National Security Agency costs more than faculty of the Ivy League plus US Cultural Exchanges

After the American Century                                                                                                                     

Should the United States invest in education, cultural exchange, and international understanding, or should it take money away from such things and instead invest in spying, code-breaking, eavesdropping, and the creation of international distrust? Since 2001, the answer to that question has been to plow billions into The National Security Agency (NSA) while cutting funding for cultural programs. Since May the NSA has been much in the news, as the extent and reach of its programs has become known. Most Americans, if asked before then, probably could not have said what the initials N S A stood for, even though they were paying billions of tax dollars to support it.

The scale of the NSA's main facility at Ft. Meade, Maryland is best grasped by some comparisons. It is larger than the United Nations building and US Congress combined. It is the largest employer and the largest user of electricity in the State of Maryland. There are spaces for more than 18,000 cars in its parking lot, and the site has its own entrance from the nearby interstate highway. Do not try to use the entrance, however, as it is for NSA employees only, and you will be stopped if trying to enter the area.

There are many NSA facilities besides the buildings at Ft. Meade, both in the United States and abroad. Estimates of the number of employees vary, but apparently there are about 30,000. Being a secret organization, it is hard to get a reliable figure. The Washington Post recently wrote that there were 35,000 code breakers working for the NSA and affiliated groups at the CIA and other agencies. Whatever the number, it is clearly more than the combined faculties of the Ivy League plus MIT and CalTech. Harvard has 2100 faculty, for example. Dartmouth and Brown have fewer, Cornell has more. But the faculty for these ten elite universities are less numerous than the employees of the NSA.  Is the social, educational, and cultural value of the NSA greater than ten of the world's finest universities? The Harvard faculty has won 44 Nobel Prizes, trained generations of outstanding leaders, and graduated an international body of alumni from almost every country in the world. Such universities are a major force for progress, peace, and prosperity. They not only create knowledge; they create a global community. 

BEcause the NSA is secretive it cannot create a global community. It creates suspicion and distrust. It stimulates paranoia. It assembles enormous databases.  It listens in on the presidents of foreign countries, and has recently angered Brazil, Germany, and Mexico, to name just a few. Its staff creates encryption and de-encryption codes. They publish some articles, but their best work must be hidden from scholars, and they cannot be said to be part of or to participate in the global community of knowledge. They are paid as well as Ivy League faculty, but they do not have the same credentials. Would anyone seriously propose that the NSA's contribution to life is equal to that of one Harvard or one Yale, much less 10 such universities?

I am not arguing against the NSA, as such. But how large should it be? At what point would money be better spent elsewhere? Its value does not increase as a direct function of its size. When do diminishing returns set in? An NSA twice as large is not necessarily twice as valuable. There is an enormous new building about to open in Maryland. There is a new data center in Utah as well, and there are more facilities on the drawing board. 

The budget increases for the NSA have come at the expense of other programs, notably cultural exchanges, such as the Fulbright program, which creates strong international connections and builds understanding and trust. As the NSA has grown, such programs have shrunk or disappeared. The Mike Mansfield Fellowship program improved cultural understanding between Japan and the United States, until it was cut from $1.8 million to 0! Likewise, the Institute for International Public Policy Fellowship Program (IIPP) once offered study abroad to minority undergraduates, but it has lost all of its funding. The State Department also plans to eliminate all funding for the George J. Mitchell Scholarship. It provides postgraduate study in Ireland and Northern Ireland for 12 individuals a year. That is a small investment, but over time such programs create valuable networks of human relationships.

The largest and oldest such program, The Fulbright, has had to struggle for funding since the end of the Cold War. Yet in many nations the American contribution is matched or topped by the partner countries. Germany and Denmark, for example, put more money into their Fulbright exchanges with the US than the State Department does. American cutbacks in this case make no economic sense, for these foreign countries are funding US faculty and students to go abroad. There are more than 300,000 Fulbright Alumni from more than 150 countries, and everywhere they are a force for mutual understanding that promotes economic growth and cultural exchange. About 8,000 Fulbright awards are granted every year, with roughly 30% of the money coming from other nations or private contributions.More than 40 Fulbright alumni have won Nobel Prizes. No one from the immensely better-funded NSA has done so or ever is likely to do so, because its organization and goals are antithetical to the values that these prizes recognize.

The US government contributes about $275 million per year to Fulbright. By comparison, the 2014 budget for NSA and the like is 175 times that size. It "Provides $48.2 billion in discretionary base funding for the National Intelligence Program." This is more than the operating budgets for the ten leading universities already mentioned and all the exchange programs combined.

Instruments of "soft power" such as the Fulbright Program are being neglected or even abandoned in favor of secrecy, spying, and code-breaking. Yet the West won the Cold War in good part because its cultural life, its educational institutions, and its consumer goods were more appealing than the Soviet alternatives.  Expanding the NSA at the expense of good universities and cultural exchange is not good policy. It is time to see the NSA as just one part of a coordinated approach to better security and improved international relations. Spying cannot bring peace or prosperity. Creating vast secret agencies with no public oversight does not enhance democracy. The danger in such enterprises is that the means become the ends, that surveillance itself (and its expansion) becomes the goal.

The Meaning of Obama's Massive Phone Monitoring: Is this Telegate?

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                          

I have meditated a good deal today on the massive phone monitoring effort by the US government. This cannot simply be explained away as a legacy of the Bush years, for apparently the efforts have intensified during the Obama Administration. Here are some thoughts about what this may mean.

Practical. When millions of phone calls are being monitored every day, the sheer amount of data collected requires an enormous investment in equipment and a large staff to deal with the flood of information. Alternately, if there is not a large staff, then the information cannot be analyzed and used. Billions of dollars must be spent on this cyber defense system, and one wonders if spying on millions of people is the best way to spend this money or to make the country safe.

Anti-Terrorism as a justification. The justification for gathering all this information, and also apparently for monitoring hundreds of journalists, is the need for greater security. This sort of argument is impossible to refute, since it relies on unstated dangers and secret information that by definition the public cannot know about. The public is just supposed to trust the government receives real security benefits from the information gathered. Yet one cannot feel at ease with this situation, for it violates the basic rules of the American democratic system, which is built not on blind trust but a free press that serves as a watchdog. A government that spies on journalists and citizens does not inspire their confidence. 

The Bill of Rights. It is often said that the Constitution does not explicitly protect privacy. This is true, but the First Amendment does protect free speech (hardly encouraged by monitoring phone calls) and the Fourth Amendment specifically protects citizens against searches and seizures. Tracking phone calls, wire-tapping, and the like are arguably a form of search and a seizure of information. The fourth amendment reads in full, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Who can possibly believe that the government has defined "the place to be searched" in specific and personal terms for the millions whom they have been spying upon? I do not feel secure in "my papers and effects," which it is surely plausible to translate into today's world as secure in my digital documents and electronic communications.

Obama's Authority is eroded by these revelations.  He has weakened his presidency, and in so doing becomes a little less able to inspire the confidence of citizens or of allies. Unhappily, these revelations must be contemplated almost immediately after the public learned that the Internal Revenue Service may also have abused its powers. Time and investigations will show whether there is a pattern here, but the combination of the IRS scandal, the scandal over listening in on hundreds of journalists, and the telephone call monitoring suggests widespread arrogance in the executive branch. Given the Congressional deadlock on many issues, a weakening of the president's authority, as well as the distraction these scandals are causing, all diminishes the chances for compromises and legislative achievements.

The Bottom Line. The problems of the Obama Administration are to a considerable degree of its own making. Presidential second terms are often difficult, and this one seems to be no exception. Think of Lyndon Johnson after his re-election, when antiwar protests dogged his every step. Think of Richard Nixon's second term, engulfed by Watergate. Think of Reagan's second term, and Irangate. Think of Bill Clinton's scandal-ridden second term and the attempted impeachment. And finally, think of George W. Bush's second term, when his approval ratings sank below 25%. Since 1963, not one  president found a way to escape controversy and unpopularity in a second term. Obama unfortunately seems headed toward a similar fate. One senses that there will be more revelations, in what one might call "Telegate."