Who do you trust?
Trust is a fundamental fallacy in politics and government, or in any realm where power is concentrated. This adage is so true that P.J. O’Rourke summarized the American political experience in a book he titled Don't Vote – It Just Encourages the Bastards. Yet trusting politicians aligned with one’s basic beliefs causes such encouragement every election cycle, which in recent history has elected philanderers, dufuses and con men as president. Placing trust in any politician or party (aside from the Libertarians, who seek power in order to dismantle it) invites abuse of power in the present.
The big problem though is not the present, but the future.
Indisputable is the fact that Nazis used German gun registration to disarm their victims. What is less well known is that the gun registration program was not Hitler’s invention but that of the preceding Weimar government. What is enacted by one regime may initially cause no material harm or might even create some social good. Yet the same laws benignly applied by one administration can become a tool of Orwellian abuse under another.
Hence, the unfolding saga of Edward Snowden’s strategic leak of PRISM.
Snowden is a youngster being hounded by authorities for publicizing government secrets, which makes Snowden either a hero or traitor depending on your personal trust focus. PRISM and predecessor government surveillance systems are all children of America’s War on Terror and the rape child of 9/11. Aside from fringe civil libertarians, nobody denies the need for surveillance of enemies foreign and domestic. Where folks disagree is who can be monitored and how. Old fashioned police work that begins with probable cause on a specific suspect is positively wholesome. Digital panopticons that bring Big Brother monstrously to life are obvious violations of basic privacy even under alleged checks and balances. The line lay somewhere between these extremes. Tripping over the line does not require actual abuse of an individual – it must merely violate trust and the prerogative to privacy.
In serial disclosures over seven days we have learned that Uncle Sam acquires and analyzes every cell phone call, text message and Internet activity of all Americans. The line has been crossed.
The NSA – which stands for the National Security Agency, but for a long time was known within the beltway as No Such Agency – is an enormous technology consumer. Their data centers make Google’s look minuscule. In the 1990s they bought enough super computers and Field Programmable Gate Arrays to listen for keywords in telephone conversations around the world using the ECHELON system. In short, they snort all available data from whatever source they can, enabling alerts and deep digging by “authorized” agents.
You can trust those agents because their employers (politicians) said so.
Trust is weakest where there are serial violations. A wife might learn to again trust a husband who cheated once, but would be a fool to forgive Bill Clinton. Likewise, one would be a fool to trust the head of the Justice Department, Eric Holder. Under his leadership, Holder has willfully smuggled guns to violent Mexican drug cartels, obfuscated congressional testimony to the point where Congress has taken him to court, and oversaw the FBI sacking your cellphone records. Called Obama’s “sin eater”, Holder (who once infamously suggested that American’s needed to be “brainwashed” about gun control) is at the nexus of every Obama overreach, which may be why Obama – in a Nixonian maneuver – has tried to shield Holder via executive privilege claims.
This is where PRISM becomes a bigger problem than the mere violation of everyone’s privacy.
The NSA triggers investigations at the request of the president’s security departments (much as Obama may have done via IRS investigations of Tea Party non-profits). These queries then tap FBI computers where much of the PRISM data is gathered. Some allege this is a necessary check against random and unwarranted searches since the FBI has the legal authority for accessing domestic information. The NSA has the horsepower to analyze mass data, and the FBI has the authority to collect it.
The FBI is a division of the sin eater’s Department of Justice.
Who do you trust? Snowden trusted Obama until doing so was like Hilary trusting Bill. “I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor.” Therein is the danger of trusting power and politicians, neither of which is inherently safe. Political winds cause voter brushfires, and we see one now ready to burn out of control thanks to Snowden.
(Amusingly, such disclosures also instigate political limbo dancing. California Senator Dianne Feinstein once berated the Bush administration’s use of anti-terror surveillance saying “Just one year after receiving unchecked authority in a little known section added to the PATRIOT Act last spring – the Administration has significantly abused its discretion.” Yet when Obama has caused every digital part of American human existence to be usurped, she says “This is called protecting America.”)
“I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents,” was Snowden’s note to a reporter as they discussed his motivations for shining a light into PRISIM. “Such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it.”
Despite exposing state secrets, Snowden may be a man worth trusting.
