I’m glad I live in a country with people who are vigilant in defending civil liberties. But as I listen to the debate about the disclosure of two government programs designed to track suspected phone and e-mail contacts of terrorists, I do wonder if some of those who unequivocally defend this disclosure are behaving as if 9/11 never happened — that the only thing we have to fear is government intrusion in our lives, not the intrusion of those who gather in secret cells in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan and plot how to topple our tallest buildings or bring down U.S. airliners with bombs planted inside underwear, tennis shoes or computer printers.
Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.
I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.
That is why I’ll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime.
So I don’t believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower. No, I believe Snowden is someone who needed a whistle-blower. He needed someone to challenge him with the argument that we don’t live in a world any longer where our government can protect its citizens from real, not imagined, threats without using big data — where we still have an edge — under constant judicial review. It’s not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale attack gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater.
A hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for linking on his blog to an essay by David Simon, the creator of HBO’s “The Wire.” For me, it cuts right to the core of the issue.
“You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about,” wrote Simon. “And you would think that rather than a legal court order, which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame. Nope. ... The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the F.B.I. and N.S.A. are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. ... I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a database of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the Internet. And it’s scary that your cellphones have GPS installed. ... The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. ... The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.”
We do need to be constantly on guard for abuses. But the fact is, added Simon, that for at least the last two presidencies “this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon bombing before they occur.”
To be sure, secret programs, like the virtually unregulated drone attacks, can lead to real excesses that have to be checked. But here is what is also real, Simon concluded:
“Those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically motivated enemy. And, for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks.”
And, I’d add, not just bloviating. Imagine how many real restrictions to our beautiful open society we would tolerate if there were another attack on the scale of 9/11. Pardon me if I blow that whistle.
Comments (6)
You can download archives for all of your sites for free. All you have to do is request an archive (from your Settings page) and wait overnight. The next day the archives are ready to download.
I don't have a problem with most legal electronic surveillance, since it doesn't usually give access to content, and no one is interested in my tawdry little life anyway. But I can understand people's concern with mass culling of phone and e-mail metadata from ordinary citizens, especially since this administration has shown that it is willing to use its authority arbitrarily to harass its opposition.
(I added your blog to my WordPress feed. One nice thing about WP is that it lets you follow blogs from other platforms as long as they publish an RSS feed.)
I appreciate your comments about Xanga. I agree it was & maybe still can be a good experience. I basically am in a "wait & see" mode because I don't want to lose track of some friends here. On the other hand, it makes more sense to me to keep up with Facebook as my family is there as well as so many contacts from various areas of my life. What "The Narrator" used to term as "life's intrusions" are affecting my life and time now so that I don't have time to write about them and don't really feel a need to do anymore. Also, I was able to access your LiveJournal. ~~Blessings 'n Cheers
I like your thoughts on Xanga. I've found the same things to be true...same things I like about it here.
Hope you enjoy your new blogging place.
HUGS!!!
I read the post from June, 2005 via the link. That was rather heart wrenching. Sure, your mother probably thought at the time it was best you and your brother did not go to your father's funeral, but she recognized it was a mistake later. Sometimes parents just don't understand what would be meaningful to a child. I remember when my grandfather died. I was with him the day he died. He worked a part time job as a warehouseman. He rode the bus and it left him off about the same time I was getting home from the school I attended in 8th grade. So, we would meet and do the very short walk home together. On that particular day, he collapsed immediately after we crossed the street a short distance from the house. I ran and got my grandmother and my step-mother. They came, one of them returned to call an ambulance. He died at the hospital. My grandmother believed he was given a medication to which he was allergic which may have caused his death. At some point in all of this, either my step-mother or my grandmother made some remark that I didn't understand about his death. I don't know. I think I did. I sure knew I wasn't going to see him again, but they may have made the remark because I didn't show a lot of emotion. Well, that's because I was not allowed to express emotion during my upbringing, I suppose. However, I loved my grandfather dearly, so no doubt, I felt grief inwardly. If my grandmother had decided I should not attend the funeral with the family and friends, you bet I would have had a very hard time forgiving her. I understand your "works for me". However, by now, both of us know that reluctance to forgive is not healthy. I am so glad you shared this episode. I would not have read it originally because I had not yet joined Xanga until July 2005. This post was good for me to read. It reminded me of a favorite quote on forgiveness: "Refusing to forgive is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." I recently read a new (to me) quote on the subject: "He who cannot forgive others destroys a bridge over which he himself must pass." ~~George Herbert (I insert "She" & "herself"). "Forgive me" for writing such a long comment, but this particular post from 2005 really resonated with me. ~~Blessings 'n Cheers
BTW: So far, I tend to agree with you on the 4th amendment. I think it's more important for our government to do as much as possible to protect its citizens. I don't believe, from what I can tell that collection of telephone, e-mail records violates privacy. Seizure of any of these in particular to reveal content requires a warrant, as I read the amendment you quote.
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