CNN Also Mistakes Victory for Violence

NRO's Stephen Spruiell recently noted the Washington Post's use of passively constructed leads to turn major Talibani defeats into lamentable generic violence. CNN joins in with today's story titled "Afghan fighting: Another 29 killed":

At least 29 people have been killed in the latest bloodshed in the escalating conflict in southern Afghanistan, according to the U.S.-led coalition. The coalition command in Kabul said Wednesday that 24 insurgents, four Afghan National Army soldiers and one Afghan National Police officer were killed late Tuesday in the Tarin Kowt District of Uruzgan province. This six-hour fight began "when a joint combat patrol of Afghan and coalition forces returned fire against several enemy fighters who were hiding in a compound shooting at them." The troops responded "with heavy machine gun fire and forced the attackers to retreat. Enemy fighters then attempted to reinforce with additional militants from two nearby compounds." Six Afghan soldiers and three Afghan police were wounded. Heavy fighting between troops and Taliban-aligned fighters has claimed dozens of lives in recent weeks.

In case you missed it, the real story is that a patrol of Afghan soldiers was attacked by Taliban terrorists and the Talibanis were slaughtered with minimal losses to our allies. The final highlighted paragraph refers to another battle where most of the "dozens of lives" were also our enemies. UPDATE: Spruiell compares CNN's Afghan "reporting" with the more informative style of StrategyPage (Thanks for the link).

Your Data or Your Cash!

Early last month, in keeping with my recent habit of occasional repartee with leftish bloggers, I took Can't Take it Any More to task for his hyperventilation over President Bush's so-called leak of classified information. The entire "leak" presscapade was so singularly silly I didn't comment beyond one short and sarcastic post. But my conversation with CTAM left me somewhat disturbed because he managed to both accuse President Bush and Vice President Cheney of frequently lying and abdicate responsibility for demonstrating a single instance of their prevarication:

And my apologies if I intimated that GW has lied in the past. I meant to state it clearly: GW has lied often to the American public; Dick Cheney has lied more often and more baldly; and they both continue to do so.

...

Two things I definitely do not plan to do as a blogger is 1) to engage in endless circular arguments about with fellow bloggers; and 2) to conduct endless research to back up my arguments.

Today the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson promises to resolve CTAM's dilemma with "An Easy Call: Lying", concerning the NSA's data-mining of telephone records. As James Taranto points out, this story was reported by the New York Times back in December. There's no reason to re-break the story except to once more undermine the Bush Administration, no matter the cost to national security.

To judge how thoroughly the media has confounded this issue I asked my wife, who normally does not pay close attention to politics, to summarize in one sentence her impression of today's media coverage of the NSA story. Her answer was that "the NSA is recording the conversations of American citizens", and that is exactly Robinson's conflation when he accuses the administration of having lied by denying listening to domestic telephone conversations.

So why does the NSA need this database? Phone calls within a terrorist network may exhibit distinctive pattern characteristics (or they may not, but you can't know that ahead of time). The patterns could involve duration, location, chaining, etc., and the NSA needs this data to search for them.

Pattern searches typically take one of two approaches. The first involves searching for specific patterns known in advance. For example, a grocery store chain might mine sales data to discover how often people buy milk and eggs when they also buy wine. The NSA, on the other hand, is likely searching for unknown patterns. This involves using phone records from known terrorist rings to "train" a complex computer program. The program then searches for similar sets of records in NSA's giant database. A side advantage of the database is that pre-assembling these records will speed the process of rolling up any new terrorists networks discovered in the future.

As to why the NSA's anonymous database should concern us, there are two arguments. The first is the implication of illegality on the part of the administration. Most news sources have been careful not to claim this explicitly because the NSA's actions are simply not illegal. (UPDATE: John Hindraker of Powerline discusses the legality of the NSA's program in more detail. He doesn't reach a firm conclusion that would apply in all circumstances, but summarizes the relevant statutes.) The second point of concern is that the government can easily circumvent the current anonymity of the phone records it maintains. As Robinson says, "No names are attached to the numbers. But a snoopy civilian with Internet access can match a name with a phone number, so imagine what the government can do." Or as the Post's William Arkin says:

Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent Americans, their sheer scope, the number of "transactions" being tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real time.

But these concerns amount to little more than paranoid presuppositions of government malice. Consider Robinson's worry that the NSA could easily re-link the anonymous phone numbers with names and addresses. Well, so what? If the concern is that a rogue NSA employee might do this and somehow misuse the information, then why is this more likely than a rogue phone company employee doing the same thing? If the concern is that the NSA itself might use these records in an authorized investigation, then is there any doubt the NSA could easily obtain the same information and more by other means? If Robinson is concerned this data might be used in illegal investigations without proper court orders, then our concern should be the fact of the illegal investigations, not the particular data used!

Arkin's concern seems to be the speed with which the NSA can investigate targeted individuals. But why is investigative speed a problem? If the target is innocent we would rationally want their innocence speedily determined. If the target is guilty we would rationally want them swiftly apprehended. It seems the non-anonymous income, employment, and address information we send the government each April should be far more worrisome in this respect than anonymous telephone billing records.

Another possible worry is that the NSA's pattern-matching software might wrongly spotlight, say, football-team phone-trees rather than terrorist cells. But anyone who denounces the program for this reason must also demonstrate why other such imprecise suspect searches used in law enforcement, such as those based on physical characteristics or vehicle descriptions are not similarly problematic.

If data-mining bothers you: get over it. Every major company you do business with "mines" your records to improve sales and profit margins; it's ridiculous to rule the same useful techniques out of bounds for intelligence agencies. I note with interest that many of today's hand wringers are liberals who believe we should raise taxes! To that I say--take my data, I'll keep my cash!

---

Related Washington Post stories: Phone Calls Are Just the Start; NSA Program Further Blurs Line on Privacy; Lawyer: Ex-Qwest Exec Ignored NSA Request; GOP Duo Back Hayden for CIA; Is Bush Overreaching?; Bush Defends Scope of Domestic Spying; The Right Call on Phone Records

None of the [Incumbents]

Brewster's Millions is one of those silly, B-comedies you must learn to love young, or not at all. Still, there's some ageless charm in the tale: it's been remade at least five times since young Cecil B. DeMille's original 1914 encelluloidation. In the 1985 version, "Monty" Brewster (Richard Pryor) is a minor-league baseball pitcher who discovers he's sole heir to a long-lost (white) uncle's $300 million fortune. But there's a catch: Brewster must blow $30 million in 30 days, with no tangible assets to show for the money, to inherit the full fortune.

Brewster finds some clever ways to waste the money, such as buying a rare stamp for several millions and using it for postage. But my favorite gag is when Brewster declares himself a last-minute candidate for mayor of New York City, runs television commercials around the clock in every state declaring his opponents foolish and corrupt, and adopts the campaign slogan "Vote None of the Above".

Until the United States Congress adopts term-limits, I plan to follow a slightly modified strategy and vote "None of the Incumbents". I've almost written this post a half-dozen times over the past couple of years as I've grown more and more frustrated with the legislative fecklessness of Republicans. I won't rehash their foolishness here. If you're conservative you've heard the litany; if you aren't they'd be meaningless anyway. But from steel tariffs to Medicaid to Social Security reform to agricultural subsidies to overall spending Republicans have utterly abandoned conservatism.

I was a college senior in 1994 when Republicans wrested control of the House and Senate from Democrats, and the wise words of my faculty adviser, Dr. Marvin Folkertsma, have returned to me many times since. He agreed the Republican takeover was one of the most remarkable and unexpected political events of his lifetime, but cautioned that it wouldn't change much about how Washington works. He was dead right.

I believe that time spent in Congress is in it's own way just as perceptually corrupting as being a famous actor, athlete, televangelist, or any other of the perputually dysfunctional celebrities among us. That's why I think it's a disgrace that the Republican congressman for whom I was an intern, Frank R. Wolf, recently celebrated his silver anniversary in Congress and is now the senior member of Virginia's delegation. I'd like all congressmen limited to a single term and their staffs, perquisites, and pay cut in half. Serving should constitute a huge sacrifice with no incentive for careerism at that level. Not only would this reduce the direct attraction of public office to candidates motivated by self-interest, it would reduce the value of ex-congressmen to lobbyists (there'd be a lot more ex's with a lot fewer connections) and thus the indirect attractions of public office as well.

What finally brought me to this point? The oil price gouging legislation and demagoguery were the last straw. Republican leaders are spouting rhetoric that undermines the very foundation of American prosperity and fosters economic ignorance--already an overly plentiful commodity. All that distinguishes our economic policies from those of the degenerating powers of Europe are a few population points of economic simpletons; cultivate a few million more such larcenists and we'll slip to the level of a South American banana republic like Bolivia or Venezuela.

Each previous time I've begun this post Democratic leaders immediately did or said something so childish and irresponsible that I changed my mind and decided voting against Republicans wasn't worth the chance of Democratic rule. Not this time. I've now realize it's time to "reload" and try again with a new Republican majority a few terms down the road. That's why I'll be doing my best to see that Republicans lose both houses of Congress in 2006. That's why I'll no longer financially support the Republican party, and why I'll only support Republican challengers, not incumbents in congressional elections.