Perhaps it would be of interest to the ongoing discussion about NSA accumulation of phone use metadata to see how some math gets mixed with metadata in a relatively simple universe. Professor Kieran Healy does just that (found via memeorandum) using a database of 256 names of socially active Bostonians from 1775. Based only on identification of individuals with seven suspected subversive groups,
Prof. Healy is able to use three mathematical tools to identify a particular “person of interest” … Paul Revere … as someone that the government might want to monitor very closely. As it turns out, this would have been correct; Revere was not an independent ringleader of the various revolutionary groups but he was well-connected with nearly everyone from Samuel Adams to Joseph Warren to Robert Newman.
I suppose I had some inkling that modern mathematical tools are this powerful. And to some extent, I have to take Prof. Healy’s word for it both that the math has been properly applied and that the data selected is fair (if its subject matter is provocative) because the math itself is frankly beyond me. But given that demonstration, it takes little imagination to consider what immensely more powerful computers, and immensely richer data, might cook up just from seeing the fact that A communicated with B, and then B communicated with C, and so on.
Many people, myself included, are gravely worried about the privacy implications of all that we have learned in the past few days as a result of Edward Snowden‘s leak. But let me add something new to the mix: the First Amendment’s right of freedom of association. In 1958, the Supreme Court held that the state of Alabama could not compel disclosure of NAACP’s membership list, because to do so would intolerably chill the right of people to associate with one another to advocate for political change.
If Alabama’s Attorney General had access to metadata such as is already held by the Federal government, it wouldn’t have needed to have been given a copy of the list. It would have only needed to have known the names of a few suspected leaders within the group, leaders who could have been readily identified by their own public activities. From there, seeing who they contacted and who contacted those people, it wouldn’t have taken long to come up with a statistically reliable extrapolation of everyone important in the group.
In a way, I’m less uncomfortable with the NSA using search algorithms that actually probe the content of communications than I am with them conducting all this complex analysis of communications metadata, particularly after seeing how powerful that metadata is when coupled with sophisticated math and powerful computers. An algorithm that looks for content has some kind of targeting to it, some sort of goal that it’s looking for. That sort of information “destination” is something that can be evaluated and understood. And communications metadata from someone who has already been identified from other sorts of evidence — a pen register — is useful intelligence and law enforcement information that we should all want the government to have when it goes after actual bad guys.
As a matter of law, pen registers are not protected from warrantless search by the Fourth Amendment. But I don’t think we’re talking about a pen register anymore with this NSA thing. A pen register is related to a specific telephone number. The data that’s been gathered by the government since 2008 has not been limited in any way at all, as set forth on the second page of a judicial opinion which I’m frankly more upset by than the fact that the government asked for the information in the first place. It’s every phone call that’s been made or received. Every text message that’s been sent or received. Every e-mail, every tweet, every post, every communication of any kind sent over the various carriers, who are basically all of them that matter.
Remember that the government has already shown a propensity to use much more clumsy means to identify much less dangerous political adversaries. And while they’re really sorry about that (in the wake of its becoming public knowledge), it demonstrates why we ought to think carefully before we trust the government to have data like this in the first place. Maybe no law has been broken by the NSA; it did, after all, get a warrant in the FISA court.
But there ought to be a law to rein this sort of thing in, and there ought to be more critical oversight than has apparently taken place, because so much information under such tight control in the hands of so few people with so much power is a situation well-fertilized to grow into profound abuse.
One use of “there ought to be a law” that I can get behind.
Now we just need to figure out how to spin this “for the children.”
You’ve said it a couple times now, so I’m going to ask: do you mean to say that people in the IRS set out to identify political adversaries of the administration because they were adversaries, i.e. outright political persecution, or do you accept, or at least not challenge based on current evidence, that what was done was to select applications for scrutiny that was necessary under the law (some degree of scrutiny is necessary to enforce the bar against 501c4 status for groups whose primary purpose is electoral activity) using (among others) identifiers relating to groups who might be political adversaries of the administration?
“Remember that the government has already shown a propensity to use much more clumsy means to identify much less dangerous political adversaries.” You could be saying there that you think or suspect that (“to identify … political adversaries”) was the purpose of those actions – maybe the conscious and/or primary purpose thought of in those terms or maybe just a purpose. But you could also just be noting that that was, in any case, the effect. I.e., they were seeking to identify applications that merited review, and/but one thing that happened is that groups that were in fact (or perhaps?) adversaries of the administration were identified (as what?).
I can hardly see where we would say that it doesn’t matter which of those it is – which one you are saying it was, and which was in fact the case – either for the purpose of just general discussion about that matter around here, or for the purpose of your use of that example to illustrate a point about the more recent matter this post addresses.
I’d welcome a clarification.
The AP article I linked to does a pretty good job of explaining the evidence. The controversy is not whether Tea Party groups were specifically targeted. They were. The Director of the IRS has already called that targeting “inappropriate.” His agency has already offered an apology for it. There is some dispute about how far up the food chain knowledge (and thus at least tacit approval) went at any given point in time but we don’t need to go all the way up the org chart to President Obama himself for my point to be vindicated. Someone, in this case a group of someones, in the Executive Branch, had access to power and information and decided that an enterprising (and therefore rewarding) use of those things would be harassment and obstruction of the President’s political opponents BECAUSE they were the President’s political opponents. That’s abuse of executive power and that’s why there ought to be both legal and political restraints on its use.
Someone, in this case a group of someones, in the Executive Branch, had access to power and information and decided that an enterprising (and therefore rewarding) use of those things would be harassment and obstruction of the President’s political opponents BECAUSE they were the President’s political opponents.
This is not in evidence that I can see. If you can show it to me, great, but I didn’t see it in that article. The behavior can be inappropriate and be apologized for for reasons that don’t amount to that. Once the scandal broke, the only incentive was to manage the damage by admitting inappropriate action and apologizing, and that might well have been appropriate, but it doesn’t establish that conclusion.
What I saw in that article were a lot of outside people of one political perspective offering a particular interpretation of what was done, and then a few of the people directly involved saying that what was done was wrong, but also specifically denying a political motive. I saw no outside assessment from an impartial analyst – all the outside commentary was either from Republican lawmakers or Tea Party spokespeople who have been (rightly, it appears) complaining aout their treatment for years without getting a response.
I also saw an article that runs with that kind of outside analysis, and also advance the interpretive frame you are set on in its own voice, for somewhere around fifty paragraphs before coming to this bit of context in the second to last graf:
“In all, about 300 groups were singled out for additional review, Lerner said. Of those, about a quarter were singled out because they had “tea party” or “patriot” somewhere in their applications.”
Did you get that far? It’s buried pretty far down. That seems significant to me. What were the other three-quarters of the groups singled out for? The IRS might well have concluded that using political-name identifiers at all to do this work was “inappropriate,” and was perfectly happy to apologize for that given the enormity of the scandal.
Again, I don’t see clear evidence in that article for the very clear conclusion about motives in this situation that you helpfully state you are committed to. Rather, that seems like the conclusion everyone jumped to and has stuck with since the story came out. And it could be the truth. But I don’t see the evidence. If you have other evidence that would convince me of the political motive you allege to contradict the specific denials thereof (which are just as clearly on the record as the apologies for inappropriate targeting of conservative political groups, which can be inappropriate even as concurrent targeting of other groups would also be inappropriate), I’m open to seeing it.
The rise of the 501(c)(4), what I’ve always called Dark Money, had opponents from its inception. Those enemies included Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans hated the unions hiding their donor money, the Democrats hated Crossroads, they both hated the Tea Parties
The creation and migration of the (c)(4) entity began with a clean-up of the 527 system. The entire point of both 527 and (c)(4) was to hide donor identities, hence my Dark Money moniker for these shitheel incorporations.
The Swift Boaters were a 527. George Soros runs MoveOn, a 527.
IRS takes a dim view of reincorporation anyway: such moves always stir up the mud. But nobody’s ever clarified what a (c)(4) incorporation is and isn’t.
Bureaucracy doesn’t always operate with Orders from On High. The Bush43-era IRS and FEC went after some of the 527s, fining both Swift Boaters and MoveOn for violations, League of Conservation Voters, too. With that handwriting (and blood spatter) on the wall, political operators started moving to the (c)(4) incorporation — and the bureaucrats kept chasing them like so many cockroaches when the light’s turned on.
The problem isn’t the partisanship — even if we cast this in the most nefariously partisan terms — the problem is the Dark Money itself. Nobody should be giving Dark Money to political campaigns. 527, 501(c)(4), — it’s always gonna be some corporate structure, some filthy little rat hole will be dug for these bastards to hide. The Tea Parties wanted to hide their donor lists under (c)(4) rules, well, they were just the latest crop of mushrooms sprouting up on the horse turds of American politics. And yes, it was the Obama administration who went after them. But even the Bush43 government went after the Swift Boaters.
…There is always, of course, Nixon to point to to make Burt’s larger point about potential for abuse. It’s certainly a valid point.
Cracking down on the (c)(4) was well within IRS purview. It wasn’t just the Tea Parties. The mass migration from 527 to (c)(4) just happened to be Russo Marsh’s “cunning plan” to reanimate the zombie of Dark Money, to quote Blackadder. If we’re to talk about Abuse, there’s plenty of reason to say Matt Kibbe and David Koch have been abusing the system for years, as Soros and the Swift Boat scum had been abusing the 527.
Different day, different abuse. As the worthy Dr. Saunders observed about the Freaky Deakies on Parade: “Put. It. Away.”
I did get that far. In fact, I found that number pretty convincing that there was targeting going on; my presumption is that fewer than 25% of all 501(c)(4) applicants receive this level of scrutiny. Part of that impression comes from my own experience of organizing 501(c)(4) entities myself, both for groups in which I was active and for clients, and encountered little of the scrutiny described by the AP and complained of by the groups themselves. Part of that impression comes from knowing that about 8% of all tax returns get reviewed by human beings simply as a matter of the allocation of available enforcement resources by the Service itself, so I’m inferring that this is about the level of enforcement on a random basis that the Service can actually accomplish in practice.
Scrutinizing applications for tax-exempt status is an appropriate thing for the IRS to do, just as writing speeding tickets is an appropriate thing for police to do. Now, if it turned out that for every speeding ticket written to a car that had an Obama bumper sticker, three were written to cars that had Romney bumper stickers, that’s wrong even if each individual recipient of the ticket was actually speeding. That’s evidence of political targeting and selective enforcement of the law.
Were Tea Party and Patriot groups targeted for disproportionate scrutiny in their tax-exempt applications? 25% of all applicants appears to be a high ratio to me, for reasons stated above. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps there are statistics that can prove this one way or the other.
Last word in the exchange to you, Mr. Drew.
No, that’s fine. You’re admitting to a series of presumptions about the facts being what support your conclusion. That’s all I was arguing for. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable presumption or assumption that the political motive you state was what was operative; i don;t begrudge anyone taking that approach. I just want to be clear that that’s what is going on at this point.
Your previous statement I quoted read as absolute enough to me that it seemed like a fair interpretation to say that you were saying that it was proven with evidence that the motivation was as you stated it was, and that to say there was any significant probability that it was not that way is unreasonable.
Now you openly admit to the reasonability of doubt not just about the motive for the action, but about what actually occurred: “Were Tea Party and Patriot groups targeted for disproportionate scrutiny in their tax-exempt applications? 25% of all applicants appears to be a high ratio to me, for reasons stated above. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps there are statistics that can prove this one way or the other.” Your very specific claim about the very specific motive involved in that action seems to have been pulled even further off the table.
I’m entirely satisfied, thank you.
Oh, but we live in a new era!
Now that history is over, there will never again be a dissident movement that’s in the right. We can squelch with impunity.
But then, by parsing available metadata, we might easily come to the conclusion that Mickey Dolenz was actually the drummer for the Monkees.
A lot of false positives in there.