result hasn’t topped 25 percent since then.[58] Commentators have worried over both the causes of this decline under Bush and its failure to reverse under Obama for years now, but the simplest way to account for it may just be to say that when it comes to mistrust and suspicion, it was the government that started it. In a 2022 polemic, the scholar Jonathan Crary wrote of “an array of platforms and applications [that] not only enable but reward sociopathic behavior,” noting further that “at its most basic, the ‘sociopathic’ denotes what is anti-social or injurious to the existence of society.”[59] He was talking about the internet as a whole, but it serves just as well as a description of STELLARWIND, the NSA, and the larger government impulse after September 11 to recast citizens as people who no longer deserved the freedom to encounter one another on their own terms.
Chapter 12
They Do This All the Time
I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward.
—Barack Obama
At the beginning of October 2016, with just over a month to go before the presidential election, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, was trailing Hillary Clinton by three percentage points in the polls. He had managed to trim down his opponent’s lead in the middle of September, after Clinton said that one could reasonably describe “half” of Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables” and also was caught concealing that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia. Her performance in the first general election debate on September 26, however, helped to reestablish the polling advantage she held throughout the entirety of the campaign. Still, a 3 percent lead was hardly comfortable, and not just because of the margin of error. Though Americans generally didn’t have a favorable view of Trump, they didn’t like Clinton, either, and the prospect of voters heading to the polls thinking of Clinton as the least bad option didn’t inspire overwhelming confidence. If Clinton and her supporters were going to get any real sleep before Election Day, they needed something to break in their favor.
They got it. On October 7, The Washington Post published a video from 2005 that showed Trump in conversation with the Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. The two men were on a bus driving slowly through a parking lot, and although the camera was outside the bus, its audio feed was plugged into the microphones that Trump and Bush were wearing, and it captured everything they said. For thirty seconds or so, Trump recounted trying to sleep with a married woman who rebuffed his advances and then got breast implants. “She’s totally changed her look!” he said. Then someone on the bus noticed the woman waiting for them in the parking lot and changed the subject, saying, “Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit!” General exclamations of agreement followed. While the other passengers disembarked, Trump and Bush stayed behind so that they could exit on their own and get the shot they wanted. Trump said he should eat some breath mints “just in case I start kissing her,” and then he expanded on his tactics for sleeping with women:
You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss, I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Bush, cackling along, said, “Yeah, look at those legs, all I can see is the legs.” A few seconds later, the pair stepped onto the pavement, met the woman they had been ogling, and walked into the studio, where Bush asked her which of the two she’d take on a date if she had to choose.
The Republican nominee for the presidency had been caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault. He was already trailing in the polls, he would have to face Clinton in a second debate later that weekend, and there was just a month left in which to undo the damage. Trump released a video apologizing that evening, but his tone made it clear the apology was strictly pro forma, and he also accused Bill Clinton of actually abusing women (as opposed to just talking about it) and Hillary of attacking her husband’s victims. Nothing like it had ever happened during a presidential campaign before. Conservative commentators feared, and liberal commentators hoped, that what came to be known as the Access Hollywood tape would be the final “nail in the coffin” of Trump’s political aspirations. As we all know, it wasn’t. Another of Trump’s remarks from earlier in 2016 turned out to be more prescient: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible!”
Trump was an unprecedented candidate in a number of ways, but to many commentators the real novelty of his campaign came down to his shamelessness, the eagerness with which he would admit serious and even criminal wrongdoing as though it were something to be proud of, his absolute indifference to being caught in a lie, his willingness to state the ugly parts of his appeal plainly rather than alluding to them, and his diamond-hard confidence that he would get away with and even be rewarded for his worst behavior. While much of Trump’s self-regard is unjustified, that confidence was well founded. As the past fifteen years of American history had made clear, powerful people really could get away with almost anything.
* * *
• • •
In February 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney went on a hunting trip at Armstrong Ranch, a fifty-thousand-acre property to the southwest of Corpus Christi, Texas. He was accompanied by Pam Willeford, a longtime friend of the Bush family and then ambassador to Switzerland, and Harry Whittington, a lawyer and Texas politico who had worked for George W. Bush’s father as far back as 1964. The trio were hunting for quail. It was late on a Saturday. The “hearty ranch breakfast,” lunch “under a huge oak tree,” and siesta that structured each day’s fun had all come and gone. Cheney was waiting for the quail to flush from a covey when a single bird took off to his right. Willeford was to Cheney’s left, and Cheney didn’t know where Whittington was. He turned toward the bird to fire his 28-gauge shotgun, and by the time he realized Whittington was standing there, it was too late. Cheney shot his friend in the face.[1] When Whittington was released from the hospital six days later, he spoke to the press wearing a navy suit and a tie the same color as the bruises that covered the right side of his head. Then Whittington apologized to Cheney. “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week.”[2] In his memoirs, Cheney wrote that he “appreciated the grace with which he handled the situation. He was a true gentleman.”[3]
Just three months prior, a group of Marines had been on patrol in Haditha, a city in Iraq’s Al Anbar province, when an IED exploded near their convoy, killing one soldier and wounding two others. In response, the Marines killed twenty-four unarmed civilians. They raided homes in a nearby village and killed everyone they found inside, including women, elderly people, and four children under the age of six.[4] At some point, the Marines also noticed a taxi approaching. The driver was bringing four students from the technical institute in Saqlawiyah to stay with one of their families for the weekend. When the driver threw the car into reverse and tried to retrace his route, the Marines opened fire and killed all of the passengers. The Marines initially lied to an Iraqi doctor about how the civilians had died, claiming that shrapnel from the IED was to blame, and then they lied to military investigators, saying that the IED explosion had been followed by a firefight with “insurgents.”[5] Eight members of the squad were charged in connection with the massacre, but charges against six of the killers were eventually dropped, and a seventh was found not guilty. In 2012, the eighth, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, was convicted of just one count of negligent dereliction of duty. His rank and pay were reduced, but he was not discharged from the military. He served no jail time.
In the summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the low-lying city of New Orleans, breaching its network of poorly maintained levees and putting 80 percent of the city under as much as fifteen feet of water. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was slow to send help, leaving people stranded in their homes and in a football stadium that became more squalid and chaotic with each passing day. When FEMA did finally send help, it was the wrong kind—the agency had spent the past several years preparing to respond to a terrorist attack, and authorities in Baton Rouge who had prepared a field hospital for victims were surprised to receive supplies for responding to a chemical attack, including the drug Cipro, which is used to treat victims of anthrax. Officials called in the Louisiana National Guard, but three thousand of its eleven thousand members, along with most of its heavy equipment, had been shipped over to Iraq.[6] Two days after the storm, a FEMA official emailed the agency director, Michael Brown, from the Superdome and said that people were likely to die within hours if help didn’t arrive immediately. Brown’s press secretary replied that the director wasn’t available at the moment, writing, “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner.”[7] On September 2, as New Orleanians remained trapped in their houses and the Superdome, Bush told Brown that he was doing “a heck of a job.”[8] Brown resigned a week and a half later, transitioning into several years of work in disaster response for the private sector, plus a job as a talk-radio host.
In 1998, 120 countries voted to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC), a judicial body intended to serve as a venue for prosecuting people accused of war crimes. Though President Clinton refused to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification, citing America’s “fundamental concerns” about the ICC, he was willing to sign the Rome Statute, a hopeful sign for the court’s future. The Bush administration “unsigned” the statute in May 2002, and then Congress passed a law prohibiting the U.S. government from cooperating with the ICC in any way and authorizing the president to use “all means necessary,” including military force, to free any American or allied person detained by the ICC. The bill was colloquially known as the Hague Invasion Act. The Bush administration then began signing Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs) with allied countries, ensuring that “current or former government officials, military personnel, [and] citizens of the other party” could not be extradited to the ICC. The United States had signed more than a hundred of these BIAs by 2018.[9]
