The heated debate over the line between liberty and national security took center stage as Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, defended government surveillance programs at Stanford’s launch this week of “The Security Conundrum” speaker series.

If such surveillance methods were further restricted, “that smaller box, in my professional judgment, would make the job of the NSA harder and would probably make you less safe,” Hayden told a packed audience at the event co-sponsored in part by the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Hayden admitted to being “prickly” as he discussed privacy concerns over NSA’s collection and storage of phone and email metadata covering billions of calls and messages by American citizens. The surveillance programs, which were exposed last year by leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden, were only used after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, given “the totality of the circumstances,” Hayden explained.

Hayden was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. He then led the CIA from 2006 to 2009.

The metadata collection “is something we would have never done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10. But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11,” he said. “No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No, it was a logical response to the needs of the moment.”

Amy Zegart, CISAC’s co-director and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, led the conversation with the four-star general. She pointed out that a majority of Americans distrusts the NSA and believes the agency is lying.

Hayden stressed that the phone records were similar to billing statements – detailing who made the calls and when. “There is no content. It is not electronic surveillance. Not at all.”

CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart leaders a talk with former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden at the inaugural "Security Conundrum" speakers series on Oct. 8, 2014.

Though he understands why the operation is “theoretically frightening,” in reality, it’s designed to aid in the capture of terrorists within the United States, Hayden said.

“To listen to the content of the calls would violate the laws of the United States. It would violate the laws of physics,” he said. He challenged if anyone could offer “concrete evidence” of harm stemming from the phone data collection.

In defining the right to privacy, Hayden cited his philosophy behind the balancing act between security and liberty.

“Privacy is the line we continually negotiate for ourselves as unique creatures of God and as social animals,” he said. “There are some things that the community has the right to know – and there are other things that they clearly do not have the right to know.”

The debate is over where that line is drawn, between “what is mine” and “what is owed the collective,” he said.

Hayden noted that the phone and email metadata collection programs are only a small part of the larger issues the nation faces as it deals with increasingly adept enemies and the surveillance abilities of other nations.

“I’m just simply saying – who knows more about you? One of the least of your worries is the government,” he said, half-jokingly. He noted that Google knows more about Americans than does the U.S. government, and the Silicon Valley company uses that data for commercial purposes.

Addressing how tech companies are becoming more reluctant to cooperate with government requests for email communication data, Hayden said he didn’t have an answer about how to address the relationship.

There is a call for transparency of what the government is doing, but Hayden said “translucency” might be the better option, so as to not reveal all that the U.S. does for foreign intelligence.

“This is an enterprise that’s based on absolute secrecy,” he said of the NSA.

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But to achieve that, “it’s not transparency,” he said. “We actually have to be translucent … where you have the glass … and you get the broad patterns of movemen

The danger of not being able to target emails, Hayden said, would be that emails become a safe haven for enemies. “If we don’t’ do it, if you’re not going to let us do this stuff … over the long term, it puts your liberty at risk because bad stuff will happen.”

“The Security Conundrum” speaker series looks behind and beyond the headlines, examining the history and implementation of the NSA operations, the legal questions generated by them, the media’s role in revealing them, and the responsibility of Congress to oversee them.

Each guest speaker, in conversation with Stanford scholars, will probe the problems from different vantage points to explain the political, legal and technological contours of the NSA actions, as well as outline ways to preserve the nation’s security without sacrificing our freedoms.

On Nov. 17, journalist Barton Gellman will be the featured speaker. He is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on the 9/11 attacks and has led the Washington Post's coverage of the NSA. On April 10, Reggie Walton, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, will take the stage as the speaker on April 10.

Along with FSI and CISAC, the series is also co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government, and the Stanford Law School.

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FSI's Francis Fukuyama and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, write in the Financial Times that President Barack Obama's stance on ISIS is "overpromising" and that the United States should follow lessons from British history and pursue a more sustainable strategy known as "offshore balancing."

FSI's Francis Fukuyama and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry,  a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, write in the Financial Times that President Barack Obama's stance on ISIS is "overpromising" and that the United States should follow lessons from British history and pursue a more sustainable strategy known as "offshore balancing."

Francis Fukuyama and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry write in the Financial Times, suggesting President Obama's stance on ISIS is "overpromising" and that America should follow lessons from British history and pursue a more sustainable strategy known as "offshore balancing." 

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the war on terror, the United States needs to reconsider its strategy in dealing with these threats, a Stanford scholar says.

"For the United States, a counterterrorism strategy cannot be considered in isolation from other policies," said Martha Crenshaw, a terrorism expert and senior fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, in an interview.

"This means that our actions should be justifiable and transparent." 

In a chapter of a new book, Crenshaw advocates vigilance against terrorism, while not overreacting. It is not prudent to be complacent about the impact of terrorism on international security, though it is by no means an "existential threat" for developed countries, she wrote.

Crenshaw founded the Mapping Militant Organizations project to identify militant organizations globally and trace how they arise, their root causes and their connections.

In an interview, she said, "We are all fond of saying that there is no military solution to a political problem and that the states that are directly threatened by terrorism, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, should muster the resolve and resources to combat it. But we haven't figured out how to implement these rather abstract prescriptions and admonitions."

She suggested that there is a role for military force and outside powers, but it should be limited and precise in intent. 

America's actions against terrorism should not violate democratic norms, Crenshaw said. "And we should not veer erratically between complacency and alarm, but take a middle ground."

She said context is all-important. "It's frustrating, but there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Similar countries have reacted differently to terrorism yet produced the same overall outcome."

Negotiation and compromise?

One challenge for countries like the United States is to find alternatives in confronting terrorism. For example, governments may need to decide whether to recognize or negotiate with groups they deem as terrorist entities.

"Is compromise possible?" she wrote, citing failures in Sri Lanka and Colombia but success in Northern Ireland on this front. There is no consistent answer, she said.

An approach of realism and expectations of mixed results may define the best way forward, she said.

"Perhaps the most important lesson for the international community is that the process of ending terrorism is likely to be slow and arduous, requiring gradualism, endurance and commitment despite setback," Crenshaw wrote.

She added, "States may not be able to prevent or eradicate terrorism, but they can manage their reactions to it."

She advocates "capacity building," or giving local governments the capacity to deal with terrorism by building more effective security institutions in the broadest sense.

"What happens at the local level is important to overall international security," Crenshaw said. "Terrorism threatens the stability of already weak and fragile states, thus contributing to state collapse, ungoverned spaces, social dislocation, repression and economic decline."

Drone debate

Crenshaw said that the United States increasingly prefers the use of drones rather than large-scale military options in the fighting of terrorism.

"Drones are a highly efficient means of implementing a policy of targeted killings of leaders of militant groups," she wrote.

Drone usage began under the Bush administration, she noted, and peaked in 2010 under the Obama administration. "Future U.S. counterterrorism strategy will rely on the covert use of limited force, utilizing drones and special operations forces," she wrote.

What are the implications of drone warfare? Crenshaw said that questions remain unanswered about how international law applies to drones, as well as issues of accountability and transparency.

"Despite their precision," she said, "drones kill civilians."

Political violence

It is difficult to predict when and where terrorism may strike, she said. Terrorists are innovative and they experiment, especially when faced with adjusting to new obstacles.

"For example, just when hijackings were thought to be a relic of the past, Al Qaeda combined them with suicide missions to achieve the devastating 9/11 surprise," Crenshaw wrote, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center.

She said that Muslims bear the brunt of terrorism, suffering between 82 percent and 97 percent of all deaths. In terms of trends, suicide missions are increasingly used as a lethal tactic.

From 1991 to 2001, there were 170 suicide attacks causing 2,077 deaths, while since 9/11, there have been 2,130 such attacks resulting in 26,866 deaths. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the most common places where terror incidents occur.

Why have terrorists been so unsuccessful in wielding radiological, chemical or biological weapons? So far, the Japanese subway sarin attacks in 1995 remain the only instance of chemical weapons being used by a terrorist group. "Are the acquisition and use of such weapons too difficult? The answers are still elusive," Crenshaw said.

Meanwhile, "cyberterrorism" has largely been conducted by sophisticated state actors – like the Stuxnet virus that damaged the Iranian centrifuges – and not terrorists. It remains to be seen whether terrorists have such capabilities, Crenshaw wrote.

Crenshaw's chapter, "Dealing with Terrorism," will be published by the United States Institute of Peace in the forthcoming new book, Managing Conflict in a World Adrift.

She noted, "Terrorism has been a common strategy for challenging the status quo for quite a long period of time – at least since the European revolutionary and anarchist movements of the late 19th century. There is no reason to think it will disappear."

MANILA, Philippines – When Victor Corpus was an idealistic young military officer, he turned on his country to join the communist New People’s Army. He headed for the mountains and would face years of armed struggle, imprisonment and then a sentence to death.

What made the highly trained Philippine Army first lieutenant lead a bold raid to capture the weapons from his own armory at the Philippine Military Academy – one that would go on to make him a living legend and lead to a movie about his life?

“It was my realization that our society at that time was structured like a pyramid, where the wealth of the nation is controlled by about 100 families on top, where less than 1 percent of the population controls everything,” recalls Corpus, who is now 70.

When the Army ordered the 26-year-old officer and his soldiers to train the private militia of a wealthy warlord in the northern Philippines, a trigger was pulled.

“If you are a member of the Armed Forces and you realize that you are just being used as an instrument of the elite, to preserve and protect their interests, it makes you want to rise up and fight for what you believe are the true interests of the people,” he said.

“That is what made me go to the rebel side.”

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It’s still a factor that makes young Filipino men and women pick up arms today: The gap between rich and poor, the government corruption, the dynasties that still rule the impoverished countryside.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks reinforced the U.S. commitment to build the capacity of the Philippine military to prevent their country from becoming a haven for extremists who might use the country to stage and plot another attack against United States’ interests.  

Felter helped the Philippine Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM) set up the country’s first counterterrorist unit. That elite Light Reaction Battalion has now been expanded to a regiment of 1,500 soldiers. Felter traveled to the Philippines in February to receive a medal in honor of his work in establishing this force.

His work with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a military attaché, and dozens of trips back since, allowed him to get behind the scenes and make friends in the military and government. Those close relationships provided him unprecedented access to thousands of sensitive documents chronicling in micro-level detail the history of Philippine military and government efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism in the field.

“All counterinsurgency is local,” says Felter. “You need to study it at the local level to really understand it. And the Philippines is like a Petri dish for studying both insurgency and counterinsurgency because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government and military responses to address these threats over time.”

Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his Stanford Ph.D. dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency in this conflict prone country. After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisors – Stanford political science professors David Laitin and James Fearon – he realized the extensive incident-level data could be coded in a manner that would make it a tremendous resource for scholars studying civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of politically motivated violence.

“This comprehensive conflict dataset, when it becomes public later this year, is going to be the Holy Grail of  micro-level conflict data,” Felter says. “It promises to be an unprecedented resource for scholars and policy analysts studying the foundations and dynamics of conflict. It has the potential to drive a significant number of publications, reports and analyses, and enable conflict researchers to develop insights and test theories that they would not have been able to do before.”

They also hope to help journalists do a better job of analyzing conflict.

Jim Gomez, the AP’s chief correspondent in the Philippines, says there is little access to detailed data about the conflicts he has been covering for two decades.

“There is a natural contradiction between military, police, intelligence and other security agencies which, by nature, operate in secrecy,” says Gomez, who has been on the front lines of many battles in his homeland. “The database is one step toward satisfying the need of journalists to be able to write stories with more accurate and in-depth detail and context. It allows for better comparative analysis and can give insights to emerging patterns like those found in the southern Philippines. Better access to information, to my mind, is always a boon to better security policies.”

CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.

Felter coordinated with senior leaders in the Armed Forces of the Philippines to gain approval to access and code the unclassified details from tens of thousands of individual conflict episodes reported by Philippine military units in the field dating back to 1975. Most of data were gleaned from the original hand-typed records maintained by the Philippine Army. Felter worked with contacts in the Philippine military to build a team of military and civilian coders to scan and input data from the only existing copies of these original incident reports.

In 2009 – while a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution prior to his final deployment in Afghanistan – Felter invited his colleague, Navy veteran Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to join him as ESOC’s co-director. Shapiro and Felter were graduate school classmates and worked together at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center where the vision for ESOC was first articulated. Felter and Shapiro formally established the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project and began to build comprehensive databases on multiple political conflict cases around the world.

Eli Berman, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, joined the team soon after. Today he is research director for international security studies at University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of economics at UC San Diego.

“I'm fascinated by how economic development is best achieved in places where property and people are insecure. Unfortunately, that's true of many Philippines communities,” Berman said. “Joe is the perfect partner for that research. He brings insights that come from years of thoughtful experience and local knowledge. The team he has assembled and the data they bring are a joy to work with.”

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ESOC members also include David Laitin, James Fearon and Jeremy Weinstein, all from Stanford’s political science department, as well as affiliates and a growing cadre of current and former post-doctoral fellows.

The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project website was launched last year. It highlights some of the key initial findings from ongoing data collection efforts in the Philippines as well as Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews. Ultimately, nearly all of the releasable data Felter is compiling on the Philippines case will be made available via the ESOC website. The non-digitize materials such as hardcopy records and taped interviews will be housed in the Hoover Institution’s Library and Archives.

“This will be the gold standard for micro-level conflict data. The planets aligned for us in many cases,” Felter said. The team also has had unprecedented access to data sources in Iraq and to some degree from Afghanistan, Columbia, and Mexico.

“What’s unique about ESOC is that we’re trying hard to make it easier for others to study conflict by pulling together everything we can on the conflicts we’ve studied,” says Shapiro. “On Iraq, for example, the ESOC website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics, and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources, and all the files ESOC members have used in their research on Iraq.”

Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to ESOC as a resource for data on Iraq “because it’s so useful to have everything in one place.”

The West Point Connection

Many of these documents, some dating back to 1975, were withering in the heat and humidity of an old building at army headquarters before Felter and his Philippine military team arrived to scan and record them.

Felter’s chief Filipino partner in compiling and analyzing the data is another West Point grad, Lt. Col. Dennis Eclarin, an Army Scout Ranger commander who led many of the counterinsurgency missions that he would later come to analyze. Eclarin conducted 1,500 hours of videotaped interviews with rebels who gave up their arms and surrendered.

Eclarin recalls being a lieutenant fresh out of West Point and negotiating the surrender of 20 communist rebels.

“I got the chance to interview the rebel commander of this very elite group, against whom I had been fighting in 2000, and when I interviewed him he said: `You know what? If you had just given us one water buffalo each, we would not have been fighting you, we would have just gone out and tilled our land,’” Eclarin recalls.

He would go on to interview hundreds of rebels and their commanders, such as the Islamic militant chief who talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men’s belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side.

There was the Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money for the communists and the young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family.
Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.

“The interviews and the coding has changed me – and it’s changed the perception of the Armed Forces, too,” Eclarin says. “We just appreciate data; we see it in a new light. We were just thinking short term, but the data allows us to look long-term and more strategically. Where are the hot zones we must avoid? What time of day are they likely to attack?”

Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.

“One time I was coding and was amazed to see the records of some of our comrades who had been ambushed and killed,” Agustin says. “Being a member of the Scout Rangers and seeing those who are missing – you hurt. But you must push through because you’re giving them a voice. They gave their lives for the Army, they sacrificed their lives for their families – and we are going to give them a voice.”

Erwin Olario, a civilian and the lead coder of Eclarin’s team, says the data is agnostic.

“We don’t take sides; we’re not out to prove anything. But, hey, if we could possibly contribute to bringing about peace one day – that would be something.”

The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012, to make sure it’s accurate and cleaned of classified details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter’s ongoing book projects and multiple journal articles, including a recent article in the American Economic Review entitled, “Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict.”

Denis Eclarin and Joe Felter at a military ceremony outside Manila on Feb. 8, 2014. ©John Tronco



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Development and Civil Conflict

Another of Felter’s longtime Filipina friends is Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, cabinet secretary for the Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development. They go back to 1997, when the two were classmates working on their master’s in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

The two caught up on classmate gossip during a recent meeting in her Manila office. She was on a rare break from her work in the south, where Typhoon Haiyan had claimed more than 6,200 lives in November.

Soliman tells Felter she used a study based on ESOC data to help demonstrate the efficacy of her department’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. This flagship development program attempts to reduce poverty by giving cash to families falling under poverty thresholds, conditional on enrolling kids in school and getting them regular medical checkups and vaccines.

Soliman and her staff used the study conducted by Felter – and Benjamin Crost at the University of Illinois and Patrick B. Johnston at the RAND Corporation – in which they took an existing World Bank experiment in the Philippines that separated villages into those that would receive the cash transfers and those that would not. The scholars incorporated measures of violence from the ESOC data to estimate the effect of the CCT program on conflict intensity. They found cash transfers caused a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents and, using their data on local insurgent influence, they determined the program significantly reduced insurgent influence in the villages that received the cash transfers compared with those that did not.

“Your results were very, very important and it had such a strong impact with the legislators, and in particular the budget, because they saw the program is not just about education and health,” Corazon tells Felter. “They saw it even has impact on peace and security.”

“That’s just great,” Felter says. “That’s what motivates our team to engage in this type of work and really what you want to hear. It’s such a privilege for us to support you in this capacity.”

A Rebel’s Redemption

Felter led the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan, reporting directly to Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petaeus, before becoming a senior research scholar at CISAC and retiring from the military in 2012.

While he misses his time on active duty and the sense of purpose that comes with serving in combat, he believes his ESOC research will make a difference and have an impact in stabilizing conflict areas and setting conditions for development and governance efforts to be effective.

“In the last decade, the United States and the international community have devoted tens of billions of dollars towards rebuilding social and political order in troubled countries,” Shapiro says. “Thousands of families today are mourning loved ones lost in those efforts. ESOC is devoted to learning from that experience, and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all do a better job helping such places in the future.”

Traveling back to the Philippines often to meet with Eclarin and his coders keeps him tied to the men and women who are on the ground. And close to old colleagues such as Corpus, who was pardoned by President Corazon Aquino and went on to become the nation’s head of intelligence.

“Here’s the irony: The intelligence service was one of the organizations that was running after me, and then I was eventually assigned to head this very organization. Only in the Philippines,” says Corpus, whose counterinsurgency plan drafted in 1989 was hugely successful.

The communist New People’s Army is estimated to have approximately 5,000 rebels today, down from its high of 26,000 in the mid-1980s. And the government signed a hard-sought peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in last spring, which grants the Muslim areas of the southern Mindanao region greater political autonomy.

Still, many don’t believe the accord will hold and separatists from Moro National Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyef Group continue to threaten stability in the south.

“As long as the root forces remain – the income gap between the rich and the poor – there will always be rebellion,” says Corpus.

CISAC Consulting Professor Thomas Hegghammer writes in this Lawfare Foreign Policy Essay: Calculated Caliphate that the move by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to declare itself an Islamic State with a caliphate as its leader is a "bold and unprecedented" move.

Hegghammer, director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and a leading scholar of the jihadist movement, explores the motivations, both strategic and ideological, behind the recent ISIS revelations in Iraq.