Today I explore the relationship between Obama’s national security address with his surveillance policies. Many see the distance between his speech and action as proof of their cynicism about Obama and more generally about American politicians. I note that the distance can provide the grounds for the opposite of cynicism, i.e. consequential criticism. But for this to be the case, there has to be public concern, something I fear is lacking.

I am an Obama partisan, as any occasional reader of this blog surely knows. One such reader, in a response to my last post on Obama’s national security address, on Facebook declared: “your endless contortions in support of this non-entity make you look increasingly ridiculous.” He wondered: “Is this really what a ‘public intellectual’ looks like today?” I am not profoundly hurt by this. I am enjoying the one time in my life that I actually support an American political leader in power. I was an early supporter of the State Senator from the south side of Chicago and find good reasons to appreciate his leadership to this day. Through his person and his words, he has changed American identity, to the pleasure of the majority and the great displeasure to a significant minority. Obamacare is his singular accomplishment. He rationally responded to the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, despite sustained opposition. Perhaps he could have done more, but powerful forces were aligned against him. He has carefully redirected American foreign policy, cooperating with allies and the international organizations, engaging enemies, working to shift the balance between diplomacy and armed force. Obama has worked to move the center left, as I analyze carefully in Reinventing Political Culture,  and I applaud his efforts even when he has not succeeded.

That said I have been disappointed on some matters, and I want to be clear about them here. In my judgment, the surge in Afghanistan didn’t make much sense. The escalating use of drones, without clear and public guidelines, has concerned me: the killing of innocents was not recognized, as drone warfare contributed to the long history of placing civilians and non combatants at increasing risk. (In this sense, drone warfare and terrorism are two sides of the same coin.) And now this week, there is the news about “Obama’s dragnet” (as The New York Times put it), Obama’s continued and even escalating mass surveillance. Although this was very much implied in news reports before the revelations (they are not really shocking to the informed), reading the details, particularly as reported by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian,  underscores fundamental problems.

I wanted to see a “strong black line” drawn between the war on terrorism and the rule of fear after “9/11,” and the Obama era. I wanted to see national hysteria replaced by sensible policy, to bracket the governance of Bush-Cheney in the same way that McCarthyism was bracketed and criticized. The latest news underscores that in significant ways this has not happened. The line has been thinly sketched rather than clearly drawn. Some things have changed, much hasn’t.

This is why I thought Obama’s national security speech was so important. He was announcing a change in policy, moving from a “war on terror” to a struggle against terrorists, using normal law enforcement methods. This was a change I had been waiting for. But what then to make of the latest revelations?

Many have expressed outrage, with the editorial writers of The New York Times leading the way. Others see confirmation of their strong civil liberty criticisms of the President on national security, with Greenwald leading here, and a broad swath of media commentators following. I find myself in between these positions, not persuaded by either, but also crucially not convinced by those who suggest that the surveillance is no big deal and argue that it is legal and necessary. That is the reasoning which must be put to rest.

Although clearly Obama’s speech and action conflict, drawing the conclusion that he is just a hypocrite, another cynical politician administering American hegemonic power, I believe, is mistaken. This is how Greenwald responded to Obama’s national security speech, as I analyzed in my last post written before the publication of the Snowden revelations. We now know what Greenwald knew, but we didn’t. He had inside knowledge of Snowden’s leaks. Yet, as Greenwald explains his position now, I am uncomfortable. He is too sure that the only reason for secrets is to protect the prerogatives of the powerful: too fast to dismiss threats to national security.

On the other hand, I find Obama puzzling, even schizophrenic in his response to the Snowden leaks. He welcomes the debate we must have (especially now) about the need to balance security and civil liberties concerns, while he also denounces leaks and leakers who instigate discussion. He is obviously caught between his desire as a principled centrist to have all with opposing views discuss a pressing problem, and his belief that national security requires official secrets. He wants to have a full public debate, taking into account all reasonable points of view, but he worries that this may lead to giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” Disciplined governance is pitted against democratic deliberations. And there is a clear political calculation. Public opinion is more moved by security than by civil liberty concerns.

Here is the significance of his speech at the National Defense University, remembering that the speech preceded the revelation for the public, but for Obama it was the other way around. The speech was a response to the overt and covert policies that together have made “the war on terror.”

Perhaps, if we are still in a post 9/11 “war,” the argument for official secrets and escalating compromises in civil liberties is justified. But, if in fact, the war is over, as Obama announced in his speech, the continuation of war policies has to be critically appraised. Obama suggested in his speech a logical conclusion: “We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” In these terms: how can the broad, not just targeted, surveillance by the National Security Agency be justified? Obama’s speech strongly suggests that it can’t. Obama’s words provide solid grounds for opposition to his administration’s policies, including those revealed about the NSA.

I still support Obama. I hope that under public pressure he follows the logic of the position he outlined in his national security speech. But I am concerned that the pressure may not be there.

Tuesday August 10, 1948 was, as it happened, a turning point in American culture, a small moment but one of major significance. On this day, Candid Camera was first broadcast on American television. For over sixty years Candid Camera and its offspring have held a place in popular culture. The show, long hosted by Allen Funt, amused viewers by constructing situations in which unsuspecting citizens would be encouraged to act in ways that ultimately brought them some measure of public humiliation, documented by hidden cameras. These naïve marks were instructed to be good sports. “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera” became a touchstone phrase.

Perhaps the show was all in good fun; perhaps it contributed to a climate of distrust whereby citizens thought twice about helping strangers. Still as long as the show remained in its niche on television it attracted little public concern and less disapproval. Candid Camera was, one might suggest, beneath contempt. What happened for sure is that in time the use of hidden cameras has mutated. CCTV (closed circuit television) cameras; the tracking of citizens by governments and corporations, is so endemic to the modern polis, it has  become unremarkable. Surveillance is not merely an obscure commentary by Jeremy Bentham or Michel Foucault, but a reality of which we instruct our children. These cameras are treated as fundamental to security. And perhaps they are.

Technology has its way with us. As cameras have become more portable and as video has become more viral, the hidden camera has become an essential tool of the political provocateur. At one point both law enforcers and investigative journalists (think Mike Wallace) relied on hidden cameras to catch the bad guys engaging in despicable acts. The scenes made for effective prosecutions and mighty television.

But today the offspring of the old show have run amok, shaking American politics. Hidden cameras are everywhere. And they are used in a fashion that is quite different from the civic-mindedness of the journalists of 60 Minutes. Today, secret puppet masters are not inclined to trap their targets in illegality, but rather to provoke discrediting humiliation, merging S&M with MTV. And, sad to say, it works.

As with many innovations, these tricks are bipartisan, even if the cunning Funts are not. Unlike Candid Camera, these tricksters are directly dangerous to our commitment to democratic openness. They aim to annoy and discredit without prior evidence that provocation is warranted. They place people on their guard and off their game. As the penumbra of the Watergate scandal reminds us – along with the pranks of Dick Tuck on the liberal side of the ledger – dirty tricks are not a novelty of the new millennium. But what was once an occasional localized annoyance has been replaced with the contagion of phony meetings and politically motivated prank calls. Puerile hoaxers approach politicians or agency employees sweet-talking them in common cause to say something that they had no intention of saying. Often the embarrassment results from a desire to go along, not recognizing that agreeing with a bonehead can be grounds for termination.

The poster child for Candid Camera politics is the conservative gadfly, James O’Keefe, who as a student at Rutgers University once attempted to have Lucky Charms banned from the cafeteria because of their offensiveness to Irish Americans. That was cute, I admit. But it was much less cute when he secretly filmed workers at Planned Parenthood giving abortion advice to underage women, and ACORN employees helping pimps. Most recently, by pretending to represent an Arab-American charity, his crew encouraged an NPR senior Vice President for Fundraising to reveal left-wing bias; a viral record that brought both NPR’s VP and its CEO to their knees. We have neocons, paleocons, and now a Videocon. O’Keefe’s targets were hardly criminals, but his films had toxic effects.

The left has a little catching up to do, but Ian Murphy, of the website the Buffalo Beast, attempted to even the score by pretending to be conservative billionaire David Koch. In a phony phone call with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker the two chatted in a most amiable fashion, while Walker revealed his hard right preferences.

The problem is not that O’Keefe and Murphy did not get the “goods.” The problem is that they did. Through their duplicity, they revealed private and discrediting moments. But the real danger is how the profusion of what we might label YouTublicity will shape openness in our culture. As hidden camera deceit multiplies, we will be more cautious in our social relations, more willing to erect barriers preventing contact with strangers, and more likely to demand credentials. I think we already have enough gatekeepers separating citizens and public servants. Do we need more? Candid Camera politics can amuse or rile us, but should this proliferation continue, it is certain that in the end the joke will be on us.

This is the first of a series of posts by Daniel Dayan exploring the significance of WikiLeaks.

Is WikiLeaks a form of spying? Transferring information to an alien power can induce harm. This is why spying constitutes a crime. In the case of WikiLeaks, the transfer concerns hundreds thousands of documents.  The recipients include hundreds of countries, some of which are openly hostile. In a way WikiLeaks is a gigantic spying operation with a gigantic  number of potential users. Yet, is it really “spying?”

Spying (in its classical form ) involves a specific sponsor in need of specific information to be used for a specific purpose, and obtained from an invisible provider.  WikiLeaks “spies” eagerly seek to be identified (Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief,  has been voted Le Monde’s “man of the year”). Information covers every possible domain, and there is no privileged recipient. Anyone qualifies as a potential beneficiary of Wiki-largesses and most of those who gain access to the leaked information have no use for it. Spying has become a stage performance.

On 9/11 a group of Latin American architects hailed the destruction of The Twin Towers as a sublime event. The pleasure of seeing Rome burning had been made available for the man of the street. It was –suggested the builders – a democratization of Neronism.  In a way, WikiLeaks, could also be described as a democratization of spying.  It offers a form of  “public spying.” Distinct from mere spying (a pragmatic activity), it proposes “spying as a gesture.”  This gesture concerns other gestures. What WikiLeaks discloses is less (already available) facts than the tone in which they are expressed.

Content or gestures?

If the Assange leaks reveal nothing that we did not know already, what counts is less their  propositional content than the enacted speech acts.  The vocabulary of WikiLeaks gestures starts with the noble gestures of war.  Many commentators tell the WikiLeaks saga in military terms. For the Umberto Eco, it is a“ blow:” “To think that a mere hacker could access the best kept secrets  of the world’s most powerful states is in fact a considerable blow to the state department.”  For David Brooks it is a declaration of war: “the group celebrated the release of internal State Department documents with a triumphalist statement claiming that the documents expose the corruption, hypocrisy and venality of U.S. diplomats.”

The journalism of investigation, the journalism of  disclosure, and the journalism of intrusion

By inflicting enforced visibility, WikiLeaks adopts a family of gestures that characterize contemporary trends in journalism.  In a way WikiLeaks is “investigative journalism” pushed one step further. Yet “investigative journalism” is a misnomer, since, in principle, every sort of journalism should involve investigation.  If sources and facts were not checked, journalism would be no more than gossip or propaganda.  The real name for what is usually called “the journalism of investigation” should be the “journalism of disclosure.”  In a way, then, WikiLeaks “enforced visibility” is a new step in the journalism of disclosure.

Like a journalism of disclosure, it displays a paradoxical virtue. WikiLeaks can cause a scandal without revealing anything new.  The journalism of disclosure, can astonishingly survive without disclosing anything at all. At that point it turns into a journalism of mere intrusion. “Intrusive journalism” may wish to become a journalism of investigation, a journalism of denunciation. Yet, the process fails because the offered revelation just doesn’t occur. What is left, is the trappings of denunciation; the denouncing gesture without an actual content.

Thus Michael Moore bursts into the building of a large corporation, finds no one to challenge, and harangues a closed door.  Or, to take a French example, Sarkozy is being filmed, without knowing it while he awaits the beginning of an interview to be aired  on channel FR 3. Sarkozy is waiting for his turn to get on the air; he exchanges small talk with people around him, muses about new subjects for TV shows.  The video is mildly boring. Apart from its intrusive nature (and the dogma of Sarkozy’s detestability), it reveals nothing of interest. All it has to offer is the gesture of filming someone who is not aware of being filmed.  Yet the video turns into a trophy circulating on websites.   It reveals nothing about Sarkozy, but says a lot about  the use of visibility, about a new form of “surveillance” that denies the president the right to a “back region.”  All it really displays is its own intrusive nature.  What is mostly interesting about this example of “intrusive journalism,” is that it is has provoked heated controversies, and turned the cameraman who recorded the non-event into a hero. Like Assange, this hero is a crusader for  a new visibility ( which I plan to address in future posts), a “transparentizer.”