An “experienced analyst” at the National Security Agency ran an illegal surveillance project that involved “unauthorized targeting and collection of private communications of people or organizations in the US.” The agency’s inspector general concluded that the analyst “acted with reckless disregard”  for “numerous rules and possibly the law.”

This happened ten years ago. The inspector general’s report was issued six years ago. But the public is just now learning about it, courtesy of Bloomberg. After some intrepid Freedom of Information Act work, we can now see a highly redacted version of the IG report.

The NSA’s investigation of the analyst began about a month before American hero Edward Snowden’s public disclosures of other illegal activities on the part of the  “intelligence community.”

Snowden’s reward for exposing crime in government? Involuntary exile to Russia under threat of life imprisonment.

Snowden’s comment on the report: “Defenders of broad surveillance authorities always insist that Americans don’t have to worry because our intelligence agencies are tightly constrained by law and policy …. But time and again we’ve seen that when laws are violated and powers are abused, no one is held legally accountable.”

New government offices/officials seldom solve anything, and usually make things worse. But something obviously needs to be done about the “intelligence community’s” lawlessness. How about a single replacement for multiple agency inspectors general?

Let’s call this proposal the “Intelligence Ombudsman Office.” It would presumably need to be created by Congress. They should get to work on that ASAP.

The IOO would replace all US intelligence agencies’ inspectors general and other internal enforcement mechanisms.

It would consist of a small board — with previous “intelligence community” affiliations an absolute disqualification for appointment — and a staff of reasonable size for the job.

The IOO would have complete authority to visit any “intelligence community” site, view any “intelligence community” generated document no matter its level of classification, interview any “intelligence community” employee under oath, and present allegations of “intelligence community” crimes to grand juries.

It would also run (hopefully very secure from “intelligence community” eavesdropping) tip lines via phone, Internet, snail mail, and in person, and it would be a felony to punish or retaliate against any “intelligence community” employee for using them.

The IOO wouldn’t solve the overall problem of America’s “national security” apparatus running amok. Supporters of freedom have been fighting a rearguard action against that apparatus’s encroachments since at least as far back as the 1940s. The only real solution is to disband the NSA, CIA, NRO, et al., and salt the earth where their headquarters once stood.

But if we can’t get rid of these rogue agencies, we should at least give an external board real power to police them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, cites a previous action (Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia Univ.) to this effect:

“A private entity violates the First Amendment ‘if the government coerces or induces it to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint.”

The plaintiffs say “That is exactly what has occurred over the past several years, beginning with express and implied threats from government officials and culminating in the Biden Administration’s open and explicit censorship programs.”

The suit was filed in May, but is only now proceeding to its deposition and discovery phases.  Among those to be deposed: Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The judge in the case notes that “there are compelling reasons that suggest Dr. Fauci has acted through intermediaries, and acted on behalf of others, in procuring the social-media censorship of credible scientific opinions.”

After nearly three years of stamping unjustified  endorsements from “SCIENCE!” on pure, undiluted authoritarian political measures, Fauci will now have to explain himself under oath.

The “under oath” part is important, given Fauci’s recent campaign to shift responsibility for the political implementations of his own statements and actions, throwing others under the bus so as not to call into question his claim: “I represent science.”

Trofim Lysenko, head of the Soviet Union’s Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, imposed a “Marxist-Leninist” line on biological research. He “represented science” in the USSR, and actual scientists who disagreed with him were censored, suppressed, even imprisoned and executed.

Fortunately, we never got to the imprisonment/execution stage with the COVID-19 pandemic. What we did get was suppression of actual science and actual scientists in support of a politically driven line on everything from masking to school closures to vaccine mandates.

From his perch atop NIAID, Fauci set himself up as, effectively, America’s Lysenko.

As the highest-paid (and among the longest tenured) employee of the federal government, he lied to us — and endorsed lies to us — about the efficacy of masking and vaccination, the advisability of school closures, and numerous other issues.

He also willfully participated in efforts to discredit, and even suppress public discussion of, actual science on the subject, as when he endorsed National Institutes of Health director Frances Collins’s call for a  “devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration, in which actual scientists cited actual science on behalf of a “focused protection” strategy versus the  NIAID/NIH/CDC’s rights-violating, economically damaging, non-science-supported “zero COVID” approach. That latter approach still enjoys a (thankfully dwindling) cult following and will likely slow down our return to normalcy for years to come.

Lysenko was eventually removed from his post in disgrace. Fauci hopes to retire with honors.

Hopefully Fauci’s deposition will go a long way toward shifting the stain on science’s reputation to his own reputation and those of his co-conspirators, where it belongs. Lysenkoism is too deadly to leave undiscredited.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As the October 28 deadline to complete his acquisition of Twitter approached, Elon Musk used the platform to send an open letter to its advertisers.

Why did Musk buy Twitter? “I didn’t do it to make more money,” he writes. “I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.”

That might seem an odd approach toward the people who use Twitter to make more money, and of course there’s always the question of whether to believe him. But he sets out a vision that those advertisers should find attractive.

He reassures them that he doesn’t plan to turn the platform into “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”

Rather, he wants a platform that’s “warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences.” He wants to deliver ads that are highly relevant  (“actually content!”) rather than irrelevant (“spam”) to those preferences … so that it “strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”

He wants to serve the advertisers by serving the users. That sounds like a pretty smart business plan.

People using social media to create “silos” in which they’re only (or at least mostly) exposed to ideas they agree with isn’t something that’s going away.

Twitter’s approach of driving people away to other platforms (by banning, “shadow-banning,” etc.) over their  political views, wasn’t a smart business plan.

It intentionally took money out of Twitter’s pockets by driving advertisers to those other platforms as well — even though Twitter’s follow/block tools were up to the job of letting users “silo” themselves instead of leaving, so that advertisers could find and court them right there.

Perhaps Musk really isn’t buying Twitter “to make more money.” But he still seems to be following the late economist Milton Friedman’s dictum:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

The rule of the social media game is: Sell users to advertisers.

Sending users away when it’s possible to keep them there and expose them to relevant ads (but not irrelevant ones) fails the users, the advertisers … and the platform’s owner(s). To the extent Musk serves the first two, he also serves the last — himself.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY