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Saturday, January 25, 2014

Distrust in America, War in Syria and Protests in Ukraine

In a speech on Jan. 17, President Obama spoke of the challenge of a world “that is remaking itself at a dizzying speed.” The subject of his address at the Justice Department was the complex issues of security, privacy and the limits of government power raised by revelations about the National Security Agency’s spying. That debate continued to rage through the last week. But Mr. Obama could have been speaking as well about conflicts in places like Syria and Ukraine, which seemed to become more intractable with every effort at resolution.
Secrets and Contractors
When the first of Edward Snowden’s cache of secret documents leaked out nearly eight months ago, the initial presumption was that the United States had another WikiLeaks on its hands — a painful and embarrassing breach of confidentiality that would require fixing and explaining, but not necessarily changing, what the government was trying to do. Before long, however, the revelations about the extraordinary spread of the N.S.A.’s global surveillance raised a host of questions about the balance of liberty and security at a time, as Mr. Obama put it, when “there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do.”
Much of the debate has swirled around legality, constitutionality and morality. But the questions underscored last week were more practical: Has the N.S.A.’s vast sweep of phone records, and specifically those of its own citizens, made us safer? Can we trust the government and its network of private contractors with so much data?
One development was the revelation that Mr. Snowden’s background had been vetted by a private firm contracted by the government to perform sensitive security checks, and that the company, U.S. Investigations Services, had submitted more than 650,000 incomplete investigations. It was not immediately known whether Mr. Snowden’s background check was among the flawed ones, but it is noteworthy that Mr. Snowden was working for another private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, at the time he took off for Hong Kong with his trove of secrets. The complaint filed by the United States government against USIS thus underscored how extensively the government relied on contractors not only to do its secret work, but also to vet those very contractors.
Even more damaging to the government’s case was the report of a bipartisan, independent agency within the executive branch, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which declared that the N.S.A. program that collects data on nearly every American phone call is both illegal and not particularly useful. In its 238-page report, issued Thursday, the board called on the president to end the program for both constitutional and practical reasons. “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” wrote the board.
In his speech last week, Mr. Obama said he would restrict the access of intelligence agencies to phone records and eventually move the data out of the hands of the government. But it was clear that the need to set limits on governmental snooping, not only within the United States but also around the world, would be passionately debated for a long time to come.
That, in turn, is likely to intensify the debate over whether Mr. Snowden is a whistle-blower or traitor. On Thursday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that he was prepared to discuss how to handle the case against Mr. Snowden, but only if Mr. Snowden first returned from temporary refuge in Russia and pleaded guilty. A growing number of voices, including that of the Times editorial board, have urged the government to consider clemency.
Low Expectations in Syria
In Geneva, the Syrian government and the divided opposition opened the first round of what were loosely termed “negotiations,” with expectations so low that the absence of an immediate collapse was deemed to be progress. And in a sense it was: Since the Arab Spring protests against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011, nothing seems to have helped slow the spread of a full-scale civil war. More than 130,000 Syrians have died, and around seven million have been driven from their homes.
The Geneva meeting was the product of a conference in June 2012, attended by both Russia and the United States, which set guidelines for the establishment of a “transitional governing body” formed on the basis of “mutual consent” and including members of the government and the opposition. All participants have nominally agreed to this.
The trouble is that Mr. Assad’s representatives insist that this means first discussing how to stop “terrorism,” a term they apply to all the insurgents seeking their ouster, both moderates and Al Qaeda-linked radicals. The opposition insists that the outcome must be ridding Syria of Mr. Assad, something his side declares “a red line.” And each side has its international sponsors.
So wide apart are the two sides that they gathered for the first meeting on Friday morning in two adjacent rooms, with Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran United Nations diplomat, shuttling back and forth. And so turbulent were the talks that it was deemed a success when the negotiators agreed to continue on Saturday and to meet in the same room
.Ukraine’s Cold Standoff
The two-month-old Ukrainian standoff between President Viktor F. Yanukovych and protesters furious at his rejection of closer ties to Europe was nowhere near as fearsome as Syria’s, but last week it claimed its first fatalities when two men died of bullet wounds. That led to a meeting between the president and the three most prominent opposition leaders, which temporarily raised hopes of a resolution to the conflict — hopes that fizzled when, after the talks, protests spread to some other cities.
For now, Mr. Yanukovych has shown no readiness to make any concessions, and the protesters have defied bitter cold and threatening new laws to maintain their camp on Kiev’s Independence Square. With every passing day, a violent drive by security forces to clear the square becomes more likely.
Last week, the United States canceled the visas of some Ukrainian officials involved in earlier crackdowns on protesters — a move that implied a threat of even tighter sanctions against specific members of the government should there be greater violence. But beyond that, the West has been largely relegated to watching and waiting.

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