…that Jennifer is a party pooper.
Idioms—they’ll get you every time:
Yeah, it’s sophomoric. But it made me laugh.
NSA phone records: unconstitutional, or just a bad idea, or what?
I’ve seen a lot of chatter around the blogosphere about the NSA phone records program that goes like this: “Those who argue that it’s constitutional are in favor of it.” But the two do not necessarily go together.
I don’t usually quote Barack Obama approvingly, but he hit the proverbial nail on the head last Friday when he said of the NSA phone records program:
We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.
Well, we absolutely do have some problems here, because an increasing number of people do not trust those government institutions, and they have pretty good reasons for seeing it that way.
But that’s a separate issue from the question of whether NSA was “abiding by the Constitution” when it collected and stored the data if it limited access to it in the ways it says it did. And that’s a separate question from whether it did follow those limits. Which is in turn a separate question from whether, even if it did follow those limits and was abiding by the Constitution, the program is something we want, and how vulnerable to abuse it might be.
Now, you may think the Constitution is a relatively easy read. Absolutely clear, written in plain English for anyone to see and understand. And you may also think that the reason lawyers and judges and SCOTUS justices go on and on and on about it as though it’s so complex is because they have a political agenda, and/or like to twist things and make them seem obscure, and/or can’t see the forest for the trees.
But it’s really not all that simple, and the entire structure of the appeals court system culminating in the Supreme Court isn’t there just to enrich the coffers of lawyers.
Take something as concise as the Fourth Amendment. It reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Short and sweet and oh so important, and written way back in a time when in order to seize stuff you had to physically go into a home and seize actual stuff (or actual people). Of course, there was a back story, too, about how and why the amendment was written and included in the Bill of Rights, and what the words in it meant at that time because of that history. And there’s also a sequel which includes many court decisions about how the amendment could and should be applied in the present day, when all sorts of methods unforeseen by the Founders have come along and given government new and creative ways to search and to seize.
Saying something is constitutional because it does not violate the Fourth Amendment is not the same as saying it’s not a bad practice, or that you like it, or that it shouldn’t be outlawed. Something can be bad, unlikable, and worthy of outlawing and still be completely constitutional, in which case the remedy for it would be to ban it, or to ban those parts of it that make it objectionable. Saying something is constitutional because it does not violate the Fourth Amendment is not the same as saying it’s not easily subject to abuse, overreach, and corruption, and therefore not potentially dangerous.
Which brings us to the fact that the NSA’s accessing phone call records (who, when, where) that are already the property of a phone company—invasive and dangerous though this might feel—is not unconstitutional, at least as the legal system has ruled so far. Of course, if the NSA rules setting up the program read that the agency could dip into content without a warrant as required by the Fourth Amendment, that would be different, and clearly unconstitutional. Or, if the agency was actually doing this even though the rules didn’t allow it, that would mean they were operating illegally. But at this point we’ve seen nothing to prove that either was the case.
Perhaps a test case on the NSA program could ultimately reach the Supreme Court and cause it to rule anew, and SCOTUS might reinterpret the Fourth Amendment in such a way as to declare the program unconstitutional even the way it’s written. Stranger things have happened. But understand what lawyer Andy McCarthy is saying when he writes, with characteristic clarity:
…[H]ow it is “clear” that a phone record, owned and possessed by a telephone service provider (not the customer), qualifies as the person, house, paper, or effect of the customer, such that the government’s acquisition of it violates the Fourth Amendment[?] The federal courts have consistently, emphatically rejected this implausible suggestion, holding that government’s collection of phone records does not even implicate the Fourth Amendment, much less violate it…
[T]he animating idea behind the original Fourth Amendment is protection of personal property. The Constitution was not deemed to be violated absent some form of government trespass…[E]ven this new Fourth Amendment [with its “reasonable expectation of privacy”] that progressives have erected on the remains of the original one has never protected third-party business records. That, in particular, includes “metadata” ”” customer telephone activity (not the content of conversations, but numbers dialed, time and duration of calls, etc.), records of which are maintained by service providers.
To give such third-party business records constitutional status…the judges [would have] to invent a newer, more expansive Fourth Amendment.
Simply put: content is protected, records are not.
[NOTE: Snowden has, of course, made a lot of other allegations about NSA than that they simply kept the phone log records. But so far he’s provided no proof of these claims. He has said, for example, that he was able to access anyone’s email content as long as he had a personal email address for him/her, which would certainly be a very clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. But is he telling the truth? Not according to experts, who say it’s impossible that he could have accomplished what he claims he did.
So the jury, as they say, is still out on that.
And please read this from Ace.]
[NOTE II: Part II of the post I wrote yesterday on distrust and security will be coming very soon, but not today.]
Literary changers: E. E. Cummings
Another changer heard from, this time poet E. E. Cummings (and yes, he capitalized his name, although not his poetry):
In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union. Like many other writers and artists of the time, he was hopeful that the communist revolution had created a better society. After a short time in the country, however, it became clear to Cummings that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship in which the individual was severely regimented by the state. His diary of the visit, in which he bitterly attacked the Soviet regime for its dehumanizing policies, was published in 1933 as Eimi, the Greek word for “I am.” In it, he described the Soviet Union as an “uncircus of noncreatures.” Lenin’s tomb, in which the late dictator’s preserved body is on display, especially revolted Cummings and inspired him to create the most impassioned writing in the book. “The style which Cummings began in poetry,” Bishop wrote, “reaches its most complete development in the prose of Eimi. Indeed, one might almost say that, without knowing it, Cummings had been acquiring a certain skill over the years, in order that, when occasion arose, he might set down in words the full horror of Lenin’s tomb.” In tracing the course of his thirty-five day trip through the Soviet Union, Cummings made frequent allusion to Dante’s Inferno and its story of a descent into Hell, equating the two journeys. It is only after crossing back into Europe at book’s end that “it is once more possible for [Cummings] to assume the full responsibility of being a man…,” Bishop wrote. “Now he knows there is but one freedom…, the freedom of the will, responsive and responsible, and that from it all other freedoms take their course.” Kidder called Eimi “a report of the grim inhumanities of the Soviet system, of repression, apathy, priggishness, kitsch, and enervating suspicion.” For some time after publication of Eimi, Kidder reported, Cummings had a difficult time getting his poetry published. The overwhelmingly left-wing publishers of the time refused to accept his work. Cummings had to resort to self-publishing several volumes of his work during the later 1930s.
I’ve heard stories like this before—especially the refusal to publish anyone who disagreed with the Party line. The same thing happened to Will Durant (see this), who wrote about his experience:
I had written”¦several articles about our trip [to the USSR]. My literary agent, the genial and enterprising George Bye, tried to dispose of these to Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly; both of these rejected them on the ground that they would alienate too many readers; for Russia, in our Depression years, seemed to millions of Americans the last best hope of men”¦The articles [I wrote] frankly called the Soviet system a dictatorship over the proletariat, and described without glamour or prejudice””but perhaps with insufficient knowledge and understanding””the achievements and failures of Communist Russia in economics, morals, manners, religion, and government. I was warned, by a well-informed editor at Simon and Schuster, that the printing of these discourses in book form would further alienate the literary fraternity, and especially the reviewers, who were sympathetic with Russia”¦
For whatever reason, Cummings and Durant had minds that were open to what they saw in the Soviet Union, and they were able to perceive it. Way too many others were either genuinely fooled by the Potemkin village they were presented, or pretended to be because they wanted the Communist dream to be true and could not or would not give it up.
And they wished to silence those who differed.
Distrust vs. security, domestic and foreign: Part I
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
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:
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…
… 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?
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
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
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”?
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…
…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…
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.]