From the morning newsletter: Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltass morning policy news primer. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog. The two top stories this week make for an odd pairing. On the one hand, theres the evolving NSA story, in which the U.S. government is further proving it has the capacity to break into seemingly any electronic communication made at any time anywhere. What makes these revelations so unnerving to both the U.S.s critics and its allies is the extraordinary technological competence and reach on display. Apart from law and morality, the final limit on what the U.S. government can do -- feasibility -- seems less binding by the day. The magnitude of the eavesdropping is what shocked us, former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a radio interview (via AP). Lets be honest, we eavesdrop too. Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we dont have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous. On the other hand, theres Obamacare, in which the U.S. handed hundreds of millions of dollars to more than 55 competitors to build a web site (okay, okay, a digital infrastructure) that doesnt actually work. What makes these revelations so unnerving is the U.S. governments extraordinary technological incompetence. The limit on the technology the government can build -- or even pay someone else to build -- seems far lower than anyone wanted to believe. It doesnt surprise me at all, says Fred Trotter, author of Hacking Healthcare. What you need to run a massive consumer web site is the latest in horizontal scaling and thats hardly approved software for the federal government. The federal government has very conservative mechanisms for purchasing off-the-shelf software and creating new software. That puts a lot of constraints on them. The joke here is obvious: Cant President Obama just ask the NSA guys to run the Obamacare web site? After all, the ones who are no longer spying on foreign leaders will need something to do. But the more serious question is whether both of these visions of the government can be right at the same time. Is it possible that the U.S. government can contain both the terrifying technological competence implied by the NSA stories and the unnerving technological incompetence displayed in the Obamacare stories? You could make an argument for it. The NSA has much more in-house technological talent than the Centers of Medicaid and Medicare Services. Theyve also had a lot longer to get their systems up and working. Perhaps theyre just better at what they do. But it seems at least as likely that the NSA is a whole lot less omniscient than the Snowden documents suggest. A program that sounds inescapable and infallible on paper might be a mess in reality. The wrong calls might get tapped. The data analysis might make the wrong associations. The e-mail collection might fail. (This doesnt, by the way, make the revelations any less unnerving: It makes it more likely that the wrong people will get caught in the net of surveillance.) The fact that the NSA operates in secret and without market competition makes it even likelier that their tech has a lot more fail than anyone is able to report. And its not as if the NSA has any interest in coming out and explaining that it doesnt have nearly the capacity some of these stories imply. Its better to be feared than loved, and its much better to be feared than mocked. Without more information on both the extent of Obamacares problems and the reality of the NSAs surveillance its flatly impossible to say which, if any, of these views is correct. But its hard to believe that technological incompetence HealthCare.gov and and technological omniscience of PRISM can both exist, exactly as currently understood, in the same institution. I have NO DOUBTS that incompetence and technological omniscience can be in the same institution.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 13:09:28 +0000
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