Jahn, who is currently a project manager at DARPA, visited Zócalo on Tuesday with Issues in Science and Technology editor-in-chief Daniel Sarewitz to discuss why food security has been left out of national security debate and planning, and her efforts to account for food security in the national defense agenda. Their conversation covered the scope of Jahn’s career, from her team’s invention of the popular Delicata squash, to her work responding to agricultural crises in other countries, and her focus today on food policy and national security.

Throughout the discussion, Jahn emphasized how her attention to larger systems, and her willingness to question both her industry’s conventions and her own assumptions, has been fundamental to her most important insights and successes. Take, for instance, an incident where the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) called her to respond to a whitefly-transmitted disease destroying tomato crops in West Africa. By taking an alternative, participatory approach, and distributing experiments across a broad network of local farmers, her team rapidly found and scaled a tomato variety that could survive the blight. However, she said, they’d failed to account for the system’s other limitations. There was a tomato cannery in West Africa, and it could accommodate the harvest—but there was one significant issue: it did not have electricity. “The tomatoes rotted on the loading dock,” she recalled. That story, which Jahn now refers to as “the tomato parable,” incited a crucial moment of reflection for her. “I began to think about what I was really after in systems,” she said, “and it wasn’t raw abundance.”

It punctuated to her the importance of understanding the broader, systemic contexts for local phenomena, rather than a linear, “pipeline”-based approach.

Jahn explained how the insights she gained working with developing countries to understand how their agricultural strategies, and workarounds resulting from lack of industrialized infrastructure, could be implemented in the U.S. One such strategy, she described, is participatory plant breeding, a form of citizen science in which farmers and scientists collaborate to test new crops.

She also cautioned how the current emphasis on food yields and efficiency at the sake of crop diversity and the use of energy and water resources was setting the planet up for disaster.

“We made a fundamental error with equating abundance with stability,” she said. As a plant breeder, she came to realize “the more, more, more is better, better, better hypothesis” was coming at a huge price, as she explained in a recent Issues article. That spurred her on to make the U.S. food system a policy issue, which ultimately led to the inclusion of Section 1075 in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Quoted with Molly Jahn:

“Driving at efficiency, driving at productivity—when we use those as our North Stars, we tend to drive diversity out… That’s fine, if you’re not concerned with properties of the system that have to do with the functions of diversity in that system, like resilience or stability.”

The post ‘Equating Abundance With Stability’ Is an Existential Threat to the U.S. Food System appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Unlike Robert Redford,” said event moderator Julian E. Barnes, national security reporter at the New York Times, guest Asha Rangappa, a Yale national security law scholar and former FBI counterintelligence agent, “knows what we do now.”

Barnes then turned to Rangappa and opened the discussion by asking her to take stock of our national security institutions after four years of a Trump administration. How badly politicized are they now, and how hard will it be to undo that damage?

Nothing is broken for good, said Rangappa. However, she expects that the Department of Justice and the FBI, in particular, will take time to walk back from the politicization introduced by this administration.

“I think simply not being the target of vocal attacks by the person sitting in the Oval Office will go a long way,” she said, “but it’s going to be a challenge because under a Biden administration, there may be crimes uncovered involving people from the prior administration, and this once again will place the Department of Justice and the FBI in political crosshairs, even if they are pursuing legitimate operations.”

There’s a tradition in American politics, said Barnes, where the prior administration isn’t prosecuted when a new administration comes to power. He asked Rangappa if she thinks president-elect Biden should respect that history.

There’s too much that needs to be looked at, Rangappa said, pointing, for instance, to the paper trail that led to migrant children being taken from their families. “That to me is in the realm of when we discovered the [George] W. [Bush] administration had authorized torture,” she said.

The best way to determine if the government should take legal action against the Trump administration, she said, is to bring in a special counsel who can figure out what actual violations of federal law were committed. “I know we’re kind of special counseled out,” she joked, however, she added, “you really want someone who is insulated from political influence and has a very clear mandate that they follow.”

“That’s the best we’re going to be able to do short of letting it go, which I don’t think will be an option,” Rangappa continued.

Before the Trump administration leaves office, Barnes asked, is Rangappa concerned about any 11th-hour declassifications?

Yes, she said. What concerns her most is that the administration’s selective declassifications are all a “constant attempt to displace blame on the 2016 interference from Russia to Ukraine or some other entity.” That is one of the goals of declassifications before Trump leaves office, she believes: “to make the case [that] this didn’t happen.”

These 11th-hour declassifications, Rangappa said, will ultimately benefit Vladimir Putin the most. This information not only helps Russia with plausible deniability, she said; it primarily will help the Russians identify leaks and could potentially put sources in danger. “That’s what worries me.”

Looking further ahead, Barnes asked what can be done to prevent the norms that Trump broke during his presidency from being broken again in the future.

Strengthening protections for inspector generals of the intelligence community is one avenue, said Rangappa, pointing out, for instance, that the impeachment proceedings only happened because inspector general Michael Atkinson alerted Congress to the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s communications with the president of Ukraine. “Inspector generals are a vehicle for Congress to learn about misconduct in the executive branch,” she said. “What we saw was an attempt to cut that channel off at the knees by installing loyalists in that position or creating dubious legal justifications for not passing on whistleblower complaints.”

Audience questions piled in for Rangappa, asking her to address everything from whether Trump might attempt a self-pardon to the future of the Department of Homeland Security.

Self-pardon, Rangappa said, “depends on whether Trump is going to be a rational actor or a not-rational actor.” Rangappa also thinks it’s possible the president may step down at some point—“maybe even the day before inauguration”—so that Pence would be able to grant him, his children, and other players, like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, pardons. “That I think would be much more airtight,” she said.

Another audience member wanted to know how worried the intelligence community is about secrets Trump could reveal after leaving office. “It’s absolutely a real concern,” said Rangappa, noting the president’s $421 million of debt. “From an intelligence standpoint, he’s vulnerable, and he has valuable information that other countries would be very tempted [by]—and they’d be dumb not to try and exploit.”

One of the last questions of the discussion returned to the intelligence community itself, and how intact it is at this point.

The damage is mostly at the top, said Rangappa. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned of the last four years, the thing that has saved us is our vast bureaucracy,” she said. After all, it was a CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the Ukraine call, and rank-and-file agents who continued the investigation. “Our civil service, our bureaucrats—these are the people that are making our country run,” she said. If a critical mass of people were to exit, then the culture of these organizations might change, but that hasn’t happened. “I think right now the culture of these organizations is mostly still nonpartisan,” she said.

The post After a Historic Election, Asha Rangappa Looks Ahead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In a liberal democracy, the purpose of collecting secret intelligence is to obtain information vital to our interests that potential adversaries—hostile leaders, dictators, terrorists, criminals, and shadowy figures such as cyber attackers—do not want us to know. Consequently, they will want to keep this information secret and may go to extreme and even violent lengths to prevent us from ever uncovering these secrets. It follows that to overcome the will of the people with the secret (and bearing in mind that the most important secrets will be the most closely guarded) we will have to use deceptive, manipulative, and intrusive methods.

This sets out intelligence as a distinctive ethical realm. We would certainly not want such methods to be used in everyday life; the equivalent of listening at keyholes, eavesdropping, recruiting informers to gather information on relatives, or opening the family’s mail. But without using such ethically problematic methods in the service of national security, we will never obtain secret intelligence.

Moral philosophers would say there are three approaches to addressing this dilemma that we could advise intelligence agencies to draw on.

The first is to judge the morality of intelligence agency actions by their consequences. This is the natural starting point for intelligence officers: they have noble purposes—national security and public safety—that legitimate their activity. Such consequentialist approaches are closely linked to the principle of proportionality: the idea that, for example, the degree of intrusion into the private lives of others should relate to the harm the intrusion is intended to prevent. But does this mean that if the threat is great enough, such as a terrorist gang about to commit mass murder, any measure would be justified in trying to stop them, including the extremes of extraordinary rendition and trying to extract their secrets by torture?

This is where the second approach to devising an ethical framework comes in, which is importing moral precepts from outside the profession. This is known as the “deontological” approach. To be deontological is to choose to follow rules. But which rules?

National intelligence professionals might ignore “thou shalt not steal” from the Ten Commandments, since the very business of intelligence is concerned with stealing secrets. The United Nations International Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent European Convention on Human Rights provide very relevant ethical rules, including maintaining the absolute prohibition on torture.

But while some activities are prohibited, others are qualified. In these documents, privacy is a qualified right and the authorities can intrude in defense of national security, upholding the rule of law and safeguarding life—provided this is done in accordance with domestic law, and independently overseen. In that way an intelligence code of ethics for a democracy can still allow intrusive methods to be used, provided adequate safeguards are built in.

It is, however, in the nature of intelligence gathering that it has to take place in secret, often in dangerous faraway places where the intelligence officers may have to make rapid decisions to protect themselves and their sources. As anyone who has brought up teenagers will know, house rules are certainly needed, but when they are out of your sight you cannot oversee them, and you have to rely on their having internalized enough of your code of values to keep them out of real trouble. So it is with intelligence officers.

For this reason, we turn to a third approach—that of personal value ethics. This sort of system affirms how one civilized human being ought to behave toward another, drawing in such considerations as personal respect, honesty, trustworthiness, and empathy. The best intelligence officers have a strong sense of personal ethics and are very aware of their moral responsibility towards their agents and their families including after their service is over.

In our new book, we draw a comparison between the ethic of intelligence and the warrior ethic, and we discuss how over centuries, scholars and theologians evolved a philosophy of “just war” to tame the worst excesses of violence in war. From the “just war” tradition it is possible to derive comparable concepts for “just intelligence” that can be used as guides to clear thinking in unpacking the many moral dilemmas that surround the gathering and use of secret intelligence.

We summarize these as:

• right intention—Intelligence officers should act with integrity—without hidden political or other agendas—including in the authorization of intelligence activity, the analysis, assessment, and the presentation of intelligence judgments to decision-makers.

• proportionality—Intelligence officers should keep the ethical risks of operations in relationship to the harm that the operations are intended to prevent.

• right authority—The level of authority required for an operation should correspond to the ethical risks, and the supervising officers should be held accountable for their decisions and oversight.

• reasonable prospect of success—To prevent general fishing expeditions or mass surveillance, individual operations should be justified through sound probabilistic reasoning of what they are likely to reveal.

• discrimination—The risk of collateral harm, including privacy intrusion into the lives of those who are not the intended targets of intelligence gathering, must be assessed and managed on both human and technological levels.

• necessity—Intrusive investigations should only be conducted with restraint, if no other reasonable way can be found to achieve the authorized mission at lesser ethical risk.

Talking of “principled spying” need therefore not be a contradiction in a liberal democracy provided the three Rs are observed: the Rule of Law is maintained; there is lawful Regulation and oversight; and intelligence agencies act with Restraint in their use of the coercive powers of the nation-state.

We are already experiencing what it is like to live in a digital age when our personal data is harvested and exploited for profit by the private sector. The intelligence and security authorities are also busy exploiting cyberspace to gather data to uncover and track targets and potential targets. All that increases a sense of public unease about whether there is any longer a right to personal privacy. Yet at the same time there is a pressing need for protection for the citizen from a wide range of potential adversaries such as hostile states, terrorists, and criminal groups. The need to clarify the rules over principled intelligence activity has never been greater.

The post Can Spies Be Ethical? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Neutrality might be the answer.

I was born and raised in one neutral country, Switzerland. As an adult, I moved to and became a citizen of another neutral country, Sweden. I have experienced what it means to live in societies developed on peaceful and stable ground.

In 2017 my first home country, Switzerland, celebrated the 500th anniversary of its last military action abroad. In Sweden, more than 200 years have passed since the Swedish army was engaged in foreign war (at that time, an occupation of neighboring Norway).

In both my home countries, neutrality has thus stood the test of time and reinforced the democratic nature of the governments. Which is why neutrality deserves more attention, especially in small and vulnerable democracies around the world.

The planet is already moving in that direction. The primary international tactic for most countries is no longer archaic military violence, but engagement in smart public diplomacy based on international law.

A more diplomatic and law-based world fits the notion of neutrality, which means that a country does not join any military alliance or engage with other countries as a belligerent.

Historically there have been as many forms of neutrality as there have been countries to declare it. And yes, there have been some cases, as in Austria after World War II, when a country was obliged by foreign powers to become a neutral state.

In the Swiss case, the concept of neutrality goes back to the Second Peace Treaty of Paris in 1815, which allowed Switzerland to become a self-governing territory. But at that time, Switzerland was just a loose network of independent states. It took another 33 years—and, in fact, a civil war between the various states of the country—to establish the current federal, democratic state by referendum in 1848.

That state was explicitly neutral. And this direct engagement of Swiss citizens in state affairs—via votes in referendums and citizen’s initiatives— has served to enforce neutrality. When people get to make decisions, they often choose peace, stability—and neutrality.

The Swiss have, however, retained an army. Indeed, for many decades, it was said that Switzerland was an army. This reflected a triumphant megalomania in the country after it had kept itself out of two disastrous world wars that consumed its neighbors. But later in the 20th century, Switzerland reduced what had been one of the biggest and most expensive armies—a “protection force for neutrality”—in the world.

Neutrality is not static. It requires constant development and fine-tuning. The Swiss have long debated and changed exactly how their neutrality works. But the debate is always open; the Swiss consensus is that neutrality is a security issue, and security issues should not be left to a small circle within government or parliament, at least in a democracy.

One very long debate involved Swiss membership in the United Nations. Supporters of neutrality for decades argued that such a membership, which could imply participation in military operations abroad, would not be compatible with being a neutral country. In 1986, two-thirds of Swiss voters said no to UN membership. But voters narrowly approved the same measure in 2002, making Switzerland the first country to join the global organization by referendum.

My other home country has made a similar connection between democracy and neutrality. Sweden has debated whether to join NATO—as some politicians from national right-wing parties are demanding—but that would require a popular vote.

Sweden’s neutrality dates back to the Napoleonic wars, when the Nordic kingdom lost more than one-third of its territory. Since 1812, Sweden has not initiated any armed combats and has declared itself a non-aligned and neutral country. In contrast to Switzerland, this policy has never been enshrined in international treaties and Sweden has always understood its neutrality to be proactive, which has allowed it to be involved in peacekeeping efforts around the world. It also has joined the European Union and forged agreements (though not membership) with NATO.

The Swiss and Swedish examples show the different options and limits of neutrality. The stricter Swiss neutrality limits the international options of the country, but its stand is more credible than Sweden’s more pragmatic approach. At the same time, Sweden can react more flexibly to changing security challenges.

Taking these risks and benefits into consideration, when I think about the links between peace, stability, democracy and neutrality, I wonder about the power that neutrality might hold for a place under threat, like Taiwan.

Taiwan is a country of 23 million, adjacent to a larger nation of 1.3 billion, which maintains the right to invade its smaller neighbor whenever it chooses. What kind of protection does such a place need?

Taiwan has built up its military forces and weaponry, and it has made alliances with the United States and as many other countries as it can. The goal has been to counter the threat with defense.

But the Chinese threats continue—indeed, they have recently increased. So the more important piece of security might involve the example Taiwan presents to the world.

Taiwan democratized three decades ago, and it has sought to make its democracy more participatory over the years. I have visited some 15 times to observe elections and referendums, and work to enhance the country’s system of direct democracy, which is now considered a global model.

Using that democracy to embrace neutrality formally has been discussed, and the idea has a couple of virtues. First, it would reinforce Taiwan’s democracy by setting a policy in line with the views of its people, and making it clear that no government could simply go to war.

It also might provide real security, and broadcast to the world that Taiwan is devoted to peace. Again, Switzerland and Sweden are good illustrations of how such a proactive policy of democracy and non-aggression can deter invasion (Switzerland’s ability to stay out of the world wars being the prime example), while also creating a globally recognized brand for the country. If China invaded an officially neutral Taiwan, it would be threatening and attacking an open, democratic, and peaceful country—a difficult position for its autocratic government to defend.

Of course, there is no single or simple solution for the complicated security situation in East Asia. But a Taiwanese move to neutrality would project self-confidence, and a message that should impress the world. It also would allow Taiwan to focus more on its internal development, including making greater advances in its democracy. The country’s cities, in particular, are seeking more sovereignty and control from a national government that has long centralized power, in part by arguing that a strong national authority is needed for security reasons.

Neutrality, in combination with democracy, is not a guarantee of a country’s eternal life. But history suggests it is better insurance than the most sophisticated weapons systems.

The post Why Taiwan Would Be Better Off Neutral appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This debate is not a new one in American history. Even before the Cold War fears of nuclear warfare, back in the 1930s and 1940s, a similar debate erupted about a different set of security fears and what was then called “home defense.”

During the Roosevelt years, liberal democracies everywhere felt threatened by the rise of the twin absolutist ideologies that were gaining ground across the globe: fascism and communism. News of atrocities committed in the name of these isms—in Ethiopia, China, Spain, the Soviet Union—frightened Americans. Many Americans wanted to join the fight against fascism overseas, while plenty of others embraced isolationism. But all feared the possibility of aerial bombings, chemical and biological weapons, and a panic that could install a dictator in the White House.

Fear-drenched messages resounded nationwide. Radio dramas such as Archibald MacLeish’s “Air Raid” featured sounds of children screaming as bombs whizzed through the air. Americans read about new “super-bombers” that soon could fly non-stop across the Atlantic and bomb U.S. cities. Theories about how we could be attacked also seeped into the culture: What if the Nazis set up bases in Iceland or Bermuda?

In January 1939, FDR said the world “has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift [that] the distant points from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what they were 20 years ago.” By the spring of 1940, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled across the French countryside, FDR declared that, in essence, isolation was a prescription for national suicide.

“Civilian Defense in Detroit.”

New Deal liberals, previously consumed with trying to expand the safety net to curb capitalism’s sharp edges, began to grapple with citizens’ obligations to democracy in times of crisis: How should civilians work with government to keep themselves and their communities safe from enemy attacks? Should Americans be militarized to prepare for war? Should individual liberties be abridged in the name of protecting America in its hour of need? How should “home defense” help keep civilians calm and maintain their morale? Finally, should home defense improve people’s lives by combatting malnutrition, poverty, joblessness, and despair?

In May 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD)—the precursor to today’s Department of Homeland Security.

There were two competing, bold, drastically distinct liberal visions for what home defense should mean in the lives of Americans. The debate set Eleanor Roosevelt’s social defense vision against New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s brand of national security liberalism. Eleanor Roosevelt was the OCD’s assistant director, the first First Lady to have an official role in an administration; La Guardia was its director while also serving as mayor.

The two of them argued over the classic trade-off between “guns” and “butter.” For La Guardia, the need was to militarize society, whereas Mrs. Roosevelt endorsed “guns” but not at the cost of sacrificing a continued focus on social programs. La Guardia and his supporters were willing to trample on civil liberties, while social defense liberals like the First Lady made more of an effort to defend individual rights and even made a stab at protecting Japanese-Americans from the racist hysteria sweeping the nation after Pearl Harbor.

The First Lady adopted a broad conception of home defense. Her vision featured a government-led and citizen-powered movement to make Americans “as much interested today in seeing [citizens] well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed, obtaining needed medical care and recreation” as in military security. She insisted that the country had to live its values. In wartime, she argued, “every place in this country must be made a better place in which to live, and therefore more worth defending.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, center, acting as assistant director of civilian defense, at a 1941 conference on “women’s activities in civilian defense.”

To Mrs. Roosevelt, World War II was not only a struggle to defeat fascism militarily. It also required a wartime New Deal to secure a better future by mounting a national effort to attack Americans’ unmet human needs.

The First Lady was charged with overseeing volunteer participation in home defense. She helped recruit more than ten million volunteers, including an estimated three million who performed some type of social defense role. Citizens working through their government fed women and children, provided medical and child care, trained defense plant workers, led salvage campaigns, improved transit systems, planted victory gardens, and helped women learn about nutritious diets. Her campaign helped make it acceptable for liberals to champion big government both in terms of military affairs and social democratic experimentation—a government devoted to both guns and butter.

La Guardia, whose New Deal partnership with FDR had modernized and humanized the nation’s most populous city, embodied the “guns” and anti-civil liberties side of the debate. He worried about social disorder. Watching Rotterdam, Paris, and London being bombed from his perch in City Hall, La Guardia thought that American cities could eventually meet the same fate. Incensed that the administration hadn’t yet established a home defense agency, the mayor lobbied the White House until FDR signed the executive order in May 1941 and tapped La Guardia to be his home defense chief.

La Guardia brandished a new form of national security liberalism that prioritized military over social defense (and individual rights) in times of crisis. Under his vision, a government-civilian partnership would militarize civilians’ lives. He proposed requiring big city workers to volunteer as firefighters and learn how to handle a chemical weapons attack. He recommended distributing gas masks to 50 million civilians, putting a mobile water pump on every city block, and establishing five volunteer fire brigades for every city brigade. A fourth military branch composed of civilians would prepare cities to endure air raids.

La Guardia relied on fear to sell his message. He could come off like Orson Welles (creator of “War of the Worlds”) on steroids. If the public was fearful, he reasoned, it would be inspired to mobilize in its own self-defense.

While he did aid FDR in sowing a war mindset and alerting Americans to the Nazi peril, he also dispensed with civic niceties and civil liberties. In contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reaction to Pearl Harbor, La Guardia asked citizens to spy on other citizens, shuttered Japanese-American clubs and restaurants, called his media critics “Japs” and “friends of Japs,” and ordered Japanese-Americans confined to their homes until the government could determine “their status.”

America’s leading urban reformer pushed liberalism in a novel direction, as he fought to use the federal government to militarize civilians in order to maximize their safety. Ultimately, social defense took a backseat to military security during the Cold War. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy launched a range of domestic reforms aimed at strengthening the home front socially and economically, yet military security—loyalty oaths, nuclear arsenals, evacuation drills—typically took priority over social defense. The kind of far-reaching wartime New Deal envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt was never enacted during the Cold War. Even Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was cut short partly due to the demand for “guns” during the Vietnam War.

The trade-offs are evident even today. Liberals argue with conservatives and among themselves about the proper balance between individual freedom and national security. Equally controversial, social reforms to improve life at home are locked in conflict with steps to keep us physically safe. This is not just a question of resources. It boils down to how we see ourselves as citizens of our democracy. Some liberals, for example, argue that “nation-building right here at home,” as President Obama suggested in 2012, is as important as cracking down on suspected terrorist threats or planting democracy in the Middle East.

All of these debates are traceable to the struggle among liberals to alert citizens to the war on “two fronts”—at home and abroad—during the Roosevelt years. As long as America has enemies overseas and threats from within, the fight over the best balance between guns and butter and between military security and civil liberties will remain central to America’s national identity—an enduring legacy of the campaign by liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia in World War II to liberate Americans from the grip of fear.

The post The New Deal Origins of Homeland Security appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Documentarian and New America fellow Hao Wu explains to Anne-Marie Slaughter why the Chinese government has announced a recent slew of economic and social reforms. But he’s not sure they’ll live up to their transformative promise. Kevin Bankston, the new policy director at New America’s Open Technology Institute, and writer and Internet freedom activist Rebecca MacKinnon, a New America senior research fellow, join Slaughter to unpack the latest bill aimed at curbing NSA overreach, and expose its surprising opponents.

The post Reforms at Home, and Abroad appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Let’s back up. A few years ago, the administration announced a big change to the country’s National Security Strategy: instead of encouraging different agencies to pursue their own disparate policies, the “Whole of Government” approach proposed we weave together the tools of defense, diplomacy, and development. The idea was that if we could unite our response to big, global problems and to tackle them on all sides, we’d be a much more efficient in meeting our security goals. In Afghanistan, for example, the new strategy partnered USAID and the Department of Defense to fund counter-insurgency investments.

It’s a great plan. But it has yet to gain traction in the one place where we really need it: global health. Failure on that front is a real threat to American lives. So it’s about time the “Whole of Government” plan to strengthen our national security started meaning more than “fitting in with the folks who kill people.”

Take the case of the Obama administration-appointed special investigator general for Afghanistan. Here is an auditor with his eye firmly off the ball when it comes to cost effectiveness. He wants to shut down the USAID health program in Afghanistan because it is run through the country’s ministry of health, and he’s worried about corruption there.

Not that he’s actually found any corruption—he just notes that the financial management systems operating in the government of one of the poorest countries in the world aren’t up to usual U.S. standards.

What is the USAID-backed program in Afghanistan doing, exactly? It’s delivering basic health care to about 90 percent of the population at about $4.50 a head (compare that to per head health expenditure in the U.S.: $8,608). In no small part thanks to the impact of that program, Afghanistan saw the most rapid increase in life expectancy of any place on the planet between 2004 and 2010—from 42 to 62 years. About 100,000 kids each year aren’t dying in Afghanistan thanks to the decline in child mortality over just that six-year period.

Yet the inspector general suggests we forget the fact that the program is achieving spectacular results, and we pay no attention to the fact that it is one of the very few parts of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan that has actually gone according to plan. That’s not just ignoring the whole of government, or our national security interests—that’s ignoring common sense.

Or what about global vaccination programs that help keep Americans free of infectious diseases? For the past few years, America has supported some amazing programs to improve health outcomes worldwide. For example, the administration has made a $1.65 billion 2014 budget request for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Global Fund is looking for $15 billion over the next three years, which it says will help save as many as 6 million lives. That’s an overestimate of the impact of the Fund’s money, but even if the direct number is really closer to 15 percent of that, or only 870,000, we’re still talking about twice the number of people the U.S. lost in all of World War II—a pretty impressive performance. Again, the United States pledged $450 million to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) from 2012 to 2014. GAVI is on track to support developing countries in immunizing an additional quarter of a billion children by 2015, preventing nearly 4 million deaths in the process. That’s maybe three times the total of all U.S. military casualties in every war back to the American Revolution.

Despite that immense success, other parts of the administration’s national security apparatus appear happy to ride roughshod over the U.S.-backed fight against global infectious disease. I’ve complained before about the fact that the CIA used a vaccination program as part of a failed intelligence gathering operation against Osama bin Laden. It didn’t even bother to complete the program, leaving a bunch of people unprotected against disease. But the knock-on effects continue: vaccination workers have been targeted again and again, and the number of parents refusing to get their kids vaccinated is on the rise. That’s a real health threat to the United States given the increase in vaccine deniers in this country who are leaving their own children at risk. For example, measles is returning to the U.S. thanks to declining vaccination rates; the same problem in France recently led to 5,000 hospitalizations and 10 deaths. Ten kids died from whooping cough in 2010 in California thanks once again to parents who refused to vaccinate their kids. So for purely domestic health reasons, it is about time America foreswore using vaccination programs as part of defense and intelligence operations.

In fact, it’s about time ‘Whole of Government’ became a mandate for actors across the diplomacy, development, and defense sectors to start working together to strengthen national security using whichever tool is most effective to keep Americans secure. In some cases, that means defense and diplomacy should back development solutions. Or if actually getting support from the other parts of the triad is a stretch for the development leg, defense and diplomacy should at least leave it in peace to do its job. Just because USAID employees rarely shoot people doesn’t mean they can’t help make the world safer for America.

The post We’re Winning in Afghanistan (At Least With Vaccines) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We need to have a chat, so I trust you’re reading this.

Of course you are; good. Now, let’s see … how should I put this? Look, you’ve done a great job cultivating that whole “spook” image for the past 60 years. Really, you’ve just been terrifyingly adept at creating an environment of ironclad secrecy, even more so than the CIA, who’ve bungled too many overseas jobs to be the omnipotent, untouchable agency they’d like us to think they are.

Times are changing, though. For the past several generations, you’ve been the rulers of all information, with no one to challenge you. Americans just had to trust that the good quiet folk at the NSA were looking out for them, because no one else could handle data on such a large scale. It was a simpler time, back when the Internet was young and the Web was just a seed of an idea, and our idea of “big data” was the Yellow Pages.

There are new kids in town, though; kids who grew up on data. They were raised to dish out and take in as much data as possible, and they do it for fun. To you, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the rest of it are the latest places from which to siphon information. To these new kids, it’s home. It’s where they grew up, which is why they’re much better at it, and why you hire so many of them.

Now, what happens when you raise a generation on a steady diet of data, and then try to keep naughty secrets? They’re going to ask questions. They grew up in a world where information was free, and they took advantage of that fact. They learned more about the world around them than could ever be learned in school, and they went online for the answers to the questions their parents and teachers wouldn’t answer. They grew up not just appreciating that information was free, but expecting information to be free.

It gets worse. Not only are you hiring millennials, for whom secrecy is anathema—you’re hiring millennial hackers. And hacking, as you well know, means finding ways of turning technology to serve a purpose other than its intended one. When information isn’t free, these people have the ability and the will to free it.

I know this because I’m one of them. I may not have top-secret clearance and make six figures working for one of your contractors, but Edward Snowden’s demographic profile still hits close to home. When I was a boy, I used to hack into my computer games to add fart sounds to them. I built my own computers. I made my sister’s Teddy Ruxpin say horrible, horrible things. When I get a new phone, its hackability is its number-one buying point.

When I get my hands on a new piece of technology, my first thought isn’t about what it can do—it’s about what it can’t do, and how can I force it to overcome its limitations to do what I want. I then wonder, “Why wasn’t I ‘allowed’ to do this in the first place?” See, we millennial hackers simply cannot take anything at face value. We’re a bit contrarian and stubborn by nature. It’s why we’re good at what we do. The more constraints you place on us (be they workplace, physical, technological, or copyright) the more we feel a need to disregard, challenge, or overcome those constraints.

To be a hacker is to be cynical about whatever “solid” information or limits you’re faced with, to remove layers of consumer sheen or government spin until raw components are laid bare to reconstruct at will. You reward people like me with fat salaries when we do this with technology, so there’s little sense in expecting us not do the same in the rest of our lives—with your policies, rules, information, even with our own personal lives. We tinker, probe, deconstruct, and reassemble for other purposes. One thing we don’t do is blindly put hand to heart and sing “God Bless, America” —unless we’re in a North Korean gulag and it’s a contrarian move.

Do you see the problem? You need my kind of people for our understanding of data, but we don’t necessarily want or need you. You are anathema to our values and expectations. Sure, you’ve got some very smart graybeards who can do some amazing things, but they’re not going to be the bulk of your army for long, if they even still are. You have no choice but to keep hiring these hackers who didn’t grow up having data hidden from them. It’s ironic that you’ve become so reliant on people who really have no business in a tight-lipped, hierarchical quasi-militarized institution. We are the ones you should be snooping on, if only you could snoop without us.

I feel your pain.

Edward Snowden smoked you, and it wasn’t even very hard for him. Now, I know what you’re going to say. “It won’t happen again! We’ll improve security!” Who is going to improve your security? Is it going to be the naval officers you used to hire, respectful of hierarchy and used to a military lifestyle? Or maybe, say, more young, technical lay-people—contractors with the information freedom ideals of the millennial hacker? Yeah, I thought so.

Let’s face it: This isn’t going to be the last time your secrets are aired to the public. It’s probably not even going to be the last time this year that your secrets are aired to the public by another Edward Snowden, because you’ve got countless Edward Snowdens on your payroll whose first—not last—instinct is to blow open your information infrastructure. I mean, you tried to recruit me years ago, for goodness sake. Those confidential recruitment materials that said “For Your Eyes Only” all over them? Yeah, I showed those to everyone I knew, mostly because you were so heavy-handed with all the confidential stuff.

The important thing now is not to panic. No tears. You’re a big, strong, spooky organization, right? You don’t have to clean out your desk. You’ve still got a big role to play in the cyber-warfare of the next several decades. You’re just learning a hard lesson here, and I realize you’re partly being demonized for implementing what the White House and Congress want. However, you have no choice but to keep hiring these young, entitled, informed, data-driven hackers, who pretty soon might not have any secrets to leak because the Snowdens in your midst will have forced you to turn into a fully transparent (but still efficient!) organization.

Now that I think of it, you really should have played up the six-figure salary and Hawaii angle in those recruiting materials you gave me. I would’ve kept your secrets. Really.

Cheers,
Cyrus

The post An Open (Of Course) Letter to My Friend, the NSA appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The good news is that Hollywood’s latest fixation with all things intelligence-related—Homeland, which cleaned up at last night’s Golden Globe Awards, and Zero Dark Thirty, which opened this weekend at a theater near you—provides a more nuanced portrait of the Central Intelligence Agency and other government employees working in the U.S. national security apparatus. Characters like Homeland protagonist Carrie Mathison are, to put it mildly, far from flawless. And the operational abilities of our intelligence agencies as depicted by Hollywood are just as limited as they are in real life.

Why is this dose of reality good news? Because Hollywood has a near monopoly on defining the secretive world of spies and classified intelligence. The workplace drama, for most Americans, is the only way into Langley (real-life workplace dramas that make headline news aside). We all know that Grey’s Anatomy and Boston Legal take some liberties in their depictions of medicine or the legal profession. But most of us have a doctor or lawyer in the family, and have dealings (hopefully not too many) with doctors and lawyers. How many Americans know covert CIA officers or have been involved personally in a classified national security matter?

Seeing in our popular culture a national security apparatus without supernatural powers helps us recalibrate our expectations and understanding of the world, especially the fact that we can’t be delivered from all risks.

I work at a Washington think tank analyzing national security and know enough about the subject to say that a lot of what we see on screen remains way over-the-top in its glamorization of those on the front lines. Nevertheless, the idea of fallibility, what Graham Greene termed “the human factor” in his classic espionage novel by that name, is making decisive inroads. In Zero Dark Thirty, the team searching for Osama bin Laden spends a decade tracing countless bad tips and finding nothing but dead ends. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison deals with incomplete information, the push and pull of a life outside of work, and the frustrations of bureaucratic infighting. Some viewers might think Carrie’s psychological issues take away from her strength as a superspy character, but to me they’re refreshingly real.

Hollywood is moving away from the perfection that was the old James Bond (whose current iteration couldn’t keep the bad guys from blowing up MI6’s HQ in Skyfall), toward reality. Ben Affleck’s Argo also captures the sometime impotence of the U.S. national security establishment: the Iranian hostage crisis was the definition of helplessness, with 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days and a failed rescue attempt. The movie portrays the CIA as absolutely stumped in the middle of the crisis, desperate enough to turn to Hollywood and Canada—Canada!—for help in rescuing a few embassy personnel, in what was a dazzling but small victory amidst a bigger tragedy.

Perhaps back in the ’70s, on the heels of Vietnam, there was a greater understanding that our nation was not omnipotent. Maybe that’s why Americans then were united in support of their elected officials’ refusal to negotiate with the bad guys and angry mainly at the Iranians, the ones who had taken the hostages. By contrast, the recent attack on our consulate in Benghazi, which killed two U.S. diplomats and two CIA officers, got Americans angry mainly at fellow Americans. In the days and weeks following the horrific terrorist attack, politicians, pundits, and the general public sought to place blame on someone in the U.S. government for the scandalous “failure,” as if our intelligence community is so all-knowing, so powerful, so as to immunize any American anywhere from any harm at any time—to deliver us from all risk. We—rather than our attackers—were the bad guys.

Much of the public reaction to the Benghazi attack seemed informed by shows like 24, in which Jack Bauer and his colleagues seemed to have access to satellite images and drone video feeds of every square inch of the planet, and forces mustered at the ready, five minutes away from anywhere. Jack Bauer also made torture seem like a silver bullet, a means to obtain sound intelligence in short order, an old Hollywood crutch that Zero Dark Thirty has also leaned on.

Hollywood has the artistic right to distort historical events, and does so in plenty of contexts having nothing to do with national security or intelligence. But when it does so in this realm, it’s especially meaningful—because, again, it’s the primary if not sole source on these matters for most Americans. That’s why Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain felt compelled to write a letter to Sony CEO Michael Lynton calling this aspect of the film “grossly inaccurate” and voicing their concern that it could “shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.”

It may be reassuring to the public to imagine that torture works (setting aside the moral issues of whether it should be used regardless), just as it may be reassuring to imagine that there’s a James Bond or a Jack Bauer looking out for us, as opposed to someone more ordinary. And maybe it would have been too jarring for viewers to accept Carrie Mathison as their defender soon after 9/11.

But real life isn’t a Hollywood spy thriller. There isn’t just one threat out there that CIA operatives and analysts have to focus on. We don’t have drone eyes trained on every unstable area of the world (at least not yet), and we can’t provide foolproof, 24/7 protection to every American installation or individual across the globe. We live in a world full of dangers, some of which we may be able to prevent from coming to fruition, but the rest we can only accept and prepare for. We will never be able to completely eliminate the various threats to our national security, even as we fight to minimize and manage them.

So let’s have more years-long manhunts on our screens, and maybe even more explosions (spoiler alert!) like the bombing that concluded this season of Homeland. It isn’t that we can’t have happy endings, only that we need to reset our expectations to appreciate what happy endings look like in the real world.

The post Thank You, Hollywood, For the Bumbling Spies appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On what turned out to be the last afternoon of his life, Levin was enthusiastically guiding me around John F. Kennedy Airport’s renowned Terminal 5, the modernist, curvy masterpiece Eero Saarinen designed for TWA. By 2001, Terminal 5 stood as a quaintly-sized monument to a more glamorous age of air travel. Airport authorities wanted to preserve the structure but build a larger facility around it; historic preservationists, still haunted by the demolition of the old Penn Station, wanted the Port Authority to keep using the former TWA facility, unmodified. Levin’s mission that day was to convince me and my fellow New York Times editorial writer Verlyn Klinkenborg that these preservationists were not being reasonable.

It all made for an interesting, and rare, Monday afternoon field trip. Not once did we ask anything about security. Why would we? It was 9/10.

My two most surreal memories of the day that followed – bookends to the nightmare, really – are set in Times Square.

Upon first hearing the confused news reports that morning, I scrambled from my place uptown to make it into the Times building and found myself crossing Times Square at the moment the first tower collapsed. Standing with me was an impressive cross-section of humanity – French tourists, Middle Eastern breakfast-truck operators, pretty Condé Nast girls, swarms of salaried white-collar workers for whom work no longer mattered, sailors on shore leave, street performers – looking up at the jumbo screen attached to the ABC/Good Morning America facility, with the unflappable Peter Jennings manning his desk to host what seemed like the end of the world.

As the tower collapsed, the entire lower portion of our city (where my wife and countless friends worked) vanished from sight in a mushroom cloud. On Times Square, the multitude of former strangers (there is no such thing on a day like that) didn’t scream; it was more like one collective gasp emanating from thousands simultaneously punched in the gut. I recall a feeling of watching myself watch all this, almost like an extra in one of those Hollywood apocalyptic flicks where New York gets wiped out before the good, God-fearing folks in the rest of the country prevail against the aliens/natural disaster/bad guys.

I spent the next 14 hours scrambling with colleagues at the Times to make sense of the day (my wife did reach me around noon, alive and well), an exercise which seemed both essential and pointless. Did New Yorkers really need to wait for the Times editorial page to let them know what to make of that day? Kudos to Verlyn, though, for writing the pitch-perfect opening sentence to the lead editorial published on 9/12: “Remember the ordinary, if you can.”

I was still stuck on airport duty, though no longer on terminal aesthetics. I was cramming to learn everything there was to learn about airport security and unheeded warnings. The entire aviation system was grounded, would be for days, and the debate about what it would take for planes to fly again – and for a return to normalcy, more broadly speaking – was only starting.

Ten years on, it’s hard to remember – even for those of us who lived in New York – just how shell-shocked we were, and just how different everything did feel, for a time. There was the smell, for one thing. People describe it in different ways, but to me the city smelt of burnt plastic for weeks. And then there was the sense of solidarity, akin to what you read about in London during the Blitz. New Yorkers were suddenly, exaggeratedly, considerate towards each other, in the street, in the subway, at their workplaces.

What’s more, we all wanted to huddle together, all the time. My memories of those days and weeks are of crammed bars, restaurants and cafés, TVs blaring the latest news as if tuned to the World Series. No one wanted to go home, because that would mean having to absorb all this alone.

If there were a Geiger counter to measure social cohesion in those days, the needle would have been stuck at the height of the scale. We were one. For the moment, there was no room for partisanship or race or class or creed. It was – dare I say it? – beautiful.

In that moment, you may recall, there was talk about how there was no going back to 9/10, about how we would no longer be a frivolous, petty society-as if the attacks had been a punishment meted out by deities upset by our sudden devotion to reality TV shows. Writing in Time shortly after the attacks, Roger Rosenblatt noted, “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony,” the period when America’s chattering classes had refused to take anything seriously.

Reed Johnson captured the zeitgeist in a Los Angeles Times story published 12 days after the attack in which he quoted Jedediah Purdy, the brilliant young author of a book assailing irony (and then a fellow at my current employer, the New America Foundation), as saying it was “amazing to see how in these past few days we – who have been so used to living with our selves front and center – are suddenly all aware that a common condition comes first. We have not been flip, self-involved, needlessly sarcastic or focused on small divisions. We have been working for ways to help. All of us. That is new to us.”

It is hard in retrospect to track the erosion of this exceptional moment of solidarity and purpose. It wasn’t bound to last forever, of course, and the ensuing revelations of fraud on Wall Street and at companies like Enron and the debacle of the Iraq war left many Americans justifiably embittered. We also began to see that the so-called War on Terror would not, after all, require a massive mobilization of society a la WWII.

We have since returned to petty self-indulgence – be it in our pop culture or in our hyper-partisan politics – with a vengeance. Oh, and when we fly, we grumble at having to take our shoes off at security. In short, to cite Verlyn again, we did a pretty good job of remembering the ordinary.

Still, thank God for that. The spirit of 9/12 and the ensuing weeks might have been beautiful, but it was not our natural state, either as Americans or humans, and it’s too horrifying to contemplate what it would have taken to keep us in such a state of empathetic solidarity for long. Who we were on 9/10 is who we are today, and who we were on 9/12 is almost impossible to reconstruct in our own minds.

But back to the day itself, and my second surreal memory of Times Square. It was late at night as I crossed Broadway again, and, this time, for the only time in my life, I had all of Times Square to myself. No tourists were milling about; no theater-goers; no late-night revelers; no harried lawyers or accountants rushing to catch their train home. The iconic heart of the city was deserted.

Only when I walked up to 45th Street did I realize there was another human out and about, an enterprising immigrant who’d set up a display of touristy pictures to hawk to non-existent pedestrians. They were watercolors of the Twin Towers.

“I am usually located in Battery Park,” he offered by way of an explanation, if not an apology. I reflexively bought one–would even have bought two if he’d taken a credit card (that negotiation must have been my first “normal” exchange of the day), so desperate was I to preserve the image. Maybe even the moment.

Andrés Martinez is Editorial Director of Zócalo Public Square and Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy of fastfocus.

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