Distrust vs. security, domestic and foreign: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

Richard Fernandez always has something interesting to say, and this post of his is no exception:

For much of history our ability to harm ourselves was fortunately limited by the crude nature of our means. But by the dawn of the 19th century it became obvious that the lack of technology alone could not forever protect us. Men were inventing more and more lethal devices…

Somehow [man has] found a way till now to put his creations under control. What he has not managed to achieve is to uninvent knowledge…

The deep dark secret of the disarmament movement is that it never relied on the control of arms. It has always relied on the control of men. And the control of men relied upon the acceptance of taboos; in the submission to a kind of accepted set of values, in the belief in the odiousness of betrayal. The key to controlling the nuclear bomb lay in governance. It lay in the accountability of the possessors of these things to the general public…

The problem of North Korea is not a problem of technology. It is a problem of legitimacy.

In recent weeks the world has become aware of yet another wonder weapon. The full power of information technology has been revealed by reports detailing their use to capture nearly every aspect of modern communications…And yet a moment’s reflection must reveal that we always knew that technology could do this. What we had not suspected was that the Obama administration would do this.

Fernandez puts it more gracefully than I would have, but that’s essentially what I’ve been thinking ever since the NSA leak story broke. It’s why I’ve said several times that the NSA revelations would seem less alarming to most people had it not been for the IRS revelations paving the way and showing how untrustworthy government institutions can be, how easy and tempting it is to abuse power.

Of course, we always knew that—“power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—and the Founders certainly knew it (although the technology was hardly imagined by them). But there’s nothing like a demonstration, up close and personal, to make it seem more real and more urgent.

So as a result, people trust government less and less in recent days. In many ways that’s all to the good—at least, if it leads to the curbing of big government’s power to limit our liberty in order to assert its own power and/or punish its political rivals. But we still rely on government to protect us from terrorism and from predatory foreign powers—in fact, most of us pretty much expect and even demand it.

So these two impulses are in conflict in some basic way, and the disagreement is over how to balance them. Liberty is exceptionally important, but without security there can be no liberty if the outside threats become great enough. Remember that in the triad “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “life” is listed first.

But if we’re going to sacrifice any of our very precious liberty, it better be for an excellent reason. The threat had better be real, and the benefit had better be real, and the sacrifice of liberty as minimal as possible.

How the NSA data collection program factors into that is an issue on which reasonable people can differ. I don’t know enough details yet to be absolutely certain, but my strong gut reaction is that we’re giving up too much for too little benefit. And of course the problem in learning more of those details of the program is that the enemies and potential enemies learn those details too.

This is not a new problem, it’s an old one, although of course the technology by which the loss of liberty can be accomplished is fairly new and far more encompassing than in the past. But we’ve faced the same basic dilemma before at many dramatic times in our history, especially during periods when the nation threatened to splinter.

For example, we had the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798:

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed in 1798 by the Federalists in the 5th United States Congress in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during an undeclared naval war with France, later known as the Quasi-War…

Opposition to Federalists among Democratic-Republicans reached new heights at this time since the Democratic-Republicans had supported France. Some appeared to desire an event similar to the French Revolution to come to the United States to overthrow the government. When Democratic-Republicans in some states refused to enforce federal laws, such as the Whiskey tax, and threatened to rebel, Federalists threatened to send the army to force them to capitulate. As the unrest sweeping Europe was bleeding over into the United States, calls for secession reached unparalleled heights, and the fledgling nation seemed ready to rip itself apart.

The “Alien” portion of the law was mostly about activities by aliens thought to be undermining the stability of our government. It was the “Sedition” portion that was especially disturbing to people, then and now. Here’s an example, from Section 2:

And be it farther enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.

When Jefferson was elected he pardoned those who had been convicted under the Sedition Act (although apparently not until after he had used it to punish a few of his critics) and the Act died a natural death by expiration and non-renewal.

Students of American history also know that one of the big beefs with Lincoln’s behavior during the Civil War was his suspension of various civil liberties such as the writ of habeas corpus. It was a temporary wartime measure that Lincoln felt was necessary to preserve the union, but it was extremely controversial even in its time.

Now the current conflict has reached a head in a “war” that’s undeclared and far less straightforward than those earlier precedents. Growing distrust of government has heightened the fear and the dilemma.

The closest parallel I can think of (although it’s not even close to perfect by any means) was the reaction of the public at the end of the Vietnam War. Many events came together as the Vietnam War waged on and then wound down—such as, for example, the decline of trust in government engendered by the leak of the Pentagon Papers at the hands of that Snowden precursor, Daniel Ellsberg; the lengthy and frustrating prosecution of the Vietnam war itself (including shocking events such as the My Lai massacre); and the excesses of Watergate—causing trust in the government to erode precipitously, and motivating Congress and the public to try to protect itself against government and preserve civil liberties from the perceived threat.

[NOTE: Tune in soon for Part II, in which I plan to outline the ways that laws passed to limit government power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War helped lead to the famous firewall and hampered our ability to fight the war on terror effectively, and then tie that into what’s happening now.]

And then there was—the shirtwaist

The New Neo Posted on by

I was reading a post describing a new book about the original astronauts’ wives called The Astronaut Wives Club. Here’s the book’s cover photo:

astronautwives

And that’s when it hit me: shirtwaists! Whatever happened to–shirtwaists? Not that I miss them all that much.

They were dowdy and yet sort of flattering for some people (mostly the clean-cut all-American type), and very comfortable. There was a ’40s type, which I don’t remember. And then there was a ’50s type that I do remember, demonstrated by six out of seven of the wives in the photo above (every one but the rebel in the flowered sheath). They are wearing an especially plain version—the ones I had were always prints—but that’s what they invariably looked like.

I came in more or less on the tail end of the craze, which was fortunate because the style never looked good on me anyway. I was too exotic, or something like that. They were almost always made of cotton (although I also had a couple made of some synthetic non-wrinkling material that were supposed to be good for traveling), and were cut like a blouse with buttons, then came in at the waist, almost always had a belt, and the skirt was usually gathered although you can see that the two wives wearing blue in the photo are sporting the sheath variant.

And circle pins, anyone? Obligatory.

People are deciding…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to read the classics:

… George Orwell’s “1984” is enjoying a surge in popularity, landing at No. 4 on Amazon’s list of “Movers and Shakers.” Sales of Orwell’s classic have risen an astonishing 5,771% as of Tuesday morning, with a current sales rank of 213, up from 12,507 just a few days ago. A different edition of the novel has even made it onto Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers list.

Can’t imagine why.

Amnesty?

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep reading conflicting things about the chances of the amnesty bill passing. Yes? No? Do they have the votes?

One thing’s clear—it sure is flying under the radar right now. And that’s unlikely to be an accident.

Mary was merry when she decided to marry

The New Neo Posted on by

How do you pronounce “Mary,” “merry,” and “marry” in that sentence? Do all three sound different? Are two the same (and which ones), or are all the same?

According to this map, it depends where you live: only in Massachusetts, Long Island and Jersey are the three pronounced differently, there are a few spots where two are the same, but in most of the country they’re all the same.

The maps are much fun to study, and the site has a lot more for many different words. But this one (and some others) seems very wrong to me. I’m from New York, and New Yorkers say those three words differently from each other, take it from me. The distinctions may be somewhat subtle (and the vowel sounds trend somewhat toward the “eh” in “merry”), but the words do not sound the same. Nor do they sound the same in other parts of the country where I’ve lived, although they sound very different from the way New Yorkers say them.

But let’s not quibble (oh well, let’s). As I said, the maps are fun. This one (“what do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?”) brought back the word “sunshower” to me. I had forgotten that’s what we called that wonderful phenomenon in my youth.

And this one, about the name for a sweetened carbonated beverage, made me think of this old “tonic” post of mine. “Tonic” is the traditional New England term, but these maps don’t have “tonic” as a choice.

Wicked ignorant.

Come to think of it, though, I haven’t heard it referred to that way in a while, even in New England. Might the term have died out over time, like many other colorful regionalisms? Pity.

[Hat tip: Artfldgr.]

Support for affirmative action is down

The New Neo Posted on by

A new poll:

Just 45 percent of respondents said they believe affirmative action programs are still needed to counteract the effects of discrimination against minorities, while an equal 45 percent feel the programs have gone too far and should be ended because they unfairly discriminate against whites…

The number of Americans supporting affirmative action has been in decline over the past two decades, down from a high of 61 percent in its favor in 1991…

Right now, I feel like it’s reverse discrimination,” said one poll respondent, a white, 69-year-old retired teacher from Rhode Island, who was interviewed for this story and did not wish to be identified. “I did support it at first, but, gradually, because of this reverse discrimination it’s gone too far.”

Note the “did not wish to be indentified” statement. It’s become a frightening thing to declare oneself against affirmative action because it makes a person vulnerable to the dread “racist” accusation. And note how careful the respondent is to say that he/she voiced early support for the program.

Well, I never supported it, and I’m no racist. I’m old enough to remember how racist things used to be (the answer is “very”), to have deplored it, and to have been around when affirmative action began. And I remember that, although I certainly wanted racism to end, affirmative action seemed to me to be the wrong way to do it.

It was pretty simple, really: two wrongs don’t make a right. Since I was a liberal Democrat back then and in the heart of liberal-land, my small little bleatings of doubt (which I thought others would share) seemed to fall on deaf ears. But I never changed my mind, and I’m glad to see that others are coming along.

How would I have redressed the racism of the era? The only solution I ever had was equality of opportunity, and the passage of time. There’s no way to know what would have happened, and perhaps this is naive of me, but I think (and hope) that racism would have died a natural death over the years, and we would have been close to where we are right now on that score but without the bitterness that affirmative action has wrought, and without the widespread doubt about the qualifications of the members of groups who are suspected to have gotten their positions through racial favoritism.

Snowden’s story: how much veracity is there in “Verax”?

The New Neo Posted on by

Let me get one thing completely cleared up at the outset of this post: the NSA data-collection story is important. Vitally important. The program exists, and we need to know more about how it works, and whether it is (or should or should not be) legal and constitutional. Those discussions are ongoing in the MSM, the blogs, the airwaves, the posts and comment sections here, and perhaps at your dinner table or local bar.

But I’ve turned the focus on Snowden himself the last few days because the messenger is part of the news, and part of the attempt to understand the program and what was actually done (and what could have been done) under its auspices. Something about his story and his general veracity (not the authenticity of the documents; I have not questioned those) seems fishy. And his veracity matters, because part of the question is why he did this, whose interests he might be serving, and whether his description of other elements of the NSA program (those that have not been independently verified) are likely to be true or false.

What were Snowden’s actual tasks at Booz? He makes some pretty dramatic claims that, if true, are shocking. He says he had access to all the sensitive information and that he “certainly had the authorities [sic] to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.” But were those things part of his official duties and responsibilities in his work for the NSA data program? Is that what he meant by “authority” (or “authorities”)? Or is he speaking of hacking? Was he actually ordered to do this by his superiors, and if so did he do it? Or is he merely claiming he could have done it had he wanted to, because he’s a skillful computer guy who had access to information that would have let him do it?

Snowden also claimed he made a salary of $200,000, but Booz has just released a statement that his base salary was in fact $122,000. There might be ways to resolve the discrepancy (bonuses?), but it appears that Snowden misrepresented this fairly minor point. But why? And what does it mean about other things he said, including some of his more incendiary claims such as the one in the above paragraph? That’s more important than the amount of his salary, but we don’t know it was true, either.

I’m no IT person, no computer expert; au contraire. But I find it hard to believe that someone of Snowden’s youth and with Snowden’s lack of training (either military or academic) and relative inexperience was officially given that kind of authority—to wiretap the president with only a personal email address? Really? Of course, if he was, all the more reason to be extremely alarmed by the way the NSA is run, because it would be unconscionable.

Snowden also claimed that he “had full access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all around the world,” and that “he could shut down the entire system in an afternoon if he wanted to.”

I’m very very curious to know—does this sound like the type of power a sort of mid-level IT guy (“infrastructure analyst“) would have had official access to? Or is he saying he could have hacked his way into it? Furthermore, did Snowden offer Greenwald any proof of those things he was claiming (or anything but the documents, for that matter)?

Because the only thing we have to go on for much of this (so far, anyway) is Snowden’s word—and of course the documents he provided (and we don’t know what most of those were, since the majority have not been published, although more are promised by Greenwald). As for Snowden’s job, while it is true that Booz has made a statement that he did indeed work for them for “less than three months” in Hawaii, no other details of his work have been confirmed by them (and the salary amount Snowden gave was contradicted).

So we know that Snowden worked for Booz, almost certainly on computers (although Booz doesn’t even say that, by the way). I haven’t read anything yet that indicates that Glenn Greenwald independently confirmed anything Snowden told him about his life and work history, although Greenwald certainly may have done so. And the time frame indicates that Snowden most likely got that job already intending to get access to the documents and spill them, because reports are that he had already contacted Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

But here’s what I consider the strangest thing of all: Snowden also told the Guardian:

…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building…

On the face of it this is very straightforward and makes sense. But stop to think about it: if the US has the capacity to do this, why would Snowden think the US is alone in having that capacity? Wouldn’t Russia and China and all the other advanced nations of the world with a will to do it (and surely they don’t lack the will) already be doing it also, or about to do it? Why would Snowden think that stopping the US from doing so—even if he were to somehow succeed in that mission—would actually preserve these “basic liberties for people around the world?” The only way to do that would be to smash all the computers on the globe, and even then they would just be built again.

The problem is inherent in the technology. The capacity is there, and people around the world definitely have the will. It’s not just Obama, and it’s not just the US; it’s humanity and society and government itself, both here and abroad. Snowden is a smart man, so I find it difficult to believe he’s so naive as to not understand all of this.

[NOTE: The word “Verax” in the title of this post was the code name Snowden used when he first contacted Greenwald. It means “truth-teller” in Latin.]

[ADDENDUM: William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection is on the same page as I am here, with some interesting further observations as well. Excellent read.]

[ADDENDUM II: With the WaPo haste makes waste. In reporter Gellman’s rush to compete with Greenwald, huge errors are made in the story of the PRISM data. Investigate journalism is worse than dead, it’s a travesty of its former self.]

I wonder…

The New Neo Posted on by

…about this:

[Glenn Greenwald] also wrote he had been “working with” Snowden since February…

That’s part of a lengthy article about a feud between Greenwald and WaPo writer Barton Gellman about who spoke to Snowden when and about what. I’m not quoting it to delve into that brouhaha; I’m quoting it because it has also been reported that Snowden left his employment at Booz Allen Hamilton in late May (the 20th) after working for them for less than three months.

That means that if you count backwards, he had to have started work for Booz no earlier than February 20 and probably significantly later. So, if he was already speaking to Greenwald in February, does this mean he took the Booz job with the purpose of gaining access to the documents and leaking them?

If that’s true, does that change anything in the equation?

[ADDENDUM: Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was also involved in helping publicize the Snowden leak, says that Snowden contacted her (anonymously) back in January. Again, that would have been before he started working for Booz. Interesting.]

Jeffrey Toobin: Snowden is no hero…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and no whistleblower either.

I can’t say I’ve agreed a whole lot with Jeffrey Toobin (or anything political in the New Yorker) in recent years. But for the most part I agree with Toobin about Snowden. In fact, what Toobin says in the linked article is pretty much what I’ve been saying the past day or two in posts and comments in this thread and others.

However, Snowden’s motivation and judgment (right or wrong) and what should be done about him in the legal sense are completely different issues from whether the NSA data-collecting should be allowed, or whether the government can be trusted with it.

It’s curious, isn’t it, that we’ve already been given much of this information or similar information before the Snowden revelations, but it didn’t get all that much traction. The reason it’s hitting home now so forcibly rather than earlier is because of the multiple scandals in recent weeks, and in particular the IRS’s misuse of tax application information in order to stifle political dissent.

If one couples the computer age with the need for protection against terrorism, and adds Big Government and this ruthless administration (not that I think it’s necessarily limited to this administration, or even to Democrats or liberals—power corrupts), the danger is clear and hits home. It’s a potentially toxic combination that should concern every American. Since ever-more-powerful computers have taken over the storage of information, and it is possible to access exponentially (logarithmically?) more information now than ever before, it’s hard to see how this particularly large cat can be put back into the bag. I’m not a tech expert, but it seems to me that technology coupled with secrecy would make it relatively easy to amass this sort of data on American citizens, and it would take an army of leakers to keep up with it.

[NOTE: Some quotes from Toobin’s article:

What, one wonders, did Snowden think the N.S.A. did? Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications…

And what of his decision to leak the documents? Doing so was, as he more or less acknowledges, a crime. Any government employee or contractor is warned repeatedly that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a crime…These were legally authorized programs; in the case of Verizon Business’s phone records, Snowden certainly knew this, because he leaked the very court order that approved the continuation of the project. So he wasn’t blowing the whistle on anything illegal; he was exposing something that failed to meet his own standards of propriety. The question, of course, is whether the government can function when all of its employees (and contractors) can take it upon themselves to sabotage the programs they don’t like…

What makes leak cases difficult is that some leaking””some interaction between reporters and sources who have access to classified information””is normal, even indispensable, in a society with a free press. It’s not easy to draw the line between those kinds of healthy encounters and the wholesale, reckless dumping of classified information by the likes of Snowden or Bradley Manning. Indeed, Snowden was so irresponsible in what he gave the Guardian and the Post that even these institutions thought some of it should not be disseminated to the public. The Post decided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden’s.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong when he knew publication of his leaks was imminent. In his interview, he said he went there because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.” This may be true, in some limited way, but the overriding fact is that Hong Kong is part of China, which is, as Snowden knows, a stalwart adversary of the United States in intelligence matters…Snowden is now at the mercy of the Chinese leaders who run Hong Kong. As a result, all of Snowden’s secrets may wind up in the hands of the Chinese government””which has no commitment at all to free speech or the right to political dissent…

The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air””and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all now have to hope that he’s right.]

Michael B. Mukasey…

The New Neo Posted on by

…does not think Snowden’s any kind of hero, and believes the brouhaha over the NSA program is overblown. I don’t find his arguments all that compelling, although I’m not part of the unequivocal “Snowden’s a hero” bandwagon, either.

I see Mukasey as naive about the strength of the government’s motivation and willingness to misuse the NSA data, as well as about its ability to use the information wisely and well even when its goal is stopping terrorists. For example, what kept authorities from finding Tamerlan Tsarnaev (who wasn’t even a citizen) to be seriously suspicious and worthy of deportation long before he committed the Marathon bombings? Is the government inappropriately focusing on the wrong (and objectionably intrusive) information, while at the same time ignoring simpler tools that would be more effective in actually fighting terrorism?

[ADDENDUM: Also, why Snowden’s not a whistleblower.]

[ADDEDUM II: From Scott Johnson at Powerline:

Read the Guardian profile and the Post articles and you will see that Snowden professes no loyalty to the United States. He conceives of himself as a citizen of the world, or of the realm of Digitalia. He does not sound like anyone to be trusted with an assessment on our behalf the costs and benefits of the course of action he has undertaken.]

Daniel Ellsberg on Edward Snowden: leaks then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

Not surprisingly, Daniel Ellsberg thinks Edward Snowden’s a great hero.

I’ve written at length about Ellsberg before: a historical look here, and especially this one about his more recent activities (including, interestingly enough, a group he formed a few years ago to assist security-cleared operatives like Snowden who would like to divulge national secrets they feel need divulging).

The title of today’s Ellsberg piece is purposely inflammatory: “Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America,” despite the disclaimer in the body of the article, “Obviously, the United States is not now a police state.” Ellsberg is a man of the left, but he seems to think we should distrust the government. And that’s certainly where most of us are at these days, with good reason. But he also seems to think we should trust the impeccable judgment of individuals such as himself, Bradley Manning, and now Edward Snowden to determine what’s a dangerous violation of national security and what is not, and to reveal only the latter and not the former. Of course, given Ellsberg’s history, he would think that.

But I don’t, although I also don’t see an obvious solution to the dilemma, other than the safeguards the Founders built into the Constitution. But they did not foresee the centralization of information possible in the computer age, and that’s what we’re facing now. That centralization gives the government unprecedented tools to reach into people’s lives and use the information to no good, and it gives a great many more employees such as Snowden (many of whom might have either very bad judgment or very bad motives, despite their security clearances) unprecedented access to scads of such information.

As far as Ellsberg’s history goes, I urge you to read in its entirety this piece I wrote on that subject back in 2006. It’s the third section of an in-depth four-part series on the dilemmas connected with security leakers and whistleblowers on matters related to national security. Ellsberg’s disclosure was (as far as I know) the first time the press participated in printing such a leak; before that, the press would have declined, probably out of patriotism or fear. But Vietnam changed that picture, as well as so many others

Come to think of it, I urge you to also read the other three parts of the series I wrote back then. It all seems relevant. Here’s Part I, here’s Part II, and this is Part IV. It may actually be that fourth essay that is most relevant, because it concerns whether leakers should be prosecuted, and if so, how.

And what about the role of newspapers in showcasing the information provided by the leakers? Ellsberg and his Pentagon papers were presented in a certain way by the press, but as we already know the press is not especially interested in scrupulous devotion to the objective truth. Political agenda? Of course.

Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote about the Pentagon Papers’ press coverage, which contains the following quote from a WSJ article by James Q. Wilson:

Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the [Pentagon Papers] documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.

In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.

The present case—Snowden and the NSA data—presents a curious and I believe unprecedented hybrid of things. If not for the IRS scandal, the NSA revelations would not have had nearly the same impact as they do coming now. The IRS abuses were of the domestic rather than the foreign sort, and did not rely on the disclosure of national security information but were uncovered in an investigation sparked by complaints by the Tea Party victims themselves. But the IRS actions that were uncovered constitute such strong evidence of egregious abuse of sensitive information about American citizens by a government entity for political purposes that it is no longer possible to imagine that the sweeping NSA information would not be used for similar purposes. The fact that the NSA data was gathered by asserting a national security anti-terrorism motive was what makes it somewhat similar to the Pentagon Papers, with their foreign policy subject matter. But the NSA case is quite different in representing the interface of questions on how best to fight that war on terror with questions that are essentially concerned with the domestic liberty of citizens vis-a-vis big government.

[NOTE: I want to remind all who are tempted to think Snowden a hero that his fleeing to China must be regarded as a potential huge red flag. China, bastion of libertarianism?

I myself am conflicted between being grateful about the leaking of the content, and concerned about the method and the precedent it sets, as well as skeptical about what Snowden is really all about, who has helped him, and what they are expecting him to provide for them in return.]