{"id":38736,"date":"2014-01-27T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=38736"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:20:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:20:03","slug":"surveillance-and-scandal-time-tested-weapons-for-u-s-global-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/01\/surveillance-and-scandal-time-tested-weapons-for-u-s-global-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Surveillance and Scandal: Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s About Blackmail, Not National Security<\/em><\/p>\n

For more than six months, Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post<\/em>, the New York Times<\/em>, the Guardian<\/em>, Germany\u2019s Der Spiegel<\/em>, and Brazil\u2019s O Globo<\/em>, among other places.\u00a0 Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA\u2019s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington.\u00a0 The answer is remarkably simple.\u00a0 For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA\u2019s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line — like, in fact, the steal of the century.\u00a0 Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA\u2019s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.<\/p>\n

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington\u2019s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9\/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.<\/p>\n

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history<\/a> of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet\u2019s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America\u2019s closest allies.<\/p>\n

Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage — akin to blackmail — in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA\u2019s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.<\/p>\n

A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army\u2019s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI\u2019s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes<\/a> into the Internet\u2019s fiber optic cables.<\/p>\n

This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations<\/a> began.\u00a0 Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.<\/p>\n

In a time of increasing imperial austerity and exceptional technological capability, everything about the NSA\u2019s surveillance told Washington to just \u201cgo for it.\u201d \u00a0This cut-rate mechanism for both projecting force and preserving U.S. global power surely looked like a no-brainer, a must-have bargain for any American president in the twenty-first century — before new NSA documents started hitting front pages weekly<\/a>, thanks to Snowden, and the whole world began returning the favor.<\/p>\n

As the gap has grown between Washington\u2019s global reach and its shrinking mailed fist, as it struggles to maintain 40%<\/a> of world armaments (the 2012 figure) with only 23%<\/a> of global gross economic output, the U.S. will need to find new ways to exercise its power far more economically. As the Cold War took off, a heavy-metal U.S. military — with 500 bases worldwide circa 1950 — was sustainable because the country controlled some 50% of the global gross product.<\/p>\n

But as its share of world output falls — to an estimated 17%<\/a> by 2016 — and its social welfare costs climb relentlessly from 4% of gross domestic product in 2010 to a projected 18% by 2050, cost-cutting becomes imperative if Washington is to survive as anything like the planet\u2019s \u201csole superpower.\u201d Compared to the $3 trillion cost<\/a> of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the NSA\u2019s 2012 budget of just $11 billion<\/a> for worldwide surveillance and cyberwarfare looks like cost saving the Pentagon can ill-afford to forego.<\/p>\n

Yet this seeming \u201cbargain\u201d comes at what turns out to be an almost incalculable cost. The sheer scale of such surveillance leaves it open to countless points of penetration, whether by a handful of anti-war activists breaking into<\/a> an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, back in 1971 or Edward Snowden downloading NSA documents at a Hawaiian outpost in 2012.<\/p>\n

Once these secret programs are exposed, it turns out that nobody really likes being under surveillance. Proud national leaders refuse to tolerate foreign powers observing them like rats in a maze. Ordinary citizens recoil at the idea of Big Brother<\/a> watching their private lives like so many microbes on a slide.<\/p>\n

Cycles of Surveillance<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the past century, the tension between state expansion and citizen-driven contraction has pushed U.S. surveillance through a recurring cycle. First comes the rapid development of stunning counterintelligence techniques under the pressure of fighting foreign wars; next, the unchecked, usually illegal application of those surveillance technologies back home behind a veil of secrecy; and finally, belated, grudging reforms as press and public discover the outrageous excesses of the FBI, the CIA, or now, the NSA. In this hundred-year span — as modern communications advanced from the mail to the telephone to the Internet — state surveillance has leapt forward in technology\u2019s ten-league boots, while civil liberties have crawled along behind at the snail\u2019s pace of law and legislation.<\/p>\n

The first and, until recently, most spectacular round of surveillance came during World War I and its aftermath. Fearing subversion by German-Americans after the declaration of war on Germany in 1917, the FBI and Military Intelligence swelled from bureaucratic nonentities into all-powerful agencies charged with extirpating any flicker of disloyalty anywhere in America, whether by word or deed. Since only 9% of the country\u2019s population then had telephones, monitoring the loyalties of some 10 million German-Americans proved incredibly labor-intensive, requiring legions of postal workers to physically examine some 30 million first-class letters and 350,000 badge-carrying vigilantes to perform shoe-leather snooping on immigrants, unions, and socialists of every sort.\u00a0 During the 1920s, Republican conservatives, appalled by this threat to privacy, slowly began to curtail Washington\u2019s security apparatus. This change culminated in Secretary of State Henry Stimson\u2019s abolition of the government\u2019s cryptography unit in 1929 with his memorable admonition<\/a>, \u201cGentlemen do not read each other\u2019s mail.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the next round of mass surveillance during World War II, the FBI discovered that the wiretapping of telephones produced an unanticipated byproduct with extraordinary potential for garnering political power: scandal. To block enemy espionage, President Franklin Roosevelt gave the FBI control over all U.S. counterintelligence and, in May 1940, authorized its director, J. Edgar Hoover, to engage in wiretapping.<\/p>\n

What made Hoover a Washington powerhouse was the telephone. With 20% of the country and the entire political elite by now owning phones, FBI wiretaps at local switchboards could readily monitor conversations by both suspected subversives and the president\u2019s domestic enemies, particularly leaders of the isolationist movement such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and Senator Burton Wheeler.<\/p>\n

Even with these centralized communications, however, the Bureau still needed massive manpower for its wartime counterintelligence. Its staff soared<\/a> from just 650 in 1924 to 13,000 by 1943. Upon taking office on Roosevelt\u2019s death in early 1945, Harry Truman soon learned the extraordinary extent of FBI surveillance. \u201cWe want no Gestapo or Secret Police,\u201d Truman wrote<\/a> in his diary that May. \u201cFBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a quarter of a century of warrantless wiretaps, Hoover built up a veritable archive of sexual preferences among America\u2019s powerful and used it to shape the direction of U.S. politics.\u00a0 He distributed<\/a> a dossier on Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson\u2019s alleged homosexuality to assure his defeat in the 1952 presidential elections, circulated<\/a> audio tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s philandering, and monitored<\/a> President Kennedy\u2019s affair with mafia mistress Judith Exner. And these are just a small sampling of Hoover\u2019s uses of scandal to keep the Washington power elite under his influence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,\u201d recalled<\/a> William Sullivan, the FBI\u2019s chief of domestic intelligence during the 1960s, \u201che\u2019d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that \u2018we\u2019re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter…\u2019 From that time on, the senator\u2019s right in his pocket.\u201d After his death, an official tally<\/a> found Hoover had 883 such files on senators and 722 more on congressmen.<\/p>\n

Armed with such sensitive information, Hoover gained the unchecked power to dictate the country\u2019s direction and launch programs of his choosing, including the FBI\u2019s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that illegally harassed the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements with black propaganda, break-ins, and agent provocateur<\/em><\/a>-style violence.<\/p>\n

At the end of the Vietnam War, Senator Frank Church headed a committee that investigated these excesses. \u201cThe intent of COINTELPRO,\u201d recalled<\/a> one aide to the Church investigation, \u201cwas to destroy lives and ruin reputations.\u201d These findings prompted the formation, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, of \u201cFISA courts\u201d to issue warrants for all future national security wiretaps.<\/p>\n

Surveillance in the Age of the Internet<\/strong><\/p>\n

Looking for new weapons to fight terrorism after 9\/11, Washington turned to electronic surveillance, which has since become integral to its strategy for exercising global power.<\/p>\n

In October 2001, not satisfied with the sweeping and extraordinary powers of the newly passed Patriot Act, President Bush ordered<\/a> the National Security Agency to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation’s telephone companies without the requisite FISA warrants. Somewhat later, the agency began sweeping<\/a> the Internet for emails, financial data, and voice messaging on the tenuous theory that such \u201cmetadata\u201d was \u201cnot constitutionally protected<\/a>.\u201d In effect, by penetrating the Internet for text and the parallel Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for voice, the NSA had gained access to much of the world\u2019s telecommunications. By the end of Bush\u2019s term in 2008, Congress had enacted laws<\/a> that not only retrospectively legalized these illegal programs, but also prepared the way for NSA surveillance to grow unchecked.<\/p>\n

Rather than restrain the agency, President Obama oversaw the expansion of its operations in ways remarkable for both the sheer scale of the billions of messages collected globally and for the selective monitoring of world leaders.<\/p>\n

What made the NSA so powerful was, of course, the Internet — that global grid<\/a> of fiber optic cables that now connects<\/a> 40% of all humanity. By the time Obama took office, the agency had finally harnessed the power of modern telecommunications for near-perfect surveillance.\u00a0 It was capable of both blanketing the globe and targeting specific individuals.\u00a0 It had assembled the requisite technological tool-kit — specifically, access points to collect data,\u00a0computer codes<\/a> to break encryption, data farms<\/a> to store its massive digital harvest, and supercomputers<\/a> for nanosecond processing of what it was engorging itself on.<\/p>\n

By 2012, the centralization via digitization of all voice, video, textual, and financial communications into a worldwide network of fiber optic cables allowed the NSA to monitor the globe by penetrating<\/a> just 190 data hubs — an extraordinary economy of force for both political surveillance and cyberwarfare.<\/p>\n

Click here to see a larger version<\/a><\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

\"In<\/a>

In this Top Secret document dated 2012, the NSA shows the “Five Eyes” allies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom) its 190 “access programs” for penetrating the Internet’s global grid of fiber optic cables for both surveillance and cyberwarfare. (Source: NRC Handelsblad, November 23, 2013).<\/p><\/div>\n

With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany\u2019s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far.<\/p>\n

After all, once FBI agents had tapped thousands of phones, stenographers had typed up countless transcripts, and clerks had stored this salacious paper harvest in floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C.\u00a0 To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ<\/a> one police informer for every six East Germans — an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA\u2019s technology to the Internet\u2019s data hubs now allows the agency\u2019s 37,000<\/a> employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet.<\/p>\n

A Dream as Old as Ancient Rome<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much as Hoover\u2019s FBI once did. In September 2013, the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> that the NSA has, since 2010, applied sophisticated software to create \u201csocial network diagrams…, unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible…, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist\u2019s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the expenditure of $250 million annually under its Sigint Enabling Project, the NSA has stealthily penetrated all encryption designed to protect privacy. \u201cIn the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,\u201d reads<\/a> a 2007 NSA document. \u201cIt is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.\u201d<\/p>\n

By collecting knowledge — routine, intimate, or scandalous — about foreign leaders, imperial proconsuls from ancient Rome to modern America have gained both the intelligence and aura of authority necessary for dominion over alien societies. The importance, and challenge, of controlling these local elites cannot be overstated. During its pacification of the Philippines after 1898, for instance, the U.S. colonial regime subdued contentious Filipino leaders via pervasive policing<\/a> that swept up both political intelligence and personal scandal. And that, of course, was just what J. Edgar Hoover was doing in Washington during the 1950s and 1960s.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the mighty British Empire, like all empires, was a global tapestry woven out of political ties to local leaders or \u201csubordinate elites\u201d — from Malay sultans and Indian maharajas to Gulf sheiks and West African tribal chiefs. As historian Ronald Robinson once observed, the British Empire spread around the globe for two centuries through the collaboration of these local leaders and then unraveled, in just two decades, when that collaboration turned to \u201cnon-cooperation.\u201d After rapid decolonization during the 1960s transformed half-a-dozen European empires into 100 new nations, their national leaders soon found themselves the subordinate elites of a spreading American global imperium. Washington suddenly needed the sort of private information that could keep such figures in line.<\/p>\n

Surveillance of foreign leaders provides world powers — Britain then, America now — with critical information for the exercise of global hegemony. Such spying gave special penetrating power to the imperial gaze, to that sense of superiority necessary for dominion over others.\u00a0 It also provided operational information on dissidents who might need to be countered with covert action or military force; political and economic intelligence so useful for getting the jump on allies in negotiations of all sorts; and, perhaps most important of all, scurrilous information about the derelictions of leaders useful in coercing their compliance.<\/p>\n

In late 2013, the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> that, when it came to spying on global elites, there were \u201cmore than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years,\u201d reaching down to mid-level political actors in the international arena. Revelations from Edward Snowden\u2019s cache of leaked documents indicate that the NSA has monitored<\/a> leaders in some 35 nations worldwide — including Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, Mexican presidents Felipe Calder\u00f3n and Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indonesia\u2019s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.\u00a0 Count in as well, among so many other operations, the monitoring<\/a> of \u201cFrench diplomatic interests\u201d during the June 2010 U.N. vote on Iran sanctions and \u201cwidespread surveillance<\/a>\u201d of world leaders during the Group 20 summit meeting at Ottawa in June 2010. Apparently, only members of the historic \u201cFive Eyes\u201d signals-intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain) remain exempt — at least theoretically — from NSA surveillance.<\/p>\n

Such secret intelligence about allies can obviously give Washington a significant diplomatic advantage. During U.N. wrangling over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, for example, the NSA intercepted<\/a> Secretary-General Kofi Anan\u2019s conversations and monitored the \u201cMiddle Six\u201d — Third World nations on the Security Council — offering what were, in essence, well-timed bribes to win votes. The NSA\u2019s deputy chief for regional targets sent a memo<\/a> to the agency\u2019s Five Eyes allies asking \u201cfor insights as to how membership is reacting to on-going debate regarding Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions […, and] the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indicating Washington\u2019s need for incriminating information in bilateral negotiations, the State Department pressed its Bahrain embassy in 2009 for details, damaging in an Islamic society, on the crown princes, asking<\/a>: \u201cIs there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, in October 2012, an NSA official identified as \u201cDIRNSA,\u201d or Director General Keith Alexander, proposed<\/a> the following for countering Muslim radicals: \u201c[Their] vulnerabilities, if exposed, would likely call into question a radicalizer\u2019s devotion to the jihadist cause, leading to the degradation or loss of his authority.\u201d The agency suggested that such vulnerabilities could include \u201cviewing sexually explicit material online\u201d or \u201cusing a portion of the donations they are receiving\u2026 to defray personal expenses.\u201d The NSA document identified one potential target as a \u201crespected academic\u201d whose \u201cvulnerabilities\u201d are \u201conline promiscuity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as the Internet has centralized communications, so it has moved most commercial sex into cyberspace. With an estimated 25 million<\/a> salacious sites worldwide and a combined 10.6 billion <\/em>page views per month in 2013 at the five top sex sites, online pornography has become a global business; by 2006, in fact, it generated $97 billion<\/a> in revenue. With countless Internet viewers visiting porn sites and almost nobody admitting it, the NSA has easy access to the embarrassing habits of targets worldwide, whether Muslim militants or European leaders.<\/p>\n

According to<\/a> James Bamford, author of two authoritative books on the agency, \u201cThe NSA’s operation is eerily similar to the FBI’s operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to \u2018neutralize\u2019 their targets.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ACLU\u2019s Jameel Jaffer has warned<\/a> that a president might \u201cask the NSA to use the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist, or human rights activist. The NSA has used its power that way in the past and it would be na\u00efve to think it couldn’t use its power that way in the future.\u201d Even President Obama\u2019s recently convened executive review of the NSA admitted<\/a>: \u201c[I]n light of the lessons of our own history\u2026 at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of actually conducting such surveillance.\u00a0 In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian people, he wrote<\/a>, \u201cThey even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.\u201d If Snowden is right, then one key goal of NSA surveillance of world leaders is not U.S. national security but political blackmail — as it has been since 1898.<\/p>\n

Such digital surveillance has tremendous potential for scandal, as anyone who remembers New York Governor Eliot Spitzer\u2019s forced resignation in 2008 after routine phone taps<\/a> revealed his use of escort services; or, to take another obvious example, the ouster<\/a> of France\u2019s budget minister J\u00e9r\u00f4me Cahuzac in 2013 following wire taps that exposed his secret Swiss bank account. As always, the source of political scandal remains sex or money, both of which the NSA can track with remarkable ease.<\/p>\n

Given the acute sensitivity of executive communications, world leaders have reacted sharply to reports of NSA surveillance — with Chancellor Merkel demanding<\/a> Five-Eyes-exempt status for Germany, the European Parliament voting<\/a> to curtail the sharing of bank data with Washington, and Brazil\u2019s President Rousseff canceling a U.S. state visit and contracting<\/a> a $560 million satellite communications system to free her country from the U.S.-controlled version of the Internet.<\/p>\n

The Future of U.S. Global Power<\/strong><\/p>\n

By starting a swelling river of NSA documents flowing into public view, Edward Snowden has given us a glimpse of the changing architecture of U.S. global power. At the broadest level, Obama\u2019s digital \u201cpivot\u201d complements his overall defense strategy<\/a>, announced in 2012, of reducing conventional forces while expanding into the new, cost-effective domains of space and cyberspace.<\/p>\n

While cutting back modestly on costly armaments and the size of the military, President Obama has invested billions in the building of a new architecture for global information control. If we add the $791 billion<\/a> expended to build the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy to the $500 billion<\/a> spent on an increasingly para-militarized version of global intelligence in the dozen years since 9\/11, then Washington has made a $1.2 trillion investment in a new apparatus of world power.<\/p>\n

So formidable is this security bureaucracy that Obama\u2019s recent executive review recommended the regularization, not reform, of current NSA practices, allowing the agency to continue collecting American phone calls and monitoring foreign leaders into the foreseeable future. Cyberspace offers Washington an austerity-linked arena for the exercise of global power, albeit at the cost of trust by its closest allies — a contradiction that will bedevil America\u2019s global leadership for years to come.<\/p>\n

To update Henry Stimson: in the age of the Internet, gentlemen don’t just read each other\u2019s mail, they watch each other\u2019s porn. Even if we think we have nothing to hide, all of us, whether world leaders or ordinary citizens, have good reason to be concerned.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Alfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of <\/em>Policing America\u2019s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State<\/a>, which is the source for much of the material in this essay.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2014 Alfred W. McCoy<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s About Blackmail, Not National Security – With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}