Sure, but that’s a spurious objection. Almost any imaginable plan for interfering with the enemy (whatever enemy, in whatever context), even one that is wildly successful, will eventually cease to be successful, because the enemy will eventually learn to counteract it. So nothing is effective “long-term”. That doesn’t mean we should never do anything.
There are plenty of perfectly valid criticisms to be leveled against this plan (assuming it’s actually a plan, as opposed to just some-random-idea-that-was-brainstormed-and-written-down-and-now-we’re-making-fun-of-it-as-if-the-NSA-really-spent-years-of-effort-on-it). But “it might work a few times but then not more than that” isn’t one of them. You know what you call a plan that works a few times? A plan that WORKS.
In fairness, the main argument I can imagine FOR this plan is that it could be ridiculously cheap and easy. If you already had a bunch of infrastructure set up to hack AQ leader’s computers (and, unlike all the domestic spying issues, this is something that the NSA sure as heck SHOULD have), and you find some porn, there’s at least some possibility that you’d get a relatively large bang for the buck by figuring out the right way to release it. So Bad-AQ-leader is living holed up in a cave in some very inaccessible part of Pakistan. We COULD plan a multi-million dollar Zero Dark Thirty style raid on him which risks losing US soldiers, killing innocents, and pissing off our nominal allies. Or we could attempt to render him ineffectual by revealing that he likes kiddie porn. It PROBABLY won’t work. But it costs almost nothing and has very little risk. I mean, sure, why the heck not?
I think we’ve gone too far down the Al Qaeda rabbit hole here- or at least I should’ve stressed that that’s not who this is about. If you read the article the OP linked to, you can see the NSA was talking about discrediting people with links to radical Islam (not terrorism) or anti-U.S. views in the hope that this would damage radical Islam in a general way. So they weren’t looking at taking down Al Qaeda through porn leaks- they were talking about spying on people who have the wrong opinions and then leaking what they’d found to discredit them.
This is feels more and more like a strawman argument. Nobody said that nothing is worth doing unless it works forever. The argument is that this barely seems like it would do anything at all even under the most optimistic scenario.
That’s too simplistic. The real answer depends on the circumstance: is the plan worth the cost? Is it the best use of your resources?
“Why the heck not” seems to be the justification for pretty much all of the spy overreach we’ve been learning about this year. That’s not good enough. And if you have all that information, shouldn’t you just spy on him and try to take down the network instead of finding creative ways to embarrass him? :rolleyes: Or kill him and then leak the kiddie porn thing. At least that way you’ve definitely done something.
Almost, not quite. They hired an actor to do the film but he had to wear a mask to look like Sukarno. Apparently it was so ridiculous that the film was never used for anything, much less given to Sukarno. And I believe the intent was not to blackmail Sukarno, but to bolster rumors in Indonesia that he was being blackmailed by a blonde who was suspected to be a KGB agent. Part of the downfall of the plot was that most Indonesians wouldn’t have thought differently of Sukarno if he was sleeping with another woman, whether it was filmed or not.
Although those in the security community have been warning about these types of operations being possible - it is really only in the last 5 years or so that some of this data is hitting a critical mass. It isn’t going to be necessary in many cases to put GPS trackers on cars anymore - as you can much more easily track a cell phone. Wiretaps? Easy - but more and more people are using text - which makes it even easier.
These one off operations are also excellent training for the more important stuff - and following these targets can lead to more important stuff as well.
You don’t really think the NSA is screening millions and billions of phone calls only to use them for military strikes - do you?
Of course not - they are replacing pages in al Qaida manuals, hacking into various control systems (don’t think that stuxnet is the only one), and they even seriously considered taking out Iraqs bank balances and such - with some keystrokes - but were afraid that it would cause a loss of confidence in the world economy (supposedly - it wasn’t that they couldn’t do it).
Imagine in your own life if someone could listen in - how they could fuck with you. CC that email you sent to bob complaining about Tom (to Tom himself). If there is someone out there causing a bunch of problems for the US - but we don’t want to kill them - it is pretty easy if you have access to his email, texts, cell phone - to seriously fuck up his life - without much effort (in many cases). Of course they are going to do that. This is just the beginning.
You don’t even need to send someone to a persons house anymore to rearrange their furniture (like the Stasi used to do)
I believe that THAT SPECIFIC OBJECTION is spurious. If we came up with a cheap and low-risk-to-American-lives plan that was likely to discredit (and thus presumably remove from leadership, and lead to some amount of chaos) two consecutive Militant Leader Guys, I think the fact that they would then wise up and we would not be able to continue to use it after that does not mean that it would not be worth doing.
Oh, I agree entirely. I strongly doubt that this is, on the balance, a good and practical plan, in most situations.
But if there were ever a situation in which this plan was greenlit, I think the main thing it would have going for it was that it was cheap and easy and very very low risk. I suspect that there are plenty of way-outside-the-box ideas that get kicked around from time to time, and maybe 1 in 100 is worth trying at all, and many of those fail, but that doesn’t mean that the fact that they were discussed automatically means that the discussers were just irresponsible nutcases.
The way it’s been presented, I think this is actually in place as a justification for gathering data. Such as “We must gather this information because it will solve a problem! fist pump”
For this purpose? I don’t stand convinced it would be very effective. My original “Long Term” has been modified in my view to Marley’s points. It probably wouldn’t do anything to harm them, and if the “Cells” concept is close to correct, then it wouldn’t harm the overall structure, either.
I think you might be treating Militant Leader Guy as more important than I am, but that’s a matter of interpretation.
That’s true. But in this case the NSA appears to have gathered data on six guys so it could discredit them if it wanted to.
No justification is required there. But this isn’t actually about Al Qaeda leaders. These were “radicals” not accused of any particular involvement in terrorism, and in some cases the NSA didn’t feel the guys were doing anything illegal- just potentially embarrassing.
I wonder how many MORE recruits Al Quaida could get if it became known that their leadership had loosened up on porn and other sexual and puritanical issues.
Lamest attempt to justify porn surfing at work, ever.
The fact is that the enemy doesn’t believe in Islam, really – note the “drink, screw, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” behavior of the 9-11 hijackers. Digging up their porn habits would have the same result as it did in the Cold War when the CIA or the KGB got some “compromising” shots of a Third World bigwig (i.e. “Can I have a dozen wallet-size copies of this one… and this one… and can you print a couple eight-by-ten glossies of that one?”)
When has it ever been difficult to get people to do that? Ardent feminists had no problem excusing Clinton for using an intern as his personal humidor. Ardent deficit hawks had no problem excusing Bush for spending like a drunken sailor.
