Day: November 3, 2013
Belgrade and Pristina need to work together
Radio Free Europe tells me the Kosovo municipal election went badly today in the north: voting materials were destroyed at three polling stations, turnout was low and intimidation was high, with one Serb candidate attacked yesterday. The observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) withdrew and polls closed early.
This is too bad, even if unsurprising. Assignment of responsibility for what went wrong will have to await investigations of what happened, but it is clear enough that both Belgrade and Pristina have a problem. The organized criminal groups in northern Kosovo, supported by nationalist hardliners and elements in the Serbian security services, are able to defy both Belgrade’s desire to see smooth implementation of the EU-brokered April agreement as well as Pristina’s desire to see its institutions recognized as the only legitimate ones in the northern part of the country. Read more
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Opening the barn doors
Tucked away towards the end of today’s mammoth New York Times article on the National Security Agency’s foreign eavesdropping, Scott Shane turns to the main policy issues:
Joel F. Brenner, the agency’s former inspector general, says much of the criticism is unfair, reflecting a naïveté about the realpolitik of spying. “The agency is being browbeaten for doing too well the things it’s supposed to do,” he said.
But Mr. Brenner added that he believes “technology has outrun policy” at the N.S.A., and that in an era in which spying may well be exposed, “routine targeting of close allies is bad politics and is foolish.”
Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.
“I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
Whatever reforms may come, Bobby R. Inman, who weathered his own turbulent period as N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, offers his hyper-secret former agency a radical suggestion for right now. “My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself,” he said. “It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But bad news doesn’t get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild.”
Is NSA simply doing its job? Isn’t that job vital to American diplomacy? Has it gone too far in monitoring foreign leaders? Does it represent a threat to civil liberties at home? Should the Administration simply make public what NSA does so that citizens (including members of Congress) can make up their own minds about it? Read more
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