October 23, 2006

Ends and Effects

Causality is tricky business, especially when the causal chain includes people. Things don’t always seem to end up the way they were intended. This is, to most of us, an obvious fact of life. We plan things and hope for the best, we might even try our best to make uncertainty as small a factor as possible. Especially when investing and planning long-term, uncertainty is a nuisance.
      So we go about trying to eliminate whatever sources of uncertainty we can think of. This doesn’t ever work all the way, but can go quite far. For instance, we use logic to find out whether the causal chain of actions and events seems reasonable or not. And we create ways of assuring, at least to some degree, that people we depend on in our planning behave a certain way. We can rely on some people doing their jobs and following orders, and others to do what they have contractually agreed to do.
      Where not possible, we can try to foresee people’s actions through understanding that they generally do what they have an incentive to do. And so, all we need to do is show them that they have an interest in doing certain things or doing them in certain ways – and that further increases the possibility of success in our planning. All this doesn’t eliminate the vacuum of uncertainty, but it removes much of it and thereby makes our plans more likely to come true.
      But it seems this logic, which is rather obvious to most of us, does not apply to government. Take the last government investment in protecting the “country,” where the Department of Homeland Security has been awarded a grant to develop a “sentiment analysis” software to sift through literally millions of articles to find negative opinions of the United States or its political leadership. The purpose is to gather information that could express a negative attitude leading to future threats to the country and/or its politicians.
      The thinking should go something like this. If negative opinions of the United States are expressed in the news in a certain country, it probably reflects a popular disagreement which can, in time, lead to a political pressure to repudiate United States foreign policy. That, in turn, might turn into hostility and so be a threat to the United States.
      The logical chain seems intuitive, but just a little investigation should prove it utterly unrealistic. For instance, it totally depends on supervised countries being democratic and enjoying a fairly extensive freedom of the press. How so?
      Without democracy there should be no real political pressure, since the population cannot “force” its political leaders to take action. As we learn in school, without democracy there is no way of holding politicians accountable and so there is no popular pressure on the political leadership. And, of course, democracy usually means people have a right to express themselves freely (at least to some degree), which means the government in dictatorships and other non-democracies wouldn’t even consider the public opinion as a guide when making decisions.
      The freedom of the press is therefore also a necessary condition, for without it there can be no public discussion on political issues and so there can be no public pressure on political leaders to repudiate anything. If people cannot express themselves in the media, and if there is no press somewhat independent of the core of political power, there will of course be no discussion. Countries without the freedom of the press, as it is commonly defined, are simply not democratic.
      So it would seem the “sentiment analysis” is only applicable on democracies. But who believes a future terrorist attack on the United States comes from a democratic country? The origin of terrorism isn’t Sweden, Spain or South Korea. Terrorism thrives in and is supported by dictatorial states where government brainwashing, poverty and religious fanaticism are ever present in people’s everyday lives. Only in such societies can people be brainwashed enough to literally dedicate their lives to get back at “America.”
      But why would a terrorist network publicly advertise their opposition and plans to strike at the “Great Evil” in the west? It is reasonable to believe such networks conceal their work and plans rather than advertise them in the media. Especially after the development of this new software has been publicly announced (as is now the case), there is absolutely no reason to believe any such critical opinion pieces would be published by newspapers and news services without first considering the likely effect. The effect of the software is more likely to silence criticism in such countries rather than find the source of hostility.
      It should also be obvious that this new software really has nothing to do with terrorism, but with threats from other governments. What other reason is there to go through the public media to identify opposition? The threat must come from or at least be directly supported by the heads of state in these countries; otherwise the threat cannot be identified by the software.
      Why? Because, as we have seen, free news reporting reflects popular opinions and thereby creates pressure on political leaders, and unfree news reporting reflects the views of the political leadership. Simply put, unfree news reporting means the political leadership decides what is reported. The former requires democracy and democratic states are unlikely to “create” terrorists or attack the United States; the latter is the case in countries much more likely to be a threat to the United States.
      Opposition to US foreign policy constituting a real threat will thus be reported in the media in only such countries where people are indoctrinated by unfree reporting and where the political leadership is hostile to the west and wishes to create popular demand for action. And only dictatorial states are likely to engage in war with the United States. The software should thus be directed towards the Middle East and other such dictatorial states in Africa and Asia.
      But in these states it would be easy for the political leaders and/or terrorist networks to use other means to communicate their views – and use the media for diversions only. The media is, in a way, already used for diversions, however for domestic political purposes. After all, why would wannabe terrorists use the media when they know it is being analyzed by the United States government? There is reason to believe no one but dictatorial loonies such as Kim Jong-Il would continue to express hostile views in the media – no one actually planning a strike would be stupid enough to publicly declare it in advance knowing “the enemy” gets the warning.
      But such countries as North Korea are already among the prioritized countries for American intelligence, and so they are already under heavy surveillance. So what is it they are trying to accomplish with this new software? As we now know, it would work much better supervising media in democratic countries with free press, such as North America and Europe.

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