CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and nine other national security and intelligence scholars were recently invited to the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., for unprecedented talks with high-ranking officials. They discussed cybersecurity, the plummeting public trust in the agency, its relationship with Congress and how to rebuild the agency’s reputation and rethink its program operations. 

The academics were first taken to the black granite wall carved with the names of 171 military and civilian cryptologists who have died in service. “I think they wanted us to know that this is an organization of people, not some robots trolling through your emails,” said Zegart, author of the book, “Spying Blind,” which examines why U.S. intelligence agencies failed to adapt to the terrorist threat before the 9/11 attacks. 

The scholars were then taken to a windowless conference room for several hours of what Zegart called remarkably frank and free-ranging talks about the agency and its tactics.

The NSA is one of the world’s most secret intelligence gathering organizations. Its methods have come under intense scrutiny with a series of damaging leaks about its operations. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and national intelligence reporters have revealed tactics that have left many Americans cold and questioning the legality and necessity of the agency’s methods. From monitoring emails and phone calls, to secretly cracking encryption codes that protect personal email as well as financial and medical records and Internet chats – the revelations just keep coming. Civil liberty organizations and Internet privacy advocates here at Stanford are outraged, while some foreign governments are accusing Washington of Big Brother tactics run amok. 

Zegart answers questions about those perceptions and her Sept. 23 briefing at NSA headquarters.

 Are the accusations that the NSA is Big Brother squared fair?

Image

If you look at the reporting on the NSA so far, there is zero evidence of a widespread, deliberate and nefarious plan by the agency to violate the law and spy on American citizens. This is a policy debate, not a scandal. There’s no question in my mind that the NSA has interpreted its legal authority to the maximum extent of the law possible. They’ve taken what Congress has granted them and they have pushed to the edge – but that’s a very big difference from running amok.  

How did this unprecedented meeting come about and why do you think the senior NSA officials – who asked not to be identified – called on social scientists?

In our group, the last time someone went to the NSA was in 1975, which tells you how rare it is for them to invite academics in. The was a sense at senior levels that they need to think more systematically and long-term about education, about being more open to academics coming in and doing research about the NSA and hearing what academics have to say. In part, thought-leaders at universities can play a role in transmitting some of the complexities in which the NSA operates – the tradeoffs the agency is confronting and the constrains under which they are operating. 

 One thing this meeting highlighted for me is that the NSA is not free to respond to the criticism it gets in the press. It’s intertwined with other organizations that have a say in how it responds: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, the Justice Department and the White House. And they have never had to deal with the spotlight before. They gave me this statistic: Last summer, there were 167 legitimate questions from the press; in the summer of 2013 there were 1,900 media requests. That’s a tenfold increase. This is a whole new world for this agency. And to go against secrecy is just totally counter to their culture. This was a bold step for them to have us come in.

Did the NSA officials talk about whether they had broken any laws? 

They definitely wanted us to believe that what they are doing is lawful and effective. I believe the lawful part; I’m not so sure about the effective part. I think they haven’t looked hard enough about what effective means. Do they know it when they see it? And who’s to judge?

They were quick to point out that they’re under extensive oversight both by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The question is whether Americans are comfortable with the lines that have been drawn by their own government and if they’re comfortable with the lack of transparency. The NSA is really bad at letting us know what the gains are (from surveillance) and they’ve struggled with how to deal with the public reaction to the Snowden revelations. 

This is an intelligence agency and they’re supposed to be stealing information from other governments; that’s what we pay them to do and other governments would use those capabilities in an instant if they had them. That has gotten lost in the debate. When I talk to my parents and friends, they think that the NSA is listening in on their phone calls. That’s just not true. They’re examining phone logs: who called whom and for how long. No one is listening to your conversation with grandma.

The fundamental problem is that the NSA is highly regulated – but nobody trusts the regulatory framework."

Did you discuss former NSA contractor Edward Snowden? 

Extensively. It’s the biggest breach in the agency’s history. They’ve been in crisis mode since June. They’ve been putting our fires every day and the arsonist is still out there. NSA officials told us that they know 125 documents have been compromised; they believe Snowden probably has already passed to the press another 50,000 documents and that the entire tranche that he may have taken is bigger than that. But there’s a question about whether that tranche is accessible, that Snowden may have done things to make some of his data hard to read.  

They said Snowden didn’t just download documents he himself had access to. He used social engineering, convincing someone else to give him access to additional information to breach security protocols. Meanwhile, Snowden had plenty of avenues for whistleblowing, including five inspectors-general and the members of the congressional intelligence committees, but he availed himself of none.

Have Snowden’s actions endangered national security or international relations? 

The standard lines about “irreparable harm” are not convincing to many people because they are so vague, we’ve heard them so often, and the government classifies boatloads of information that shouldn’t be secret. But NSA officials got a little more specific. They said Snowden has hurt national security in three ways: The first is that he revealed government surveillance capabilities. Second, he’s revealed politically embarrassing things that are harming relations with our allies – and they believe there is more to come. (Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff postponed a state visit to Washington, for example, following the release of evidence that the U.S. spied on Brazilian politicians and business leaders.) They said Snowden has a pattern of releasing embarrassing information around big international meetings, such as the G20 summit. The third damaging impact is that Snowden has hurt the NSA’s ability to produce intelligence.

What are some of the challenges and solutions moving forward? 

Intelligence is a political loser and so you see a lot of members of Congress who says they are shocked – shocked! – to find out what the NSA is doing when they had full opportunity to be briefed on these programs for a long time. So they’re making political hay out of NSA’s difficulties. Most members of Congress have zero incentive to actually learn anything about the complexities of intelligence because the voters don’t hear about it and they don’t reward them for it. 

The near-term challenge is to stop Congress from doing something stupid, such as the wholesale cancelling of NSA programs and capabilities. The medium-term challenge is to figure out what sensible options there are to restoring the public trust and make the NSA more transparent and more targeted in its collection approach. When NSA chief Keith Alexander steps down, we are going to see all of these issues come to a head in a very public way with the confirmation of the next director. 

The longer-term challenge is creating better mechanisms to assess whether NSA should do things just because it can technically – to weigh the wisdom and efficacy of programs, not just their legality. The NSA also needs a sustainable education campaign so that when things break in the news, legislators and constituents have an understanding of what this agency does and can put these revelations into perspective.

They definitely wanted us to believe that what they're doing is lawful and effective; I believe the lawful part, I'm just not so sure about the effective part." 

What are the strengths of the NSA that the public doesn’t get to see? 

The NSA is the organization that’s responsible for information assurance, like if you’re in government on a secure phone line. And most people don’t know the NSA wrote the codes to protect our nuclear arsenal from day one. So the NSA has two, often conflicting missions. One is signals intelligence, which is offense, and the other is the information assurance that is defense. In an era of cyber vulnerabilities, information assurance is huge. They feel like they were doing what they were authorized to do and serving the mission and that they are being characterized as evil for doing what they think is right.

What were your biggest takeaways from this meeting? 

I would say one of the things that I did walk away from the meeting hearing – and I think that perhaps this is the big policy question – is that the NSA orientation is to collect now, ask questions later. So the question is: Is that the right operating philosophy; are we comfortable as a democratic society with that collect-now-ask-later approach?

America may have legitimate competitive reasons to worry about the number of computer science and engineering graduates from elite Chinese and Indian universities – the figure dwarfs that of U.S. students with similar degrees.

But a new book by Stanford researchers and others says that the concern that these countries will develop their own centers of high-tech production and innovation and draw research, development and scholarship away from American shores is still premature.

The research, a multidisciplinary look at the growth of higher education in the world's four largest developing economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China (known collectively as the BRICs) – analyzes the quality of institutions, the quantity of people getting degrees and equal access to education.

The book, University Expansion in a Changing Global Economy: Triumph of the BRICS?, is published by Stanford University Press.

"In the past 20 years, university systems in these big countries have just exploded," said Martin Carnoy, a Stanford professor of education and one of the authors. Carnoy is also an affilate of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"So the questions are why did it happen and what are the implications? And specifically, what are the implications for the U.S. if the market is flooded with new scientists and engineers? Are we going to be overwhelmed? What happens to their societies if all the energy is focused on elite institutions," Carnoy said.

The researchers approached their questions with the belief that societies, and governments, can be judged by the way they invest in and organize their public higher education systems.

For example, how well these countries create a labor force that is competitive in the information age depends on the quality of higher education. Whether people have equal chances to succeed relies on having colleges that are accessible to even the poorest students. And how effectively a country expands its university system may determine how successful it is at growing a robust economy and competing with the United States and Europe, the scholars argue.

"If you have economic growth and provide educational opportunities, you're perceived as a legitimate, successful government," Carnoy said. "So our theory was, if you can pull this off, if you can successfully expand your university systems, you are likely a pretty efficient government."

BRIC undergraduate education increased from about 19 million students in 2000 to more than 40 million students in 2010. The largest increase was in China, which went from less than 3 million to almost 12 million bachelor's degree students during that period, the study says.

Financing elite schools

The study found that BRIC countries are pouring money into their elite colleges in an effort to create world-class institutions and have their graduates compete with the United States and Europe.

Researchers say the elite colleges are much better for the focused investment, and the engineers and computer scientists are graduating with similar competency and training as those from developed countries.

But the mass institutions are receiving fewer resources, the study says, and that's where most of the students go. In 2009, 2.1 million of the 2.5 million total bachelor's graduates in China matriculated from mass institutions, not elite ones. In India, it was 2.2 million of 2.3 million.

This widening funding gap between top schools and mass institutions has broad implications, the scholars argue. The gap has the potential to slow economic growth domestically, deepen income inequality and create less social mobility.

Students who go to the mass institutions aren't getting high quality, competitive educational experiences, the study says, and many of the students also get stuck with big bills as funding assistance is directed toward the elite universities.

"What happens, then, is they are doing a good job of educating students at the elite levels, but they are not doing a good job of educating students at the non-elite levels who are also fundamental for the economy," said Prashant Loyalka, a research fellow at FSI and one of the study's authors.

In absolute terms, the sheer numbers of students graduating from elite institutions in computer science and engineering majors in these countries is also high. In China, for example, the total number of computer science and engineering graduates from elite universities is more than the total number of such graduates from the United States.

But sustaining and building innovation hubs requires more than the elite, the researchers said. The engine of these new economies is the rest of the population – those that attend mass institutions.

"In the United States, we have relied on competent second-tier engineers. They are the guts of our system. We need good students in all fields in these second-tier universities because the top-tier universities just don't produce that many graduates. They simply don't," Carnoy said.

He warned that this redistribution of funds away from second-tier institutions is a concern in the United States as well. "To an extent the BRICs have to do it, because they don't have enough resources to go around. But do we have to do it? The answer is probably no. It certainly should be no," Carnoy said.

The research is one of the first empirical and comparative looks at the higher education systems across these countries, and relied on in-country interviews, surveys, data analysis and classroom observation.

Report card

Overall, the researchers found that significant challenges remain as these countries march toward creating universities that can rank alongside those in the United States and Europe.

China, the scholars said, is doing pretty well, but Russia and Brazil are question marks.

"Russia has provided the vast majority of its people with a high level of education, but it has lagged in terms of putting money into research," Loyalka said. "Brazil has a high-level of graduate education and research at its top-tier public institutions, and these institutions are receiving a lot of support. However, the vast majority of students attend private institutions, which are, on average, of dubious quality."

India, Loyalka noted, was surprising. Despite its very good technical universities, he said, "you have a small proportion of Indians going to those, and the mass institutions are of really poor quality."

"The higher education system in India does not appear to be well organized," Loyalka said.

Among other recommendations, the researchers said India should increase its graduate education and, along with Russia, increase spending on research.

The project began in 2007 as an interdisciplinary venture supported by FSI, and incorporated scholars in economics and international comparative education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, FSI and universities in Moscow and Beijing.

Several articles focusing on different aspects of the review also have been published over the past year. The most recent, which appears in the July/August issue of the journal Change, highlights the research on quality and quantity of graduates in engineering and computer science from the four countries.

Besides Carnoy and Loyalka, the scholars involved in the project include Maria Dobryakova, a research associate and the director for portals at the Center for Monitoring Quality Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow; Rafiq Dossani, a senior economist at RAND Corp. and former senior research scholar at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute; Isak Froumin, a mathematician and director of the Institute for Educational Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow; Katherine Kuhns, who received her PhD in the International and Comparative Education Program at Stanford Graduate School of Education; Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, a professor at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration in New Delhi, India; and Rong Wang, director and professor of the China Institute for Educational Finance Research at Peking University.

Brooke Donald is the social sciences writer at the Stanford News Service.

Access to life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments is a nagging problem for millions of Latin Americans. In several countries of the region, judicial actions for the protection of basic rights have proved to be instrumental for gaining access to such goods. Brazil and Colombia are, allegedly, the two Latin American countries with the largest number of right to health cases. Everaldo Lamprea suggests that dismantling right to health litigation in order to reduce public costs--as was recently proposed by the Colombian government-- would be a catastrophic event for many Colombians, trapped in a heavily privatized and deregulated health system where many life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments are out of the reach of most pockets. Lamprea will suggest that a more reasonable governmental reaction should include an analysis of the role played in the current health-sector crisis by global actors such as International Financial Institutions and BigPharma companies

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to announce that undergraduate senior honors student, Anna Barrett Schickele, received the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. This university award is given to the top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering.

Schickele's thesis entitled, "One Drop At A Time," examines the factors that inform farmers' decisions to use modern irrigation systems in the Lurín Valley of Peru, where she spent several months conducting fieldwork with a Lima-based NGO. Schickele — a public policy major —was able to collect primary data through interviews with farmers and fieldworkers to inform her research study that includes policy recommendations to the NGO community and government officials.

Anna Schickele (center) with Francis Fukuyama (left) and Larry Diamond (right).

Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, served as Schickele's thesis advisor together with Rosamond L. Naylor, the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at FSI.

"Ana's thesis is an important contribution to our understanding of the barriers and openings for stimulating agricultural development among subsistence farmers," said Carnoy. "Her original insights make the thesis particularly valuable for those addressing development issues in the world’s poorest regions."

In August, Schickele will begin a research position at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CDDRL's best thesis award was given to Kabir Sawhney, a management science and engineering major, who wrote his thesis on the effect of regime type and the propensity to default on sovereign debt. Advised by Professor of Political Science Gary Cox, Swahney cited the cases of Romania in the 1980s and more recently of Greece to conclude that the quality of government — rather than regime type alone — determines whether a country chooses to default. 

After graduation. Sawhney will join the consulting firm Accenture as an analyst in their San Francisco office.  

Three honors students' received fellowships from Stanford's Haas Center of Public Service to pursue public service-related work after graduation. Keith Calix and Imani Franklin both received the Tom Ford Fellowship in Philanthropy and will be working in New York for grant-making foundations, and Lina Hidalgo received the Omidyar Network Postgraduate Fellowship to work with an international organization.     

The CDDRL Undergraduate Senior Honors Program is an interdisciplinary honors program led by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI. The program recruits a diverse group of talented students interested in writing original theses on topics impacting the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law. During the year-long program, students write their thesis in consultation with a CDDRL faculty member, participate in research workshops, and travel to Washington, D.C. for "honors college."

The nine members of the graduating class of 2013 CDDRL undergraduate honors students include:

Food and water security in sub-Saharan Africa remain a challenge despite the region’s abundance of arable land and untapped water resources. In FSE’s final global food policy and food security symposium, water expert John Briscoe drew upon his many years of international field experience (including a 20-year career at the World Bank) to deliver a personal assessment of the issues facing Africa and suggestions for the way forward.

Improvements in infrastructure, agricultural productivity and investment are crucial for tapping Africa’s agricultural and development potential. And middle-income countries, such as Brazil, may have the most lessons to share.

Dams and the quest for water security

“Africa’s infrastructure is lousy,” said Briscoe, an environmental engineer and director of Harvard’s Water Security Initiative. “Crumbling roads, patchy supplies of electricity, and inadequate water storage are some of Africa’s biggest impediments to growth.”

Image

Africa has the potential to irrigate an additional 20 million hectares of land, but building that infrastructure is expensive and finding funding has become more difficult. Historically, the World Bank and wealthy countries like the United States have helped. But funding dams is now unpopular.

Meanwhile, middle-income countries - such as Brazil, India and China - are building infrastructure for water-enabled growth, and are filling the funding gap left by rich countries. Whereas the World Bank now finances about five dams, the Chinese finance over 300 dams outside of China in the developing world.

Sub-Saharan Africa has benefited from some of these projects, but still contends with an international NGO and donor community resistant to dam development.  

Big is beautiful – the case of Brazil

“Africa must increase its agricultural productivity, and a romantic emphasis on small, local, organic farming is not going to get it there,” said Briscoe.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural growth rate remains very low. In some countries, yields for staple crops like maize are actually falling. A deficit in knowledge to increase agricultural productivity is part of the problem.

Briscoe shared a telling observation of a Ghanaian CEO of a multinational company: ‘Once the best and the brightest Ghanaians went into engineering. Now they become anthropologists because NGOs dominate the job market and this is the skill they want.’ 

Briscoe pointed to Brazil as a compelling case for greater investment in agriculture and agricultural research. Between 1985 and 2006, Brazilian agricultural production grew by 77 percent.

“Much of this growth did not come from cutting down the Amazon, but by doing things smarter than it did before,” said Briscoe. “Over the last 30 years, through financial crises and changing political parties, Brazil sustained public investment in agricultural research.”

Image

Additionally, Brazil pioneered the use of “no-till” agriculture, now practiced by over 50 percent of its farmers. The culmination of these activities increased productivity while farming more sustainably.

An important contribution to Brazil’s productivity has been its utilization of genetically modified crops. Brazil chose not to eulogize the “small and organic” philosophy of many NGOs, but embraced new technology. Middle-income countries are currently eight of the 10 largest users of GMOs.

Brazil was also pragmatic when it came to scale. Brazilian farms are large. Thirty percent are large commercial operations producing 76 percent of the country’s output. Many environmentalists and small farmers perceived large agrobusiness as the enemy, but these large enterprises were also the grey geese laying the golden eggs for the country.

Understanding that there are no silver-bullet solutions, the Brazilian government sought innovative ways to support smaller farmers. For example, concessions for a large irrigation project in the Pontal were awarded to agribusiness operators that integrated at least 25 percent of irrigable land to small farmers as part of the company’s production chain.

Sugarcane

“Brazil’s success did not happen over night,” said Briscoe. “African countries must be patient and persistent, particularly with respect to public investment in agricultural research…and pragmatic and realistic about scale.”

Role for foreign investors

In the face of low levels of public investment in agriculture and non-existent or shallow domestic capital markets, there is a role for foreign direct investment (FDI) to play. FDI projects, such as international land deals, can help create implementation capacity by bringing capital and know-how, creating employment and developing infrastructure.

“But it is easier said than done,” said Briscoe. “Foreign investors, including the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC), have struggled in sub-Saharan Africa because farming is a complex business.”

Briscoe noted a shortage of indigenous entrepreneurs, the small size of potential investments, and lack of access to markets have constrained IFC engagement and performance in sub-Saharan Africa.

While there are no shortcuts for Africa, Briscoe insisted optimism and a determination to move faster are needed. Africa must decide whether to follow the prescriptions of the advocacy community or, like Brazil, pursue an opposite strategy.

“Will Africa focus on its real problems, ‘the politics of the belly’?” asked Briscoe. “Or will it succumb again, to the western ‘politics of the mirror’?”