David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/06/david-brooks-and-edward-snowden.html

by msabalau • 13 years ago

136 66 13 years ago

msabalau• 13 years ago

"The press is not among the elements of civil society that Brooks lists; and yet it is the one to which Snowden turned."

Real journalists should be ashamed of "pundits" such as Brooks

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

The mind of a Savior of Humanity.

e3pi• 13 years ago

HN Poll: Are you `properly embedded in gently `gradated' authoritative structures'?

Who'd be a better friend. Choose one:

Edward Snowdan: unmediated, indeferent, catalyst `Savior of Humanity'?

David Brooks: `mediated', `deferent', genuflecting despicable toady?

WestCoastJustin• 13 years ago

It irks me a little how everyone keeps dropping the "high-school dropout" bit. If you watch the video of him speaking [1], it is readily apparent he is no flunky. At any rate, he was taken under the wing of CIA/NSA/Booz Allen, who must have seen something in him, and given a highly specialized and job specific education.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM

threeseed3• 13 years ago

Well he did flee to Hong Kong of all places. So clearly he isn't the most learned person around.

qzxt• 13 years ago

Apparently, you're the less learned one. Hong Kong was a former property of HRH and still maintains, both culturally and politically, the civic values from their predecessors. As a matter of fact, judging from what I saw last time I was over there, one could reasonably argue that they handle civil dissent much better than us here in the states, both on the protesters' side and on the government's side.

subsystem• 13 years ago

I think it's a fairly common attitude that if you just do as you're told and don't rock the boat you'll be successful. So of course it's going to be provoking that someone who doesn't fit the mold can still make a very good living.

ef4• 13 years ago

It's simple: it's an easy way to belittle him. It's part of the broad character assassination we always see when somebody tries to make waves.

How many people now hear of Julian Assange and think "he's kinda creepy and megalomaniacal?". They believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him.

GHFigs• 13 years ago

They believe that precisely because the media relentlessly worked that image into every story about him.

It's not hard to get a similar impression from his own writing and speaking, or from people that worked with him.

zachrose• 13 years ago

Or rms, perhaps?

SkyMarshal2• 13 years ago

It's simple: it's an easy way to belittle him. It's part of the broad character assassination we always see when somebody tries to make waves.

Sex scandal accusation is in the works I'm sure.

JPKab2• 13 years ago

FYI: Booz probably hired him not because they trusted him, but because he possessed a Top Secret/Secure Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) Clearance, along with experience for the CIA. People think the CIA is very selective with who they hire: they aren't. As a guy whose former company used to make me go to career fairs every now and then to man the booth in the DC area, I was shocked at how many cocky, CIA employees looking for a way to cash in their TS/SCI clearance at a contractor would show up and have AWFUL education credentials (colleges with reputations as being diploma farms with dorms, weak majors, etc). The CIA is more likely to hire someone who went to a "joke" party school with an A average than someone who went to a difficult school with a C average. I can't speak for Snowden's skills, since I never knew him. I will say this: he worked IT security for a while. The Federal Government, and particularly IC and DoD IT security has no middle class. It is made up of the teeming masses of talentless certification whores with zero coding skills and a complete lack of offensive hacking skills. They rely on their Security +, CISSPA, etc certs, which are obtained with cramming courses followed by incredibly easy (for people who are smart enough to code) tests. Then there are the "red team" folks. These are the bad asses, the small minority who often have weird, unconventional backgrounds, write books on penetration testing (Violent Python for example) and laugh their asses off at the whole joke of a security apparatus that is the CISSPA paperwork paradigm.

rW80b2• 13 years ago

Here you're wrong. The CIA and some other members of the IC are very selective in who they hire, but not in the way most top-tier companies are. The issue is applicant clearance. So if you're a genius, native-US born linguist who has lived in several Middle Easter countries, speaks Arabic, and has a honors degree from a top school, or a brilliant mathmetician/computer scientist who studied in Eastern Europe and married an Eastern European, it's relatively hard to get the level of clearance you need for the CIA, because of the way that foreign residence and/or family and friends count on your clearance questionnaire. And if you've got this background and smoked a couple of dozen joints in college, getting a clearance becomes near impossible.

On the other hand, if you're a community-college educated applicant with solid grades and military or law enforcement experience, and no foreign residencies or drug experiences and/or alcohol-related misdemeanors, you're golden. You allude to this phenomenon.

But while it relatively easy for a certain kind of applicant to get into the CIA, it's far from the truth to say that they're not selective. They're incredibly selective, and they're excluding some of the most promising candidates that apply because of their particular kind of selectivity.

Beside the loss of many highly-qualified applicants (what serious language expert hasn't lived overseas?), this is also said to create a certain culture that bears more resemblance to boot camp than to the highly-professional organization the CIA has been traditionally. Snowden alluded to this in his interview.

This is not a secret problem. In fact, there were quite a few public Senate hearings on the issue after 911. But nothing much is reported to have changed.

marshray5• 13 years ago

Surprised no one has pointed out the worst of Brooks' warped logic:

    > If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably
    > revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

and

    > He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak
    > like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter.
    > They limit debate a little more.

This is exactly like something a friend from the former Soviet Union told me a few years ago. People in the community would self-censor, and moreso censor each other by saying explicitly: "If we don't censor amongst ourselves, the central authorities will be forced to step in and impose even tighter and more strict measures than we are under now."

This goes beyond a simple fear of consequences. It's a pervasive acceptance of the aggressor's malevolence in which the victim ritualistically cowtows in order to appease it.

This is ICD-9 code 995.81 "Battered person syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome :

* The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.

* The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.

* The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

EDIT:

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome "a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors or abusers, sometimes to the point of defending them. [...] One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat."

youngerdryas2• 13 years ago

I am upvoting this for spite, and if David Brooks was battered he probably deserved it.

marshray5• 13 years ago

I'm disappointed you upvoted my comment for spite. I'd much rather have a thoughtful reply (pro or con). For the record, I respect David Brooks as a person, have found his writing to be insightful in the past, and of course do not believe he or anyone deserves to be battered.

gridmaths2• 13 years ago

Great quote ... and we are all kind of susceptible to Battered Person Syndrome, post 911, post Boston.

It takes a concerted effort to resist the feeling we are guilty : our government and military and legal systems are there to protect us.. if I'm noticed and singled out when I cross a border, for criticizing Cheney on twitter, then maybe its me.. maybe I'm out of line.

Maybe the huge embarrassment at having to take my belt off in public at TSA checkpoint was my fault.. after all, I chose to wear a belt that had a metal buckle.. I brought it upon myself.

I think this happened to David Brooks.. I think the state sponsored 'terror' scheme of putting hackers and journalists away for 10 years for acts of conscience.. has been effective in keeping Journalists in line. Speak out and you too could end up rotting in a cell.

marshray5• 13 years ago

I'm not from the Northeastern US, but it seems to me like it might not really be the old 9/11 and Boston traumas. Surveillance and harassment of reporters certainly didn't start then.

For example, in 1971 the Nixon administration broke into leak-conduit reporter Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in an attempt to obtain medical files with which to publicly discredit him.

Of course, recent administrations have pushed for and obtained laws requiring that all medical records be stored electronically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Fielding_break...

mtdewcmu2• 13 years ago

He's showing his sympathy for things liberals care about. He takes great pains to sound evenhanded. It could be because he's trying to win over liberal NY Times readers, or, it's possible that he's unaware that he's a conservative.

marshray5• 13 years ago

I really don't see this as a liberal-conservative issue.

etherael• 13 years ago

Better yet, if I recall correctly, inflicting this malaise upon malignant actors that engage in this kind of bad faith behaviour was one of the stated side effect objectives of wikileaks, by forcing their targets to close ranks and become less and less open and in touch with the real world they cripple their ability to interact and interface with that real world, and trust counterparties in conspiring and analysis of the data that they have access to in putting their plans and foreign policies into action.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but eventually, hopefully to the point that one day they just disappear into irrelevancy.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

David Brooks is a glorified typist. What the hell does he know about anything, let alone the human mind.

koops• 13 years ago

With his column David Brooks loses his title of "The Liberals' Favorite Conservative."

New title: "Betrayer of a Genuine American Hero." And I can think of worse.

jayro• 13 years ago

Brooks is the ultimate apologist for this kind of corrupt military, industrial, surveillance state crap. What a tool.

This article about Brooks (written by Greenwald and dating back to 2009) is pretty illuminating.

* David Brooks: our nation’s premier expert warrior http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/brooks_6/

spodek• 13 years ago

Anyone can write what David Brooks wrote, dodging anything of importance about the situation. Here, I'll do with David Brooks what he did with Snowden -- avoiding looking at the situation, slighting someone's character without knowing anything important. I'll just work with his Wikipedia page.

Here goes...

David Brooks sounds like an intelligent guy, but if you look at his background you see his true colors. Raised in suburban Philadelphia's ultra-wealthy Main Line, he started and has never wavered from an ultra-elite, insider status, leading to today living literally inside the Beltway, the quintessential system man, his status-quo "opinions" on every issue a foregone conclusion.

His intelligence sadly belies his consistent conclusion-first-supporting-argument-second reflexive responses. What else would you expect from someone so ingrained in the establishment -- Yale, Duke, University of Chicago, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. This man may have never said a single word to someone who didn't know where their next meal might come from, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil with a creme fraiche brulee.

This nation could use discussion of important issues, debate, thoughtful exchange. He delivers rubber stamp answers. We as a nation lose out. While he can't single-handedly deserve credit for our slide into partisan bickering and bureaucracy, he proudly contributes more than his share. And why not, with lucrative speaking fees and book options paving his way.

If you want a pundit to unthinkingly deliver a preconceived notion supporting keeping things the way they are, David Brooks is your man. Sadly, if you want thoughtful consideration of complex issues, he'll stand in the way of whoever would deliver.

---------------

There, how was that? Can I have a job as the knee-jerk conservative guy at the New York Times now?

nnethercote• 13 years ago

I think you've actually described David Brooks pretty accurately.

lukifer2• 13 years ago

I think that's the point: ad hominem attacks are unhelpful even when they accurate. Snowden's character and motivations should not figure into the broader debate at all.

a5seo• 13 years ago

Lest we forget, Reason nailed Brooks already: "Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail."

http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/22/the-simpletons

jckt3• 13 years ago

Why did the NYT hire him? Is it so that they maintain some "balance" in their opinion pieces?

caseysoftware• 13 years ago

Yes, he's their token conservative.. intellectual diversity and all.

hindsightbias• 13 years ago

Well, that's a laser accurate description of Brooks, so maybe not the best example...

contingencies• 13 years ago

Cripplingly demonstrative.

fspeech• 13 years ago

You wrote amazingly well. Should be a great asset in addition to your hacking skills.

w_t_payne2• 13 years ago

Wow. Pretty good!

randlet• 13 years ago

The Rockwell painting mentioned in the article for anyone who is interested: http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/11_Western-Art/27_Popula...

gridmaths2• 13 years ago

Totally unimpressed with Brooks' character assassination piece.

This college dropout did what those at the NSA with PhDs failed to do in their responsibility to ensure that their organisation stayed within the spirit and laws of their mandate.

He did what Brooks failed to do as a journalist, ie. to draw attention to a worrying centralization of absolute power, and abuse of law.

Lets describe Benjamin Franklin, John Rockefeller, Walt Disney as high school dropouts, rather than look at what they achieved.

CleanedStar• 13 years ago

"betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed."

Actually, if you look at the Constitution, it says - "The Congress shall have power...To declare War...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions...To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia"

If the US was going to have a permanent standing army, an intelligence service monitoring its citizens and so forth, why specifically limit appropriations to two years? Why place power in Congress's hands? Why have citizen's militias repelling foreign invasions?

The US has a professional army more akin to Czarist Russia than anything the founder's imagined.

I never really thought that much about Ai Weiwei, but what he just said is right. There's really no fundamental difference between the kinds of monitoring the government of China does and what the US is doing with things like PRISM.

pradocchia• 13 years ago

Ha, that's nothing. Just wait till Friedman weighs in.

wam• 13 years ago

Brooks's entire business model is getting people to respond to what he writes, however stupid it is. "Trolling for money" (a trite observation, but there it is). It's unfortunate that even sound rebuttals like this one feed into the cycle that makes him a successful columnist.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Brooks deserved a response like this. Just looking at the very top comments voted up on the NYT:

This column reads like ... Nixon's Enemies List.
This is something right out of Nixon's secret tapes ranting about that Daniel Ellsberg fellow.
Mr. Brooks, this is one of your more bizarre commentaries.
Brook's article is nothing more than a shallow and poorly thought through character assassination
What a bizarre column.
Brooks column is the most awful piece of smear journalism I have ever read.

To be honest, I'm almost surprised the NYT ran it. I've read a lot of his columns, never thought much of them, they just seemed fairly "normal". But this one is truly just bizarre, just bizarre. I really want to know what on earth he was thinking?

grandalf2• 13 years ago

He's doing his part to help diffuse the situation. It's his show of loyalty to the powers that be. He's thought of as influential and this kind of thing is expected of him.

He won't be held accountable for this piece. He's done his duty and would never submit to any kind of rational questioning of his motives or his beliefs. I guess what it boils down to is that he's an actor.

grandalf2• 13 years ago

What I can't understand is how anyone can respect the NY Times with stuff like this being published. This guy is one of the paper's star writers and he writes this kind of thing.

It's one thing to be conservative and wish to defend atrocities committed by governments, but it's completely another to do so using the kinds of techniques Brooks employs.

I'd go so far as to say that the NY Times is complicit in the moral wrongs that it spreads propaganda to help cover up.

specialist• 13 years ago

Thank you for including the name of the pundit (David Brooks) in the link. Saves me the effort of opening link.

saosebastiao• 13 years ago

What I can't figure out is how it always takes 1000 words for David Brooks to explain a concept simple enough to convey in 10. I'm not that big of a fan of the TL;DR...but with David Brooks, you don't actually gain anything by reading the whole thing.

crusso3• 13 years ago

Is the information so grave that it’s worth betraying an oath, circumventing the established decision-making procedures, unilaterally exposing secrets that can never be reclassified?

Isn't the fact that this story has had such strong "legs" a great indication that this act of whistle blowing was justified?

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

I tend to think of this immediate reversion to ad hominem attacks as an extension of the bike-shedding impulse.

Is PRISM a good idea? Did Edward Snowden do the right thing? Where is the line between unacceptable disclosures (that should be punished severely) and, e.g., the Pentagon Papers. These are complex issues and few people are courageous enough to take a stand on them, especially under their real names. There's just too much uncertainty. I sure as hell don't know what the right answer is, on many of these questions.

But everyone feels entitled to an opinion of whether Julian Assange is "creepy", "arrogant", et cetera.

As a lesser degree of whistleblower, I went through something similar. People make all kinds of speculations about why you did what you did, and they're usually far off the mark. Granted, in my case I made some mistakes along the way. For one example, I probably should not have implored Google to "choke on a taint" at one point (if only because it distracted attention away from the valid message there) even if, on that particular issue, my indignation was justified.

People get into bike-shedding discussions about personalities and possible motivations because it's a lot easier than discussing the underlying and often more complicated issues.

ck2• 13 years ago

David Brooks is a well-known institutionalist.

This is why you cannot listen to him about when the government behaves badly.

grappler• 13 years ago

One story here is about what a “hacker” is. What the word represents, what people who identify with it value, and what role those people play in private industry, in government, and in the military/security/intelligence world.

Here on Hacker News, where most of the top stories, threads and comments are favorable to Edward Snowden, you might have the impression that there's some unspoken “hacker code” just below the surface, encompasing ideals like sharing source, promoting freedom of expression and privacy, understood by anyone whose work closely concerns the internet.

When it comes to the intelligence community, this impression would be sorely mistaken. If you are a regular on hacker news, NSA types already have a stereotype for people like you:

“Remember, folks, IT weenies are the code-clerks of the 21st century” https://twitter.com/20committee/statuses/343812020992372736

After this incident, they'll probably step up efforts to keep people who sympathize with these sorts of values away from classified information. They'll find plenty of other able candidates who don't share these values.

http://qz.com/92509/edward-snowdens-lesson-to-both-businesse...

David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden

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