Difference of Opinion
Oct. 11th, 2004 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynThe Wall Street Journal published an article today about MI5, the British agency tasked with gathering domestic intelligence. (MI6 is the foreign intelligence division.)
The US, as you may recall, does not have a domestic intelligence agency. Our closest analogue is the FBI. The FBI is pretty much a traditional police force. It approaches its job from the perspective of "how do we find and capture criminals after they have committed a crime?" MI5 is more about terrorist prevention: "how do find terrorists before they act, so that we can prevent the attack entirely?"
The article touts MI5 as highly successful in preventing terrorist attacks. The last successful Islamic terrorist plot in the UK was 10 years ago, and MI5 has detected and stopped several since then.
Also emphasized is the stark difference in the scrutiny and oversight that the FBI receives, versus MI5. For example: MI5 doesn't need a warrant for a wiretaps or searches -- only the authorization of a cabinet official. Who can also authorize secret break-ins, which I'm thinking are illegal in the US. Parliament has no direct authority over MI5. MI5 agents seldom testify in court, and when they do, they do so behind a curtain, without disclosing their names. They're also selective about what information they will testify about in public, and present evidence in secret court sessions that neither the defense nor defense's counsel may be present for. ("Defendant's right to confront his accuser"? Forget it.)
There is an almost instinctive appeal to the "prevention" approach. Terrorism isn't very susceptible to the traditional after-the-fact approach; the highest profile attacks are all suicide runs, and it's perfectly obvious who the direct perpetrator was. You can still go after their support network, of course. But their incentives are very different from those of a bank robber or a car thief.
But there's also something ... creepy about "prevention". If you stop it before it happens, how do you know it was going to happen? Remember when Jose Padilla (aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, aka Ibrahim ... what a tangle of names he has) was arrested on suspicion of planning to set off a "dirty bomb"? There was -- andprobably still is -- more concern about his arrest and subsequent treatment than over the possibility that he might have built and detonated such a device.
I prefer it that way. I like to know who the bad guys are: I want them to be the terrorists and not the guys trying to protect me from the terrorists. I'd rather have cops who were often ineffectual, but who were not corrupt (not because they are incorruptible, but because the corrupt ones would be caught), than effective ones who could easily hide abusers and corrupt men within their ranks.
And this is why I would not trade our FBI for Britain's MI5. Happily for me, this is unlikely to be put to the test, as the most undesireable of MI5's powers are not merely illegal in this country, but unconstitutional. Even when US officials were looking at ways to emulate MI5's effectiveness, they had to give it up: it simply would not fly in US culture.
But this isn't really the point I wanted to make. This is:
Britain is a good country.
For all that I dislike -- in some cases, vehemently -- large portions of their political policy (not just domestic spyng, but restrictions on speech, laws to enforce niceness, medical policy, etc.), nothing I've heard about the place suggests the daily life for the vast majority of its citizens is difficult, harsh, or unpleasant. To the best of my knowledge, political dissidents are not hauled off to secret internment camps in the dark of the night. Citizens are not beaten for failure to wear the right clothing or pray to the correct deity. Their economy is not in ruins and tribes of armed men do not control the streets. Britain would not be my first choice of countries in which to live, but it's surely in the top five.
In a peculiar way, this gives me hope. Too often in politics, we look at what we're opposing as if it were a slippery slope: one step in the wrong direction, and we will slide inevitably into oblivion. Socialize medicine today, and tomorrow, Joe Stalin will be running America. Allow the CIA to spy on domestic terrorists, and in a year they'll be jailing political dissidents without trial. Make abortions illegal, and soon women will lose the right to vote. Loosen FDA restrictions now, and in a decade we'll be eating canned earthworms labeled as baked beans. Every battle is life-or-death, every step in the wrong direction spells certain disaster.
And I'm not saying that I want the FBI to operate under MI5-like restrictions, or that I necessarily think any of the above would be a good idea. It's important to fight for what you believe is right, whether little or big things are at stake.
But perhaps there's more tolerance in the system than we give it credit for. Maybe it won't be the end of the world, whether Bush or Kerry wins in November. For all the things that Nader, Bush, Kerry and Badanik disagree on, there's still a lot they all believe in. Democracy. Free markets. Freedom of speech and religion. Equality. Yes, they support those goals in varying ways and to varying levels, but none of them are proposing that slavery be legalized, or a state-sponsored religion be enforced, or that the Internet should be shut down as a hotbed of political dissent.
Perhaps what we all have in common is enough to keep us going in more-or-less the right direction, even if we take some missteps.
Maybe choosing betwe Coke and Pepsi isn't so bad; at least neither one of those is cyanide.
The US, as you may recall, does not have a domestic intelligence agency. Our closest analogue is the FBI. The FBI is pretty much a traditional police force. It approaches its job from the perspective of "how do we find and capture criminals after they have committed a crime?" MI5 is more about terrorist prevention: "how do find terrorists before they act, so that we can prevent the attack entirely?"
The article touts MI5 as highly successful in preventing terrorist attacks. The last successful Islamic terrorist plot in the UK was 10 years ago, and MI5 has detected and stopped several since then.
Also emphasized is the stark difference in the scrutiny and oversight that the FBI receives, versus MI5. For example: MI5 doesn't need a warrant for a wiretaps or searches -- only the authorization of a cabinet official. Who can also authorize secret break-ins, which I'm thinking are illegal in the US. Parliament has no direct authority over MI5. MI5 agents seldom testify in court, and when they do, they do so behind a curtain, without disclosing their names. They're also selective about what information they will testify about in public, and present evidence in secret court sessions that neither the defense nor defense's counsel may be present for. ("Defendant's right to confront his accuser"? Forget it.)
There is an almost instinctive appeal to the "prevention" approach. Terrorism isn't very susceptible to the traditional after-the-fact approach; the highest profile attacks are all suicide runs, and it's perfectly obvious who the direct perpetrator was. You can still go after their support network, of course. But their incentives are very different from those of a bank robber or a car thief.
But there's also something ... creepy about "prevention". If you stop it before it happens, how do you know it was going to happen? Remember when Jose Padilla (aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, aka Ibrahim ... what a tangle of names he has) was arrested on suspicion of planning to set off a "dirty bomb"? There was -- andprobably still is -- more concern about his arrest and subsequent treatment than over the possibility that he might have built and detonated such a device.
I prefer it that way. I like to know who the bad guys are: I want them to be the terrorists and not the guys trying to protect me from the terrorists. I'd rather have cops who were often ineffectual, but who were not corrupt (not because they are incorruptible, but because the corrupt ones would be caught), than effective ones who could easily hide abusers and corrupt men within their ranks.
And this is why I would not trade our FBI for Britain's MI5. Happily for me, this is unlikely to be put to the test, as the most undesireable of MI5's powers are not merely illegal in this country, but unconstitutional. Even when US officials were looking at ways to emulate MI5's effectiveness, they had to give it up: it simply would not fly in US culture.
But this isn't really the point I wanted to make. This is:
Britain is a good country.
For all that I dislike -- in some cases, vehemently -- large portions of their political policy (not just domestic spyng, but restrictions on speech, laws to enforce niceness, medical policy, etc.), nothing I've heard about the place suggests the daily life for the vast majority of its citizens is difficult, harsh, or unpleasant. To the best of my knowledge, political dissidents are not hauled off to secret internment camps in the dark of the night. Citizens are not beaten for failure to wear the right clothing or pray to the correct deity. Their economy is not in ruins and tribes of armed men do not control the streets. Britain would not be my first choice of countries in which to live, but it's surely in the top five.
In a peculiar way, this gives me hope. Too often in politics, we look at what we're opposing as if it were a slippery slope: one step in the wrong direction, and we will slide inevitably into oblivion. Socialize medicine today, and tomorrow, Joe Stalin will be running America. Allow the CIA to spy on domestic terrorists, and in a year they'll be jailing political dissidents without trial. Make abortions illegal, and soon women will lose the right to vote. Loosen FDA restrictions now, and in a decade we'll be eating canned earthworms labeled as baked beans. Every battle is life-or-death, every step in the wrong direction spells certain disaster.
And I'm not saying that I want the FBI to operate under MI5-like restrictions, or that I necessarily think any of the above would be a good idea. It's important to fight for what you believe is right, whether little or big things are at stake.
But perhaps there's more tolerance in the system than we give it credit for. Maybe it won't be the end of the world, whether Bush or Kerry wins in November. For all the things that Nader, Bush, Kerry and Badanik disagree on, there's still a lot they all believe in. Democracy. Free markets. Freedom of speech and religion. Equality. Yes, they support those goals in varying ways and to varying levels, but none of them are proposing that slavery be legalized, or a state-sponsored religion be enforced, or that the Internet should be shut down as a hotbed of political dissent.
Perhaps what we all have in common is enough to keep us going in more-or-less the right direction, even if we take some missteps.
Maybe choosing betwe Coke and Pepsi isn't so bad; at least neither one of those is cyanide.
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no subject
I doubt if the Patriot Act goes as far as MI5.
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Date: 2004-10-11 05:19 pm (UTC)That's the essential ethical dilemma presented in Minority Report (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/), a Tom Cruise vehicle generally dismissed as an overblown action flick.
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Date: 2004-10-11 05:20 pm (UTC)I'd argue that the problem is big jumps. MI5 wasn't brought in overnight by politicians making snap reactions to possible threats. That's where the link breaks down - politicians want solutions *now*, because they want to get re-elected *now*, and this results in short-term thinking. If an MI5-like organisation for the US was put together in small increments over say the next 50/100 years, then it might manage to get put together correctly. But there's no way in hell that any politician is going to try and start that sort of thing. Various US politicians appear to have been attempting to implement the "let's just give them *lots* of power and hope this terrorism thing just goes away" approach with FBI/CIA/etc. Hence the Patriot act, etc.
Short precis: just because England hasn't dropped down the slippery slope doesn't mean that America won't degenerate into a third-world theocracy.
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Date: 2004-10-11 06:48 pm (UTC)ASIO (http://www.asio.gov.au/) does a lot of the work MI5 does, but there are a lot of other departments to do other things (check out the About page). But after the evidence is collected it is presented to the police (State or Federal) who do all the door kicking and the arresting and the chasing.
The scary guys are ASIS (http://www.asis.gov.au/index.html) They worry me.
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Date: 2004-10-11 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-11 09:37 pm (UTC)Both Clinton/Reno's 1996 Antiterrorism Act, and Bush/Ashcroft's PATRIOT act gave them unprecidented and arguably unconstitutional powers to blend their police and intellegence work.
Just to give an example, the FBI has extensive powers to use warrantless surveillance on "Agents of a Foreign Power". Sounds like it might be reasonable, until you realize that their definition includes any organization that is organized outside this country, including Amnesty International (a British organization). If you are a member of AI, these laws give the FBI the right to wiretap your phone, hijack your internet uplink, and force organizations you do business with to divulge all their records of you without being permitted to talk about it.
All of this, without the judicial oversight that forms the "checks and balances" that we count on to protect our constitutional rights (no warrant, gag orders for the people getting subpoenaed, they can't even legally talk to their lawyers). The ACLU literally had to break the law to bring suit against the FBI in a case recently. MI5 might have more powers than the FBI does when it comes to intelligence like this, but some of the stuff that the FBI can do and has done lately is pretty scary.
Crime vs Intelligence
Date: 2004-10-12 07:43 am (UTC)Wheras MI5 might act against espionage acts(classifying terrorism as espionage) I would think they don't pass information to law enforcement.
IE if they break into someone's apartment suspected of planning a terrorist act, without a warrant, and discover marijuanna in the apartment - they don't go and tell the local police.
By the same token, if they break into someone's apartment who is planning a terrorist act, and find BDSM gear, they don't go an leak that info to the media when that person is running for office.
In the United States, our law enforcement agencies have repeatedly refused to take responsibility for their actions. So if they find out something incriminating, or just reputation smearing, and leak the info they don't want to be held accountable.
That is why we tend to limit them more. Hoover made the FBI very powerfull by using blackmail, this caused a backlash against it limiting its ability to gather further blackmail.
Even today, the FBI has been unable to show it understands differences. It recently used aspects of the PATRIOT act, sold to America as a bill to stop terrorists, to go after organized crime. While I have no problem going after organized crime, if the goverment gets up and swears something is only for anti-terrorism and than uses it for other things, it leads me to beleive the goverment has not reformed and is not worthy of the trust they are asking for.
Personally, I have very little objection to expanding the FBI's powers, if it comes along with an honest reform. New agents should learn why Herbet Hoovers actions were wrong. They should have extensive ethics courses. And if the misuse their power, they should be fired.
Here is my proposal:
1) Remove Hoovers name from the FBI buildings due to the shame he brought it(public demonstration of contrition)
2) Establish a museum of shame for the FBI that all agents are required to be conversant with their past indiscretions
3) Establish sufficient internal oversight, and ethics courses publicly accessible so we all know that an FBI agent is required to know
4) Hold them accountable
5) Give them broad powers
Of course, it's an empty proposal, as I don't think they ever will take responsibility. But if they did, than I'm open to giving them wide powers.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-12 10:59 am (UTC)Yesterday, outright violations of liberty and personal rights would have been considered unthinkable. Today, they're being considered but questioned as to their necessity. Tomorrow, they may be considered standard operating procedure.
Slippery slope argument? Yes, I think people are right to be concerned. It's not a slope of a single day or five years, but over a decade, society can change.
Fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, the zeroes. We can't see the progression while we're in the midst of them, but we can look back and see the changes.
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