The Navy Yard and the NSA

By David K. Shipler

            With Congress locked in an ideological impasse, the U.S. government may look weak and bumbling, but it has never been more powerful in collecting personal information about Americans and foreigners—the guilty and the innocent alike. So how was it that the Navy knew less about Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis than the press was able to learn in a few hours? How come Alexis kept his Secret clearance despite police reports that he twice fired a gun, claimed to be hearing voices, and thought his brain was being manipulated by extra-low frequency radiation?

How did the Boston Marathon attackers escape detection, when one of them had been called to the FBI’s attention? And the would-be Christmas Day “underwear” bomber after his father warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria? And—given the global reach of the National Security Agency—the al-Shabab squad in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall? The answers are specific to each case, but among them is this: A dozen years after the 9/11 attacks, the government has still not learned the central lesson of that failure, which is not about amassing information but, rather, how to connect the dots among disparate points of data that have been filtered and focused. The lesson has remained unlearned partly because the indiscriminate collection accumulates unprocessed information so rapidly in such volume as to be practically useless.

Frozen Scandals and the Myth of Self-Correction

By David K. Shipler

            Perhaps it’s premature to say, but it seems likely that Edward Snowden’s enormous sacrifice will be in vain. In the pattern of recent leakers and whistle-blowers before him, his damaged life will have no compensation in the form of revised policy. Nothing will change. So it has been with the likes of Thomas Tamm, Thomas Drake, and others who didn’t go to jail as Army private Bradley Manning will, but suffered the destruction of their careers for the sake of informing an American public that basically didn’t care about the wrongdoing they exposed.

This is the phenomenon of the “frozen scandal,” as Mark Danner described it brilliantly in 2008, in The New York Review of Books:

“We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.