System Failures

The most important function of government is to protect its citizens from harm and its primary function is to keep them from physical harm inflicted by foreign invaders and from other citizens.   We bind together and give up a little bit of freedom for this purpose.   And as I argued in my blog post on May 23 of last year (http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2017/05/our-children.html), no other function is greater than the protection of our children.  Children represent the future of our society (and a principal reason for discord in the EU since they aren’t having any).   The fundamental tensions in our society revolve around what protection means and the limits to the power of the State to exercise those powers, particularly under the 2^nd Amendment and the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution.  The proliferation of firearms and the advance of technology have created new issues under those provisions.   Additionally, the growth and bureaucratization of our federal government have made it so that our security is reliant on complex systems and processes to keep us safe.  These systems and processes need to be rigorous and as free of political taint as possible.

They are failing us, massively.

Last month, a false alarm in Hawaii sent people scurrying in terror as a low level government employee “pushed the wrong button” at closing time, making the island’s inhabitants believe that a North Korean missile attack was imminent.  People screamed, hid children in sewers and braced for what they thought was a nuclear attack.  It took 48 minutes to broadcast an all clear signal.  Imagine the horror for those long minutes that these people thought might be their last on earth.  The employee in question has been fired and “had a history of confusing drill and real-world events.”   The FCC has so far ascertained that the Hawaii Emergency Management system had “inadequate safeguards” and had no way of dealing with a false alarm.  Later, the governor said that he couldn’t sent out the all-clear because he couldn’t remember his Twitter password.   This pathetic Keystone Kops charade is unacceptable in a world in which multiple threats face us.  With North Korea’s presumed missile capability, Hawaii is one of the most vulnerable places in the U.S. and that system needs to perform flawlessly.  The U.S. has been under nuclear threat since 1957 and North Korea first tested in 2006.   The Hawaii failure was at two levels.  First, the system permitted a low level, poor performing employee to set off a false alarm.  That failure was compounded by the failure of the governor to give an “all clear” signal for more than 45 minutes.   In a matter that represent the most fundamental duty to protect—to accurately warn against a devastating existential threat--- government showed that it failed.

The second failure has arisen from the mechanisms that are also specially designed to protect us—the F.B.I. and the FISA courts.   The FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts were created in 1978 to approve wiretaps and data collection for foreign surveillance, originally as a tool in the Cold War, then pivoting to the war on terrorism after 9/11.  While the facts are still unfolding, it appears that the F.B.I., with the tacit or explicit consent of Barack Obama (and likely funded by the Clinton campaign using one or more intermediaries) utilized the agency to surveil the Trump campaign and transition.  It’s pretty clear that the agents involved in procuring the background information necessary to present to the FISA court were hyperpartisan, and appeared much more interested in derailing or undermining Donald Trump than they were obtaining foreign intelligence.   And it has all the earmarks of an Obama/Clintonesque structure—pretext, plausible deniability, layering through different entities and individuals.   Make it so complex that it takes years to peel the layers and cut through the intermediaries to get to the truth.   And I remind you that Barack Obama has shown few inhibitions about using the mechanisms of the State to go after his political enemies.  He was able to become senator only because his campaign somehow obtained access to the sealed divorce court records of Jack Ryan, and publicized them, effectively derailing his campaign.

FISA Courts, like the I.R.S. and the F.B.I. should be sacred institutions, free of partisanship as possible.  For all the caterwauling about Trump’s “totalitarian inclinations,”  it is the political use of the policing arms of the State that defines a totalitarian regime (see China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela).  The F.B.I. is now taking on the smell and taint of a 3^rd world surveillance state.   Once it heads down that path, its credibility as a protecting agency is lost.  By entangling itself in the political process, the F.B.I. has systemically failed us.

To make matters even worse, the F.B.I. came under fire by the New York Times for its slowness in uncovering the devious deeds of Lawrence Nassar, who molested hundreds of young girls.  The Times article said that from the time he first came under scrutiny by the F.B.I. to the time he was exposed, at least 40 additional girls had been molested by this beast.  It blamed, in part, the lack of coordination between the agency and local law enforcement for its sluggishness in response to the complaints it was receiving.  The New York Times front page article on Sunday, February 4 details the bureaucratic ossification that enabled Nassar to continue to perpetrate his despicable deeds long after the agency was first made aware of them.   While I frequently am at odds with the New York Times, I applaud them for calling out the F.B.I. in this instance.   Its primary purpose is to protect and there is no greater priority than the protection of our children.  And its response to Larry Nassar was a massive failure.

When government gets too big, too cumbersome and meddles in too many things (eg California criminalizing plastic straws and NY attempting to make Tide pods “less appetizing”), it begins to lose function executing on its most important functions.   Government at its core must protect.  The failure of Hawaii’s missile warning system, the failure of the F.B.I. to keep partisan taint out of the FISA surveillance system, and its failure to protect the victims of Larry Nassar are clear warning to us.  These recent failures are large and dangerous.  The Hawaii missile alert system could mean life or death to our citizens.  The F.B.I. failure in issuing F.I.S.A. warrants has serious 4th Amendment implications, and its further failure to act with dispatch permitted dozens of young girls to be hurt.

We are living at a time when SYSTEMS need to work properly.  The threats we face from nation states and nonstate actors have never been so numerous and capable of using technology to hurt Americans.  Government needs to be dramatically reduced so that it can focus on its core purpose.