One man stands up against the Panopticon

God help us if we lose

by Justin Raimondo

At the end of the eighteenth century, the laissez-faire-philosopher-turned-statist Jeremy Bentham devised a scheme for the design of a prison he called the Panopticon: a circular building at the center of which is a watchtower made of glass from which it is possible to observe the inmates at all times. If we look at America as one vast prison, with ourselves as the inmates, we can get some idea of what the national security bureaucracy was envisioning when they conceived PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” and the program that records the details (minus content) of every phone call made in the US (which, as far as I know, doesn’t have a name). Derived from documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald, these revelations throw back the curtain on a modern day, hi tech Panopticon, with the high priests of the National Security State sitting at the center of it, relentlessly observing us, the prisoners—who don’t even know we’re prisoners – 24/7.

PRISM allows the National Security Agency (NSA) “direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants,” according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian newspaper. The information scooped up by the NSA includes “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats,” according to the Power Point presentation leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The document claims the US (and British) governments collect this information “directly from the servers” of internet service providers. While at first denying even knowing about any such government program, as well as the idea that they would allow direct access to their servers, the named ISPs later conceded the truth of these accusations by acknowledging that the information is indeed being provided in a “online room,” where massive amounts of information are stored and then transferred to government snoops.

Smear Brigade Goes After Snowden

... and Greenwald. They can't refute the message – so they go after the messengers

by Justin Raimondo

When whistleblowers expose government wrongdoing and abuses, the procedure is always the same: the regime’s defenders focus on the whistleblower’s alleged personality defects and smear him within an inch of his life. They did it with Dan Ellsberg, they did it with Julian Assange, they did it with Bradley Manning, and that all too familiar modus operandi is unfolding pretty quickly in the case of Edward Snowden, the heroic libertarian who exposed Washington’s massive and unconstitutional spying operation against American citizens. The pundits who take seriously their job as the power elite’s Praetorian Guard are going after Snowdenhammer and tongs, and in these dark times their polemics provide a rich source of humor.

The funniest one – although this is admittedly a hard choice to make – has got to bethis piece by one William Foxton, a rather pathetic Tory “moderate” who claims to care about “civil liberties, Internet freedom, that sort of thing.” So you see he’s one of us – but he’s “never liked Glenn Greenwald,” the journalist who broke the story. Well, why not? Greenwald, after all, has been one of the staunchest advocates of those very causes, almost single-handedly responsible for calling foul on the foulest attack on civil liberties since the era of J. Edgar Hoover.

Foxton is coy on this point: he says maybe it’s because Greenwald’s pieces are “enormous,” not to mention “turgid” – although this doesn’t appear to deter Glenn’s numerous readers. Oh, but you see, they’re a “cult” – although he doesn’t let us in on the secret ceremonies, complete with Satanic altars and Druidic incantations, that no doubt figure prominently in the activities of the Greenwaldian sect. So then how do Greenwald’s many admirers – myself among them – qualify as cult members? Well, you see:

Let the smearing of Edward Snowden begin

The debate about this Short, Fat, Narcissist, Loner, Coward, Defector, Traitor, Cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood Communist is over.

By Elias Groll

Edward Snowden's decision to publicly reveal his identity has placed him at the center of growing controversy about the U.S. government's intelligence-gathering activities.

But by stepping forward, Snowden, the source behind reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian about highly classified U.S. intelligence programs, has also come under fire in the media. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me," Snowden told the Guardian. "I want it to be about what the U.S. government is doing." Snowden hasn't exactly gotten his wish.

While hailed as a hero in some quarters, Snowden has also been described as a coward and a traitor. Here is a thematic guide to the Snowden smear campaign.

Traitor

None other than John Boehner, the speaker of the House, took to ABC's Good Morning America to brand Snowden a traitor -- a sentiment echoed by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

This is, hands down, the scariest part of the NSA revelations

Metadata is more invasive and a bigger threat to privacy and civil liberties than the PRISM system

By Shane Harris

Forget PRISM, the National Security Agency's system to help extract data from Google, Facebook, and the like. The more frightening secret program unearthed by the NSA leaks is the gathering and storing of millions of phone records and phone-location information of U.S. citizens.

According to current and former intelligence agency employees who have used the huge collection of metadata obtained from the country's largest telecom carriers, the information is widely available across the intelligence community from analysts' desktop computers.

The data is used to connect known or suspected terrorists to people in the United States, and to help locate them. It has also been used in foreign criminal investigations and to assist military forces overseas. But the laws that govern the collection of this information and its use are not as clear. Nor are they as strong as those associated with PRISM, the system the NSA is using to collate information from the servers of America's tech giants.

Google chief wrote about 'terrifying' surveillance months before NSA leaks

Big Brother tyranny is probable but not inevitable

By John Hudson

Before defending the U.S. government's surveillance apparatus -- as he did last week -- Eric Schmidt wasn't so blasé about government snooping.

In an overlooked chapter of his recently released book The New Digital Age, Google's executive chairman described the battle for Internet privacy as a "long, important struggle" and depicted the emergence of Big Data surveillance tactics as a threat to a free society.

"Governments operating surveillance platforms will surely violate restrictions placed on them (by legislation or legal ruling) eventually," he wrote in a chapter on the future of terrorism. "The potential for misuse of this power is terrifyingly high, to say nothing of the dangers introduced by human error, data-driven false positives and simple curiosity."

Sounds like a familiar problem, right?

Little did Schmidt know that two months after his book's release, an intelligence contractor named Edward Snowden would carry out the biggest leak in the history of the National Security Agency, exposing its surveillance program PRISM and the cooperation of top technology firms including Google.

Was Cheney right about Obama?

Presidential authority is easy to accumulate and very difficult to undo

BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE

After Barack Obama was elected to his first term as President but before he took the oath of office, Vice-President Dick Cheney gave an exit interview to Rush Limbaugh. Under George W. Bush, Cheney was the architect, along with his legal counsel, David Addington, of a dramatic expansion of executive authority—a power grab that Obama criticized, fiercely, on the campaign trail, and promised to “reverse.” But when Limbaugh inquired about this criticism Cheney swatted it aside, saying, “My guess is that, once they get here and they’re faced with the same problems we deal with every day, they will appreciate some of the things we’ve put in place.”

I was reminded of that line during last week’s revelations about mass-surveillance programs administered by the National Security Agency. When Cheney said it, the remark struck me as cynical and self-serving. Now it seems prescient. Many observers have lamented Obama’s war on leaks—which has been distinguished by an unprecedented number of prosecutions—suggesting that there is some hypocrisy in a President who, having promised to roll back Bush’s “policy of secrecy,” has devoted his time in office to the merciless pursuit of whistle-blowers.

Why Edward Snowden is a hero

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

BY JOHN CASSIDY

Is Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old N.S.A. whistle-blower who was last said to behiding in Hong Kong awaiting his fate, a hero or a traitor? He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the existence of Israel’s weapons program, before him, Snowden has brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country.

Doubtless, many people inside the U.S. power structure—President Obama included—and some of its apologists in the media will see things differently. When Snowden told the Guardian that “nothing good” was going to happen to him, he was almost certainly right. In fleeing to Hong Kong, he may have overlooked the existence of its extradition pact with the United States, which the U.S. authorities will most certainly seek to invoke. The National Security Agency has already referred the case to the Justice Department, and James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has said that Snowden’s leaks have done “huge, grave damage” to “our intelligence capabilities.”

Kindness and Strangers

Treating Immigrants Like Strangers

Ellis Island 

By BRYAN CAPLAN

Immigrants are strangers, and we should treat them accordingly.

On the one hand, this means that we should consider all of the ways–good and bad–that immigrants affect us.  We shouldn’t merely consider the fiscal effects of immigration.  We should consider the broader economic effects, including those on innovation and entrepreneurship.  And we should consider the political effects–how immigrants will sway our future policies and priorities.

None of this means, however, that we may ignore the welfare of immigrants.  They’re strangers but still human beings.  No one is obligated to hire strangers, house strangers, or support strangers in the lifestyle to which they’d like to become accustomed.  When someone else offers to hire, house, or support a stranger, however, we are normally obliged not to interfere.  If you disapprove of your employer’s latest recruit or your landlord’s new tenants, you have every right to quit or move.  But to overrule other people’s agreements requires a very good excuse.

How America Lost Its Way

Our institutions need fixing

By NIALL FERGUSON

Not everyone is an entrepreneur. Still, everyone should try—if only once—to start a business. After all, it is small and medium enterprises that are the key to job creation. There is also something uniquely educational about sitting at the desk where the buck stops, in a dreary office you've just rented, working day and night with a handful of employees just to break even.

As an academic, I'm just an amateur capitalist. Still, over the past 15 years I've started small ventures in both the U.S. and the U.K. In the process I've learned something surprising: It's much easier to do in the U.K. There seemed to be much more regulation in the U.S., not least the headache of sorting out health insurance for my few employees. And there were certainly more billable hours from lawyers.

This set me thinking. We are assured by vociferous economists that economic growth would be higher in the U.S. and unemployment lower if only the government would run even bigger deficits and/or the Fed would print even more money. But what if the difficulty lies elsewhere, in problems that no amount of fiscal or monetary stimulus can overcome?

Nearly all development economists agree that good institutions—legislatures, courts, administrative agencies—are crucial. When poor countries improve their institutions, economic growth soon accelerates. But what about rich countries? If poor countries can get rich by improving their institutions, is it not possible that rich countries can get poor by allowing their institutions to degenerate? I want to suggest that it is.

Consider the evidence from the annual "Doing Business" reports from the World Bank and International Finance Corporation. Since 2006 the report has published data for most of the world's countries on the total number of days it takes to start a business, get a construction permit, register a property, pay taxes, get an export or import license and enforce a contract. If one simply adds together the total number of days it would take to carry out all seven of these procedures sequentially, it is possible to construct a simple measure of how slowly—or fast—a country's bureaucracy moves.

The Twilight Of Christian Europe

Europeans are so post-Christian that they don’t even have a hostile view towards Christianity

By ROD DREHER

A Catholic bishop in England addresses a recent conference. 

Excerpt:

The recent analysis of the 2011 Census results appears to indicate that before the end of this decade Christianity – once the faith of the great majority of British people – will become the faith of a significant minority. If most English people no longer identify themselves as Christians it will surely be one of the most momentous changes in our history since missionaries sent by Pope Gregory arrived on the coast of Kent in the year 597 AD. However, I want to suggest today that this may not be an entirely negative development as it dispels any ambiguity and requires of Christians a greater clarity in both teaching and witness. As Catholics we speak of this as nothing less than a “new evangelisation”, a new proclamation of the Gospel in our time. It is “new” not because there is a new faith or a new Gospel but because we face a new and changed situation. It was surely with this in mind that Pope Benedict called for the “Year of Faith” as an invitation in the Pope Emeritus’s words to “rediscover the joy of believing and enthusiasm in communicating the faith” (PF n.7) and “to profess the faith in fullness and with a renewed conviction” (PF n.9). This is surely what is now needed and it is what this Northern Catholic Conference sets out to address.

The bishop speaks of the current moment as “the twilight of Christian England.” Who could possibly doubt him? Is it just me, though, or do you too cringe when he speaks of this epochal catastrophe for Christianity as possibly “not an entirely negative development”? I mean, I see what he’s getting at, but that phrasing strikes me as like finding something positive to say about the firebombing of Dresden because it hastened urban renewal.

If Big Brother is our guardian angel now, could he become Lucifer?

Who Can Check the Surveillance State?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” said Secretary of State Henry Stimson of his 1929 decision to shut down “The Black Chamber” that decoded the secret messages of foreign powers.

“This means war!” said FDR, after reading the intercepted instructions from Tokyo to its diplomats the night of Dec. 6, 1941. Roosevelt’s secretary of war? Henry Stimson.

Times change, and they change us.

The CIA was created in 1947; the National Security Agency in 1952, with its headquarters at Ft. Meade in Maryland. This writer’s late brother was stationed at Meade doing “photo interpretation” in the years the CIA’s Gary Powers, flying U-2s at 70,000 feet above Mother Russia, was providing the agency with some interesting photographs.

This last week, through security leaks, we learned that the NSA has access to the phone records of Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. Of every call made to, from or in the U.S., NSA can determine what phone the call came from, which phone it went to, and how long the conversation lasted.

While NSA cannot recapture the contents of calls, it can use this information to select phones to tap for future recording and listening.

Through its PRISM program, the NSA can acquire access, via servers such as Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL, to all emails sent, received and presumably deleted or spammed. And if the NSA can persuade a secret court that it has to know the contents of past, present or future emails, it can be accorded that right.

Those Selfish Germans

Germany, dominating the eurozone without being very keen to do so, is damned if she does and damned if she does not

by Anthony de Jasay

Innate qualities and disciplined economic management earned Germany a solid position, the envy of most of the eurozone, and accusations of selfishness for not sharing her good fortune more readily with others, notably with the Southern tier of Europe that is having a hard time under the overload of its excessive debt.

Few people pretend to be wholly unselfish—the really unselfish probably least of all. Selfishness in oneself is not really shameful where good reasons to pardon it are easy to find. It is in others that it is blame worthy and a source of deep indignation. This indignation is one part in the mixture that fuels our demand for social justice and solidarity on the part of the better off.

Envy works differently, though it works to the same end. It is one of the instincts most people have and yet very few will confess it even to themselves, let alone out in the political arena. As it is shameful to admit it, it finds expression in some more noble disguise, such as the rejection of inequalities. This sentiment, joined to the condemnation of the selfishness of others, saves the notion of social justice from running on empty. Coveting the money and goods of the more fortunate explains the persistent claim for redistribution between classes in a country and lately also between richer and poorer countries .

It does so even without supposing hypothetical social contracts or agreements on a norm of equality. Covetousness completes the amalgam that suffices to give meaning to social justice that would otherwise have to seek it in contestable metaphysical speculations.

In his classic book Envy,(1) the Austrian sociologist Helmuth Schoeck makes the somewhat unexpected point that envy is rather a good thing because it makes for social stability. The envious represent a threat to the person they envy. The latter is therefore well advised to avoid provoking them and not flaunt his accomplishments, his superior talents, and his wealth. Ostentatious consumption will breed hostility, while measure, taste, discretion, and the other hallmarks of breeding and self-discipline will blunt it. Thus envy leads to better behaviour and less strife.

When Government Cries Wolf

An overdose of "warnings" puts our lives at risk

by David R. Henderson
In the spring of 1982, when I was working in the Reagan administration, my friend Harry came to visit. He had started learning how to use kayaks and wanted to try out his skills on the Potomac River. I had never been in a kayak in my life, but I was excited also. So we rented two kayaks, tried them out on the placid C&O canal beside the Potomac and then decided that we were ready for the river. I had driven over the Potomac every day on the way to work, and it seemed like a calm enough river. How dangerous could it be?

When we walked down to the shoreline, we saw a big official sign that said, "WARNING: DANGEROUS CANOE PUT-IN."

"Yeah, right," we thought. “There goes government crying wolf again.”

Wrong. Within 50 yards of where we put in our kayaks, we were using all of our strength to navigate down a very rough river with substantial rapids. Within two minutes, I was worn out and was running on adrenaline. When I finally I got to my first bit of calm water, I relaxed slightly—and immediately tipped over. I was upside down and stuck in the kayak. I forgot what I had just learned about pulling the rope that held the “skirt” in place. I kept yanking my body for what seemed an eternity—and was probably less than ten seconds.

Finally, I yanked so hard that my body was released from the kayak. When my head got above water, I held on to the kayak—but saw that I was heading for the next big set of rapids. Fortunately, a seasoned kayaker appeared out of nowhere, told me to hold on to the strap on his kayak, and towed me to shore. I was lucky.

What had gone wrong? We had mistakenly dismissed the government’s warning. But why had we done so? Because the government so often cries wolf. The government warns us about many risks, large and small, and rarely gives any idea of the size of those risks. We have a kind of “warning pollution.” In economics, there’s something known as Gresham’s Law, which says, “Bad currency drives out good currency.” With respect to warnings, there’s a similar law, and since I’m identifying it, I’ll name it Henderson’s Law of Warnings: “Trivial warnings drown out serious warnings.”

The kayak incident happened 31 years ago, and, even then, I had become used to the government crying wolf. Since then, the warnings about trivial risks have increased substantially. In California, where I live, Proposition 65, passed by the voters in 1986, requires sellers to put warning labels on goods that contain chemicals that can cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. Many products sold in California carry labels warning of this harm, even if the risk is tiny. Supermarkets post generic “Proposition 65 Warnings.” These warnings, generally at the entrance to a store, tell customers that the store contains goods that may cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. Gee, that’s helpful. I’ve lived in California all the years since that 1986 law was passed and I, like virtually all Californians, have learned to tune out those Proposition 65 warnings.

The Smoke And Mirrors Are Running Out

Politicians rob from the future to hide the true conditions of the present

Those who believe the economy is recovering are ignorant of the facts. Other than the Great Depression no US recovery (and I don’t believe we are in a recovery) taken longer. Eventually it may take more than a decade like the 1930s. Or perhaps it will be like Japan which is in its third decade of “recovery.”

Politics and Economics

The truth is that our economy is spent, exhausted and filled with misallocations and distortions made much worse by government interventions. There is no recovery, nor will there be one until a massive purge (usually referred to as a depression) occurs. This event will result in bankruptcies that release scarce, misallocated physical capital from unproductive and unwanted areas to places where it is needed and can be utilized efficiently.

Rather than allow this pre-condition to an economic recovery and a growing, efficient economy, politicians want to prevent it. They use smoke, mirrors and propaganda (lies) to hide the reality of our sick economy. Their obfuscations continue, but the effective life is limited.

What politicians do to the country beyond their term in office means nothing to them. Their concern is only for themselves and the short-term that exists between elections. As a result they rob from the future to hide the true conditions of the present. Those still unborn will be paying for their criminal economic charade.

Economic Conditions

So how bad is the economy? Michael Shedlock, “Mish” is among the more prolific as well as more incisive financial analysts on the web. His site is always worth reading, but a recent post is essential. To impress upon you the seriousness of the situation and to encourage you to read his post, I quote some of his points (anything in red is my emphasis):

… we’re doing the same thing that led to the 2008 blowup — we’ve learned exactly nothing.  In real terms our GDP is in fact contracting by about $500 billion a quarter, after adjusting for debt expansion — that’s $2 trillion a year, more or less.

In terms of debt and inflation, Mish determined that:

… we’re contracting in purchasing power adjusted for new debt at more than 10% over the last four quarters.

Big Brother Says, ‘Open Your Mouth!’

Your DNA as well as your data is at risk from overreaching government

By RAND PAUL

The Bill of Rights is and should be popular. It is something most Americans overwhelmingly support. Conservatives love the Second Amendment and honest progressives defend the First Amendment. But it is sometimes harder for the public to embrace and champion the due process of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments.

Why? Because to defend due process sometimes means defending trials, lawyers, and privacy for people accused of heinous crimes. Understandably, some don’t choose to think about the fact that the worst imaginable people in our society are still guaranteed rights as citizens—the right to trial by jury, the right to an attorney, the right to be free from suspicionless searches.

Who would want to defend the rights of awful rapists and murderers? The easy response is that we defend due process to try to ensure that the person who is punished is guilty of the crime. There have been times in our country’s history when due process was ignored or absent. The lynching of black men in the South is the most egregious. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War Ii is another stain on our history when we strayed from due process.

Last year, President Obama signed into law a bill that allows for the indefinite detention without charge of an American citizen. When I asked a fellow Senator if this meant that an American citizen could be sent to Guantanamo Bay without charge or jury trial, and be indefinitely detained for the rest of their life, he responded: “If they are dangerous.”

But this only begs the question: Who gets to decide if they are dangerous?

We have a Bill if Rights to protect us—innocent, law-abiding Americans citizens, not criminals, not terrorists, not enemies.

The Bill of Rights exists to protect citizens like Richard Jewell, the security guard whose efforts helped save lives during the bombing of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. After the bombing, Jewell became a suspect in the investigation and was quickly convicted in the court of public opinion. Everyone rushed to label him a terrorist.

After 88 days of media speculation and slander, Jewell was formally cleared of all charges. They eventually caught the real culprit who set the bombs. Today, one could easily imagine some calling for Jewell’s constitutional rights to be waived and for him to be indefinitely detained as an enemy combatant.

Losing faith in state schools

A new campaign for the abolition of UK faith schools ignores the real crisis in the state education sector

by Neil Davenport 

Militant atheists, along with prominent religious leaders, have launched a campaign to ban schools from selecting children on the grounds of faith. The Fair Admissions campaign was launched last week by a coalition of groups, including the British Humanist Association, the Lib Dem education association and Muslims for Secular Democracy. In the long term, the group would like faith-based selection schools banned and, in the short term, the admissions policies of faith-based schools changed.

The charge against selection on religious grounds is that it is ‘unfair’. Children who are not members of the ‘right religion’, or who are from secular backgrounds, are effectively barred from specific schools. For Fair Admissions campaigners, this is a legalised form of discrimination. Rabbi Jonathan Romain of the Accord Coalition likened faith-based selection to ‘the idea of no Catholics to be allowed in the army, no Jews to be social workers’.

In reality, the Fair Admissions campaign is the latest assault on traditional communities in Europe. In Germany, for instance, some states have outlawed circumcision of Jewish and Muslim boys on the grounds that it is a form of ‘child abuse’. In the UK, the Equalities Act provides a mechanism through which faith schools could be prosecuted for teaching beliefs that denounced homosexuality.

There is a curious paradox here regarding faith schools. On the one hand, respect for a plurality of beliefs, values, traditions and customs are the hallmarks of official multiculturalism. Anyone old-fashioned enough to be judgmental about other cultures can find themselves publicly ostracised or even on the wrong side of the law. But on the other hand, respect for diversity starts to fade whenever faith schools are mentioned.

The Gap Between Disaster and Prosperity

Savings is the buffer which is the gap between disaster and prosperity

by Alan Greenspan

As far as your average American household is concerned, they would argue that they’re saving more than enough — or at least until recently they would have said that.

The reason [for that mind-set] is they’ve looked at their 401(k)s, and they’ve looked at the value of their homes, and they’ve looked at their assets generally — and while we economists may say that capital gains do not finance real capital investment and standards of living, the average household couldn’t care less.

When you think in terms of the economy as a whole, you have to realize that if the output of an economy — or in household terms, the amount of income [available] is all consumed, [then] we’re not accumulating the types of assets which we find productive over the years. Every advanced economy invests a significant amount of what it produces. It ploughs it back in the way of capital assets — meaning factories, equipment, all forms of capital — which essentially make the standard of living rise, because as technology and capital increase, an hour’s worth of effort on the part of a person has (over the generations) been increasing.

The comparable measure with respect to households is that if you don’t save adequately, you are wholly dependent upon the income you are getting. But as far as you’re concerned, unless you put money away for nest egg purposes, for retirement, for a variety of other purposes, you will find that you are living an extraordinarily precarious existence. Savings is the buffer which is the gap between disaster and prosperity.

By maintaining a stable financial system, a stable monetary system contributes to economic growth through enhancing stability and, most importantly, keeping inflation at a subdued level. The issue of rising wealth in the last 15 years or so is essentially a global phenomenon and one that results because of the consequences of what was seen when the Cold War came to an end.

Russia's new Middle Eastern role

Voters don't trust conservatives with guns after the disaster of the Iraq and Afghanistan nation-building campaigns

By Spengler 

Russia has thrown a monkey wrench into Western plans for Syria by promising to deliver its top-of-the-line S300 surface-to-air missile system to the Bashar al-Assad government. Exactly when the missiles might arrive remains unclear; the last word from Moscow is that the missiles are not yet in place, which means the matter is up for bargaining. 

It is humiliating for the West to trip over a game-changing Russian technology nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The larger scandal is that the West lacks countermeasures against the Russian system, the result of misguided defense priorities over the past dozen years. If the United States had spent a fraction of the resources it wasted in nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan on anti-missile technology, Russia would lack the bargaining chip in the first place. That's spilt milk, however, and the pressing question is: what should the West do now? 

The questions to ask are:

1. Is Russia a rational actor?

2. If the answer to the first question is affirmative (as the overwhelming majority of analysts believe), what does it have to be rational about?

3. Can the United States do anything in the foreseeable future to change the present regime in Russia?

4. If the answer to the third question is affirmative, then what do we want to negotiate with Vladimir Putin? 

The right way to go about this, I believe, is to draw a bright line between Russia's opportunistic meddling in Middle Eastern affairs and existential issues for the Russian state. Much as we may dislike the way the Russians manage their affairs, it isn't within the power of the West to change the character of the Russian regime.