Follow the money

Sergei Svetlitsky. No Police State Campaign. Kiyiv, 2011.

Well, that explains something.

Really interesting: NSA Internet Spying Sparks Race to Create Offshore Havens for Data Privacy http://t.co/GrWBXMVaDN
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 29, 2013

I'm that idiot Obot who can't understand why he's supposed to feel terrorized by the revelations of NSA collecting data on the communications of American citizens, I haven't been [jump]
shy about admitting it. I just don't see how they can use it for the traditional purposes of suppressing dissent and muzzling the press. Indeed, evidence is that they can't, as in the great AP scandal of last spring, when the Department of Justice wanted to put 20 AP reporters under surveillance and instead of going over to NSA to pick up their phone records they had to get a warrant and demand them from the AP itself.*

Then I saw this really interesting Wall Street Journal article and realized something: there's a cui bono thing going on here that is quite independent of suppressing dissent and muzzling the press, and has more to do with the potential customers of Email Made in Germany:

Three of Germany's largest email providers, including partly state-owned Deutsche Telekom AG, teamed up to offer a new service, Email Made in Germany. The companies promise that by encrypting email through German servers and hewing to the country's strict privacy laws, U.S. authorities won't easily be able to pry inside. More than a hundred thousand Germans have flocked to the service since it was rolled out in August..... 

"Countries are competing to be the Cayman Islands of data privacy," says Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank that receives funding from the tech industry. While establishing these islands of privacy might make for good marketing, the initiatives face hurdles. Laws demanding that data be stored in-country can give domestic Internet-service providers a boost but also could raise their customers' costs.

It was that Cayman Islands reference that gave it away, alongside the fact that it was the Wall Street Journal running the story; in addition to the usual German privacy hysterics**, this service is primarily aimed at people who are anxious to keep their financial transactions private, most particularly from the government—in other words tax cheats and money launderers, also known as some of our most distinguished citizens right here in the United States.

Because when you are a police state seeking to suppress dissent and muzzle the press you don't exactly keep it a secret.*** You try to keep the identities of your informants under wraps, because you don't want the citizenry to know when they are and when they aren't being watched, but you want them to know they might be watched; to assume they're being watched all the time. And social network analysis makes no sense in that context: when you shake somebody down and start shouting at him, "Who are your friends? Who are your friends?" the point isn't to find out who his friends are but to frighten him and maybe recruit him into the service.

There are lots of people who have seen something like that happening in the US, and it has nothing to do with the National Security Agency, or even, mostly, with the FBI, but more with the ICE and local police forces and sheriff's departments, from Ray Kelly's Brooklyn to Joe Arpaio's Tucson: it's the experience of young black men, and of people with Arabic names. Believe me, nobody is checking out their metadata.

But if you are trying to track down an international terrorist network, as our intelligence services are certainly supposed to be doing, and you want to follow the money, secret social network analysis of communications metadata would be a great tool. And since financing terrorist networks, money laundering, and tax evasion fit together nicely in a horizontally integrated portfolio, following the money can easily lead to all three.

And that, dear friends, is a threat to a wealthy libertarian who feels God, or Aqua Buddha, or Ms. Rand gave him an inherent right to avoid paying taxes; and that, perhaps, is why the whole NSA story has such long libertarian legs.

*Once upon a time there were 250 officers from FBI, CIA, and National Counterterrorism Center who had illegal access to the NSA collections; it started in 2006 and went on until August 2009. Then they stopped breaking that law, for some reason. Do you recall anything special about 2009? Like a new president or something?

**Invariably explained in historical terms of the German people's experience of Nazi and Stasi secret-police states, though I'll bet one day we'll learn that the hysteria was mainly among the third of the population that served as informants.

***True, Uncle Donald Rumsfeld and his outfit set up a secret probe of Code Pink, the Raging Grannies, and other dire domestic threats in 2004, but that clown show may well have been dumb enough to believe, or at least hope, that they would find a connection between Medea Benjamin and Ayman al-Zawahiri. And in any case even in the Bush presidency they were quickly exposed and forced to stop doing it.