a recent op-ed<\/a>, I decried the current lurch to surveillance of all Americans\u2019 communications, all the time\u2014even more for what it portends than for what it already does. When universal government monitoring of once-private communications is redefined as \u201cthe new normal,\u201d pressure will build to apply the capabilities now flying under the flag of counterterrorism to new forms of wrongdoing\u2014failure to report taxable income, for example, or child abuse, or dangerous driving. In putting forward this idea, I feared undermining my own case as unfounded speculation. But the same day my piece appeared, the Wall Street Journal<\/i> ran an essay by Holman Jenkins, Jr., a member of its editorial board, urging steps in this very direction. \u201cA basic problem is that terrorism is rare,\u201d Jenkins observed; \u201cCrime isn\u2019t.\u201d \u201cMaybe the best outcome\u2026would be to take metadata surveillance away from the spooks and apply it more broadly and openly to regular law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n*****************<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know what disturbs me more\u2014the tectonic shift toward increasingly comprehensive state surveillance or the official response to its public exposure. Any terrorist organization or foreign intelligence establishment must long have been aware that practices like those now revealed were at least highly likely in the United States. They come as a surprise only to the broad American public. We live in a country so big, and so profligate, that it supports a semi-secret agency like the NSA with an estimated annual budget in excess of $10 billion. That figure exceeds the gross national product of more than one hundred countries<\/i>. Yet the agency (just one among many secretive institutions comprising the military-intelligence complex) is so well insulated from public scrutiny that it shows every sign of stonewalling through the current controversies.<\/p>\n
This country\u2019s political elites, across the three branches of government, have coalesced to defuse and obfuscate the revelations\u2014desperately fashioning one disintegrating fig leaf after another to conceal a reality that is increasingly apparent. In one of the least inspiring statements of his presidency, Obama characterized the newly-disclosed NSA activities as \u201cmodest encroachments on privacy,\u201d insisting that \u201cnobody is listening to your telephone calls.\u201d He went on to characterize the revelations as an opportunity for a \u201cnational conversation\u201d on privacy and security. This from a president whose administration has done everything in its power suppress the information that might fuel such a conversation.<\/p>\n
The quality of the deception and double-talk deteriorate as you go down the food chain of officialdom. Last March, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. testified to the Senate Intelligence that the NSA did not collect records on \u201chundreds of millions of Americans.\u201d Since the June revelations, he has insisted that that testimony was the \u201cleast untruthful\u201d that he could provide \u201cabout a classified program.\u201d A postmodernist at heart, that man. When truthfulness and protection of classified programs are juxtaposed, you know which will prevail.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile the upper crust of the legislative branch keep tripping over their lines, in efforts to defend the unraveling deception of those who\u2019ve elected them. \u201cThere is no content involved\u201d in the NSA surveillance, insisted at first Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, \u201cno content of a communication.\u201d A few days later she acknowledged that NSA analysts can indeed access the \u201ccontent of a call.\u201d But the surveillance represents an effective and necessary tool against terrorists, she gamely maintains. Trouble is, the evidence for this can\u2019t be presented because of\u2014you guessed it\u2014national security. \u201cThe instances where this has produced good\u2014has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks\u2026is [sic] all classified,\u201d avers Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. And anyway, the activities were legitimate, the congressional leadership insists, because all elected representatives were \u201cbriefed.\u201d \u201c\u2018Fully briefed,\u2019\u201d retorted Senator Barbara Mikulski, \u201cdoesn\u2019t mean we know what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
As always when those at the top find themselves caught in blatant contradiction between official public values and their own designs, the English language is the first casualty. After the scandal broke, NSA Director Keith Alexander went before the Senate to insist, \u201cWe have great people working under extremely difficult conditions\u2026to protect our civil liberties and privacy.\u201d Such flat-earth declarations make more sense, when you realize that they come from the same world that has abolished \u201ctorture\u201d in favor of \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n
These vaulting peaks of hypocrisy are simply the visible tips of troubling deep structures in U.S. governance. Vast realms of state institutions and activity have been cordoned off from legal inquiry, and hence public scrutiny, by being bracketed as vital to national security. Court challenges to government surveillance of telecommunications data arising in the wake of the 2005 disclosures have met with a peremptory, and thus-far effective, defense from government lawyers: evidence required to try the cases would purportedly breach national security. This has effectively stalled legal challenges in their tracks.<\/p>\n
*****************<\/p>\n
Now, privacy isn\u2019t everything. Every privacy-watcher I know can readily identify settings where privacy claims have to yield to others\u2019 needs to know. Where there is specific evidence of someone\u2019s highly communicable disease, imminent murderous intent, or life-threatening negligence, mechanisms are required to override the sanctity of the home, or the privacy of communications. But these crucial overrides have to be justified in terms of specific dangers attributable to specific people in specific situations. What we are seeing now, by contrast, is a drift into a world where diffuse and collective dangers are taken as pretexts for tracking everyone, all the time.<\/p>\n
So indeed, a national conversation is needed on how personal data should, and should not serve, in combating foreign dangers. We need to ask what we\u2019re prepared to do, and where we\u2019re prepared to draw the line. Unfortunately, as the events of the last two weeks have shown, the information to support this kind of conversation is exactly what this country\u2019s political class is determined to conceal. Without it, the \u201cconversation\u201d won\u2019t be anything more than a monologue.<\/p>\n
_________________________<\/p>\n
James B. Rule<\/i> is a sociologist at U.C. Berkeley\u2019s Center for the Study of Law and Society. He has been contributing to <\/i>Dissent for thirty years. His most recent book is <\/i>Privacy in Peril: How We Are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience (Oxford University Press).<\/i><\/p>\n
Go to Original \u2013 dissentmagazine.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No serious privacy-watcher was surprised, I suspect, at Edward Snowden\u2019s National Security Agency revelations. Major New York Times stories at the end of 2005 had already implied that Washington was monitoring virtually all Americans\u2019 telecommunications traffic\u2014both phone calls and e-mails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31234","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=31234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}