Friday, February 15, 2013

National Counterterrorism Center's 'Terrorist Information' Rules Outlined In Document


Matt Sledge
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National Counterterrorism Center's 'Terrorist Information' Rules Outlined In Document

Posted:   |  Updated: 02/15/2013 6:10 pm EST
NEW YORK -- A training document released in response to a civil liberties organization's lawsuit and obtained by The Huffington Post reveals that the government considers an "analyst's wisdom" the ultimate arbiter of whether data on American citizens can be classified as "terrorist information" and retained forever.
"Only a CT (counter-terrorism) analyst can determine whether data constitutes terrorism information," the electronic training course for new National Counterterrorism Center analysts states. "There is no requirement that the analyst's wisdom be rock solid or infallible."
The document, identified by its introduction as a "rules of the road" course on data access and use, is marked "SECRET." But it was released in a significantly redacted form to the Electronic Privacy Information Center under a Freedom of Information Act request on Tuesday, in response to a lawsuit filed in August 2012.
The training course is a novel window into the thought processes of analysts for the NCTC, which was created by President George W. Bush in 2003 in response to recommendations from 9/11 Commission. The NCTC is supposed to connect the dots on potential terrorist threats to the United States by combining information from other agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security.
The NCTC saw its powers to legally examine and retain data on American citizens and other people in the country vastly expanded under rules approved by the Justice Department in March 2012. As the Wall Street Journal reported in December, the agency can now copy entire databases -- such as citizens' flight records -- and retain that information for up to five years.
The public affairs department of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a written comment that the training document was created in 2012 and is still in use.
Since deeming data "terrorist information" makes it eligible to be saved in the NCTC's database forever, the document's fuzzy definition of terrorist information is a source for concern, said Ginger McCall of EPIC.
"This is high stakes, because you're talking about potentially being classified in connection with terrorism information," she said. "The data can be retained indefinitely then. We don't know all the parties that this data is shared with, or all the uses that are made of this data."
The NCTC guidelines say that data can be retained indefinitely where there is a "reasonable and articulable suspicion" that it has something to do with terrorism. The training course provides for the first time an explanation of how analysts come to that conclusion:
  • The analyst must be able to explain the "math" (logic) on their analysis and how they arrived at their conclusion. This is the articulable portion of the standard.
  • The "math" or analysis must be prudent to the average counterterrorism analyst. This is the reasonable portion of the standard.
"They try to boil it down to math, as if this is an exact science," said McCall. "It's not an exact science, as they acknowledge below."
Further down on the same slide, the course states that "The totality of the facts -- even if the facts individually appear innocent in nature" can be used to classify data as terrorist information. And it also states the line about there being "no requirement that the analyst's wisdom be rock solid or infallible," adding, "In fact, it is expected to change as new information comes to light."
The document does not specify what kind of access the NCTC has to Americans' private information. Before the center's new guidelines went into effect, a Department of Homeland Security privacy official warned that they represented a "sea change" in how the government treated its citizens' privacy.
An information paper released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in January claimed that the new guidelines improved on old ones by "adding specificity on how data is obtained, retained, and disseminated, and providing for enhanced safeguards and oversight mechanisms to protect important privacy and civil liberties."
EPIC's ultimate goal with its Freedom Of Information Act request is to find out which government agencies are sharing information with the NCTC, and under what terms they are allowing the center to make wholesale copies of databases. So far, however, the government has refused to provide the memorandums of understanding between the NCTC and other government agencies. The government claimed to EPIC that it couldn't find any such memoranda, even though they are referenced and linked in the training guide. The ODNI public affairs office declined to comment on the missing memoranda, citing EPIC's ongoing lawsuit.
Until the interagency agreements are released, McCall said, the public will remain in the dark.
"If we're going to be using these sorts of mechanisms where it's wholesale retention of information … we should have a real conversation about that," she said. "We should have a real debate about what these protections for privacy and civil liberties are."
  • December 13, 2012


U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens

By JULIA ANGWIN

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.
Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens-even people suspected of no crime. Julia Angwin reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.
Not everyone was on board. "This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

More

Documents

NCTC Guidelines – 2012
NCTC Guidelines -- 2008
Homeland Security Department Email about the NCTC Guidelines
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.
Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans "reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information" may be permanently retained.
The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.
"It's breathtaking" in its scope, said a former senior administration official familiar with the White House debate.
Counterterrorism officials say they will be circumspect with the data. "The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes," said Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the parent agency for the National Counterterrorism Center.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution says that searches of "persons, houses, papers and effects" shouldn't be conducted without "probable cause" that a crime has been committed. But that doesn't cover records the government creates in the normal course of business with citizens.
Congress specifically sought to prevent government agents from rifling through government files indiscriminately when it passed the Federal Privacy Act in 1974. The act prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren't "compatible" with the reason the data were originally collected.

Three Years of WSJ Privacy Insights

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The Wall Street Journal is conducting a long-running investigation into the profound transformation of personal privacy in America.
Selected findings:
But the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government's daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. "All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want," says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.
As a result, the National Counterterrorism Center program's opponents within the administration—led by Ms. Callahan of Homeland Security—couldn't argue that the program would violate the law. Instead, they were left to question whether the rules were good policy.
Under the new rules issued in March, the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC, can obtain almost any database the government collects that it says is "reasonably believed" to contain "terrorism information." The list could potentially include almost any government database, from financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages to the health records of people who sought treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals.
Previous government proposals to scrutinize massive amounts of data about innocent people have caused an uproar. In 2002, the Pentagon's research arm proposed a program called Total Information Awareness that sought to analyze both public and private databases for terror clues. It would have been far broader than the NCTC's current program, examining many nongovernmental pools of data as well.
"If terrorist organizations are going to plan and execute attacks against the United States, their people must engage in transactions and they will leave signatures," the program's promoter, Admiral John Poindexter, said at the time. "We must be able to pick this signal out of the noise."
Adm. Poindexter's plans drew fire from across the political spectrum over the privacy implications of sorting through every single document available about U.S. citizens. Conservative columnist William Safire called the plan a "supersnoop's dream." Liberal columnist Molly Ivins suggested it could be akin to fascism. Congress eventually defunded the program.
The National Counterterrorism Center's ideas faced no similar public resistance. For one thing, the debate happened behind closed doors. In addition, unlike the Pentagon, the NCTC was created in 2004 specifically to use data to connect the dots in the fight against terrorism.
Even after eight years in existence, the agency isn't well known. "We're still a bit of a startup and still having to prove ourselves," said director Matthew Olsen in a rare public appearance this summer at the Aspen Institute, a leadership think tank.
The agency's offices are tucked away in an unmarked building set back from the road in the woodsy suburban neighborhood of McLean, Va. Many employees are on loan from other agencies, and they don't conduct surveillance or gather clues directly. Instead, they analyze data provided by others.
The agency's best-known product is a database called TIDE, which stands for the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. TIDE contains more than 500,000 identities suspected of terror links. Some names are known or suspected terrorists; others are terrorists' friends and families; still more are people with some loose affiliation to a terrorist.
image
Getty Images
Intelligence officials met at the White House in March to discuss the NCTC proposal with John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser.
TIDE files are important because they are used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to compile terrorist "watchlists." These are lists that can block a person from boarding an airplane or obtaining a visa.
The watchlist system failed spectacularly on Christmas Day 2009 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man, boarded a flight to Detroit from Amsterdam wearing explosives sewn into his undergarments. He wasn't on the watchlist.
He eventually pleaded guilty to terror-related charges and is imprisoned. His bomb didn't properly detonate.
However, Mr. Abdulmutallab and his underwear did alter U.S. intelligence-gathering. A Senate investigation revealed that NCTC had received information about him but had failed to query other government databases about him. In a scathing finding, the Senate report said, "the NCTC was not organized adequately to fulfill its missions."
"This was not a failure to collect or share intelligence," said John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser, at a White House press conference in January 2010. "It was a failure to connect and integrate and understand the intelligence we had."
As result, Mr. Obama demanded a watchlist overhaul. Agencies were ordered to send all their leads to NCTC, and NCTC was ordered to "pursue thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads."
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Getty Images
Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center: 'We're still a bit of a startup and still having to prove ourselves.'
Quickly, NCTC was flooded with terror tips—each of which it was obligated to "exhaustively" pursue. By May 2010 there was a huge backlog, according a report by the Government Accountability Office.
Legal obstacles emerged. NCTC analysts were permitted to query federal-agency databases only for "terrorism datapoints," say, one specific person's name, or the passengers on one particular flight. They couldn't look through the databases trolling for general "patterns." And, if they wanted to copy entire data sets, they were required to remove information about innocent U.S. people "upon discovery."
But they didn't always know who was innocent. A person might seem innocent today, until new details emerge tomorrow.
"What we learned from Christmas Day"—from the failed underwear bomb—was that some information "might seem more relevant later," says Mr. Joel, the national intelligence agency's civil liberties officer. "We realized we needed it to be retained longer."
Late last year, for instance, NCTC obtained an entire database from Homeland Security for analysis, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Homeland Security provided the disks on the condition that NCTC would remove all innocent U.S. person data after 30 days.
After 30 days, a Homeland Security team visited and found that the data hadn't yet been removed. In fact, NCTC hadn't even finished uploading the files to its own computers, that person said. It can take weeks simply to upload and organize the mammoth data sets.
Homeland Security granted a 30-day extension. That deadline was missed, too. So Homeland Security revoked NCTC's access to the data.
To fix problems like these that had cropped up since the Abdulmutallab incident, NCTC proposed the major expansion of its powers that would ultimately get debated at the March meeting in the White House. It moved to ditch the requirement that it discard the innocent-person data. And it asked for broader authority to troll for patterns in the data.
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Getty Images
National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen testifies before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill in January.
As early as February 2011, NCTC's proposal was raising concerns at the privacy offices of both Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, according to emails reviewed by the Journal.
Privacy offices are a relatively new phenomenon in the intelligence community. Most were created at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Privacy officers are often in the uncomfortable position of identifying obstacles to plans proposed by their superiors.
At the Department of Justice, Chief Privacy Officer Nancy Libin raised concerns about whether the guidelines could unfairly target innocent people, these people said. Some research suggests that, statistically speaking, there are too few terror attacks for predictive patterns to emerge. The risk, then, is that innocent behavior gets misunderstood—say, a man buying chemicals (for a child's science fair) and a timer (for the sprinkler) sets off false alarms.
An August government report indicates that, as of last year, NCTC wasn't doing predictive pattern-matching.
The internal debate was more heated at Homeland Security. Ms. Callahan and colleague Margo Schlanger, who headed the 100-person Homeland Security office for civil rights and civil liberties, were concerned about the implications of turning over vast troves of data to the counterterrorism center, these people said.
They and Ms. Libin at the Justice Department argued that the failure to catch Mr. Abdulmutallab wasn't caused by the lack of a suspect—he had already been flagged—but by a failure to investigate him fully. So amassing more data about innocent people wasn't necessarily the right solution.
The most sensitive Homeland Security data trove at stake was the Advanced Passenger Information System. It contains the name, gender, birth date and travel information for every airline passenger entering the U.S.
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House Oversight Committee
Mary Ellen Callahan, then-chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security: 'This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public.'
Previously, Homeland Security had pledged to keep passenger data only for 12 months. But NCTC was proposing to copy and keep it for up to five years. Ms. Callahan argued this would break promises the agency had made to the public about its use of personal data, these people said.
Discussions sometimes got testy, according to emails reviewed by the Journal. In one case, Ms. Callahan sent an email complaining that "examples" provided to her by an unnamed intelligence official were "complete non-sequiturs" and "non-responsive."
In May 2011, Ms. Callahan and Ms. Schlanger raised their concerns with the chief of their agency, Janet Napolitano. They fired off a memo under the longwinded title, "How Best to Express the Department's Privacy and Civil Liberties Concerns over Draft Guidelines Proposed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center," according to an email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The contents of the memo, which appears to run several pages, were redacted.
The two also kept pushing the NCTC officials to justify why they couldn't search for terrorism clues less invasively, these people said. "I'm not sure I'm totally prepared with the firestorm we're about to create," Ms. Schlanger emailed Ms. Callahan in November, referring to the fact that the two wanted more privacy protections. Ms. Schlanger returned to her faculty position at the University of Michigan Law School soon after but remains an adviser to Homeland Security.
To resolve the issue, Homeland Security's deputy secretary, Jane Holl Lute, requested the March meeting at the White House. The second in command from Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the FBI, NCTC and the office of the director of national intelligence sat at the small conference table. Normal protocol for such meeting is for staffers such as Ms. Callahan to sit against the walls of the room and keep silent.
By this point, Ms. Libin's concern that innocent people could be inadvertently targeted had been largely overruled at the Department of Justice, these people said. Colleagues there were more concerned about missing the next terrorist threat.
That left Ms. Callahan as the most prominent opponent of the proposed changes. In an unusual move, Ms. Lute asked Ms. Callahan to speak about Homeland Security's privacy concerns. Ms. Callahan argued that the rules would constitute a "sea change" because, whenever citizens interact with the government, the first question asked will be, are they a terrorist?
Mr. Brennan considered the arguments. And within a few days, the attorney general, Eric Holder, had signed the new guidelines. The Justice Department declined to comment about the debate over the guidelines.
Under the new rules, every federal agency must negotiate terms under which it would hand over databases to NCTC. This year, Ms. Callahan left Homeland Security for private practice, and Ms. Libin left the Justice Department to join a private firm.
Homeland Security is currently working out the details to give the NCTC three data sets—the airline-passenger database known as APIS; another airline-passenger database containing information about non-U.S. citizen visitors to the U.S.; and a database about people seeking refugee asylum. It previously agreed to share databases containing information about foreign-exchange students and visa applications.
Once the terms are set, Homeland Security is likely to post a notice in the Federal Register. The public can submit comments to the Federal Register about proposed changes, although Homeland Security isn't required to make changes based on the comments.
Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared December 13, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: U.S. Terror Agency To Tap Citizen Files.
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Monday, February 11, 2013

Edward Said & jean Paul Sartre


Diary

Edward Said


Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.
Then, as with many things French, the fashion began to change back, or so it seemed at a distance. Several books about him appeared, and once again he has (perhaps only for a moment) become the subject of talk, if not exactly of study or reflection. For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time. Yet he seemed neither infallible nor prophetic. On the contrary, one admired Sartre for the efforts he made to understand situations and, when necessary, to offer solidarity to political causes. He was never condescending or evasive, even if he was given to error and overstatement. Nearly everything he wrote is interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its freedom to be verbose) and its generosity of spirit.
There is one obvious exception, which I’d like to describe here. I’m prompted to do so by two fascinating, if dispiriting discussions of his visit to Egypt in early 1967 that appeared last month in Al-Ahram Weekly. One was in a review of Bernard-Henry Lévy’s recent book on Sartre; the other was a review of the late Lotfi al-Kholi’s account of that visit (al-Kholi, a leading intellectual, was one of Sartre’s Egyptian hosts). My own rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in a very grand life, but it is worth recalling both for its ironies and for its poignancy.
It was early in January 1979, and I was at home in New York preparing for one of my classes. The doorbell announced the delivery of a telegram and as I tore it open I noticed with interest that it was from Paris. ‘You are invited by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.’ At first I thought the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that to despatch my unconditional acceptance (this after learning that les modalités, the French euphemism for travel expenses, were to be borne by Les Temps modernes, the monthly journal established by Sartre after the war). A few weeks later I was off to Paris.
Les Temps modernes had played an extraordinary role in French, and later European and even Third World, intellectual life. Sartre had gathered around him a remarkable set of minds – not all of them in agreement with him – that included Beauvoir of course, his great opposite Raymond Aron, the eminent philosopher and Ecole Normale classmate Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who left the journal a few years later), and Michel Leiris, ethnographer, Africanist and bullfight theoretician. There wasn’t a major issue that Sartre and his circle didn’t take on, including the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in a monumentally large edition of Les Temps modernes – in turn the subject of a brilliant essay by I.F. Stone. That alone gave my Paris trip a precedent of note.
When I arrived, I found a short, mysterious letter from Sartre and Beauvoir waiting for me at the hotel I had booked in the Latin Quarter. ‘For security reasons,’ the message ran, ‘the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.’ I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault’s apartment to find a number of people – but not Sartre – already milling around. No one was ever to explain the mysterious ‘security reasons’ that had forced a change in venue, though as a result a conspiratorial air hung over our proceedings. Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Teheran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later (just before Sartre’s arrival) and was never seen again.
Foucault very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers and journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn’t until much later (in fact almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy ofCorriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.
Foucault’s apartment, though large and obviously extremely comfortable, was starkly white and austere, well suited to the solitary philosopher and rigorous thinker who seemed to inhabit it alone. A few Palestinians and Israeli Jews were there. Among them I recognised only Ibrahim Dakkak, who has since become a good Jerusalem friend, Nafez Nazzal, a teacher at Bir Zeit whom I had known superficially in the US, and Yehoshofat Harkabi, the leading Israeli expert on ‘the Arab mind’, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, fired by Golda Meir for mistakenly putting the Army on alert. Three years earlier, we had both been fellows at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, but we did not have much of a relationship. It was always polite but far from cordial. In Paris, he was in the process of changing his position, to become Israel’s leading establishment dove, a man who was soon to speak openly about the need for a Palestinian state, which he considered to be a strategic advantage from Israel’s point of view. The other participants were mostly Israeli or French Jews, from the very religious to the very secular, although all were pro-Zionist in one way or another. One of them, Eli Ben Gal, seemed to have a long acquaintance with Sartre: we were later told that he had been Sartre’s guide on a recent trip to Israel.
When the great man finally appeared, well past the appointed time, I was shocked at how old and frail he seemed. I recall rather needlessly and idiotically introducing Foucault to him, and I also recall that Sartre was constantly surrounded, supported, prompted by a small retinue of people on whom he was totally dependent. They, in turn, had made him the main business of their lives. One was his adopted daughter who, I later learned, was his literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian origin. Another was Pierre Victor, a former Maoist and co-publisher with Sartre of the now defunct Gauche prolétarienne, who had become a deeply religious and, I supposed, Orthodox Jew; it stunned me to find out later from one of the journal’s assistants that he was an Egyptian Jew called Benny Lévy, the brother of Adel Ref’at (né Lévy), one of the so-called Mahmoud Hussein pair (the other being a Muslim Egyptian: the two men worked at Unesco and as ‘Mahmoud Hussein’ wrote La Lutte des classes en Egypte, a well-known study published by Maspero). There seemed to be nothing Egyptian about Victor: he came across as a Left Bank intellectual, part-thinker, part-hustler. Third was Hélène von Bülow, a trilingual woman who worked at the journal and translated everything for Sartre. Although he had spent time in Germany and had written not only on Heidegger, but on Faulkner and Dos Passos, Sartre knew neither German nor English. An amiable and elegant woman, Von Bülow remained at Sartre’s side for the two days of the seminar, whispering simultaneous translations into his ear. Except for one Palestinian from Vienna who spoke only Arabic and German, our discussion was in English. How much Sartre actually understood I shall never know, but it was (to me and others) profoundly disconcerting that he remained silent throughout the first day’s proceedings. Michel Contat, Sartre’s bibliographer, was also there, but did not participate.
In what I took to be the French style, lunch – which in ordinary circumstances would have taken an hour or so – was a very elaborate affair taken at a restaurant some distance away; and since it had been raining non-stop, transporting everyone in cabs, sitting through a four-course meal, then bringing the group back again, took about three and a half hours. So on the first day our discussions about ‘peace’ lasted for a relatively short time. The themes were set out by Victor without any consultation with anyone else, so far as I could see. Early on, I sensed that he was a law unto himself, thanks no doubt to his privileged relationship with Sartre (with whom he occasionally had whispered exchanges), and to what seemed to be a sublime self-confidence. We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (this was Camp David time), (2) peace between Israel and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamental question of future coexistence between Israel and the surrounding Arab world. None of the Arabs seemed happy with this. I felt it leapfrogged over the matter of the Palestinians. Dakkak was uneasy with the whole set-up and left after the first day.
As that day wore on, I slowly discovered that a good deal of negotiating had gone on beforehand to bring the seminar about, and that what participation there was from the Arab world was compromised, and hence abridged, by all the prior wheeling and dealing. I was somewhat chagrined that I hadn’t been included in any of this. Perhaps I had been too naive – too anxious to come to Paris to meet Sartre, I reflected. There was talk of Emmanuel Levinas being involved, but, like the Egyptian intellectuals whom we’d been promised, he never showed up. In the meantime all our discussions were being recorded and were subsequently published in a special issue of Les Temps modernes (September 1979). I thought it was pretty unsatisfactory. We were covering more or less familiar ground, with no real meeting of minds.
Beauvoir had been a serious disappointment, flouncing out of the room in a cloud of opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of women. At the time I did not regret her absence; later I was convinced she would have livened things up. Sartre’s presence, what there was of it, was strangely passive, unimpressive, affectless. He said absolutely nothing for hours on end. At lunch he sat across from me, looking disconsolate and remaining totally uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face. I tried to make conversation with him, but got nowhere. He may have been deaf, but I’m not sure. In any case, he seemed to me like a haunted version of his earlier self, his proverbial ugliness, his pipe and his nondescript clothing hanging about him like so many props on a deserted stage. I was very active in Palestinian politics at the time: in 1977 I had become a member of the National Council, and on my frequent visits to Beirut (this was during the Lebanese civil war) to visit my mother, regularly saw Arafat, and most of the other leaders of the day. I thought it would be a major achievement to coax Sartre into making a pro-Palestinian statement at such a ‘hot’ moment of our deadly rivalry with Israel.
Throughout the lunch and the afternoon session I was aware of Pierre Victor as a sort of station-master for the seminar, among whose trains was Sartre himself. In addition to their mysterious whisperings at the table, he and Victor would from time to time get up; Victor would lead the shuffling old man away, speak rapidly at him, get an intermittent nod or two, then they’d come back. Meanwhile every member of the seminar wanted to have his or her say, making it impossible to develop an argument, though it soon enough became clear that Israel’s enhancement (what today is called ‘normalisation’) was the real subject of the meeting, not the Arabs or the Palestinians. Several Arabs before me had spent time trying to convince some immensely important intellectual of the justice of their cause in the hope that he would turn into another Arnold Toynbee or Sean McBride. Few of these great eminences did. Sartre struck me as worth the effort simply because I could not forget his position on Algeria, which as a Frenchman must have been harder to hold than a position critical of Israel. I was wrong of course.
As the turgid and unrewarding discussions wore on, I found that I was too often reminding myself that I had come to France to listen to what Sartre had to say, not to people whose opinions I already knew and didn’t find specially gripping. I therefore brazenly interrupted the discussion early in the evening and insisted that we hear from Sartre forthwith. This caused consternation in the retinue. The seminar was adjourned while urgent consultations between them were held. I found the whole thing comic and pathetic at the same time, especially since Sartre himself had no apparent part in these deliberations. At last we were summoned back to the table by the visibly irritated Pierre Victor, who announced with the portentousness of a Roman senator: ‘Demain Sartre parlera.’ And so we retired in keen anticipation of the following morning’s proceedings.
Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor, and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional, journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated Egyptian leader. For the rest of that day Sartre resumed his silence, and the proceedings continued as before. I recalled an apocryphal story in which twenty years earlier Sartre had travelled to Rome to meet Fanon (then dying of leukemia) and harangued him about the dramas of Algeria for (it was claimed) 16 non-stop hours, until Simone made him desist. Gone for ever was that Sartre.
When the transcript of the seminar was published a few months later, Sartre’s intervention had been edited down and made even more innocuous. I cannot imagine why; nor did I try to find out. Even though I still have the issue of Les Temps modernesin which we all appeared, I haven’t been able to bring myself to reread more than a few extracts, so flat and unrewarding do its pages now seem to me. So I went to Paris to hear Sartre in much the same spirit as Sartre was invited to come to Egypt, to be seen and talked to by Arab intellectuals – with exactly the same results, though my own encounter was coloured, not to say stained, by the presence of an unattractive intermediary, Pierre Victor, who has since disappeared into well deserved obscurity. I was, I thought then, like Fabrice looking for the Battle of Waterloo – unsuccessful and disappointed.
One further point. A few weeks ago I happened to catch part of Bouillon de culture, Bernard Pivot’s weekly discussion programme, screened on French television, and broadcast in the US a short time later. The programme was about Sartre’s slow posthumous rehabilitation in the face of continuing criticism of his political sins. Bernard-Henry Lévy, than whom in quality of mind and political courage there could scarcely be anyone more different from Sartre, was there to flog his approving study of the older philosopher. (I confess that I haven’t read it, and do not soon plan to.) He was not so bad really, said the patronising B-HL; there were things about him, after all, that were consistently admirable and politically correct. B-HL intended this to balance what he considered the well-founded criticism of Sartre (made into a nauseating mantra by Paul Johnson) as having always been wrong on Communism. ‘For example,’ B-HL intoned, ‘Sartre’s record on Israel was perfect: he never deviated and he remained a complete supporter of the Jewish state.’
For reasons that we still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was afraid of seeming anti-semitic, or because he felt guilt about the Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the Palestinians as victims of and fighters against Israel’s injustice, or for some other reason, I shall never know. All I do know is that as a very old man he seemed pretty much the same as he had been when somewhat younger: a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him. Certainly Bertrand Russell was better than Sartre, and in his last years (though led on and, some would say, totally manipulated by my former Princeton classmate and one-time friend, Ralph Schoenman) actually took positions critical of Israel’s policies towards the Arabs. I guess we need to understand why great old men are liable to succumb either to the wiles of younger ones, or to the grip of an unmodifiable political belief. It’s a dispiriting thought, but it’s what happened to Sartre. With the exception of Algeria, the justice of the Arab cause simply could not make an impression on him, and whether it was entirely because of Israel or because of a basic lack of sympathy – cultural or perhaps religious – it’s impossible for me to say. In this he was quite unlike his friend and idol Jean Genet, who celebrated his strange passion for Palestinians in an extended sojourn with them and by writing the extraordinary ‘Quatre Heures à Sabra et Chatila’ and Le Captif amoureux.
A year after our brief and disappointing Paris encounter Sartre died. I vividly remember how much I mourned his death.

Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000, pages 42-43, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/edward-said/diary 
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Relax! You’ll Be More Productive


OPINION

Relax! You’ll Be More Productive

By Published: February 9, 2013, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html?src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=all


THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?
More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.
“More, bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided assumption — that our resources are infinite.
Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work.
Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.
In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.
Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.
Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.
As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.
The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.
In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.
The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.
“To maximize gains from long-term practice,” Dr. Ericsson concluded, “individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”
I’ve systematically built these principles into the way I write. For my first three books, I sat at my desk for up 10 hours a day. Each of the books took me at least a year to write. For my two most recent books, I wrote in three uninterrupted 90-minute sessions — beginning first thing in the morning, when my energy was highest — and took a break after each one.
Along the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.
The power of renewal was so compelling to me that I’ve created a business around it that helps a range of companies including Google, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, the Los Angeles Police Department, Cleveland Clinic and Genentech.
Our own offices are a laboratory for the principles we teach. Renewal is central to how we work. We dedicated space to a “renewal” room in which employees can nap, meditate or relax. We have a spacious lounge where employees hang out together and snack on healthy foods we provide. We encourage workers to take renewal breaks throughout the day, and to leave the office for lunch, which we often do together. We allow people to work from home several days a week, in part so they can avoid debilitating rush-hour commutes. Our workdays end at 6 p.m. and we don’t expect anyone to answer e-mail in the evenings or on the weekends. Employees receive four weeks of vacation from their first year.
Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.
Tony Schwartz is the chief executive officer of The Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 10, 2013, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Relax! You’ll Be More Productive.
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