Media

On June 16, the House of Representatives passed an Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, which requires the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to produce a report on terrorist use of social media (Section 344). On July 7, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee approved an intelligence authorization bill that does not include the House bill’s mandate for a DNI report but does require social media companies to report terrorist activity to the federal government (Section 603). These proposals are new developments in the growing efforts to counter terrorist use of social media. The House Requirement for a DNI Report The House bill requires the DNI to produce a report containing the "assessment of the intelligence community on terrorist use of social media." The report must assess: What role social media plays in radicalization in the U.S. and elsewhere; How terrorists and terrorist organizations use social media; The intelligence value of social media posts by terrorists; and The impact on U.S. national security of terrorist content on social media for fundraising, radicalization, and recruitment. This proposal connects to efforts to understand terrorist use of social media, its national security implications, and ways to counter it. Legislative interest in the intelligence community’s assessment of these issues is understandable, but controversies about, for example, the role social media plays in radicalization, will heighten scrutiny of the intelligence community’s conclusions. Depending on what it contains, the DNI’s report could increase congressional interest in regulating social media for counter-terrorism purposes—another reason such a report could be consequential. The Senate Requirement for Social Media Company Reporting The bill approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee requires anyone who "obtains actual knowledge of any terrorist activity" while providing electronic communication or remote computing services to the public through means of interstate or foreign commerce to provide federal authorities with "the facts or circumstances of the alleged terrorist activities." This requirement directly regulates social media providers and raises more questions and policy implications than the House mandate for a DNI report. The provision does not define "terrorist activity," beyond requiring reports of activities touching on the federal crime of "distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction" (see 18 USC sec. 842(p)). Without parameters, companies could interpret "terrorist activity" differently, creating under-reporting (which would harm the purpose for reporting) and over-reporting (which would create privacy and free speech concerns). To protect privacy, the provision states that it may not be construed to require a provider to monitor users, subscribers, or customers or the content of their communications. Although social media providers do not have to conduct active surveillance, the provision does not address privacy or free speech worries associated with reporting communications to the federal government (my recent Cyber Brief provides some guidance on these issues). Further, the provision does not specify what federal agencies (FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA) should receive reports because it assigns that responsibility to the Attorney General. Nor does the provision say anything about what agencies can do with submitted information. Thus, the provision raises concerns similar to those advocates of civil liberties have raised about proposed cybersecurity legislation designed to increase information sharing between the private sector and the federal government. News reports raise questions about the purpose of the reporting requirement. Senator Diane Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued that "social media companies should be working with the government to prevent the use of their systems by violent militants." The Washington Post quoted an unnamed Senate aide who indicated the provision seeks to stop companies from removing content related to terrorism without informing the federal government in order to avoid losing potentially valuable intelligence. Reuters quoted "an official familiar with the bill" stating that its "main purpose was to give social media companies additional legal protection if they reported to the authorities on traffic circulated by their users." Legislation can serve multiple objectives, but, given sensitivities about tech companies providing information to the federal government, clarity on the purposes of this proposed regulation is critical. The provision leaves other questions unanswered. What happens to a social media provider that does not report terrorist activity of which it is aware? What oversight is needed to monitor reporting terrorist activity on social media to the federal government? How will such regulation be perceived by foreign customers of U.S. companies who are, post-Snowden, upset about the U.S. tech sector’s cooperation with, and vulnerability to, the U.S. government? Does the requirement apply to foreign companies that, in providing communication or computing services, access facilities or means of foreign or interstate commerce? The House and Senate proposals demonstrate intensifying concern in Washington, D.C. about terrorist use of social media, with the Senate bill containing the first attempt to require social media companies to support the federal government’s fight against digital terrorism. Although neither bill is close to becoming law at the moment, what happens next bears watching for national security, civil liberties, and business reasons.

There is increased speculation about the whereabouts of Abubakar Shekau in the Nigerian media. His last media broadcast was in early March when he pledged allegiance to the self-proclaimed Islamic State and threatened to disrupt Nigeria’s presidential and gubernatorial elections. Since the video’s release, Boko Haram terrorism seems to have decreased, but it has not entirely subsided. According to the Nigeria Security Tracker (NST), 505 deaths have been reported in April so far, compared to 1,426 in March. According to the Nigerian media, some in the Nigerian military are taking Shekau’s silence as evidence that Boko Haram is largely in disarray. However, there have always been questions about Shekau. The last time he was seen in public was 2009. Since then, the Nigerian security services have claimed many times to have killed him. There has been speculation that the “Abubakar Shekau” that appeared in Boko Haram videos was actually an actor or a double. Presuming that Shekau does, in fact, continue to exist, his authority or role in the leadership of Boko Haram is also unclear. Some have suggested that Boko Haram is run by a council, of which Shekau is only one member. In 2009, the security services cracked down on Boko Haram, killing its then leader, Mohammed Yusuf, and at least 800 followers. In the aftermath, Boko Haram melted into the countryside and urban slums and re-grouped. It re-emerged as a violent fighting force two years later, in 2011. Boko Haram may be following that same pattern now.

Medicines sans Frontiers (MSF –“Doctors Without Borders”) issued a detailed criticism of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) for its alleged failure to improve conditions at the Tomping displaced persons camp in Juba. UNMISS is trying close the camp and remove the displaced persons elsewhere. This will pose logistical challenges during the rainy season, now underway. MSF is a highly distinguished international humanitarian agency that has cooperated closely with UN agencies and plays a major humanitarian role in South Sudan. The New York Times reports that the overt criticism of UN agencies by MSF is unusual. This episode highlights the humanitarian challenges that endure in South Sudan, even if international attention has waned following the political and security crises that began in December last year. The bottom line is that humanitarian and UN agencies working in South Sudan require much higher levels of international funding. Otherwise, an even greater humanitarian tragedy than what we have already seen becomes all but inevitable.

Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight has been catching a lot of flak since it launched last week. Perhaps the harshest has been directed at the site’s retention of the often-contrarian climate analyst Roger Pielke Jr., with everyone from Paul Krugman to the Center for American Progresspiling on. The onslaught is disturbing. I’ve disagreed with Roger often, but he is genuinely well intentioned. People who care about getting good policy should want more thoughtful voices, not fewer, proposing options – and organized campaigns to run heterodox thinkers out of town are awfully ugly. But that doesn’t mean I’m impressed with the new FiveThirtyEight. Indeed it’s another energy post – “U.S. and Chinese Current Accounts Converging” – that’s troubling. The post starts out with an arresting chart (reprinted at the top of this post) that shows an impressive improvement in the U.S. current account balance. The author then explains what’s happened: “In the U.S., a natural gas boom is cooling demand for imported petroleum, and oil represents a huge share of American imports. The dollar, meanwhile, has depreciated, boosting American exports.” This is certainly the conventional wisdom. But what one expects from FiveThirtyEight is a data-driven interrogation of that conventional wisdom. Alas that would have produced a different result. Here’s another chart that combines the data presented by FiveThirtyEight (the blue line – it looks different because I’m showing absolute numbers rather than percentage of GDP) with three other series. Start by comparing the blue and red lines. These seem to move together beginning in 2009. In particular, what you’ll see is that the big shift in the current account comes in 2008-9. Indeed the decline in the oil trade balance (the red line) accounts for a little more than half the decline in the current account balance. So far so good: changes in oil trade seem to explain a lot of what’s happening with the current account. But now look at the dashed lines. The green dashed line shows that net petroleum and product imports have been declining steadily since about 2007. This raises a first problem with FiveThirtyEight’s analysis: if falling oil imports explain so much of the lower current account deficit, why hasn’t the current account deficit continued to plunge alongside oil imports? The answer is pretty straightforward: oil prices have gone up. The United States imported 64 percent as much oil in 2013 as in 2009, but the average cost of an imported barrel was 66 percent higher. It’s the purple dashed line, though, that’s the most damning. What that line shows is that in the span that the U.S. current account balance really shifted – 2008-9 – U.S. oil production had barely begun to pick up. It was only later, beginning in 2011-12, that output really took off. But that’s not the period when the big change in the current account balance appeared. (Had I added in natural gas liquids, which started rising earlier, the comparison would look a little better, but the basic problems would remain.) Had FiveThirtyEight actually juxtaposed the current account balance with oil trade data, it wouldn’t have ratified the conventional wisdom. Indeed one shouldn’t be surprised with this result. As Robert Lawrence showed in a paper that my program published in January, there are strong theoretical reasons to be skeptical of claims that falling U.S. oil imports and rising U.S. oil production will substantially reduce the U.S. current account deficit. Which gets to the heart of FiveThirtyEight’s challenge. They want to do theory-free data analysis. But without at least some sort of theory, you at best need to investigate a much larger volume of data in order to get useful results. (That’s what Nate Silver did so well with election predictions and baseball statistics.) At worst, if your data isn’t good enough, theory-free analysis leaves you with nothing. Here’s hoping that FiveThirtyEight will be disciplined enough to stick to analyses where its unusual approach works.

The current Economist has an article on U.S. oil and gas that repeats an increasingly common view: tight oil will make “future oil shocks less severe” since “frackers can sink wells and start pumping within weeks”. (Here’s a variant from The Atlantic last August.) That speedy response means that “if the oil price spikes, [drillers will] drill more wells”, quickly spurring new production, and taming any price spike. This is severely flawed – a point that recent experience reinforces. It is undeniably true that the time from drilling to production is far lower for tight oil than for traditional wells. But that doesn’t mean that industry can respond quickly and powerfully to oil market shocks. Imagine that a disruption in the Strait of Hormuz threatened to send oil prices up from one hundred to two hundred dollars a barrel for a span three months. How would U.S. oil producers respond? The first thing they’d do is ask themselves whether new investment would make sense over the full life of any new well rather than just over the span of the disruption. Let’s take a best-case scenario: a developer realizes that something is afoot on Day 1 of the crisis and is confident the price rise will last three months. If you assume that about 20 percent of a well’s output comes in its first year, and that production declines by about 50 percent in a straight line over the course of that year, then you end up with 6-7 percent of total production during the period of elevated prices. Wells with break-evens up to 106 or so dollars a barrel, rather than merely 100 dollars a barrel, are now in the money. This will not spur radical change. (If I was doing this carefully, I’d discount future cash flow, making the up-front revenue boost more consequential. But the basic qualitative point would still stand.) Even if you extend the crisis to six months, you get a maximum break-even of about 112 dollars a barrel, a relatively small increment. And this assumes that drillers act instantly upon a supply disruption; in reality, making a decision to drill, mobilizing resources to begin production, and actually drilling and fracking a well would delay the start of production and further blunt the slightly-above-normal returns. One can argue with the numbers I’ve used to make this point, but the basic qualitative conclusion is solid. In fact the numbers I’ve just presented overstate how strong drillers’ response would be. In the short run the number of rigs available for drilling is fixed. (I could make a similar argument about other capital and people needed to initiate production, but it’s useful to focus on one thing.) It’s true that producers can move rigs from natural gas toward oil, but that’s happened so much over the last couple years that there isn’t a huge margin to do that today. Over time, you could see more rigs get ordered. But companies aren’t going to order a bunch of rigs that will be active for a few months and then sit idle once prices return to normal – that’s not a profitable proposition. Instead companies faced with an impending price spike will bid for a fairly fixed set of rigs. Since those rigs are newly valuable – you can now make a bit more money using each one because oil prices are higher – companies will be willing to pay more. The break-even price for a given well will therefore rise, moving some seemingly profitable but marginal prospects back into the red, and leaving them untapped as a result. This dynamic also explains why newly cash-flush producers won’t be able to blindly plow all their money back into increased production even if they were inclined to: the necessary rigs wouldn’t be there. And there’s one more constraint: transportation. Even if drillers can respond quickly, that doesn’t mean that they can get the oil they produce to market. If there isn’t sufficient pipeline or rail capacity to quickly move newly produced oil to market, companies aren’t going to produce that oil. It takes a decent amount of time, of course, to expand transport capacity. This won’t always be a big constraint, but it’s one more strike against the “tight oil production is always going to be super-responsive” line. We’ve recently had an ugly piece of real-world experience in natural gas that backs this all up. Henry Hub natural gas prices rose from $4/MMBtu to about $5.50/MMBtu over the span of a few weeks in January. They’re still elevated. So are rigs rushing toward newly profitable opportunities in natural gas? Absolutely not: the gas-directed rig count declined 4 percent last week (half those rigs went to oil and the other half were inactive) and has fallen 20 percent over the last year. This is due in part to the fact that the cold snap driving prices up right now is ultimately going to dissipate, and in part because we don’t have the right infrastructure in place to move additional natural gas production to market quickly. (It’s also because using available rigs to drill for oil remains more profitable than moving them to gas, despite the price spike.) To be certain, this story would look different if we were talking about long-term increases in the price of oil. A run-up like the one we saw in the 2000s, which unfolded over the span of almost a decade, would give drillers plenty of time to respond. (Though experience in the oil sands in the 2000s suggests that capital and labor constraints – and resulting cost inflation – would still be a major drag.) But for the sorts of oil price spikes we worry about most – those driven by sudden and intense geopolitical disruptions – the responsiveness of tight oil production is likely to do a lot less to blunt the consequences than many people seem to hope.

Nicholas Kulish, writing in the January 9 New York Times, reported that the International Crisis Group estimates the number of dead from the current round of fighting that started December 15 in South Sudan is nearly 10,000. This is much larger than the December 26 estimate by UN Special Representative for South Sudan Hilde Johnson of 1,000 killed. Fighting has intensified since December 26, no doubt resulting in more casualties. As Herve Ladsous, the under secretary for Peacekeeping Operations said, “We are not able to provide final figures. We know it will be very substantially in excess of the 1,000 figure.” In sub-Saharan Africa, where there is fighting, it is often difficult to get an accurate handle on casualty numbers. Rarely are there morgues and much of the fighting is usually dispersed over large areas. Then there are the casualties, usually civilian, from disease and hunger that results from the movement of displaced persons. Over the years, many NGO researchers working on the ground in conflict areas have suggested to me that to get a realistic figure, it was necessary to multiple official figures by at least five. That makes the International Crisis Group estimate, if not exact, then at least indicative of realities on the ground.

Seth D. Kaplan, writing in the opinion pages of the January 7 New York Times, observes that by 2015, half the world’s population living on less than $1.25 a day will reside in fragile states. These poor contribute disproportionately to political instability, even terrorism. Nigeria is a fragile state, and the “worst run of the world’s most populated countries.” Lagos, the commercial and cultural capital of the country, has a population of more than 17 million. By comparison, New York’s five boroughs numbered 8.337 million in 2012. Most Lagos residents are impoverished and large portions of the city are built in a swamp. Nevertheless, Kaplan suggests that Lagos may be a model for how fragile states might begin to succeed. Kaplan points out that in fragile countries such as Nigeria, central governments are often remote from their citizenry and politics is dominated by elites struggling for a larger piece of the pie. Not so, at least to the same extent, in urban agglomerations like Lagos where more localized elections take place. Kaplan’s strategy (shared by many) is devolution of power from the corrupt national government to state and local governments and the creation of a local culture that holds governments accountable. Devolved power (under Nigeria’s 1999 constitution) means that the Lagos electorate can and does demand specific services, thereby encouraging candidates to address practical problems. Numerous Nigerian interlocutors have told me that something approaching a civic contract is indeed emerging in Lagos: citizens pay taxes and the city government provides services. Over the past decade public transportation, garbage collection, and street cleaning have dramatically improved. The Lagos state government has also become friendlier to business. I would also suggest that Lagos has been fortunate in its leadership. The current governor of Lagos state, Babatunde Fashola has vision, native political skills, and an eye for good management. So too did his predecessor, Bola Tinubu. So, one good governor succeeded another, though subsequently they have fallen out with each other. Kaplan also argues that in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural city like Lagos, politicians cannot afford to pit ethnic and religious groups against one another. Both Tinubu and Fashola have emphasized what unites Lagos, not what divides it. Finally Lagos has had a long tradition of opposition to whatever government is installed in Abuja. Among other consequences, Lagos has had to meet its costs of government largely through local taxation rather than through oil revenue doled out by the central government. But, the nagging question remains how much of the progress in Lagos is the result of the personalities and skills of the last two governors, rather than a fundamental transformation of its political culture.

Bill Keller’s recent New York Times article entitled "Nelson Mandela, Communist" appeared on December 8. Based on research undertaken by the British historian Stephen Ellis in 2011, Keller accepts Ellis’ conclusions that Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party and a member of its Central Committee, despite repeated denials by Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC). He asks the question, “should we care?” If true, does Mandela’s South African Communist Party membership diminish him? Keller concludes that it does not. Instead, he suggests South African Communist Party membership was an aspect of Mandela’s pragmatism and flexibility. When it came to governance, Mandela’s pragmatic compromising–strongly supported by South African Communist Party icon Joe Slovo–won out over the “nationalizers and vengeance seekers.” But, Keller suggests (persuasively, in my view) that the ANC association with communism helps explain its failure to evolve from a liberation movement “to a political party, let alone a government.” Further, “it is something in the nature, the culture, of liberation movements. United by what they are against, they tend to be conspiratorial, to discourage dissent, and to prize ends over means.” It is just these characteristics that South African democrats criticize in the administrations of former president Thabo Mbeki and President Jacob Zuma. The close ties between the liberation movements, the Soviet Union, and China also help explain the hostility that the administrations of former president Ronald Reagan and former prime minister Margret Thatcher had toward the ANC and Mandela. During the Cold War, the “friend of my enemy was my enemy,” and the “enemy of my friend was also my enemy.” That way of thinking was part of the background to U.S. support for the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s President Laurent-Désiré Kabila and others who were simultaneously regarded as monsters.

Andrew Ross Sorkin addresses Nelson Mandela’s transformation from a socialist to a capitalist in the December 10 New York Times. Like other African liberation movements, the African National Congress (ANC) long advocated nationalization of much of the economy as essential to addressing the consequences of apartheid. The evolution of Mandela’s perspective was a highly significant development. Sorkin cites Mandela’s conversations with his biographer, Anthony Sampson, and a newspaper interview by Mandela’s close associate Tito Mboweni, subsequently a governor of the South African Reserve Bank. These sources attribute Mandela’s change of view to conversations with “world leaders” at the 1992 World Economic Forum at Davos. Mboweni, quite credibly, cites Mandela’s conversations with Communist party leaders from China and Vietnam, then in the process of selling off state owned enterprises and inviting in foreign investors, as particularly influencing Mandela. According to Mboweni, “they told him frankly as follows: ‘We are currently striving to privatize state enterprises and invite private enterprise into our economics. We are Communist Party governments, and you are a leader of a national liberation movement. Why are you talking about nationalization?’” Here, as in other areas, the end of the Cold War and the transformation of the surviving Communist states played an important role in the shaping of Mandela’s and the ANC’s approach to South Africa’s economics and governance. Elsewhere, I have argued that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that provided a crucial context for South Africa’s negotiated transition to non-racial democracy. Sorkin shows the importance of the new economic policies of China and Vietnam to the reshaping of Mandela’s approach to economics. Mandela’s view prevailed within the ANC, though there was significant left-wing opposition. There still is, if outside the ANC political establishment. Looking toward the 2014 elections, many South Africans are questioning free-market economics, given South Africa’s slow rate of economic growth, very high levels of unemployment, and the increases in economic inequality. The gap between white and black incomes is greater now than in 1994. However, Mandela’s great achievement was the promotion of racial “reconciliation” in South Africa, with whites accepting the new political dispensation. Mandela’s conversion to free market economics certainly promoted that goal. That may be its greatest significance.

For many, Nelson Mandela is no longer so much an historical figure as a legend. Even his portraits in the media are now idealized, neither the image of the young radical nor of the elderly statesman. He has become the personification of all that is good with respect to South Africa’s democratic transition and journey toward racial reconciliation. As the world-wide outpouring of emotion shows, the international community embraces him as a symbol of hope. And, according to the media, more than fifty heads of state will go to Johannesburg this week to pay tribute to him. For South Africa, now is not the time for objective analysis of his successes and failures as a politician but rather the commemoration of a national myth. The apotheosis of a political leader can be of immense value to nations that are deeply divided. During the generations between the American Revolution and the Civil War virtually all elements of American society–North and South, East and West–invoked the memory of the legend of George Washington. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate armies ensured that Mt. Vernon was undamaged, and both sides claimed to be Washington’s heir. After the war, shared reverence for the Washington myth played a role in national reconciliation. Nelson Mandela plays a similar role in South Africa, a country notoriously divided by race, ethnicity, class, language, and history. Yet we are seeing that virtually all South Africans–at least for the time being–are united by the Mandela myth. There are ironies in the differences between myth and historical reality, and often the latter can be more interesting, if less useful for state-building. Apotheosis little accords with Washington’s cool Anglican deism of temperament and the compromises he made. While resident in Philadelphia and New York, he rotated his slaves so that none could claim freedom based on residence in a northern state. Similarly, Mandela, the “man of peace” and a convinced democrat, was an initiator of the “armed struggle” and allied with such notorious figures as Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. He also solicited and received support from Communist-front organizations during the height of the Cold War. Important as the Mandela myth is, Mandela the human politician is of exceptional interest. In an article in Foreign Policy, I have tried to look at a few aspects of the man behind the myth.

This is a guest post by Emily Mellgard, research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. In the fight to save Africa’s wildlife and stem the tide of senseless slaughter for profit, awareness campaigns across the globe are as crucial as more boots on the ground in the game reserves and parks. Many consumers of ivory, rhino horn, and other wildlife products –such as tiger parts– do not know deadly supply chain through which ivory comes to be in shops around the world, or don’t care. One Chinese government worker interviewed for a New York Times article in March this year commented that: “As long as the quality of the ivory is good, who cares what happened to the elephant.” But this is not just an African or an Asian issue. The United States after all, remains the third largest market for trafficked wildlife. There is a great need, not only for enhanced and tightened anti-poaching efforts, but for much greater popular awareness of the monstrous fate of the wildlife being “harvested.” If demand falls, so too will profit, and therefore motivation for poaching. Organized crime, insurgents, terror groups, and  independent "entrepreneurs" are targeting the elephants and other African wildlife because it is profitable. If profits die out, they will move on. This wildlife crisis is market driven, rather than ideological. The Philippines in June this year, became the first non-African nation to destroy their ivory stockpile. The United States has also begun to embrace a comprehensive approach in its recent anti-poaching and trafficking policies. In a highly public display in Colorado on November 14, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service destroyed its six ton stockpile of confiscated ivory. They also invited other countries to follow their example. President Obama issued an Executive Order on July 1, 2013 that establishes enhanced legal and judicial steps against poaching. It also provides for U.S. “technical and financial assistance… where appropriate.” He also established a Presidential Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking and tasked it with developing and implementing a National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking. Former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea Clinton in September launched a U.S. $80 million anti-poaching plan at the Clinton Global Initiative. This is Hillary Clinton’s first major initiative since she stepped down as secretary of state at the beginning of 2013. While such public efforts and initiatives are important in the fight to save the elephants, and other targeted wildlife, to be most effective they should target each link in the poaching and trafficking chain. The Clintons’ initiative concentrates on poaching prevention and prosecution. There also remains a need to concentrate on raising awareness of the consequences of the carnage that poaching and trafficking wreck on the wildlife populations. There are reports that Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, and Tobey Maguire are collaborating on an anti-poaching movie. That would be a highly positive step. Awareness campaigns run in China (the largest end market for ivory) are showing some progress in sensitizing people against participating in the wildlife trafficking market. Such awareness raising campaigns would likely go a long way to decreasing American demand for wildlife products as well.