Why America Spies on Allies, Enemies, and Itself | Barry Posen | Big Think

Why America Spies on Allies, Enemies, and Itself
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Americans have gotten so used to being surveilled by the intelligence community that they barely register it as an invasion of privacy, says MIT professor Barry Posen. He goes further to say that the kind of data collection used by the government could very easily be used in nefarious ways (should someone nefarious get their hands on it). Another big issue he suggests is the price tag that this surveillance costs American taxpayers. At $70,000,000,000... that so-called "security" might be priced way too high. The Charles Koch Foundation aims to further understanding of how US foreign policy affects American people and societal well-being. Through grants, events, and collaborative partnerships, the Foundation is working to stretch the boundaries of foreign policy research and debate by discussing ideas in strategy, trade, and diplomacy that often go unheeded in the US capital. For more information, visit charleskochfoundation.org.
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BARRY POSEN:
Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI. He has written three books, Restraint-A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks and The Sources of Military Doctrine. The latter won two awards: The American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November/December 2007) and "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony," International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow; Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and most recently Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Brian Posen: It is an unclassified number-and has been for several years-what the United States spends on intelligence every year. It’s an unclassified number. They don’t really break out what they’re spending it on, they break it out only in terms of two categories: general intelligence and military intelligence. And the totals for many years now have been around $70 billion. Seven-zero billion dollars. $70 billion. About 20 billion for military, which helps you fight, about 50 billion, “just because”, to surveil the world.
Now I have to say, I’m skeptical that we need to spend $70 billion on intelligence. I’m skeptical about what some of this intelligence is buying and doing. I’m skeptical.
Intelligence in general is what you need for defense or offense; you need it for restraint, you need it for hegemony. Intelligence you need to run a great power strategy. But I’d like to unpack what it is that we’re doing a little bit better, and look at some of these activities and ask, “Is this really necessary?”
Because my impression is we pretty much spy on everything given the chance: friends, enemies, whomever. During the peak of our 9/11 anger and hurt we spied on ourselves. And we spied on ourselves without really sorting out the legal ramifications of it. We collected vast amounts of metadata, stored it. This is spying on Americans! We’re doing a little bit less of it now, but it’s not very hard for an American who has friends abroad to get caught up in surveillance. There’s just a lot of collection, a lot of collection.
And a lot of this information is stored so that if something happens, the IC, using fancy algorithms, can backtrack communications among individuals to figure out who was implicated and who knew who. If you have the big library and you have the guilty party, you can then reverse engineer to try to figure out who else was implicated. It doesn’t prevent the terrorist attack, but it does allow you to prosecute the group.
But all the rest of us end up compromising our privacy for this purpose, and this is another thing where we should have a conversation. And it’s not an easy and straightforward conversation, because some people would privilege safety and say, “Fine, they can have tha...
For the full transcript, check out bigthink.com/v...

[@ContinualImprovement]

Big brother is watching you.

[@0stre]

G.Orwell says 'hello'

[@BruceWayne-ii5th]

Man his tone be like "Ahh... fuck it let's go BOWLING"

[@ENDFilmsVideos]

This guy didn’t say a single thing of substance for the entire video.

[@benesgro4531]

Impossible to ignore the huge Koch at the beginning

[@jacobrepino3808]

Ben Esgro Yeah... Unfortunate.

[@doodelay]

Never said why we spy other than offense and defense

[@boazthomassie4919]

this doesn't explain anything

[@burntnolan]

deltrontheory also wrong. The video tells ya how much is spent, and gives a very basic description of metadata collection. There’s basically nothing of worth or note in this video other than the price tag for American surveillance

[@nickmagrick7702]

its not meant to, its supposed to pose questions for people to think about that they might not otherwise

[@SuperKingslaw]

This only talks about budget. Not "Why America Spies on ....". This channel should be renamed the "Little Think"

[@importantname]

We do not know what our enemies are doing - if we did, intelligence would be irrelevent.

[@marcoviper69]

Just like Stalin in his time

[@joekeanetv]

Koch koch koch

[@unimornnbr1]

You know that spider man meme where there are two spider mans

[@dmitriymeh]

50B for keeping the rope tight on your friends' neck and help them be "better" allies.

[@kensyjolicoeur]

i can't believe your comment was 6 years ago, i am new to this topics

[@nathanpen1031]

It takes $300,000,000 to build 3 miles of toy train tracks in Tempe Arizona (for those of you without a calculator that's $100, 000,000 a mile) Our government is corrupt, incompetent and totally out of control. Bottom line ... we are fucked ....

[@dannyaleiva9603]

Now can we talk about the 2.3 Trillion dollars that were declared missing on 9/10/2001??

[@N00B283]

they went to the spying ;)

[@maxwellmendo2828]

It was a payment for an "inside job".

[@N00B283]

Yeah, I believe 911 was a false flag as well, so sad and horrible these people were sacrificed for a cause of war. War is a racket

[@dannyaleiva9603]

yeap 😐. it'd be nice if someone as established as BigThink were to confirm suspicions as well.

[@N00B283]

To be honest, it's not only Obama, its been ever since the Bush administration and still continues on with Trump, and will until you get money out of politics, and add to that make all salaries the same no matter what your position in the white house because politics shouldn't be for the money but for the people. But this is only scratching the surface​

[@frostybuckets2098]

This guy has a misunderstanding of the NSA. The NSA has been collecting more and more every year. Big think should have bill binny or Edward Snowdon on about this stuff.

[@cncrim1]

Why I'm not surprise.

[@scottab140]

Cost for spying......... government employee pensions.

[@charliem123321]

Thanks for the video, much appreciated 👍

[@williamwilson6499]

Mr. Posen speaks from ignorance. But then, most everyone who is not part of the IC does the same.

[@cybersekkin]

we are doing less of it now? Not a chance, we have expanded to much higher levels.

[@albirtarsha5370]

$70 billion on intelligence. That's almost 1 Bill Gates. From that an illustrated storybook is made to present to the President.

[@DrUndies]

The President Clown

[@belid2010]

Stress

[@nokoolaid]

They collect everything.

[@slimkickens]

"Koch foundation" Are you fucking kidding me?

[@frankdrebiin]

MIT professor?

[@Hypurman1]

I've been an intelligence analyst for 15 years. This guy doesn't understand security, or our relationship with our allies at all. When you forget what you need security for, is when you know your security has been successful.

[@GaneshGunaji]

Yeah im sure the director of security studies at mit has no idea about security...derp

[@hadensnodgrass3472]

I am sorry to say, but the quality of BigThink has dropped drastically. It used to have powerful messages that I could get behind, helping me to reevaluate myself, my community, and the world. However, the only thing I have seen over the past months is bigotry and misinformation. It deeply saddens me that this channel has dropped in quality. Farewell.

[@jopmens6960]

Good luck with that

[@jodihouts6032]

I care and I agree.

[@SuperKingslaw]

Any fool can be skeptical. Lets include idiots in that group also. I assume that the speaker would like our leaders to only make decisions not based on information, but only ideology.

[@GaneshGunaji]

rofl @ the cia shills in the comments jfc dude is 100% right

[@DrogoBaggins987]

A little voice whispers from a dark corner that the benefits of all that spending are going to places such as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

[@tacokoneko]

Actually as a principled libertarian I have to point out that only 30-40 percent, max, of the federal government is controlled by a zionist faction, and mostly influences large executive departments and a few of what I would call centrist and establishment politicians. Besides that it is merely popular among officials, not universally enforced to be the best friend of Jews ever. Another 20-30% at least is primarily influenced by moderately devoted progressives, those with lofty goals of social programs, "fairer" taxes, environmental regulation and a disturbing, fawning obsession with black people (some of them are black people, might explain it), among a substantial number of these zionism is surprisingly not actually on their primary radar. The next solid 20% belongs to various industries, corporate lobbyists, and interests for the deregulation of the corporate world (this faction has the most power that prioritizes goals that coincide with those of libertarians. The Koch Brothers, who have as most notice taken ahold of Big Think, are a relatively small player in this large faction, and one of a few that also actively support libertarian goals, another example being Peter Thiel and a few of his associates).The remainder is divided among rather radical evangelical and baptist groups' influence, Mormons, a few seventh-day adventists and Catholics, these Christians having similar but often differing motives, and a moderately large slice of the pie left goes to Scientologists, who are masters of subtly making the most of what they have. Libertarians have about the 1% remaining after all this is done, through the Liberty Caucus in the House (which Ron Paul helps to organize) and based Rand in the Senate, and basically nothing outside the legislature except for the aforementioned support of some corporate leaders and the intermittent influence Rand has had on Trump (Private health insurance across state borders!). moral-vegans, left-libertarians/anarchists, PETA, antifa/state-communists, and more radical progressives/super-bernie-bros are in the grand scheme of things actually overshadowed by normal progressives so much that their influence pretty much averages out to close to nothing, at least for the things that they want which most progressives really definitely don't. ACLU and NAACP are both mostly progressives with that strange obsession with black people. Some of this type of mainstream progressive (which includes establishment center-center-right figures such as John McCain) have very strange, sometimes pagan or occult religions, and some of them are also pedophiles or have other strange sexual fetishes. Some people focus on this a lot, but overall I believe it takes a backseat to their policy of rampant statism since they are often keen to avoid the topic, while evangelicals make it really clear up front just how important and central their crazy religious crusades are in their political motions. The zionist faction has the particular strength of being close to the largest and also intermixed to a fair degree with the other factions. In this way they are able to ensure the continued mainstream, unilateral support of Israel as an ally and mostly sustained heavy foreign aid for Israel. However, this should not be mistaken for some kind of all-powerful control by Jewish overlords. The US government is strongly conflicted and dysfunctional on quite a few issues, particularly domestic ones, and this can only be due to the constant struggle for control by these different loosely organized factions I've discussed, among which zionists are only one of the power players. Just remember that literally everyone is a statist except libertarians. The big-business interests and progressives sometimes align with libertarian goals, but they know and care not for the NAP, so as soon as the issue is in any way related to copyright law, or black people, respectively, they totally lose their heads and become authoritarians. I did meet a radical zionist once, though, and boy was that scary, I hope to never meet a person like that again in a thousand suns. He definitely had some kind of mental instability and kept talking at random about how "his god" was going to "destroy the world and make it new again" when the time came. This was in a chess club and I made the mistake of sitting too close to him while playing a match with a woman. When I let her take white without a coin flip, he suddenly turned around and launched into a frightening rant about how I was "perpetuating the destruction of equality" and my every action was "absolutely sexist". You don't want to trigger one of these people, it's just as bad as what some of those types of radical progressives I mentioned do. All in all, though, rather than make your quiet little whisper that says nothing or the deranged, hateful calls for extermination of jews and destruction of Israel that some people make, I state the actual, unabridged truth, in short that zionists are statists just like all the other factions and that they must be removed from politics and converted uniformly until only principled libertarians remain. The spending on literally everything must stop, and Israel is only one part of that.

[@sebastianelytron8450]

This.... is bullshit.

[@Phil_Vach]

Because you obviously know what you are talking about. To say that this is bullshit, you must be very educated on the subject. You are so reputable in the field that you don't even need to explain why! You're amazing!

[@eat_the_pudding]

Right

[@praytopesci2794]

Right

[@mandm9218]

bored

[@pensulpusher2729]

Wow, some more big thoughts from big think. I’m just bulled over by the enormity of these thoughts

[@RpattoYT]

Rambles a lot... feels bad about it.

[@briankim3472]

"Charles Koch"

[@HedgehogStudios1]

Yup I think I'm done. Unsubscribed

[@HedgehogStudios1]

Truth Robot k

[@thawndoo]

Old man yells at clouds...

[@MaximusAbrams]

right?

[@Livingjazzarchive]

Stooge for the Koch brothers?

[@reyh9894]

u mad? haha

[@Zeegoku1007]

Don't Care.

[@JMajik24]

first comment

[@0stre]

I suggest to hire humanists and philosophers to explain to everyone in the media, in what world we live today. People need ethical authorities!

[@hatamorey1]

ratty Only the Strong survive... ethical people are stepped on and devoured by those who are ruthless and calculating

[@0stre]

soo, how to interpret the three main pillars of civilization in today's world? - ethics, religion and law - Is there anything missing here? if one pillar falls, people should be aware that civilization is also falling down.