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Declan, Al Gore, and Politics

Author:   Matt Deatherage  
Posted: 3/21/04; 3:38:02 PM
Topic: Declan, Al Gore, and Politics
Msg #: 748 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 747/749
Reads: 5402

Twice in the past few days, progressive Weblogs I admire have implied that technology writer Declan McCullaugh is one of the Media Whores, a biased conservative/libertarian writer who shades the truth in his articles to score political points at the expense of his opponents.

At Political Animal, the new home of Calpundit's Kevin Drum, the second commenter on Drum's story about how USA Today's Jack Kelley got away with fabricating stories for so long wrote, using the name "Al Gore" and a bogus E-mail address:

Perhaps it is time to examine the journalistic record of Declan 'Gore invented the internet' McCullogh [sic].

Declan made this story up out of whole cloth, carefully laundering the accusation through a crony at the Cato institute. The transcript from CNN makes it clear that Gore was claiming credit for funding, not inventing.

Today, at Pandagon, a blog I like enough to link it on the side of this blog, Jesse Taylor looks at how the right wing of American politics will likely deal with Richard Clarke, former head of counter-terrorism efforts for the National Security Council under both Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, and an ultra-hawk anti-terrorism official for seven presidents. Jesse says:

I'm really excited to see Richard Clarke's interview on 60 Minutes tonight - Billmon gives us some valuable insight on his history with White House politics and anti-terror campaign, and the ass-covering that's already gone on so far on the part of the White House.

Richard Clarke became Bush's Special Adviser for Cyberspace Security back in October of 2001. He left at the beginning of 2003, and his tenure was marked by skeptical reactions to his focus on cyberterrorism, particularly from people who said that we needed to worry more about the blood-and-guts real-life threat from terrorist. Declan McCullagh's article is likely the template for conservative addresses of Clarke's criticisms - a cloistered, paranoid hawk's hawk, a man too aggressive and too worried even for the Islamist under every bed brigade.

I find all this hard to swallow because I actually know Declan, having first met him in May 1990 at an AppleFest trade show in New Jersey, while he was still in early college. I knew him before he was a journalist - in fact, even before he was an intern at NeXT Computer back in the day. I have real difficulty with the idea that Declan would shade truth in a story to make a point, even one that agrees with his libertarian, I-don't-want-government-interference beliefs on privacy and technology. (Declan's Politech mailing list on politics and technology is also linked on the right of this blog.)

Jesse's problem is with an opinion piece Declan wrote last year linked above, where he wrote this:

But now that agency budgets are up for review, Ridge seems to be treading the same alarmist path as did his former cybersecurity deputy, Richard Clarke, who quit in January.

Clarke was a professional paranoiac, a modern-day Chicken Little blinkered by a career spent in the cloistered intelligence community. It didn't help that Clarke's résumé featured such harrowing tasks as planning for the "continuity of government" after a nuclear strike on Washington--a job where no precaution is too extreme. Soon after President Clinton appointed him to a "national coordinator" post in 1998, Clarke became infamous for darkling warnings about the specter of a "digital Pearl Harbor" that would snarl computers and roil the world's economy.

To understand this bureaucratic mindset, consider that--while at the U.S. State Department in the mid-1980s--Clarke concocted a zany plan to incite a coup against Moammar Gadhafi to punish the Libyan strongman for embracing terrorism. Clarke's suggestion: SR-71 spy planes would buzz Libya, creating sonic booms that would appear to herald an invasion, thus unnerving Gadhafi. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy would fake hostilities off the coast and the State Department would encourage "speculation about likely Gadhafi successors," according to a memo coauthored by Clarke. After news of the plan leaked, an embarrassed Reagan White House unceremoniously ditched it. The New York Times' William Safire dubbed the scheme "stupid and venal."

Clarke's penchant for the dramatic, which I witnessed firsthand when I spent an hour interviewing him in December 2001, extended to a farewell statement he circulated in January. It warned of the dangers of the SQL Slammer worm, which infected servers running Microsoft software.

In that statement, Clarke claimed that Slammer "disabled some root servers, the heart of Internet traffic." Not true. A report from the RIPE Network Coordination Center--one of the Internet's four regional registries--said that at most the worm slowed connectivity to two of the 13 root servers and did not disable any of them. "This did not cause any degradation in (domain name system) service," RIPE concluded.

Clarke also claimed that "a national election/referendum in Canada was canceled" due to computer mischief. At best, that was a reckless exaggeration. What actually happened is that Canada's New Democratic Party held a leadership convention and found their Internet voting to be sluggish. CBC reported that voting was completed just 45 minutes behind schedule.

It's not just Clarke and Ridge. Exaggeration is easy when you're a bureaucrat hoping to make yourself seem more important and thereby fatten your paycheck at your next job, or when your funding is up for review, or when you want to lobby for new and probably unwise laws that would endanger privacy or impose additional costs on technology firms (one of Clarke's pet ideas).

This is a lot closer to Declan's ideology as I've seen it (and it's clearly labeled an opinion piece): government initiatives to reduce privacy by imposing restrictions on technology are ill-advised, if not unconstitutional, without some kind of solid evidence to back them up. In fact, this is the same kind of thing that Jesse Taylor and others say about the PATRIOT Act, too. There's little disagreement here except in that Declan, who personally interviewed Clarke, finds him to be such an ultra-hawk that his ideas are ridiculous. Me, I think pretending to invade Libya would have been a lot cheaper and safer than actually invading Libya, but I'm a pragmatist.

Jesse appears to take issue with the piece because it discredits Clarke's ideas, something the right will desperately want after tonight's 60 Minutes interview. But libertarians always have the same views of anti-terrorism: anything that makes the US more like a police state in the face of "potential" attacks is a bad idea, and we must carefully scrutinize any such proposals to make sure they're not back-door attacks on privacy that can be used in other ways. It's the same reason so many libertarians are incensed about big databases of the citizenry - there's already some evidence that the US Government is banning some people from flying based on their political beliefs, using a database that they won't document, with procedures they won't document, with no appeal for people who suddenly find themselves blocked from a primary form of transportation.

Declan says that Clarke is too hawkish on cyber-terrorism, and that he overstated a few threats to the Internet to gain more support for initiatives to get more government control, and that's exactly the kind of thing Declan is usually concerned about. So what's the problem?

Well, Declan is kind of reviled among the progressives these days, because as he himself admits, he was the first reporter to note that Vice President Al Gore said on CNN that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." Declan points out that he never said Gore "invented" the Internet - he was questioning whether Gore was taking credit for things he had nothing to do with. It was not a particularly good story, but the GOP spin machine quickly picked it up and, through the echo chamber, made it into a real urban legend.

One reason the 2000 election was close enough to let Florida happen was that the GOP suceeded for most of that year in portraying Gore as a liar, a politician who only stands for what other people want to hear. Many progressives think the "invented the Internet" story was a big part of that, especially since Gore never said it. They blame Declan for bringing it to everyone's attention.

I don't think Declan is blameless here, although I do like him quite a bit. His mea culpa story accepting blame for the meme didn't appear until October 2000 - a month before the election - when the original story appeared in March 1999. In the October 2000 one, Declan points to many people who emphasize the truth of Gore's remark that Declan missed 19 months earlier: Gore did take the lead in Congress to advance the Internet as you know it. He pushed technology initiatives, he supported funding for the Internet's precursors, and he "showed an appreciation of technology that was far from usual on Capitol Hill."

But everyone gets defensive about these things, and Declan is no different. He also wrote, "But it's also difficult to argue with a straight face that the Internet as we know today would not exist if Gore had decided to practice the piano instead of politics." That's true - but Gore never claimed he was indispensable in creating the Internet, just that he took a leading role in Congress in that task, and everyone admits that's true.

Declan was no fan of Al Gore or George W. Bush:

It's fair to say that other Gore pet projects, like the Clinton administration's abandoned Clipper chip, are hardly ways to protect privacy and security online and promote the development of this technology.

Then again, it's also true the Clipper chip was first concocted under a George Bush Sr. administration, and another Bush occupying the Oval Office might well have similar inclinations.

We know that George W. Bush may not be any tech-savvier than Gore -- as anyone who caught the governor's the-Net-made-them-do-it comments about the Columbine High School killers can attest.

I don't think the guy is any threat to progressivism in any form you'd care about. However, this would all be a lot easier to debunk except for one tinfoil-hat aspect of it. I think Wired, where both the March 1999 and October 2000 stories appeared, would rather forget the whole thing. If you search Wired's site for the name of the March 1999 story, "No Credit Where It's Due," you get no hits. You have to find it manually. It's still online here.

However, it's obviously been badly edited - Gore's quote about "creating the Internet" is no longer in the article, and as now available, it makes absolutely no sense.

WASHINGTON -- It's a time-honored tradition for presidential hopefuls to claim credit for other people's successes.

That's what the campaigner in chief told CNN's Wolf Blitzer during an interview Tuesday evening. Blitzer asked Gore how he was different than other presumptive Democratic challengers, such as Bill Bradley. "What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?" Replied Gore: "I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins, and it'll be comprehensive and sweeping, and I hope that it'll be compelling enough to draw people toward it.... I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years."

Preliminary discussions of how the ARPANET would be designed began in 1967, and a request for proposals went out the following year. In 1969, the Defense Department commissioned the ARPANET.

Gore was 21-years-old at the time. He wasn't even done with law school at Vanderbilt University. It would be eight more years before Gore would be elected to the US House of Representatives as a freshman Democrat with scant experience in passing legislation, let alone ambitious proposals.

Declan's text about how the Internet existed long before Gore was in Congress makes absolutely no sense without the "initiative in creating the Internet" quote that someone at Wired has removed from the article. Someone doesn't want Wired associated with the story any longer.

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