With help from Mohar Chatterjee

The U.S. Treasury Department building. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

The U.S. Treasurys recent sanctions of Tornado Cash are opening important new fronts in the ever-evolving arms race between government regulators and the digital innovators trying to build a new world without them.

This week: Can an open-source piece of code really be deplatformed?

Cryptocurrency, and much of the open internet, is based on the idea that computer code is a shared public resource that can live more or less forever online. Bitcoin, to take the best-known example, is nothing but a bunch of servers running the same protocol and tracking the same list of transactions.

Tornado Cash, as most of the crypto world knows by now, is a mixer, a piece of software that obscures the origin of cryptocurrency. Worried about its use for money laundering, the Treasury Department has been trying to bar people from using it, including by sanctioning Tornado Cash itself.

The issue is that Tornado isnt a person, a country or a company, the typical subjects of Treasurys blacklists. As we addressed here in the wake of sanctions, it's a self-executing piece of software, something without an owner, a legal residence or a bank account. It might even enjoy some constitutional protections.

Last week, we took a look at the First Amendment questions raised by the Tornado sanctions.

This week, were seeing those questions start to be put to the test in a way that raises the prospect of a broader controversy over the platforming of controversial code, just as the platforming of controversial social media content has become a hot-button political issue.

In response to Treasurys sanctions, GitHub, a platform for software developers, took down pages that were used to develop the tool. Because of the novelty of applying sanctions to open-source software, it is not clear whether GitHubs takedown was required by law, but, when in doubt, companies often err on the side of complying with the governments wishes.

While the U.S. now forbids its use, a portion of the Tornado code continues to exist on the decentralized Ethereum blockchain network, from which it would be impractical to remove it. On GitHub, the full code had been available in an accessible form, until it was yanked offline.

Except now its not offline. Matthew Green, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, announced this week that he has re-uploaded the source code to GitHub.

Green, who studies cryptography and teaches students about Tornado Cashs privacy features, tells Digital Future Daily that this is the first instance hes aware of in which notable open-source code has gone offlineand its worth worrying about.

The idea that source code disappears from the internet is a really bad thing, he said. In his view, it's not unlike banning or destroying books: It's an act that diminishes the store of shared human knowledge.

Though Green has not yet been embroiled in any legal fights over his republication, he is already being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a veteran of fights with the government over code and expression, which asserts that Greens republication does not violate the Treasury Departments sanctions. The group argues that his posting of software code itself for the purpose of study or improvement amounts to speech.

Critics of the sanctions argue that they will lead private companies, eager to avoid irritating the government, to take pre-emptive steps against secrecy tools beyond what the law requires, even when they interfere with legitimate privacy applications or free expression.

A spokeswoman for GitHub, Sandra Dieron, did not address questions about whether or not the platform planned to take Greens post down. In a statement, she said, We examine government sanctions thoroughly to be certain that users and customers are not impacted beyond what is required by law.

Green is no stranger to controversies over software and government power. In 2013, an administrator at Hopkins, which has close ties to the federal government, asked Green to take down a blog post discussing Edward Snowdens leak of National Security Agency material, then changed course and apologized after the takedown generated online outrage.

As the Biden administration steps up its focus on blockchain, and interest in new cryptographic methods continues to grow, Green predicts that fights over secrecy tools will multiply.

This privacy stuff, he said, is going to snowball.

Tesla thinks that driving is such a complicated, fast-moving task that it requires extremely powerful hardware to train machine learning models for it at scale. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Earlier this week, Tesla unveiled DOJO its in-house supercomputer for machine learning.

The idea isnt to help Tesla build cars, but to drive them. The company thinks that driving is such a complicated, fast-moving task that it requires extremely powerful hardware to train machine learning models for it at scale. As top Tesla engineer and DOJO head Ganesh Venkataramanan put it: "real world data processing is only feasible through machine learning techniques.

And that, in turn, requires computers of a kind we havent seen before.

For the technorati, DOJO is an incredible machine: a single training tile, or processing unit of this supercomputer, can reach 1 exaflops in computing speed, twice that of leading current supercomputers like the Japanese Fugaku. (An exaflop is one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second.)

The DOJO seems to be the result of Teslas frustration with the lack of scalable computing systems that can handle the intense and unexpected challenges of truly self-driving cars and is a reminder that one of our most straightforward human activities is a very big issue to automate safely. Mohar Chatterjee

Bias in AI systems is an increasingly important policy issue, but the real mechanics of how the bias creeps in, and how it works, are frustratingly difficult for non-experts to understand.

But not impossible. In June, Vox published a video explaining the popular new AI image generators like DALL-E 2. For the uninitiated, DALL-E 2 is a tool that lets you describe an image you want to see any image and will create sometimes beautiful, occasionally haunting and often disconcertingly photorealistic renderings of your prompt.

Starting at 5:58, the video does a particularly good job explaining how the model actually works, and the biases inherent in the process. Much of the bias stems from the data the model is trained onin this case, hundreds of millions of random images scraped off the internet. But the latent space in which the model figures things out is so complex that it is nearly impossible for humans to perceive what, or even how, its learning.

And if youve been watching the explosion of misinformation in politics over the past few years and youre worried that a tool like this could be misused youre not the only one. Mohar Chatterjee

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([emailprotected]); Derek Robertson ([emailprotected]); Mohar Chatterjee ([emailprotected]); Konstantin Kakaes ([emailprotected]); and Heidi Vogt ([emailprotected]). Follow us on Twitter @DigitalFuture.

Ben Schreckinger covers tech, finance and politics for POLITICO; he is an investor in cryptocurrency.

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Can code just be 'disappeared' from the internet? - POLITICO

When the hacker turned corporate-cybersecurity specialist Peiter Zatko went to work for Twitter in 2020, he thought he could help the company improve its practices after some embarrassing breaches. But either he couldnt help Twitter, or Twitter didnt want his aidless than two years, later the company fired him. Last month he issued a massive complaint against it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, alleging widespread malfeasance and fraud at the social network.

Earlier this week, after The Washington Post and CNN broke news of the complaint, newspapers everywhere started calling Zatko a whistleblower, and I read the word so many times that it ceased to bear meaning. Zatkos accusations are serious, but the complaint, and the reporting Ive read about it, also makes them seem amorphous and inchoate, disconnected from real stakes. Zatkos situation didnt exactly have the sensibility of, say, a factory-farm foreman revealing that a major company is poisoning its chicken thighs, or a mid-level bureaucrat exposing a government perpetrating atrocities in the name of its citizens.

Tech companies are so big and so powerful and do so many bad things without consequence, its understandable that people may feel they have no option other than blowing the whistle on these companies, the way a civil servant might on a government. But its an imperfect system for meting out justice. The problem lies less with Zatko and his specific accusationsmany of which look pretty bad for Twitterand more with the erosion of the whistleblower as a concept in contemporary life. Thats a path Zatko didnt forge, even if hes treading it. Whistleblowers used to be underdogs, willing to ruin their lives in the pursuit of the truth, so that its revelation might serve the commons. Now theyre more like corporate-espionage influencers, whose actions put attention-seeking and material gain before, or in place of, justice.

Whistleblowing has a very long history. In 1777, during the American Revolution, 10 sailors aboard the warship U.S.S. Warren met in secret to conspire against a man much more powerful than them. Commodore Esek Hopkins, the commander of the Continental Navy, had tortured British sailors; the group wrote a petition to the Continental Congress, which, swayed by their case, suspended Hopkins. But the commander retaliated, and Warren sailors Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven were arrested and jailed. In response to that obviously corrupt outcome, Congress enacted what is considered to be the worlds first whistleblower law. It didnt just protect righteous actors such as Shaw and Marven; it demanded that others in similar positions act similarly, decreeing that it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.

In the following centuries, whistleblowers became symbols of moral honor. The English shipping clerk Edmund Dene Morel was instrumental in exposing the brutal, plantation slave labor in the Congo. The retired Marine general and Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler exposed a plot to overthrow the U.S. government during Franklin D. Roosevelts administration. The epidemiologist Peter Buxtun, working for the U.S. Public Health Service, exposed the Tuskegee Study, in which his employer had denied treatment to Black men infected with syphilis over four decades. The government analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers, a secret account of the U.S. governments mishandling of the Vietnam War spanning multiple presidencies. The New York City police officer Frank Serpico disclosed widespread bribery and financial corruption in the force. Edward Snowden, an intelligence contractor, leaked evidence of the NSAs global surveillance programs. (Snowden offers an illustrative example of how messy the designation of whistleblower can be. He was charged under the Espionage Act in 2013 and fled to Moscow, where he has lived since.)

Fame often followed their revelations. An entire Whistleblower Cinematic Universe retold the stories of Serpico, Snowden, and others. But that notoriety came as a result of the moral stakes of the revelations and the virtue required to unveil them. Past whistleblowers did more than just expose misdeeds. They selflessly did so from a position of far less power than those they accused, in order to protect or defend others who similarly lack power. The whistleblower isor wasan actor moved by duty, virtue, or both.

To this day, the formal definition of a whistleblower descends directly from its 18th-century precedent, in the form of laws that encourage actors to reveal misconduct by protecting them if they do so. The protections formally afforded to whistleblowers increased over time, but most of those protections were still afforded to government workers.

That changed relatively recently. In 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act became law. Dodd-Frank, passed in the aftermath of the Great Recession (and the wrongdoing by big banks that helped cause it), inaugurated a major shift in whistleblowerdom, especially in the private sector, where other laws generally didnt reach. Crucially, Dodd-Frank added a financial incentive to the sometimes-risky practice of becoming an informant. Under the law, the SEC offers cash rewards for tips that lead to the receipt of monetary sanctions. Since its inception, the SEC has recovered billions of such dollars and awarded a cool $1 billion back to people who helped it get the goods. Money, once the enemy that inspired Serpico to blow a whistle, became a motivation for doing so.

And predictably, whistleblowing has become a business. Stephen M. Kohn, a whistleblower attorney who won one of the largest awards in history, $104 million for a tax-evasion case, wrote a book about the practice, The New Whistleblowers Handbook. Doing whats right, a phrase that appears in the books subtitle, imbricated with doing what produces financial gain. This is a tremendous shift, and one with enormous consequences: Though some people will argue that whistleblowers deserve financial comfortin addition to protection from persecutionfor having the courage to speak up, society relies on people to tell the truth because it is right, not because they might get paid for it.

Zatko may well be acting out of conscience. In his complaint, he calls his disclosures an ethical obligation and suggests that he aspires to remain true to a hackers obligation to notify an affected party of its security-related problems. The complaint exclusively refers to him by his hacker name, Mudge, seemingly to underscore that allegiance. But he is indisputably a different type of actor than the civil-servant whistleblowers of history. And the structures that have arisen around whistleblowing in recent years complicate its appeals to principle alone.

Zatkos complaint against Twitter contains dozens of allegations about what the company did wrong, including lax device security, poor control of its production environment, missaccounting of bot accounts, and more. (A Twitter spokesperson defended the companys security practices to the Post, and told the paper that Zatkos allegations appeared to be riddled with inaccuracies and that Zatko now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.) But all throughout the complaint, these claims are framed not principally as misdeeds against best practice, national security, user privacy, or other domains of legitimate concern to the general public. No, they are first presented as evidence of fraud. Defrauding investors is the financial crime for which the SEC can pursue redress and, upon a successful enforcement action, restitution. For every dollar or million that the SEC might recover from Twitter if Zatkos allegations prove actionable, Zatko (and his lawyers) could be entitled to 10 to 30 percent.

John Tye, chief disclosure officer of the nonprofit legal group Whistleblower Aid, which represents Zatko, says the prospect of a reward didnt motivate Zatko. In fact he didn't even know about the reward program when he decided to become a lawful whistleblower, Tye said in an email. He did so, Tye said, to help the SEC enforce the laws. Thats fair enough. But enforcing securities lawalready a somewhat dubious moral prospect compared with historical whistleblower interventionsnow entails a reward whether you ask for one or not. Remuneration infects the process. Kohn did call it the new whistleblowing, after all.

Whistleblower Aid also counts Frances Haugen, the Facebook Papers leaker, as a client. The eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar has funded both Whistleblower Aid and Haugens efforts, a philanthropic gesture that might reasonably be construed as realpolitik to expose legitimate wrongdoing by some of the most powerful companies in the world, but that also amounts to the creation of a fundraising and organization-building activitya whole jobs program surrounding tech oppositionalism.

And then theres the dude who has the most to gain from Zatkos supposedly righteous revelations about Twitter: Elon Musk, the worlds richest man, who still hopes he doesnt have to write a $44 billion check to buy the company. Zatkos extensive warnings about the number of bots on Twitter, an issue that obsesses Musk, seem startlingly aligned with Musks interests rather than those of misled investors, let alone the public. (Tye, Zatkos representative, told me that his client began the process that led to this disclosure in December, before Musk expressed any interest in acquiring Twitter. Musk has not been involved in any way, Tye said in an email.)

Zatkos complaint does issue some concerning accusations against his former employer. According to Zatko, Twitter played fast and loose with security, and in a way that might violate a settlement the company reached in 2011 after the FTC alleged major lapses in its data-security practices. But the complaint is also riddled with gripes that speak more to Zatkos dissatisfaction than Twitters alleged corruption. His bosses didnt take his advice, and Zatko didnt like that. Then they froze him out, and fired him. Maybe doing so constitutes fraud or violationthe SEC and FTC will have to sort that matter out. But even if so, Zatkos barrage of accusations might not amount to the explosive revelation that some news coverage of the complaint has described. The document reads like a paid legal experts report on why Twitter committed fraud by a disgruntled former employee who stands to gain from its exposure, not as a righteous mans case for why a global social network is obviously and grievously dangerous.

But alas, the media cannot resist the temptation to cast the new whistleblowers in the role of the old ones. As I wrote for The Atlantic when the Facebook Papers broke, stories such as Daniel Ellsbergs come from the golden age of journalism, when information couldnt find an audience without the aid of a newspaper or magazine or television network. Ad-driven internet companies such as Facebook and Google and Twitter absconded with that access, and the spoils that accompanied it. These companies royally mucked up both the business of journalism and the operation of the democracy the Fourth Estate holds in check; journalists are both right to hold the tech industrys power to account and sometimes overly eager to do so.

Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the new whistleblowing is that tattling for material scraps is the only way the internet operates. Online life is a constant contest of appearance, both physical and moral. With attention at a premium and content proliferating, all anyone can do is scrabble to claim whatever crumbs any situation might shake loose: a hot take that produces clicks that burnish a reputation; a thirst trap that generates followers to justify sponsorship rates; a megaviral post that yields neither satisfaction nor even SoundCloud listens, but only the passing attention of a million people youve never met. A whistleblower complaint that might yet yield a payday, even if it also reveals a hidden truth.

An amorphous creature has attached itself to the new whistleblowers, like a barnacle on the warship Warren: glory and the influence it might deliver. Once an act that at least aspired toward modesty, whistleblowing entailed sufficient risk that informing on a more powerful actor might still ruin ones life. But now, in the internet age, whistleblowing has become a pathif a terrible, unintuitive oneto fame and its trappings. That glory drives the hungry maw of material success, whether or not the being that devours its spoils thrives or starves. Like everything else, whistleblowing is just another hustle.

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The Tech Industry Is in Its Whistleblower Era - The Atlantic

The FBI investigation into possible Espionage Act violations by former President Donald Trump for keeping top-secret documents at his Florida resort, has sparked curiosity in a World War I-era law that has rarely been used to prosecute actual spies.

Although the precise nature of the documents found at Mr. Trumps Mar-a-Lago is not clear, the Espionage Act criminalizes keeping or disclosing without authorization information that could harm the national defense or could aid U.S. enemies. Under the Obama administration, federal authorities aggressively went after whistleblowers and document leakers, none more famous than Edward Snowden after he exposed the governments mass surveillance system.

In the 1950s, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried, convicted and executed under the Espionage Act for allegedly sharing top-secret information about the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union. They were the only American citizens ever executed as spies during peacetime. But, for the most part, the Espionage Act has rarely been used to punish espionage.

In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Christopher Capozzola, an expert on citizenship, war and the military in modern America at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses the laws sordid origins. The Espionage Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Woodrow Wilson in a climate of xenophobia and anti-Red hysteria in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI. But because many Americans opposed fighting in what they viewed as a war between European colonial powers, Congress included provisions allowing the federal government to crack down on dissent.

Its a crucial turning point in U.S. history and the history of the federal government, and a window into what American society is really like in a moment of tension and crisis. It was a very divisive war and not all Americans agreed we should enter it. Many felt that entering the First World War would be a departure from American traditions by sending troops abroad, said Mr. Capozzola, the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen.

SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: Woodrow Wilson and the 20th century that could have been

About 2,000 people were imprisoned for violating the laws prohibitions on disloyal speech or for urging Americans to resist the draft, Mr. Capozzola said. Socialists were frequently targeted, including Eugene V. Debs, who was arrested after giving an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in 1918. Debs was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In a course correction after the war, Congress repealed or let expire the censorship provisions of the law.

For more on the origins, uses, and abuses of the Espionage Act, download this episode of History As It Happens.

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History As It Happens: The Espionage Act's sordid origins - Washington Times

In the early 1990s, Senator Patrick Moynihan campaigned for the abolition of the CIA. The brilliant campaigner thought the US Department of State should take over its intelligence functions. For him, the age of secrecy was over.

In a New York Times opinion piece, Moynihan wrote:

For 30 years the intelligence community systematically misinformed successive presidents as to the size and growth of the Soviet economy Somehow our analysts had internalised a Soviet view of the world.

In the speech introducing his Abolition of the CIA bill in January 1995, Moynihan cited British author John le Carrs scorn for the idea that the CIA had contributed to victory in the cold war against the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev and his successors. The Soviet Empire did not fall apart because the spooks had bugged the mans room in the Kremlin or put broken glass in Mrs Brezhnevs bath, Le Carr had written.

This was one of the CIAs lowest points since its establishment in 1947 (my new book marks the agencys 75th anniversary). It was created with two key goals in mind: thwarting Soviet expansionism, and preventing another surprise attack like that carried out by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour during the second world war.

While Moynihans campaign to shut down the CIA did not ultimately prevail, there was certainly a widespread perception that the agency was no longer fit for purpose and should be curtailed.

Throughout the cold war, many had regarded fighting communism as the CIAs raison dtre. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the agencys role was less clear, and it came under heavy criticism for having distorted intelligence and blatantly pandered to one ideological viewpoint: blind anti-communism. Without the cold war, Moynihan predicted, the CIA would become a kind of retirement program for a cadre of cold warriors not really needed any longer.

Three decades on, however, Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine has put Russias threat to the stability of the world back at the top of the US foreign agenda. With a formidable Kremlinologist now in charge of the CIA and Donald Trump out of the presidential picture (for the moment, at least), the agency might be expected to be an influential player in the US response to this new Cold War.

But how much does Washington trust the CIA these days and how much influence does it really have on events in Ukraine? To shed light on these questions, we need to go back to the early days of the Ronald Reagan presidency.

As US president from 1981 to 1989, the neoconservative Reagan unleashed the CIA from restrictions that had been imposed on it during the reforming post-Vietnam 1970s.

Like other anti-communists, Reagan saw the agency as a prime weapon in weakening the Soviet Union, which he famously denounced as the evil empire, and preventing the worldwide spread of communism.

The new US president was convinced that in opposing an unethical foe, one could not afford to be too scrupulous. He chose as his CIA director Bill Casey, a veteran of intelligence in the second world war a time when it had been gloves off for dirty tricksters.

An outright cold warrior, Casey resuscitated old CIA habits, running covert operations against the left-leaning but democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua from December 1981 to the ceasefire of March 1988.

Even the veteran conservative senator Barry Goldwater admitted he was pissed off when, in 1984, the CIA mined Nicaraguas harbors without informing Congress. Accosted with this oversight, the uncompromising Casey replied: The business of Congress is to stay the fuck out of my business.

The CIA worked closely with the Contras, right-wing terrorists who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government. The agency trained these guerrillas in secret camps in adjacent countries and organized munition drops from planes stationed in clandestine bases. In one initiative, a contracted CIA operative wrote a manual for the Contras explaining how to assassinate individuals on ones own side skulls had to be fractured in just the right way and then blame the enemy.

A disapproving US Congress banned these weapons drops and cut off the necessary funds. To get around this, arms were illegally supplied to Iran (then at war with Iraq) via Israel paid for by covert Iranian financial assistance to the Contras.

However, fearing the wrath of Congress should this ruse be discovered (as it later was), the Reagan administration bypassed the CIA in administering the Iran-Contra scam. While the president had not lost confidence in the agency, this was a sign that the CIA was becoming increasingly toxic in the eyes of Congress making it too risky to deploy its spooks in the customary manner.

On the threat posed by the Soviet Union, though, there was far greater accord. CIA director Casey lined up with the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, and the majority of Reagans cabinet in adopting an intransigent stance towards Moscow.

They were supported by the CIAs senior Russia expert, Bob Gates, who having gained his PhD in Russian affairs without ever visiting the country, proclaimed that the Soviet Union was an example of oriental despotism.

A keen boy scout in his youth, Gates whether out of conviction or career calculation glued himself to the American flag and offered no challenge to any president who wanted to play up the Moscow menace. Under Reagan, Casey and Gates, the CIA worked tirelessly to undermine the Soviet Union secretly supporting Polands opposition movement Solidarity, and engaging in acts of economic sabotage against the Soviet economy.

Indeed, according to Republican partisans who argued that President Reagan won the cold war (the victory thesis), the US launched its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars) with the aim of forcing Moscow to respond, thus ruining the Soviet economy and bringing about the collapse of communism.

SDI was a multi-billion-dollar space defense system designed to intercept and destroy incoming enemy missiles. According to the victory thesis, Gates exaggerated estimates of Soviet military might were not an instance of unthinking anti-communism but rather, a cunning ploy designed to persuade Congress to fund the Star Wars bluff.

Gates would go on to lead the CIA from 1991-93, the years when Senator Moynihan was campaigning for its abolition. The Senate confirmation hearings that preceded Gates tenure would be the occasion for some bitter denunciations from erstwhile colleagues. Gates later recalled that these charges of 1980s intelligence distortion truly imperilled my confirmation.

Jennifer Lynn Gaudemans, who in 1989 had left the CIAs Office of Soviet Analysis (Sova) in a disillusioned state of mind, accused Gates of seeing Soviet conspiracies around every corner, and of blatantly pandering to one ideological viewpoint.

At the Senate hearings, Gaudemans testified that Sova analysts were deeply upset when Gates suppressed their findings that the Soviet Union was not, in fact, orchestrating mischief in Iran, Libya and Syria.

She claimed he had denied them even the opportunity to publish dissenting footnotes. Sova division chiefs were, she said, routinely dismissed for being too soft on issues such as Soviet policy in the developing world, and arms control.

But while the agencys analysts had problems with Gates, more powerful individuals not least, the US secretary of state George Shultz were prepared to listen. Sova-generated data and findings made their way on to the desks of US negotiators.

On November 18, 1985, the eve of Reagans summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, the president and his negotiators received an intelligence assessment to the effect that, while Gorbachev was repairing the economic damage of the Brezhnev era, he would not meet his growth targets. Because of this and the acute nationalist discontent in Poland, CIA analysts told Reagan that Gorbachev was ready to deal with the US.

Through such insights, the agency played an important role in ending the old cold war, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991. But in the process, it also unwittingly contributed to the idea that the CIA might no longer be needed by the now-globally dominant US.

A decade later, the USs confident post-cold war demeanor changed at a stroke when two hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And the CIA would be the fall guy.

The attack masterminded by Osama bin Laden glaringly exposed the CIAs inability to uphold its founding mission of preventing another Pearl Harbour-style attack on the US. Under renewed pressure to justify its existence, the agency succumbed to the demands of the George W Bush administration in the war on terror that arose from the ashes of 9/11.

As the US government desperately sought a rationale for invading Iraq, a deal was struck. Senior leaders of the agency may squirm at the charge, but the CIA supplied intelligence to please in exchange for the right to survive.

Its leadership endorsed the mythical charge that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And when the ensuing war was a disaster, the CIA took the hit for having delivered that faulty intelligence.

Even in the early days of the Iraq war, however, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 had already stripped the agency of its central role in evaluating intelligence, handing the job to a new and independent director of national intelligence, John Negroponte.

With the role of the CIA thus diminished, the US intelligence community became an unresolved puzzle. Demoralized CIA personnel threw up their hands in despair. CIA veteran Art Hulnick, now teaching intelligence studies at Boston University, was at a loss to explain to his students the new arrangements for analyzing intelligence. Hulnick complained of an overreaction to what he termed the threat du jour.

Resources were being poured into the huge and unwieldy Department of Homeland Security; the Department of Defence was poaching assets from the CIA; and the agency had even lost its monopoly on preparing the presidents daily briefing (the first item on the presidents desk each morning, memorably described by Michelle Obama as the death, destruction and horrible things book.)

By the mid-2000s, intelligence work was being heavily outsourced to private businesses in accordance with the ideology of the George W Bush administration. Private recruiters such as Blackwater were appearing at the CIA HQs cafeteria in Langley, Virginia, hiring personnel with promises of big salary increases before sometimes subcontracting them back to the agency at inflated rates.

The CIA had never been a fainting lily but now, in the interests of its own survival, its directors agreed to engage in unsavory practices including torture, illegal kidnapping, and execution-by-drone without trial.

Waterboarding, whereby water is poured over a cloth on the victims face to produce a sensation of drowning, was a common practice in the agencys dark sites secret interrogation centers in Poland, Egypt and other countries around the world where kidnapped suspects were held.

Investigative journalism and persistently curious congressional committees are staples of American democracy, and these dubious practices were bound to come to light with the aid of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden. Snowden had worked for the CIA as a highly regarded computer security expert before moving to a private subcontractor engaged by the US foreign signals intelligence organization, the National Security Agency (NSA).

In 2013, Snowden leaked numerous files to the Guardian and Washington Post before fleeing to Russia in order to evade rendition by the CIA. His revelations about US internal surveillance practices infuriated the guardians of Americas secrets, and fed the fears of those who deplored the use of dirty tricks abroad and the development of a secret state at home.

Snowden was accused of having revealed the identities of CIA personnel on active duty to the possible detriment of their safety a form of treason (should it be proved) that was a deeply sensitive matter within CIA headquarters. It was fortunate for the agency, though, that the main thrust of Snowdens revelations was about the NSAs role in global surveillance.

By 2007, while the Iraq war grew mired, the Bush administration was talking loudly about another familiar Middle Eastern foe: Iran.

In 1953, the CIA had conspired to overthrow the countrys democratically elected but mildly leftist government headed by Mohammad Mossadegh. There followed a period of despotic royal rule by the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. His overthrow in 1979 saw a period of priestly mullah rule and of alienation, mitigated only briefly by the Iran-Contra deal.

While the Iraq war continued, the US shared the concerns of Israel, its fellow nuclear power and Irans regional rival, that Tehran was developing the wherewithal to produce an atomic bomb. The hawks in the Bush administration issued strident warnings on the subject, but had to contend with a rising force in the intelligence community: the US National Intelligence Council (also known as Nick).

By this time, Nick was generating national security estimates that informed US security and foreign policy. While it traced its origins to pre-CIA days, once the agency was founded Nick became reliant on the data and analysis it provided an arrangement that increasingly caused resentment on the part of state department officials.

After 2004, however, things changed: Nick could now call in other experts to help formulate its analyses and conclusions. And in 2007, Nick determined that Iran, contrary to claims made by the vociferous hawks in the Bush administration, was not developing nuclear weapons.

This was an outstanding example of intelligence to displease of speaking truth to power. The CIA was still supplying Nick with data and with some skilled analysts. But according to Thomas Fingar, who presided over Nick at the time of the 2007 Iran estimate, CIA groupthink no longer prevailed.

As Nick drew on a wider base of experts, it could not be accused, as the CIA had been, of gnawing at the same bone over and over again. Fingars colleagues backed his firm stance on Iran. Overcompliance was avoided in a manner that had not been possible in earlier cases such as the WMD scandal, when the CIA had enjoyed unalloyed supremacy.

Perhaps because of this, many CIA analysts appear to have been at ease with the new arrangement a point stressed by Peter A Clement, who was in charge of Russian analysis at the point of transition to the new system.

Elsewhere in the intelligence bureaucracy, however, there was discontent. The CIAs counterterrorism units absorption into a new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) elicited this comment from former agency employee and sociologist Bridget Rose Nolan:

There is a general sense that NCTC was almost a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 a way for the government to treat the symptoms, but not the cause, of the perceived problem.

Compared with others within the agency, the CIAs analysts could think themselves fortunate. Though some of them had transitioned to other units, their own team of Russian experts remained intact and unrivalled within the US intelligence community.

Perhaps surprisingly, the CIAs fortunes really began to revive with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th US president on November 8, 2016.

At first glance, Trumps election looked like more bad news for the CIA. In keeping with its mission, the agency was alert to any threat to American interests and security posed by the Kremlin.

Trump, on the other hand, was keen to achieve an era of renewed Russian-American friendship an ambition fuelled by his appetite for deal-making, his acquaintance with Russias president Vladimir Putin, and perhaps even his ambitions to make a memorable contribution to world peace.

The indications were that Trump, once in office, would not wish to bolster the role played by the ever-suspicious CIA in Russo-American relations. Yet in the immediate aftermath of his election, the outgoing Barack Obama administration effected a policy shift that saw a significant strengthening of the CIAs Russia capability.

This shift arose from the specific circumstance of Russias interference in the 2016 election but in the process, promised a wider and timely refocusing of the US intelligence effort.

In the words of the subsequent US Senate inquiry, a St Petersburg entity called the Internet Research Agency had sought to influence the 2016 US presidential election by harming Hillary Clintons chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.

It was an attempt to subvert American democracy, and the ease with which the Russians obtained Clintons confidential emails confirmed there was a wider threat to national security.

Trump gave the CIA little support during his presidency (2017-2021) and treated its personnel with contempt. He accused the agency of being elitist and of conspiring against him in the 2016 election. He dispensed with the daily intelligence briefing to which the CIA still contributed, telling Fox News: You know, Im, like, a smart person I dont have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years.

But President Obamas boost to Kremlinology has endured beyond the Trump presidency, and now looks fortuitous in light of current circumstances. Experts on the Kremlin need informers-in-place, and they are scarce assets.

We know, for example, that the CIA had to exfiltrate a key Kremlin mole in 2016, in case they were identified as the source of the agencys information on Russian smear tactics against Hillary Clinton.

The mole had alerted the agency that in June 2016, Russian cyberwarfare personnel had released thousands of hacked emails from Clintons Democratic campaign and from the computers of the Democratic National Committee. Time will tell what else this mole was telling the CIA about Kremlin tactics and intentions, up until their hasty departure from Russia.

In 2021, newly elected US president Joe Biden nominated his longstanding friend William J Burns as the CIAs new director. Unlike some of his recent predecessors, Burns was no pushover.

When Biden declared his intention of continuing the Trump policy of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, Burns made it known he was unhappy with the intelligence implications. The Taliban who took over in the wake of American withdrawal had a history of shielding terrorists.

So when the CIA pinpointed the location in Kabul of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, leading to his assassination by a drone-dispatched Stinger missile on July 31 2022, the event satisfied both men even if it smacked of gunslinger diplomacy.

But the new CIA director also brings more subtle skills to the role. Crucially, Burns has many years experience of Russo-American relations, making him exceptionally well qualified to help shape Americas response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Certainly, he is a very different character from Casey, his predecessor from the Reagan era. Burns is a formidable Kremlinologist with an impressive negotiating pedigree. His father, Major-General William F Burns, engaged in arms control negotiations and, in the final year of the Reagan administration, was director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

The younger William Burns served in the Moscow embassy in the 1990s and as US ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, describing it as his dream job. During that period of engagement with Moscow, he repeatedly warned that Nato expansion was anathema to Putin, a leader who back then appeared potentially open to an accommodation with the US.

Burns was capable of empathizing with Moscow while appreciating its threat to mankind. He was a devotee of behind-the-scenes diplomacy well before he became CIA director (the title of his 2021 autobiographical study of modern US diplomacy is The Back Channel).

According to the Hoar Amendment adopted by the US Senate in 1893, secret agents are not supposed to engage in official diplomacy, but it is a rule that has been much honored in the breach. As ambassador to Russia, Burns reached agreement with the Kremlin on how to inhibit nuclear-weapon proliferation but he was under no illusions about Putin.

Burns had accompanied Biden, then the US vice-president, on a mission to Moscow to discuss instability in Libya at the time of the Arab Spring in 2011. In his memoir, Burns wrote that Russias then-president, Dmitri Medvedev, was a reasonable man who cared about humanitarian issues and admired President Obama. In contrast, Putin was dyspeptic about American policy in the Middle East especially when it aimed at toppling autocrats.

In November 2021, Burns led a discreet delegation to Moscow that signaled, according to the New York Times, heightened engagement between two global adversaries. On this occasion, he met Putins adviser Nikolai Patrushev. Their conversation ranged over nuclear disarmament, cyberspace rivalry, Russians hacking activities and climate policy, as well as problems of mutual interest affecting Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.

Burns efforts did not, however, signify CIA complacency over Russian intentions regarding Ukraine. Together with British intelligence (but meeting with incredulity elsewhere in Europe, except for Scandinavia), the agencys Kremlinologists were convinced that Putin intended to invade Russias neighbor.

Burns is under no illusion about the threat posed by the Russian leader. Having previously likened him to the Romanov czars, he has warned that Putin may resort to using nuclear weapons. When Russias president retaliated against western sanctions by issuing travel bans on selected individuals, Burns was on his list.

From Putins perspective, the US and its CIA preach civilized values but do not observe them. He wrote in 2012 that they had spent decades upholding dictatorships in Latin America, regimes that routinely tortured to death thousands of their own citizens. To Putin, it was all part of a pattern:

The development of the American continent began with large-scale ethnic cleansing that has no equal in the history of mankind. The indigenous people were destroyed. After that [came] slavery That remains until now in the souls and hearts of the people.

The CIA is doubtless operating within Russia, but autocracies are difficult to penetrate and the agency does not have a great record of success in this regard. The extent of its covert actions will likely also be limited because the US remains reluctant to risk being seen as directly involved in the conflict.

While US armed forces are responsible for passing on military intelligence such as that which enabled the sinking of Russias flagship the Moskva, the New York Times reported in June 2022 that CIA personnel were directing much of the vast amounts of intelligence the US is sharing with Ukrainian forces. Though few other concrete details have emerged, the report stated that the CIAs presence hints at the scale of the secretive effort to assist Ukraine.

If precedents are a guide, the CIA will be engaged in intelligence gathering and dissemination as well as black propaganda psychological warfare aimed at Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and the wider world. Through undeclared strategies including the secret funding of both Ukrainian and international front organizations, it will attempt to bend world opinion to favor the Ukrainian cause and isolate the Russians.

But there is also no reason why Burns cannot revive back-channel diplomacy, should the opportunity arise. Whether or not undertaken by the CIA, diplomatic engagement with Russia depends on good intelligence on both sides. It is reliant on Putin getting reliable analysis from his own people and being prepared to act in light of that analysis.

In early February 2022, Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) collected opinion data in Ukraine which found that 40% of those polled would not fight to defend their country. Peter Clement, who worked for the CIA until 2017, observed to me that Putin and his advisers should have noted this meant that 60% were either willing to fight or undecided. The Russian leadership paid insufficient heed to such analysis.

How strong is the CIAs team of Russian analysts today? Hundreds of analysts were recruited after 9/11, largely in response to Muslim radicalism Hulnicks threat du jour. Yet the agencys Russian affairs division suffered a relative setback.

It was obliged to ask for volunteers among its analysts to quit Kremlinology and work instead on counterterrorism. According to a senior official who oversaw these sensitive changes, an effort was made to hang on to linguistic and area specialists, but the division had to give up gifted individuals who had transferable skills.

A reorganization of the CIA in 2015 led to the formation of a Directorate for Digital Innovation, which gave the agency potentially greater capability of assessing Moscows disinformation via social media. This was on the initiative of John Brennan, President Obamas admired pick to lead the CIA from 2013 to 2017.

But for civil liberties reasons, the 1947 National Security Act which established the CIA also banned the agency from operating domestically. So it is still not capable of tracking Moscows use of US-based, but Russian-controlled, digital media sources in stirring up divisions in American society.

Nonetheless, the standing of the agencys Kremlinologists received a boost under Obama and have again under Biden. Meanwhile, the distractions of recent decades such as the debate over torture are receding.

We still get periodic reminders of CIA ruthlessness, such as the recent assassination without trial of al-Qaedas al-Zawahri. But the leadership of CIA directors Brennan and Burns has set the agency on a path that bodes well for its role in seeking a resolution to the current Ukraine crisis.

The CIA, being the instrument of a democracy, is a broad church and there will always be conflicting voices. One senior source tells me the agency opposed the expansion of NATO that Moscow finds so abhorrent.

Another, a veteran of Reagans Office of Soviet Analysis, insists its Kremlinologists are too apolitical for that kind of judgment to be upheld and does not believe todays analysts will be able to contribute to intelligence successes such as those achieved during the 1980s cold war era.

But these competing views reflect a healthy struggle within the CIA to get at the truth. While the agency still has vocal critics and always will do, no one is calling for its dissolution today.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is Professor Emeritus of American History, University of Edinburgh

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones new book, A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA, is published by Oxford University Press

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The inside story of the CIA vs Russia - Asia Times

The latest incarnation of the hit film series Minions was released in Chinese theatres last week - but with a twist. Unlike Western audiences, cinema-goers in China were treated to a different ending of 'Minions 2: Once Upon a Time Gru'.

In the original film -- which chronicles the life of 'Despicable Me' super-villain Gru --one of the main characters, Will Karnage, escapes justice for attempted robbery by faking his own death.

However, in the version released in mainland China, Karnage is caught by the police and sentenced to 20 years behind bars. Once inside he even sets up his own theatre troupe.

As for Gru, he gets "back on the right track" and becomes a role model father -- disregarding the previous films in the franchise.

Of course, there are many cultural and political reasons why films may end differently in a country.

In China, all media must first pass through a censorship committee before it can be released, though it is not clear if Minions 2 was changed by censors or the film's producers.

Yet this is not the first time a foreign film has been modified in China. Just check out these alternative endings. Oh, here's a warning *Spoiler Alert* for those who've never seen any of the following movies.

In January this year, Twitter was alight over how the end ofDavid Fincher's cult classic 'Fight Club', starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, had been modified before being broadcast in China.

Instead of the protagonists blowing up the headquarters of several banks, erasing their customers' debts, police thwart their plan, a text at the end of the Chinese version indicated.

Law enforcement, on the side of justice, foiled the anarchist scheme of Tyler to destroy consumer capitalism.

Again it is unclear if the ending was altered out of self-censorship by the Chinese streaming service Tencent Video or by government order. But just over a week after the storm erupted Tencent restored the original ending.

There is no point watching this film without that scene, a person commented on the microblogging site Weibo.

In China's reimagining of Lord of War, which is nearly 30 minutes shorter than the original, the initial conclusion is replaced entirely.

Rather than getting off scot-free for pumping weapons into some of the most volatile contexts on Earth, lead character Yuri Orlovconfesses to all the crimes he faces officially in court, and is sentenced to life imprisonment.

Posting a screenshot of the alternative ending on Twitter, one user commented:"China has a stringent censorship system to ensure all TV programs, dramas and films released to the public reflect what the Communist Party deems correct aesthetics, morality, and ideology."

Lord of War, which stars Nicholas Cage, is loosely based on the colourful life of Viktor Bout, nicknamed the merchant of death.

A former Russian lieutenant, Bout was one of the world's biggest arms dealers, flying Soviet arms into battlefields from Liberia to Afghanistan. He was arrested in 2008 at a five-star hotel in Bangkok, following a years-long international investigation.

People sharing screenshots of Fight Club's alternative ending on Twitter inspired many other users to share similar images from different filmsunder the hashtag #ChinaEditChallenge.

Whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden even got involved, sharing edits of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

Cutting out the final action scene in which the Rebel Alliance destroy the Death Star in a climactic dogfight, the film skips directly to an unexplained explosion.

The "terrorist attack" is successfully prevented, while the rebels are arrested and "sent to a lunatic asylum," according to the final text in the Chinese version.

"They were discharged from the hospital after reforming their ways," it adds.

The Matrix

The 1991 tale of humans caught in a simulated reality was also given a Chinese twist.

Inspired by the philosophy of Plato, the sci-fi film depicts a dystopian future in which the world is dominated by cold, calculating machines.

In the version released in China, main character Neo is gunned down by agents protecting the system and his fellow freedom fighter Morpheus "divulges all enemy information and [is] converted back peacefully into the Matrix."

Horray!

And it is not just politics.

LGBTQ plotlines from hit US sitcom "Friends" were also removed in China before it was streamed earlier this year.

Disney's latest animated film, "Lightyear," was not even released in China as the company refused to remove a scene showing two female characters kissing.

See more here:
'The rebels were sent to a lunatic asylum': These films end differently in China - Euronews