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Security “Whoas” < 03 /> MARK DAVIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF eic_mark@defrag.net
-------------------@defragmag @themizarkshow There’s a lot going on in the world. Between 24-hour news networks, social feeds that are constantly updating, and advertisers who are always get better at tracking and targeting us, our world is shrinking quickly and its harder to find out whats truly happening without there being some sort of bias attached. We aren’t claiming to eliminate that bias completely, that would be impossible, but we are going to be upfront about what we think and why. We are going to be careful about who advertises between our stories. We are going to be highlighting as many sides to a story as possible. In fact, each issue is basically dedicated to what some magazines would see as little more than a featured article. We will go further— to deconstruct it, present it from multiple angles, and try to frame it in a larger discussion related to all of us, not just those directly effected. We may not always be successful, but we’re counting on you to call us out when we fail and prop us up when we need help. See you inside.
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History of the NSA Timeline written & designed by Mark Davis This month, we take on the long and storied history behind the NSA. It’s a government agency that has roots to almost 100 years ago, and yet the public has only been really aware of its existence for the past year thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks. This is their past, but what of their/our future?
< 21 /> Michael Waldman Interview written by Hannah Levintova interviewed: Michael Waldman The 2nd Amendment is one that we hear tossed around all the time by gun rights-activists and their huge lobby group, the NRA. But does it say what we’ve been told it says? And who’s job is it to be making that decision about how to read it?
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The Surveillance Soceity written by David Von Drehle illustrated by Dominique Whitney Cameras, drones, and malware are ever more present in our connected society. They have helped in big cases already, but is it worth it?
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written by Benedict Carey photography by Debbie Sajnani
written by Mark Davis reporting by Lucas Ruminski
Violence permiates our media. But what effect does that have on us and our youth?
Guns are allowed almost everywhere. But why have we allowed that to happen? And are we safe?
Shooting In The Dark
Conceal & Carry
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The very existence of National Security Agency (commonly known as the NSA) was not revealed for more than two decades after its establishment in 1952, and even now its structure and activities remain largely unknown. Hence its wry nickname: No Such Agency. When President Harry S. Truman set up the National Security Agency, it was exclusively aimed at monitoring communications abroad. The question that had exercised politicians and civil rights organizations since the Senate unveiled it in 1975 is to what extent its ferocious appetite for data has encompassed American citizens. General Lou Allen, the first NSA chief to appear in public, told Congress in the mid-1970s that the agency maintained lists of hundreds of names, including US citizens under surveillance for anti-war dissent or allegedly suspicious foreign connections. As our technology has evolved, so has the NSA’s capacity to intercept an astonishing variety and volume of communications. Satellites scoop up calls and emails in the ether and beam the information back to earthbound receiving stations. One estimate suggests that each of these bases hoovers up roughly one billion emails, phone calls and other forms of correspondence every day, and the agency has up to 20 bases. “This is not science fiction. It is happening now,” an NSA insider claimed. Domestic snooping exploded in scale after 9/11, when George W Bush authorized the agency to eavesdrop on Americans without the previous requirement for warrants. Within a few months of taking office in 2009, the Obama administration’s Justice Department conceded that the agency had been guilty of “over-collection” of domestic communications but claimed the excess information had been accidental. With every passing administration, the NSA has ballooned. One well-informed estimate of its staffing levels is 100,000, of whom about 30,000 are military and the rest private contractors. Its headquarters is a vast edifice of smoked glass in Fort Meade, in the leafy Washington
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suburbs, with sizable complexes in Georgia and Texas and overseas bases in Japan, Germany and the UK. It was a Democratic senator and lawyer, Frank Church, who in 1975 first raised the alarm at the agency’s sprawling tentacles. During a series of hearings into the work of the intelligence agencies, he warned that the NSA’s magnifying glass could be turned inwards on the American people. “I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,” he said. “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
Edward Snowden A former system administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a counter intelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He then worked for the private intelligence contractor Dell in an outpost in Japan and later Booz Allen Hamilton inside the NSA center in Hawaii. In 2013, he disclosed, to several major media outlets, thousands of classified documents acquired while working as a contractor. Snowden’s leaked documents reveal numerous global surveillance programs, run by the NSA and the Five Eyes with cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. His disclosures fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since have been split on the constitutionality of the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata.
1917 Army forms the Cipher Bureau and Military Intelligence Branch, Section 8 (MI-8). Disbanded post-WWI but kept in tact and relocated under the guise of a commercial company.
1929 The Black Chamber loses funding from the State Dept. and the Army refuses to fund the entire effort. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” -Harry L. Stimson (Secretary of State)
1919 The Cipher Company move to its new home in NYC and began the “Black Chamber.” This unit was made to crack other governments communications (mostly diplomatic).
1939 The Signal Security Agency (SSA) is formed during WWII. When the war was over, it was changed to the Army Security Agency (ASA).
1949 All cryptology is centralized within the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). This is an outright failure due to the burocracy between all involved parties.
1964 NSA provides possibly false evidence for the Gulf of Tonkin incident which leads ot our involvement in the Vietnam War.
1978 Foreign Intellegence Surveillence Act is passed in the fallout of Watergate and the MINARAT reveals. This act proscribes the proceedures for physical and electronic surveillence of individuals and foreign powers/agents.
1952 Harry S. Truman officially forms the National Security Agency (NSA) after investigating the failures of the AFSA. It reports to the Department of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence.
1975 MINARAT Operation (mostly active in the 1960s) is uncovered. It involved wiretapping several US senators, civil rights activists, and anti-war leaders. Internal reviews are shown calling it “disreputable, if not downright illegal.”
1986 NSA intercepts key surveillance linking Libya to the Berlin discotheque bombings.
1999 European Parliment discovers evidence of NSA engaging in economic espionage. This same year saw the NSA begin an internal “Hall of Honor.”
2013 Edward Snowden’s massive NSA leaks begin coming out in July. He flees the country as they continue over the next year.
This information leads to America’s subsequent bombings of Libya.
2001 Post-9/11 “War On Terror” sees the NSA upgrade their IT infrastructure significantly.
2014 Despite the Snowden leaks, Congress continues to pour money into the black hole that is the NSA.
written by Benedict Carey photographed by Debbie Sajnani The young men who opened fire at Columbine High School, at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and in other massacres had something in common: they were gamers who seemed to be acting out some dark digital fantasy. It was as if all that exposure to computerized violence gave them the idea to go on a rampageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or at least fueled their dormant urges. ...But did it really?
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That’s the question that social scientists have been studying and debating for decades: the effects of media violence on behavior. It’s a field that’s been expanding since the early 1950s, videogames in particular since the 1980s. The issue is especially relevant today, for a few reasons. First, is that our videogames have become more realistic and bloodier than ever. Second, is that most American boys play them extensively (girls, on average, play at lower rates and are significantly less likely to play as much of the violent games). However, a burst of new research has recently begun to clarify what can and cannot be said about the effects of violent game playing. These games have shown that they can and do stir hostile urges and mildly aggressive behavior in the short term. Moreover, youngsters who develop a gaming habit can become slightly more aggressive—as measured by clashes with peers—at least over the span of a year or two. What is not at all clear just yet is whether, over longer periods, such a habit increases the likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime like murder, rape, or assault, much less a Newtown-like massacre. (Such calculated rampages are too rare to study in any rigorous way, researchers agree.)
“I don’t know that a psychological study can ever answer that question definitively,” said Michael R. Ward, an economist at the University of Texas, Arlington. So, “we are left to glean what we can from the data and research on videogame use that we have.” The research falls into three categories: • short-term laboratory experiments; • longer-term studies, often based in schools; • and correlation studies — between playing time and aggression, for instance, or between videogame sales and trends in violent crime. Lab experiments confirm what any gamer knows: playing games like “Call of Duty,” “Killzone 3” or “Battlefield 3” stirs the blood. In one recent study, Christopher Barlett, a psychologist at Iowa State University, led a research team that had 47 undergraduates play “Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance” for 15 minutes. Afterward, the team took various measures of arousal, both physical and psychological. It also tested whether the students would behave more aggressively, by having them dole out hot sauce to a fellow student who, they were told, did not like spicy food but had to swallow the sauce. When compared to a group who had played a nonviolent video game, those who had been engaged in “Mortal
Kombat: Deadly Alliance” for just 15 minutes were much more aggressive across the board. In this example, they gave their fellow students significantly larger portions of the unwanted hot sauce. Although the jump from hot-sauce to acts of violence may seem like a big jump, similar studies have found the same thing: a dose of violent gaming makes people act more rudely than they would otherwise, at least during their play-session and for a short amount of time after they’ve finished playing. It’s much harder to determine whether the cumulative exposure to violent games leads to real-world hostility over the long term, however. Some studies done in schools have found that over time, “digital warriors” get into increasing numbers of scrapes with peers — fights in the schoolyard, for instance. In a report published just last summer, psychologists at Brock University in Ontario found that longer periods of violent videogame playing among high school students predicted a slightly higher number of such incidents over time; thus showing it could have an impact outside of the short-term rudeness that was exhibited in the previously discussed surveys (eg: unwanted hotsauce).
“None of these extreme acts, like a school shooting, occurs because of only one risk factor; there are many factors, including feeling socially isolated, being bullied, and so on,” said Craig A. Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University. “But if you look at the literature, I think it’s clear that violent media is one factor; it’s not the largest factor, but it’s also not the smallest.” Most researchers agree with Dr. Anderson... but not all of them. Some have found that it is aggressive children who are the most likely to be drawn to violent videogames in the first place; they are therefore self-selected to be in more schoolyard conflicts. But many of these studies are not able to control for outside factors, like bad family situations, pre-existing mood problems, and other known factors contributing to this sort of violent public behavior. “This is a pool of research that, so far [at least], has not been very well done,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University and a critic of the field whose own research has found no link. “I look at it and I honestly can’t say what it means.” Many psychologists argue that violent video games “socialize” children over time, prompting them to imitate the behavior of the game’s characters, the cartoonish
machismo, the hair-trigger rage, the dismissive brutality. But children are also known to imitate the flesh and blood people in their lives — parents, friends, teachers, siblings — and one question that researchers have not yet answered is when, exactly, a habit is so consuming that its influence trumps the socializing effects of other major figures, real life figures, in a child’s daily life. More concisely: what constitutes a bad habit? In surveys, about 80 percent of high school-aged boys say they play videogames, many of which are thought to be violent, and between a third and half of those players have a habit of playing 10 hours a week or more. This proliferation of violent video games has not, however, coincided with spikes in youth violent crime. In fact, the number of violent youth offenders fell by more than half between 1994 and 2010, according to government statistics. During that same time, however, videogame sales have more than doubled.
“At the very least, parents should be aware of what’s in the games their kids are playing,” Dr. Anderson said, “and [they should] think of it from a socialization point of view: what kind of values, behavioral skills, and social scripts is the child learning” from them? “Garbage in, garbage out”, as my mom used to say. But the research is showing that isn’t quite the case. All we can definitively say is that violent videogames impact the immediate decision making of the individuals involved. But that is true for a lot of things, and we don’t blame them for larger societal issues. We don’t, for example, expect road-rage to completely blow over once we get out of the car, but it also isn’t pointed to as a cause for violent outbursts. And while we can understand why a passenger acts rudely when a child has cried and kicked their seat during an entire flight, it doesn’t justify a fist-fight with the child’s parents.
“Parents should be aware of what’s in the games their kids are playing, and think of it from a socialization point of view: what kind of values, behavioral skills, and social scripts is the child learning?” In a working paper, Dr. Ward and two colleagues examined week-by-week sales data for violent video games, across a wide range of communities. Violence rates are seasonal, generally higher in summer than in winter; but so are videogame sales, which peak during the winter holidays. The researchers controlled for those trends and analyzed crime rates in the month or so after surges in videogame sales, in communities with a high concentrations of young people, like college towns. “We found that higher rates of violent videogame sales related to a clearly perceivable decrease in crimes; and especially in relation violent crimes,” said Dr. Ward, whose co-authors were A. Scott Cunningham of Baylor University and Benjamin Engelstätter of the Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany. To critics of the violent videogame industry, this is the exact opposite of what is expected from such research. But that doesn’t mean it clears the name of gaming once and for all. That’s because no one knows for sure what these findings mean. It may be that playing video games for hours every day keeps people off the streets who would otherwise be getting into trouble. It could be that the games provide “an outlet” that satisfies violent urges in some players —a theory that many psychologists dismiss but that many players believe. Or the two trends may be entirely unrelated, however unlikely that seems.
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Humans are great at contextualizing their situations. In the previous examples, we expect certain outcomes to be a given, but nothing further. For road-rage, a middle finger. For restless flights, rudeness in the terminals. For violent games, obscenities screamed into headsets. The problem comes when a habit has been allowed to form around this type of trigger. Someone with a history of road-rage probably shouldn’t drive an 18-wheeler for a living, just as a child with anger issues probably shouldn’t be exposed to fictional violence. Everything is about context. And the solution to most of our problems stem from an issue of moderation. The average American spends around 34 hours per week in-front of a screen. That adds up to almost 5 hours per day. If the majority of that time is spent absorbing violent content, you can quickly see how a problem is formed. The research can’t clearly say anything about the impact of violent games on people because that’s such a small aspect of the overall picture. We are a culture that idolizes the content glowing out from our screens. Blaming one avenue of screen-time for any major problem is foolishness driven by a lack of understanding. -with reporting/editing by Mark Davis
The
Surveillance
Society Written by David Von Drehle
Illustrated by Dominique Whitney
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Privacy is mostly an illusion. A useful illusion, no question about it, one that allows us to live without being paralyzed by self-consciousness. The illusion of privacy gives us room to be fully human, sharing intimacies and risking mistakes. But all the while, the line between private and public space is as porous as tissue paper. The adulterous couple sneaking off to a hotel: Is someone following them? The teenagers skipping school to visit the mall: Will they bump into a woman from Mom’s book club? The solitary motorist thrashing an air guitar at a traffic light: Will the driver in the next lane look over? Like children of a certain age who think closing their eyes will make them invisible, we assume that no one sees or hears our private moments, and we’re right—until someone watches or listens in on us illegally. This was true long before the National Security Agency began collecting our telephone and Internet records from technology and communications companies, and long before the House of Representatives on July 24 gave a fresh thumbs-up to further NSA collections by a narrow 12-vote margin, 217-205. It was true long before a military judge found Private Bradley Manning guilty of espionage for his role in the WikiLeaks case—but acquitted him on the charge of aiding the enemy— on July 30. The illusive quality of privacy is a recurring theme of literature going back to the Hebrew
Bible. Consider beautiful Bathsheba, who strips for a bath in the second Book of Samuel, an ancient text, only to come under the lustful gaze of King David, pacing on his palace rooftop. Or Hamlet, whose private conversation with his mother is overheard by Polonius, hiding behind the drapes. The great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was fascinated by secrets that would not stay hidden and made a masterpiece, Rear Window, from the premise that entire lives (and deaths) are on display behind the uncovered windows of anonymous cities, just waiting for a watcher to decrypt them. But the revelation of the National Security Agency’s vast data-collection programs by a crusading contract worker, Edward Snowden, has made it clear that the rise of technology is shattering even the illusion of privacy. Almost overnight, and with too little reflection, the U.S. and other developed nations have stacked the deck in favor of the watchers. A surveillance society is taking root. Video cameras peer constantly from lamp poles and storefronts. Satellites and drones float hawkeyed through the skies. Smartphones relay a dizzying barrage of information about their owners to sentinel towers dotting cities and punctuating pasture-land. Licenseplate cameras and fast-pass lanes track the movements of cars, which are themselves keeping a detailed record of their speed and location. Meanwhile, on the information superhighway, every stop by every traveler is noted and stored by Internet service providers like Google, Verizon and Comcast. Retailers scan, remember and analyze each purchase by every consumer. Smart TVs know what we’re watching—soon they will have eyes to watch us watching them— and smart meters know if we’ve turned out the lights. And the few remaining technical barriers to still more surveillance are falling before the awesome force of 1s and 0s, the binary digital magic that is the fuel of revolutionary change. Until recently, there were hard physical limits on the number of pictures that could be developed, videotapes that could be stored, phone–company records that could be typed or photocopied or packed into boxes— let alone analyzed. Now the very idea of limits is melting away. In 1980 (not that long ago; Barack Obama was in college), IBM introduced its Model 3380 disk drive, the first device capable of storing more than
a gigabyte of data. It was roughly the size and weight of a refrigerator and cost an inflation adjusted $100,000. Today a flash drive costing one-thousandth as much can store 50 times the data and fit on a key ring. The amount of data that can be stored is nearly infinite. In a prescient series of blog posts several years ago, Princeton computer-science professor Edward Felten explained that this tremendous growth in storage capacity would inevitably spur intelligence agencies to collect all available data—everything—simply because it’s cheaper and easier
analysis by the U.S. government. Remember the time you pocket-dialed your sister? The time you Googled your college flame? The day you did that thing you so deeply regret—that thing you thought was private—involving a Web search or a phone call or a text or an e-mail? It’s all there. In fact, the government, with the NSA as the lead agency, is this moment busy building the world’s largest data storage facility in Utah. More than a million square feet, room enough to preserve everything, for now.
Surveillance goes far beyond the Tireless eyes of cameras than trying to figure out what to take and what to ignore. “If storage is free but analysts’ time is costly, then the costminimizing strategy is to record everything and sort it out later,” Felten noted. That is precisely what has happened. And at the same time, ever more sophisticated computer algorithms make it possible to sift through and analyze larger and larger slices of that data, raising social and ethical dilemmas that cannot be ignored. The future is here. Nearly everything that happens from now on has the potential not just to be seen by some restless King David or overheard by an eavesdropping Polonius but also stored indefinitely. Government agencies, and the private corporations working with them, collect and store billions of records every day, and they’re hungry for more: not just phone records and Web addresses but e-mails, texts, downloads, medical records, retail receipts, bank balances, creditcard numbers and travel itineraries. The world glimpsed a corner of this future in April, when two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The scene was chaos. The bombers had vanished. Yet within a few hours, their faces were plainly visible on TV screens around the world. It turned out that every nefarious move they made as they delivered their deadly packages to Boylston Street had been scanned and stored by surveillance cameras. Their quick capture was a triumph for law enforcement but left an unsettling realization in its wake: everyone else on those teeming Boston sidewalks was also being watched and remembered in the same way. Then, just weeks after Boston, the slight and pallid Snowden emerged from his NSA cubicle to warn us that surveillance goes far beyond the tireless eyes of the cameras. Every phone call placed, every Web page visited—billions and trillions of data points, like raindrops in a monsoon—is captured daily and stored for possible
The government calls the material it collects metadata, instead of plain old data. The difference, it might seem, is the difference between a haystack and the needles hidden inside. No one cares about the hay; they hardly touch it as they search intently for the telltale glint. Perhaps a better analogy would be a catalog at the Library of Congress, which stores some 35 million books and other print publications, most of which no one ever opens. Why so many? Because it is easier to have publishers send one of everything than to choose which publications to preserve. (And who knows what, in that vast reserve, might be needed someday?) In any event, the government assures us that as long as we don’t consort with menaces to national security, our phone calls and Web searches are of no more interest to Uncle Sam than an outdated tome on Bolivian agronomy. Across the political spectrum, from ACLU Democrats to Ron Paul libertarians, Americans are skeptical of the metadata fig leaf. According to a poll on July 26 by the Pew Research Center, only about 1 in 5 people surveyed believe the government actually keeps its nose out of private phone calls and emails. The same small minority trusts government claims to use the surveillance trove only for anti-terrorism purposes. Indeed, more Americans in the survey think Uncle Sam is hacking their personal communications (roughly 1 in 4 respondents) than have faith in the government’s explanations. The skeptics no doubt have noticed that governments are made up of people and that people are prone to misuse information when driven by greed or curiosity or a will to power. The current IRS scandal, in which the agency’s rules may have been bent to political ends, could prove to be an apt example. Somewhere in the vast NSA collections are data trails belonging to political foes, unpleasant neighbors, feuding ex-spouses, bankable celebrities—and it takes no great imagination to see the temptation for corrupt bureaus or individuals to take a look around.
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What’s to stop them? In a recent speech at the Brookings Institution, Robert Litt, general counsel to the Director of National Intelligence, sought to answer that question. He argued that strong measures are in place to protect the privacy of Americans as their data accumulates on government silicon. Surveillance programs are administered by the Executive Branch, overseen by Congress and supervised by the Judicial Branch, through the super secret FISA court. The fact that most of these checks and balances take place behind closed doors does not make them toothless, Litt maintained. Take the specific case of a suspected foreign terrorist known to have communicated by phone with U.S. citizens. Litt detailed a litany of privacy safeguards that government sleuths must honor as they investigate the records. “We allow only a limited number of specially trained analysts
While the scope of surveillance today is much broader than in the past, Americans long ago grew accustomed to limits on privacy. The Supreme Court has held that information voluntarily given to third parties is no longer secret, nor can we expect privacy to cloak our actions in public places or our communications via the public airwaves. The government can intercept radio signals and is allowed to read what’s written on the outside of our mail. It’s just a step—granted, a large step—from those principles to the ones that underpin today’s massive data collections. The header of an e-mail is not so different from the face of an envelope, nor is the signal from a tablet to a wireless router entirely unlike the signal from one radio to another. We have also learned to trade elements of our privacy for all sorts of supposed benefits. Google tracks our searches so that it will know which advertisements to show us.
Technology makes all secrets more diffIcult to keep. to search these databases,” he explained, and “even those trained analysts are allowed to search the database only when they have a reasonable and articulable suspicion that a particular telephone number is associated with particular foreign terrorist organizations.” Moreover, the FISA court must certify that the terrorist connection is based on a valid suspicion, supported by information “documented in writing and approved by a supervisor.” Even after all this, the analysts are “allowed to use this information only in a limited way, to map a network of telephone numbers calling other telephone numbers,” Litt continued. And finally, the analysts don’t know any of the names that match their monitored phone numbers. Since the Snowden disclosures, further protections have been suggested. Perhaps the government should employ a team of skilled attorneys, with appropriate security clearances, to argue against the sleuths before the FISA court—to ensure that the judges hear strong arguments against snooping. Another suggestion is to declassify FISA court proceedings, to the extent possible, so the public can better understand what’s going on. Even without those additional steps, however, a majority of Americans support the current arrangement, even if they don’t entirely trust the government’s explanations. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, after digesting Snowden’s news, a solid majority feel that it’s more important to fully investigate terrorist threats than to protect personal privacy.
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Smartphones record our locations to be more helpful in steering us to the nearest multiplex, restaurant, gas station or church. Drugstores analyze our purchases to reward us with coupons redeemable on a future visit. And so on. We want our gadgets to know us intimately—want our thermostats to know when we’re cold, want our toasters to know how we like our bagel, want our search engines to know what we’re looking for even when we misspell it. So far, the majority of us have been willing to pay for that intimacy in lost privacy. Which brings us to a strange crossroads. The more technology endangers our privacy, the less we seem to prize it. We post family photos on social-media sites and ship our credit-card numbers to total strangers. We ask websites we’ve never visited—designed by people we’ve never met—to give us advice on treating embarrassing maladies and hunting for potential mates. But the government is different, as Litt acknowledged in his recent speech, because “the government has the power to audit our tax returns, to prosecute and imprison us, to grant or deny licenses to do business and many other things. And,” he continued, “there is an entirely understandable concern that the government may abuse this power.” In recent years, privacy advocates have persuaded the Supreme Court to require search warrants before police can sneak GPS trackers onto suspects’ cars or scan houses from the outside using infrared devices that sense the
telltale heat signature of marijuana grow lights. Such steps seem small, however, compared with the rapid rise of surveillance powers and the grim history of governments corrupted by the temptation to watch their peoples too closely. The admirable goals of public safety and national security have been exploited time and again by intrusive regimes around the world seeking to spy on their critics and smother dissent. Americans need only read the Bill of Rights to see that suspicion of government intrusion is a national birthright. As tools for prying grow in number and strength, this is no time to stop being suspicious. Perhaps there’s consolation in the magic of the microchip. Technology makes all secrets more difficult to keep—not just our personal secrets but the government’s as well.
Again and again over the past dozen years, the methods, mistakes and misdeeds of the world’s most powerful government have been unmasked by lowly employees convinced that what they are witnessing is wrong. From the photos at Abu Ghraib prison to the avalanche of WikiLeaks documents to the Snowden disclosures, large caches of data have been loaded onto thumb drives or burned onto wafer-thin discs—then spread around the globe in the blink of an eye. Though the clarions may be prosecuted, the facts they reveal cannot be recalled or repressed. This, ultimately, may prove to be our strongest protection against the rise of the surveillance state. The same tools that strengthen it strengthen those who protest against it. Privacy is not the only illusion in the new age of data; government secrecy is too. Big Brother might be watching, but he is also being watched. —with reporting by Massimo Calabresi
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Until very recently, laws pertaining to everyday citizens carrying concealed firearms was non-existent. This is not a second amendment right. It is not an innately American value. This is a very new idea that has been pushed and protected by lobbies such as the NRA. It wasn’t until 1976 when the first version of what we call either the “right to carry” or “concealed-carry” laws were passed in the state of Georgia that this trend really saw its start. These laws have spread like wildfire since then, based mostly on the NRA’s dubious studies showing that there is a correspondence between more guns and less violence. Gun rights advocate and author Jon Lott defended this principle in the aftermath of the Tucson shooting by claiming that, “with concealed handguns, criminals don’t know whether victims can defend themselves until they attack.” The problem with that line of thinking is that it’s impossible to prove either right or wrong. One of the reasons that can’t be proved one way or the other is that most states where conceal and carry laws have been passed, the list of permits aren’t available to the public. Why? Brent Gardner, the NRA liaison here in Wisconsin is quoted as summing it up thusly: “The NRA has strived to ensure this list is protected… because we actually heard from chief law enforcement officers that said they would begin investigations with concealed-carry permit holders. It was just shocking in that state to see the level of disrespect for concealed-carry permit holders.” If you read that quote carefully, you’ll see the framing device which they use to scare the public. Investigation is framed as an assumption of guilt. Rather than it being common sense to start ruling out people you know own the type of weapon used in a crime, they would rather the law enforcement officials start in the dark and fumble around looking for clues. The fallout from this data being protected is that we have no idea just how these laws effect violent crime rates. To me, an abundance of fire-arms means that any casual conflict that would normally be resolved with words or perhaps fists, could turn deadly without either party
planning it to. To the NRA, an abundance of guns means that would-be criminals think twice about holding up just anyone on the street. What we have in the absence of hard-data are conflicting anecdotes about the benefits and dangers of well-armed citizenry. On the one hand, we have fellows like George Zimmerman who use their conceal and carry permits in a paranoid fashion that caused the death of an innocent 17 year old. On the other hand, we have a the Appalachian School of Law massacre cut short by fellow students who were armed with handguns and able to thusly stop him. In the absence of useful data, we cannot determine which narrative is more representative of reality. Lawmakers are simply guessing, based on anecdotal arguments, that by arming their constituents, they will be helping them protect themselves, their loved ones, and personal property; not putting them at danger. But until access to data proving or disproving that is available, all they’re able to do is hope they guessed right. Until very recently, these laws were enacted in just 48 states; Wisconsin and Illinois being the only states left to give into these laws. Wisconsin was the 49th to join the conceal and carry states and as recent as November 2011, Wisconsin Senate Bill 93 says, (d) A licensee, as defined in s. 175.60 (1) (d), or an out−of−state licensee, as defined in s. 175.60 (1) (g), if the gun or firearm is a handgun, as defined in s. 175.60 (1) (bm). That means one can carry a concealed weapon as long as they first and for most have a valid license, and there weapon must be a handgun. So what does this change in the ability to carry fire-arms mean for us in Wisconsin? Can any man or woman simply walk around with a gun in the front of their jeans? Does this license grant one access to carry his or her weapon anywhere? These questions and many more make for lots of nit-picky details to this controversial bill in Wisconsin. First of all, not just anyone can carry a weapon. To obtain a license means passing a background test that checks your criminal record, mental health, and general well-being. If you don’t pass certain checkmarks, you don’t get to carry a weapon anywhere you want. This is meant to make us feel safe, but in many states who have had these laws enacted much earlier than Wisconsin, this initial check is not updated at any interval until the license expires.
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That means that if you are convicted of a crime, hospitalized against your will due to mental disorders, or anything that would normally mean you aren’t fit to carry a concealed weapon between the issuing of the permit and its expiration, its unlikely that you’ll also have to turn in your guns or stop carrying them where you want. In some instances, the regional offices designated to issuing these permits are run by such a skeleton staff that this just isn’t possible; they struggle just to keep up with issuing permits, let alone checking already issued ones with new reports and data coming in to their system. For most other issues with these laws, the questions and answers asked/given are about self-defense. Whether guns are peacemakers or are violence promoters is up to the individual, in most instances. Those who feel safer having a deadly weapon on their person probably agree that it is a peacemaker. Those who feel less safe having
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Of course, this is opposed by the Wisconsin Gun Owners Inc. a pro-gun business that boldly showed their support for the conceal and carry law at every point possible. They proactively posted Conceal and Carry signs as part of a campaign called the Defend Wisconsin Program. The campaign is a direct response to the anti-gun signs posted by businesses around Wisconsin which prohibit and are against concealed carry. They are also going against the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort, which is known for being a notorious anti-gun group.
Law-makers who passed the Conceal & Carry act obviously view its passing as a defense mechanism, but that doesn’t make it true.
more guns in the world, especially when hidden and out of sight, feel they are violence promoters. The law-makers who passed this act are obviously viewing the passing of this law as a defense mechanism, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. And with Wisconsin hiding its list of permits from the public, neither the public or the lawmakers will truly know its impact on the state anytime soon. In an article written before the bill was passed, it was stated that “the influx of armed Wisconsinites will be made up of law abiding citizens, not the motley crew of amoral criminals warned against by those against conceal and carry.” However, in the same article, it also stated that “in 2004, the Nation Research Council published data on gun violence and crime rates, that states, “There is no credible evidence that ‘right-to-carry’ laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violence.” That raises the question of why this laws passage is necessary at all. If the lawmakers know that arming the citizenry does nothing to effect crime rates, why arm them? This question is further complicated by a survey sponsored by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families that says twice as many Wisconsin adults (62%) oppose allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons as those
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who favor it (31%). Even among gun owners, the majority are opposed to allowing concealed weapons in the state of Wisconsin. Their opposition is based on the agreed thoughts that having more guns does not decrease crime nor increase safety; if anything, all it does is increases the likelihood that a gun will be fired where there wouldn’t have been a gun in-play before.
As with all other states who passed these laws, the arguments on both sides have no hard evidence due to restricted lists and concealed data. Wisconsin officials had to blindly weigh the issues and incidents in which conceal and carry can be a good or bad thing and make laws based on those judgements. In the end, they sided for a concealed carry program, following the other 48 states before them. We may never know if that was the right choice, but we can be sure that it was impacted by the lobbying efforts of the NRA; the same group fighting to keep hard-data that would either prove their case or destroy it hidden from just about anyone. And as the last state, Illinois, recently passed a similar law, we the public, need to demand this data be available. If not to us, then to independent researchers who can fairly judge the impacts of these laws on crime rates, violence in the community, and whether it puts as at danger or not. Then we will know whether our State representatives truly had our best interests in mind, or whether they were lining their pockets and furthering their career with the blood-money of gun lobby’s that were putting us at risk. -with reporting by Lucas Ruminski
THE SECOND AMENDMENT D o es notSay What You Think It Says Interview by Hannah Levintova
As America grapples with a relentless tide of gun violence, pro-gun activists have come to rely on the Second Amendment as their trusty shield when faced with mass-shooting-induced criticism. In their interpretation, the amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. Yet most judges and scholars who debate the clause’s awkwardly worded and oddly punctuated 27 words almost always arrive at the opposite conclusion, finding that the amendment protects gun ownership for purposes of military duty and collective security. In his new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, digs into this discrepancy. What does the Second Amendment mean today, and what has it meant over time? He traces the history of the contentious clause and the legal reasoning behind it, from the Constitutional Convention to modern courtrooms.
Hannah Levintova: What personal, preconceived notions about the Second Amendment did the history which you uncovered confirm or debunk?
HL: Based on what you’ve uncovered, do you think the founders understood there to be an unwritten individual right to arms that they didn’t include in the Constitution?
Michael Waldman: There are surprises in this book for people who support gun control, and people who are for gun rights. When the Supreme Court ruled in Heller, Justice Scalia said he was following his doctrine of originalism. But when you actually go back and look at the debate that went into drafting of the amendment, you can squint and look really hard, but there’s simply no evidence of it being about individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting. Emphatically, the focus was on the militias. To the framers, that phrase “a well-regulated militia” was really critical. In the debates, in James Madison’s notes of the Constitutional Convention, on the floor of the House of Representatives as they wrote the Second Amendment, all the focus was about the militias. Now at the same time, those militias are not the National Guard. Every adult man, and eventually every adult white man, was required to be in the militias and was required to own a gun, and to bring it from home. So it was an individual right to fulfill the duty to serve in the militias.
MW: Yes. And that might be noteworthy for some. There were plenty of guns. There was the right to defend yourself, which was part of English common law handed down from England. But there were also gun restrictions at the same time. There were many. There were limits, for example, on where you could store gunpowder. You couldn’t have a loaded gun in your house in Boston. There were lots of limits on who could own guns for all different kinds of reasons. There was an expectation that you should be able to own a gun. But they didn’t think they were writing that expectation into the Constitution with the Second Amendment.
HL: You point out that the NRA has the Second Amendment inscribed in their lobby, but with the militia clause specifically removed. MW: Yes. That was first reported in the ‘90s. But I didn’t want to rely on just that, so one of my colleagues went out to the NRA headquarters to look at the lobby. And she had her picture taken in front of the sign so we could confirm that it was actually still there!
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HL: So then why focus on the Second Amendment and not the English Bill of Rights or any of the other things the framers drew on that more clearly addresses individual gun ownership for the time? MW: We are not governed today, in 2014, by British common law. Law evolved, the country evolved. It was a very rural place. There were no cities. There were no police forces. It was a completely different way of living. So gun rights activists turned this into a constitutional crusade. Those who want more guns and fewer restrictions realized they could gain some higher ground if they claimed the Constitution. HL: You write that throughout most of the 20th century, the courts stayed out of the gun laws debate. What was
the change that led them back in to this debate? MW: What changed was the NRA itself. In 1991, former Chief Justice Warren Berger said that the idea that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to gun ownership was “a fraud” on the public. That was the consensus of the time; that was the conventional wisdom. The NRA used to be an organization focused on hunters and on training. In 1977, at the NRA’s annual meeting, activists pushed out the leadership and installed new leaders who were very intense, very dogmatic, and very focused on the Second Amendment as their cause. It was called the “Revolt at Cincinnati.” From there, the NRA and its allies waged a 30-year legal campaign to change the way the courts and the country saw the Second Amendment. And they started with scholarship. They supported a lot of scholars and law professors. They elected politicians. They changed the positions of agencies of government. They got the Justice Department to reverse its position on what the amendment meant. And then, and only then, did they go to court.
MW: You’ll have to ask the Supreme Court. The thing about the Heller decision that was especially concerning to me was that Justice Scalia said this was the “vindication” of his approach of originalism. But when it actually came time to doing the history, he skipped over the actual writing and purpose of the Second Amendment. Out of 64 pages [in the decision], only 2 deal with the militias. Which is what the founders thought they were talking about. One of the things that I hope people take away from this is that the original meaning is always important, but it is not the only way to interpret the Constitution. HL: What are your thoughts on the historical argument that the Second Amendment is a civil right protected under the 14th Amendment? MW: After the Civil War, there were a lot of freed slaves who were terrorized by white vigilantes. One of the purposes of some of the framers of the 14th Amendment was to make sure that they get guns. Now, the Reconstruction government that enforced the 14th Amendment also had very strong gun laws, such as prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons. Just like the colonial period and the
“You can squint and look really hard, but there’s simply no evidence of it being about individual gun ownership for self-protection.” HL: What was the impact of the NRA’s sponsorship of Second Amendment legal scholarship? MW: They certainly supported a lot of it. The way it works in constitutional law is that legal scholarship plays a pretty big role. So there became a rather deafening roar of the pro-individual gun ownership model: They were publishing and reinforcing each other. Some of it was very useful, and I cite it in the book. And some of it, when you look at some of the claims, they are easily punctured. It reminded me of the people who write movie posters, in terms of pulling quotes out of context. Like this Thomas Jefferson quote—”One loves to possess arms.” It is in serious law review articles. It’s presented as proof of what the founders really meant. But what happened was Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to George Washington, saying, “Remember I sent you a bunch of those letters from when I was Secretary of State? Could you send them back to me? I think I’m going to get attacked for this position I made. I want to be able to defend myself: ‘One loves to possess arms,’ even though one hopes not to use them.” It’s a metaphor! But it’s in these law review articles. It’s funny! When you go to the NRA website, it’s still there. You can buy a T-shirt that has the quote! HL: How is it that such questionable scholarship went so far—all the way to the Supreme Court?
early revolutionary period, it was a very different time. What you had in the South was low-grade guerrilla warfare between the races. It’s hard to draw the lesson of what we should do now, in our urban society where assault weapons are available for sale, from the Reconstruction era. HL: You write that in Heller, there was a shift in how the case was argued: There were many references to colonial America, and little about current gun laws and current patterns of violence. Is this the new normal for gun cases? MW: This is the triumph, in some ways, of originalism— Justice Scalia’s intellectual triumph in changing the way people make arguments in front of the Supreme Court. And yes, there are some other cases where it’s been pretty common. What’s interesting is since Heller, there have been dozens of cases in lower courts. Heller said: Yes, there is an individual right, but it can be limited. And the extent of the limits wasn’t really clear. Well, dozens of judges have ruled since then, and overwhelmingly, they have upheld district gun laws. They’ve said, “Yes, there’s an individual right, but society, too, has a right to protect itself.” As this judicial consensus has developed, we haven’t yet heard from the Supreme Court again. So their work isn’t done just yet.
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