The Hypocrisy Gap
Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have a hilariously subversive essay that they have somehow published with Foreign Affairs called “The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks.” Here’s their key point:
The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermineWashington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government’s
public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook Washington’s covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their own.
Few U.S. officials think of their ability to act hypocritically as a key strategic resource. Indeed, one of the reasons American hypocrisy is so effective is that it stems from sincerity: most U.S. politicians do not recognize just how two-faced their country is. Yet as the United States finds itself less able to deny the gaps between its actions and its words, it will face increasingly difficult choices — and may ultimately be compelled to start practicing what it preaches.
This is refreshing: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has changed his mind about Edward Snowden, admitting he was wrong to call him a “traitor.”
The White House has fired Jofi Joseph, a national security council staffer. According to the Daily Beast, he was the “mystery Tweeter” behind the @natsecwonk account, which was openly and viciously critical of many top White House officials.
It appears he was also behind another, racier account, according to Politico: @dchobbyist.
Big Brother and Big Money: Why has President Obama turned out to be such a strong ally of the American national security state? Working from a new analysis of 2012 campaign finance data, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen of the Roosevelt Institute argue that the answer is “follow the money.” While Obama received less overall in campaign contributions from business, they report that he “ran especially strongly” in support from telecoms, software, web manufacturing, electronics, computer and the defense industry, which they call the “industries of the future.”
Conjuring up the historical echoes of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a powerful video explaining why the NSA surveillance scandal should alarm all Americans, and in support of Saturday’s StopWatching.us rally in DC.
Meanwhile, back in HealthCare.gov:
Clay Johnson has an oped in the Daily News explaining that the real problem with HealthCare.gov isn’t the bugs, it’s the regulation setting up its procurement: It’s 6,500 pages long. “Any citizen who truly
wants a government that spends money wisely and delivers good service ought to be more concerned with the fact that there’s a new digital divide in America: the one between the public sector and the private.”
Lean start-up guru Eric Ries is one of many signing onto this petition to WhiteHouse.gov to open-source the HealthCare.gov software code “so we may help fix any found issues.” Paul Ford made the more general point a week ago in BloombergBusinessWeek.
Sally Kohn tells her fans on FoxNews.com that “I was an ObamaCare guinea pig,” and that despite some challenges signing up online, she found a much better plan for her family that will save her more than $5,400 a year. “Even with the slow and sticky website, I spent a total of four hours” online, she writes.
The GOP says this is the actual transcript of a conversation in the “online chat help” section of HealthCare.gov. “Imagine you are stuck in this site’s rush hour traffic. You still exist. You just aren’t going anywhere,” says the “helper” at one point. They’re converted part of it into an amusing (or painful, depending on your perspective) video, available at the same link.
Ezekiel Emanuel, the doctor brother of Rahm and a former adviser to the White House on health care, takes to the New York Times op-ed page to offer his remedies for what ails HealthCare.gov. My favorite: “There should be twice-weekly briefings that feature honest and complete descriptions of both the problems and solutions that the tech team is working on — in all the gory detail. We need to hear from those “best and brightest” experts whom President Obama has enlisted in the tech surge. Transparency is the only way to convince the American people that the situation is under control.”
So far, one-in-seven Americans have visited a health care exchange website, reports Pew, and of those about three-in-ten are uninsured. Another quarter of the public says they intend to visit an exchange soon, with a big chunk of those saying they are uninsured.
About those “five million lines of software code [that] may need to be rewritten” to fix HealthCare.gov? On Slate, David Auerbach points out the innumeracy and digital illiteracy behind that statement.
More on the “technology surge” from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: Acting Director of OMB Jeffrey Zients is providing “management advice and counsel to the project,” she writes in a post on HHS.gov.
In other news around the web:
If you weren’t at the Online News Association’s annual conference, this write-up by Kathy Gill will give you the highlights on what you missed.
Can journalism keep up in the digital age? In Searchlights and Sunglasses: Field notes from the digital age of journalism, a new free digital book by Eric Newton, the longtime Knight Foundation grantmaker offers his answers to that question Close readers of the Knight blog will notice that much of the book is drawn from Newton’s posts there over the years, plus speeches his given, but he’s updated throughout. And the whole thing is rendered in HTML5 and includes a “learning layer” for educators to use.
Senator-elect Cory Booker has named Louisa Terrell as his chief-of-staff. She is currently director for public policy for Facebook, and before that was a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs.
“Drones Over Haiti” is a quirky and challenging blog post by award-wnning author Amy Wilentz, expressing her concerns that current mapping projects being promoted by Open Street Maps, the International Organization for Migration, and drone-maker senseFly may have less to do with helping ordinary Haitians and more to do with making the country’s natural resources easier to plunder by multinational mining companies.
Iranians may not be able to use Facebook, unlike their leaders, but that fact didn’t stop a hybrid movement of Iranians and foreign allies from pressuring the government into releasing a prominent human rights activist, in part by flooding the Facebook wall of Iran’s foreign minister. CBS News has the details.
CNN is honoring Code for America founder Jen Pahlka (and PDM friend!) as one of its ten favorite “Thinkers” in science and technology.