Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays

Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.

Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the “violent 1910s.”

We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.

The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The “great divergence” between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period.

Wealth Disrupts

How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.

Increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes; it also results in greater numbers of wealth-holders. The “1 percent” becomes “2 percent.” Or even more. There are many more millionaires, multimillionaires and billionaires today compared with 30 years ago, as a proportion of the population.

Let’s take households worth $10 million or more (in 1995 dollars). According to the research by economist Edward Wolff, from 1983 to 2010 the number of American households worth at least $10 million grew to 350,000 from 66,000.

Rich Americans tend to be more politically active than the rest of the population. They supportcandidates who share their views and values; they sometimes run for office themselves. Yet the supply of political offices has stayed flat (there are still 100 senators and 435 representatives -- the same numbers as in 1970). In technical terms, such a situation is known as “elite overproduction.”

A related sign is the overproduction of law degrees. From the mid-1970s to 2011, according to the American Bar Association, the number of lawyers tripled to 1.2 million from 400,000. Meanwhile, the population grew by only 45 percent. Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. recently estimated that twice as many law graduates pass the bar exam as there are job openings for them. In other words, every year U.S. law schools churn out about 25,000 “surplus” lawyers, many of whom are in debt. A large number of them go to law school with an ambition to enter politics someday.

Don’t hate them for it -- they are at the mercy of the same large, impersonal social forces as the rest of us. The number of newly minted MBAs has expanded even faster than law degrees.

Lawyer Glut

So why is it important that we have a multitude of desperate law school graduates and many more politically ambitious rich than 30 years ago?

Past waves of political instability, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War, had many interlinking causes and circumstances unique to their age. But a common thread in the eras we studied was elite overproduction. The other two important elements were stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state.

by Peter Turchin, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Daniel

Trigger

The guitar—a Martin N-20 classical, serial number 242830—was a gorgeous instrument, with a warm, sweet tone and a pretty “mellow yellow” coloring. The top was made of Sitka spruce, which came from the Pacific Northwest; the back and sides were Brazilian rosewood. The fretboard and bridge were ebony from Africa, and the neck was mahogany from the Amazon basin. The brass tuning pegs came from Germany. All of these components had been gathered in the Martin guitar factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and cut, bent, and glued together, then lacquered, buffed, and polished. If the guitar had been shipped to New York or Chicago, it might have been purchased by a budding flamenco guitarist or a Segovia wannabe. Instead it was sent to a guitarist in Nashville named Shot Jackson, who repaired and sold guitars out of a shop near the Grand Ole Opry. In 1969 it was bought by a struggling country singer, a guy who had a pig farm, a failing marriage, and a crappy record deal.

Willie Nelson had a new guitar.

Forty-three years later—after some 10,000 shows, recording sessions, jam sessions, songwriting sessions, and guitar pulls, most taking place amid a haze of tobacco and reefer smoke and carried out with a particular brand of string-pounding, neck-throttling violence—the guitar looks like hell. The frets are so worn it’s a wonder any tone emerges at all. The face is covered in scars, cuts, and autographs scraped into the wood. Next to the bridge is a giant maw, a gaping hole that looks like it was created by someone swinging a hammer.

Most guitars don’t have names. This one, of course, does. Trigger has a voice and a personality, and he bears a striking resemblance to his owner. Willie’s face is lined with age and his body is bent with experience. He’s been battered by divorce, the IRS, his son Billy’s suicide, and the loss of close friends like Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and his longtime bass player Bee Spears. In the past decade, Willie has had carpal tunnel surgery on his left hand, torn a rotator cuff, and ruptured a bicep. The man of flesh and bone has a lot in common with the guitar of wire and wood.

“Trigger’s like me,” Willie said with a laugh on a cool morning last April at his ranch by the Pedernales River. “Old and beat-up.” (...)

According to legend, Roy Rogers stumbled across his famous horse back in 1938 when he was preparing to shoot a movie. The horse was a palomino named Golden Cloud. Rogers rode him, fell in love with how he handled, bought him, and then changed his name. A singing cowboy with a guitar and a gun needed a horse with a name like Trigger.

According to legend, Willie stumbled across his famous Martin guitar back in 1969, after his previous guitar had been knocked out of commission. He and his band were playing at the John T. Floore Country Store, in Helotes, Willie remembers, and at some point he laid down his Baldwin acoustic guitar in its case on the stage. “A drunk stepped on it,” Willie says. He had a couple of his guys take the guitar back to Nashville, to Shot Jackson, whom Willie had known since the early sixties.

The thing is, Willie didn’t much care about the guitar, an 800C Electric Classical, which had a thick, beefy neck. The guitar had been a promotional gift from Baldwin—a piano company—in 1968, along with a C1 amp. What Willie really liked was the sound he could get from the guitar’s pickup, a revolutionary Prismatone piezoelectronic model, made with six tiny ceramic sensors. Before the Prismatone, acoustic players like Willie had to play into a microphone, which meant they were usually drowned out by the band. The new pickup allowed him to play an acoustic guitar onstage with a band and actually be heard, especially with the C1 amp, a solid-state piece of machinery that was designed by Baldwin’s organ engineers to work with the Prismatone via a special stereo wiring system. The amp had a brushed aluminum top and five colorful “Supersound” tone buttons—red, lime green, yellow, blue, and purple—that evoked the groovy sixties. “Hear it,” promised the Baldwin catalog, “and you might think it’s a happening!”

Jackson couldn’t salvage the guitar, he told Willie over the phone. It was too busted up. Jackson did mention, though, that he had a Martin N-20 on hand and could transfer the pickup into it. Martin was the premier maker of steel-stringed guitars; the N-20, which had been introduced the year before, was a nylon-stringed, or gut-string, guitar, an attempt by Martin to make inroads in the Spanish-style market. Willie liked gut-string guitars well enough, but he was a little uncomfortable buying one over the phone. “Is it any good?” he asked. “Well, Martins are known for good guitars,” Jackson responded. Willie asked the price. Seven hundred and fifty dollars, Jackson told him. “I had just bought a roping horse for seven hundred and fifty dollars,” Willie recalls. “So I said, ‘That’s pretty cool.’ ” He bought it, sight unseen.

by Michael Hall, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Wyatt McSpadden

Al Capone’s jail cell at the Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Richard Hamilton. Swingeing London III, 1972.
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Cannibal Habits of the Common Tourist

The most iconic moment in Cannibal Tours, Dennis O'Rourke's 1988 documentary about the absurdities of global tourism, comes 40 minutes into the film, when European and American tourists visit a village along Papua New Guinea's once-isolated Sepik River. As the sweaty white folks wander around snapping photos and haggling for souvenirs, a handsome young Papuan tribesman speaks to an offscreen interviewer, earnestly explaining what he thinks of the outsiders.

"When the tourists come to our village, we are friendly towards them," he says, his words translated in the subtitles. "They like to see all the things in the village. We accept them here." While he's saying this, an elderly German woman wearing high-hitched khaki trousers and silver horn-rimmed spectacles creeps into the background, fumbles with the settings on her camera, and — oblivious to what the tribesman is saying — snaps a picture of him before scuttling back out of the frame. Upon initial viewing, this interaction seems to perfectly encapsulate the strained guest-host dynamic portrayed in Cannibal Tours: even as the Sepik native takes pains to affirm the humanity of tourists, the tourist's first instinct is to treat him like scenery.

Though Cannibal Tours was never meant to be taken as comedy, its more memorable scenes have a cringe-inducing quality that calls to mind the delicious discomfort of watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Office. In basic narrative terms, the documentary depicts a meandering series of interactions between luxury liner tourists and the Papuans who live in various Sepik River villages. What the film lacks in plot arc, however, it makes up for in awkward tension as it probes the mutual suspicion and misunderstanding that arises when wealthy outsiders visit once-primitive communities in a far-flung corner of the world.

In a typical scene, a tourist draped in expensive camera gear and boutique safari-wear might fawn over a woven-grass handicraft, ponder aloud what it's supposed to be ("Is that a dress, or is it a bag?"), inquire in half-shouted English about its price, express surprise at how cheap it is, then — often at the prodding of other tourists — ask for an even cheaper "second price." One American couple, theatrical in their condescension, offers cigarettes in exchange for a discounted souvenir; another American, a self-declared "exponent of primitive art," natters on about how tourists are ruining local craft traditions, seemingly unaware of the irony as she shops for crafts with her fellow tourists. Villagers, interviewed individually by the filmmaker, react to the presence of the tourists with a mix of befuddlement and frustration. "I want them to pay me without any fuss," one gray-bearded man says. "When I go to those big shops in the town, I can't buy things for 'second price.' [...] I must pay the first price for a shirt or trousers." In a later scene, the same elderly Papuan admits he can't understand why the tourists come there to begin with. "We sit here confused," he says, "while they take pictures of everything." (...)

Should we find it easy to recognize how the tourists' camera lenses dehumanize the Papuans, however, it's just as easy to overlook how O'Rourke's lens has a way of dehumanizing the tourists. For example: in the iconic shot that seems to sum up the entire film — a horn-rimmed tourist barging in to snap a picture of a young Papuan, mid-interview — one might eventually come to wonder just what the elderly German lady was trying to document. Why would this woman want a picture of the tribeman's back? Upon reflection, one is liable to conclude that she wasn't merely out to get a picture of the Papuan from behind; she was photographing the photographer — O'Rourke — as he conducted the interiew.

by Rolf Potts, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: YouTube, h/t The Dish

Paul Klee, Comedy 1921
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Tom Hussy, Reflections
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The Nature of David Suzuki

David Suzuki has finally realized that there are some hills he can’t climb. Now 77 years old, dealing with gout and other indignities of age, the world’s best-known environmentalist recently traded in his mountain bike for one with an electric motor. The ride from his waterfront home in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood to his office on West 4th Avenue, isn’t very long, but it’s mostly uphill. And although it has never been enjoyable, the effort suddenly started to seem unbearable this past summer. So he sought technological assistance. “God, at my age, can’t I cheat a little?” he asks.

The small admission of defeat came just a few weeks after a much more potent reminder of where he’s headed. On July 9, Tara Cullis, his wife of 40 years, and 13 years his junior, suffered acute heart failure while swimming in the ocean off their home. She made it to shore, where someone on the beach called 911, and then called their house. Suzuki, barefoot and wearing a Yakuta, a traditional Japanese housecoat, made it to her side before the ambulance arrived. She survived, but the road to recovery has been rocky. Suzuki has drastically cut back his speaking engagements and travel. The couple has sworn off alcohol and salt. It has been a time for reflection for both of them. “The reality is that at my age, I could kick the bucket tomorrow,” says Suzuki. “Everybody goes, ‘Oh, no. You’re going to live into your 80s.’ But the reality is that I’m living in the death zone and I accept that.”

His scientific career began in the late 1950s; his media one, a decade later. Since 1979, he’s been the face of CBC’s The Nature of Things, an internationally distributed science program that’s now in its 53rd season. Suzuki’s official CV runs 17 pages. It lists dozens of academic and broadcasting awards as well as his 25 honorary degrees. Now a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, he has authored or collaborated on 50 books. In 2011, Reader’s Digest anointed him as its “most trusted Canadian.” And this October, he topped an Angus Reid poll of the country’s most admired figures, with 57 per cent of respondents giving him the thumbs up. However, lately, he seems to have been garnering more controversy than accolades. Suzuki has come under fire for his outspoken views on immigration—that Canada is at its environmental capacity, basically. On a swing through Australia in September, he drew criticism for suggesting the country’s new prime minister, Tony Abbott, is guilty of negligence and “crimes against future generations” for scrapping a carbon tax and dismantling climate change bodies. He has stepped down from the board of his eponymous foundation, uttering dark warnings about the bullying of Canadian scientists and the federal government’s attempts to marginalize environmentalists. His critics in the media have become emboldened, savaging “Saint Suzuki” for his personal life as well as his politics. (...)

For a while now, the green movement’s chief messenger has been wondering just what he and his compatriots have really accomplished.

“Environmentalism has failed,” Suzuki declared in a dark blog post in the spring of 2012. The heady victories of the 1970s and ’80s over air pollution, acid rain, and clear-cut logging are distant memories. The oil and gas industry has never been stronger, sinking ocean wells, fracking across the continent, and going full-bore on Alberta’s oil sands. Meanwhile, the fight against climate change has come to a virtual halt, as governments around the world put the economy ahead of the environment. “We’ve come to a point where things are getting worse, not better,” he said in an interview with Maclean’s. (...)

Suzuki’s strength has always been his ability to translate the world of science for the layperson, cutting through the jargon and breaking down complex ideas into digestible television bites. At the height of its popularity in the mid-1980s, The Nature of Things was drawing a weekly audience of 1.3 million, or almost 20 per cent of all Canadian viewers. And the entire series was being broadcast in 13 countries, including the U.S., with 55 more nations picking up individual episodes. That success is what made David Suzuki a trusted global brand. He still defines himself as a geneticist, but it’s been decades since he was an active researcher or has even taught in a university setting. And his role as science’s interpreter was long ago supplanted by his calling as environmental evangelist.

by Jonathon Gatehouse, McLeans | Read more:
Image: Brian Howell

Conference Chic, or, How to Dress Like an Anthropologist

Wondering what to wear to the AAAs? We’ve got you covered. For women: throw a few scarves in your suitcase, a suitable range of black clothes, a kick-ass pair of shoes or boots, and some anthropological “flair,” and you should be good to go. Men need to pack their nice jeans, a good buttoned shirt, and the pièce de résistance: a stylish jacket. Unless you’re an archaeologist. Then all you need are jeans.

Anthropologists around the world are packing for the annual American Anthropological Association meetings (“the AAAs”) being held this year in balmy Chicago from November 20-24. What, you might wonder, are they packing? What look do anthropologists go for at the AAAs where thousands of anthropologists gather each year? We’ve turned to our social media networks to find out, posting this question on Twitter and on multiple Facebook accounts to learn just what fashion choices anthropologists are making this week.

We’ve identified six categories of anthropological fashion and/or fashion concern:

• Wearing one’s fieldsite, or, the “anthropological” flair requirement.
• Looking professional, but not too formal or business-y.
• Capitalism, consumerism, & fashion for the critical anthropologist.
• Stages of one’s career: from grad student to job market to professor.
• Differences across the subdisciplines.
• Scarves. (Yes, scarves get their own category.)

Here’s what our friends and colleagues had to say about all of these: (...)

The AAAs: the one time each year where anthropologists can get dressed up in front of each other without being made fun of. Instead, as one tenured male professor shared, it’s fun to dress up for the AAAs.

Anthropologists, one now-tenured female professor was told as a grad student in the 1990s, always have good shoes. This reputation continues today, at least among anthropologists as we talk about ourselves to ourselves. As one male professor offered, “To my eyes, for the ladies, it is all about the boots/shoes. The guys, it is all about the jacket.” Finding the right jacket is key as one anthropologist lamented: “I never feel like my clothes fit the bill. I either feel overdressed (black pants and dress shirt) or underdressed (jeans and dress shirt). I am missing the perfect jacket that distinguishes those jeans and dress shirts enough to elevate me from slacker to professional.”

Despite the overwhelming response that a jacket was the “It” item among male anthropologists, there were some dissenters. One professor stated that he “leans ‘teaching casual’: jeans or cords and a collared shirt with no coffee stains. No blazer, no tie.”

No tie. It seems redundant to even mention that.

by Carole McGranahan et. al, Savage Minds | Read more:
Image: UO

Edmund Witecki, Untitled 1963
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Ray LaMontagne

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Brothers Johnson

[ed. Repost. Love this one, it always makes me feel good.]

c. 1935-39 RCA Victor Special 78 Portable Record Player| Artist: John Vassos | Manufacturing Co., Inc. , NYC | Medium: Decorative Arts and Utilitarian Objects, Metalwork | It debuted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. - Via: 1 | 2

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Life of Solitude: A Loneliness Crisis is Looming

[ed. See also: Ask Polly: Help, I'm the lonliest person in the world!]

Chronic loneliness has roots that are both internal and external, a combination of genes and social circumstance, but something is making it worse. Blame the garage-door opener, which keeps neighbours from seeing each other at the end of the day, or our fetish for roads over parks, or the bright forest of condo towers that bloom on our city’s skylines.

Or blame an increasingly self-absorbed society, as John Cacioppo does. Prof. Cacioppo, the leading authority on the health effects of loneliness, is director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. “One of the things we’ve seen is a movement away from a concern for others,” he says in a phone interview. “Economics basically says you should be concerned about your own short-term interests. There’s more division in society, more segmentation; there’s less identity with a national or global persona, but rather on the family or the individual. People aren’t as loyal to their employers, and employers are certainly not as loyal to their workers.”

Loneliness, it turns out, is as bad for your health as smoking, or being obese. The research that Prof. Cacioppo has done with colleagues also adds to the growing body of work that shows how bad loneliness can be for your health. It shows that loneliness suppresses the immune system and cardiovascular function, and increases the amount of stress hormone the body produces. It causes wear and tear on a cellular level, and impairs sleep. As he writes in his book Loneliness, “these changes in physiology are compounded in ways that may be hastening millions of people to an early grave.”

His theory, simply, is that we are social animals who function most successfully in a collective; the physical pain and degradation caused by loneliness are a kind of early-warning signal of a failure to connect, the way the pain of a cut finger tells you to fetch a Band-Aid.

A study last year from the University of California at San Francisco showed a clear link between loneliness and serious heart problems and early death in the elderly. Seniors in the study who identified themselves as lonely had a 59-per-cent greater chance of health problems, and a 45-per-cent greater chance of early death. (...)

Ask Vancouverites what bothers them, and you’d think they might say house prices. Drugs on the street. Not being able to get into the hot new sushi joint. But when the Vancouver Foundation asked that question, it received a gobsmacking response.

“The biggest issue people had is that they felt lonely, isolated, and unconnected to their communities,” says Kevin McCort, president of the community-outreach charity. Last year, the foundation conducted a survey of almost 4,000 Vancouverites and found that one-third of those between 25 and 34 felt “alone more than they would like.” Another one-third said they have trouble making friends. Forty per cent of high-rise dwellers felt lonely, almost twice the number (22 per cent) living in detached homes. Crucially, the study found that the loneliest also reported being in poorer health and lacking trust in others.

“Social isolation just may be the greatest environmental hazard of city living,” writes Vancouver-based author Charles Montgomery in his new book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. “Worse than noise, pollution, or even crowding.” And the way we’ve built cities – suburbs with no central meeting place, prioritizing the car and the condo tower, passing restrictive zoning bylaws – has made the problem worse, he says in an interview. “If we’re concerned about happiness, then social disconnection in Canadian cities is an acute problem.”

by Elizabeth Renzetti, Globe and Mail |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How to Save Football

Is there an activity that Americans give more of their attention to and know less about than professional football? The essence of N.F.L. life is the intense weeklong process of preparation for Sunday, which takes place at the thirty-two N.F.L. team “facilities.” The New York Jets allowed me to spend more than a year with them at their team facility in Florham Park, New Jersey, while I wrote a book, but that was unusual. Most visitors to N.F.L. facilities receive only supervised tours on the order of state visits to Pyongyang. In an era of exposure, the national passion operates in almost total seclusion, apart from the televised games. Perhaps the distance gives it an allure that increases the pleasure. Or, possibly, those who watch wouldn’t like what they’d see if they got too close.

They have reason to worry. For all its present popularity, trouble has been lurking for football. Recent glimpses into the insular culture of the game have revealed bounties promised in New Orleans for injuring opponents, a tight end charged with murder in New England (he’s pleaded not guilty), and particularly abusive hazing in Miami. Most significant, a growing body of scientific evidence and investigative journalism, such as the recent PBS documentary “League of Denial,” and the book of the same title, has found that players are at risk for chronic traumatic encephalopathy—the degenerative brain disease previously more associated with boxers. For decades, the N.F.L. seemed indifferent to the consequences of head injuries, and may even have concealed evidence of the dire long-term cognitive costs of concussions while disseminating more anodyne information to players and their families. This has led to a perception that professional football is the Big Tobacco of sports, a profit-obsessed corporate entity with a callous lack of concern for the human beings who take the big hits.

As a result, many fans are torn. They love football, in part because of the human car wrecks, but they are repelled by the thought of enjoying a blood sport that brutalizes the minds and bodies of players. It used to be easy to say that the players knew what they were getting themselves into. Now that this has proven untrue, at least for the veterans, it’s more challenging for Americans to take uncomplicated pleasure in watching young men, many of whom grew up in poverty, play a sport they’re not sure they want their own sons to pursue. It has been the American way to tolerate our moral misgivings about the public institutions that define us, from Southern segregation to drunk driving. Then, sometimes abruptly, the queasy reservations veer into disgust and rejection. What can the N.F.L. do, going forward, to make fans feel better about the sport?

by Nicholas Dawidoff, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Mike Ehrmann/Getty

Jessica Bell
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N.S.A. Report Outlined Goals for More Power

[ed. This is a watershed moment for American democracy (and democracy everywhere). Do you want a surveillance/police state to feel safe? If so, you've got one. So do you feel safer? (and if the answer is no, what more would it take?)]

Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.

In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as “the golden age of Sigint,” or signals intelligence. “The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.’s mission,” the document concluded.

Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to “revolutionize” analysis of its vast collections of data to “radically increase operational impact.”

The strategy document, provided by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, was written at a time when the agency was at the peak of its powers and the scope of its surveillance operations was still secret. Since then, Mr. Snowden’s revelations have changed the political landscape.

Prompted by a public outcry over the N.S.A.’s domestic operations, the agency’s critics in Congress have been pushing to limit, rather than expand, its ability to routinely collect the phone and email records of millions of Americans, while foreign leaders have protested reports of virtually unlimited N.S.A. surveillance overseas, even in allied nations. Several inquiries are underway in Washington; Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A.’s longest-serving director, has announced plans to retire; and the White House has offered proposals to disclose more information about the agency’s domestic surveillance activities.

The N.S.A. document, titled “Sigint Strategy 2012-2016,” does not make clear what legal or policy changes the agency might seek. The N.S.A.’s powers are determined variously by Congress, executive orders and the nation’s secret intelligence court, and its operations are governed by layers of regulations. While asserting that the agency’s “culture of compliance” would not be compromised, N.S.A. officials argued that they needed more flexibility, according to the paper.

Senior intelligence officials, responding to questions about the document, said that the N.S.A. believed that legal impediments limited its ability to conduct surveillance of terrorism suspects inside the United States. (...)

Intent on unlocking the secrets of adversaries, the paper underscores the agency’s long-term goal of being able to collect virtually everything available in the digital world. To achieve that objective, the paper suggests that the N.S.A. plans to gain greater access, in a variety of ways, to the infrastructure of the world’s telecommunications networks.

Reports based on other documents previously leaked by Mr. Snowden showed that the N.S.A. has infiltrated the cable links to Google and Yahoo data centers around the world, leading to protests from company executives and a growing backlash against the N.S.A. in Silicon Valley.

Yet the paper also shows how the agency believes it can influence and shape trends in high-tech industries in other ways to suit its needs. One of the agency’s goals is to “continue to invest in the industrial base and drive the state of the art for high performance computing to maintain pre-eminent cryptanalytic capability for the nation.” The paper added that the N.S.A. must seek to “identify new access, collection and exploitation methods by leveraging global business trends in data and communications services.”

And it wants to find ways to combine all of its technical tools to enhance its surveillance powers. The N.S.A. will seek to integrate its “capabilities to reach previously inaccessible targets in support of exploitation, cyberdefense and cyberoperations,” the paper stated.

by James Risen and Laura Poitras, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via:

Liu Wen By Mario Testino For Vogue China
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