“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
The original Shakespearean quote referred to misery, bad smells, and a monster; but has morphed into the more familiar “Politics makes strange bedfellows”; not such a stretch since politics is replete with misery, bad smells, and monsters.
As the administration learns the lesson that in politics, bad news is not restricted to coming in threes, the scandal du jour is the revelation that the NSA has been collecting massive amounts of electronic data on pretty much every human being in the US, and, to a great extent, the rest of the world. If you speak on a telephone, use e-mail, or surf the net, Big Brother at the NSA has data on you. This ought not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. We have watched with concern the construction of the top secret data collection facility in Utah, with room for the storage of 5 zetabytes of digital information. That is reported to be a capacity sufficient to store 500 years of the world’s communications; every phone call, every e-mail, every tweet, every transaction, photo, social media… everything.
Of course we have the obligatory denial from James Clapper saying that the government isn’t collecting any data at all. I’m sure that will be spun a la Eric Holder, a la Susan Rice, a la Hillary Clinton, a la Jay Carney, a la Barack Obama… to somehow insist that he wasn’t lying just because you didn’t understand what he was trying so hard not to say. It’s like confronting teenagers! Should we not be able to insist that our government officials answer questions transparently and without deception? They may be able to escape the legal definition of perjury, but we all know when we’re being lied to, and it stinks.
Devoted partisans will insist that this invasion of our privacy has been going on for years, even since the Bush administration. I’m sure it goes back in some degree even further than that, but the intrusion fits the template of so many policy decisions coming from this White House; take the errors of the Bush years which were arguably excusable based on the panic that inspired them, consider them carefully, and then double down on Bush’s mistakes, put them on steroids, and then excuse the transgression by pointing out that Bush did it too. Again, like dealing with teenagers! Yet some on the left have seen enough. Remember, many liberals were weaned in the days of Vietnam. Distrust of the establishment is in their blood; blood that was sometimes spilled by a government that would not tolerate dissent. If the lofty rhetoric of this President turns out to be disingenuous, and his reign a redux of Richard Nixon, he will see a grand exodus of supporters marching to the tune of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
Already we are seeing a strange realignment of “bedfellows”. Liberal lefties are harmonizing with Tea Party and Libertarian types in decrying the actions of the government in this massive screening of communications. At the same time, neo-con republicans join the chorus of progressive democrats in excusing the intrusion as necessary in the war on terror (I thought that was over?), and pointing to the fact that no actual content is viewed in the screening. Good people keep saying that they have nothing to hide, so if it helps keep us safe…
IMHO: I am reminded of Niemoller’s poem regarding the sloth of German intellectuals following the rise of the Nazis (sorry for the Nazi allusion): “They came for the communists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist” then the socialists, the trade unionists, the jews, the catholics, and then finally “me”, “… and there was no one left to speak for me”. There are things this nation was founded on that were considered to be sacred; safety was not one of them. To equate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with safety, security, or being taken care of, is a pathway to bondage. Everything needs to be balanced, but some things deserve more weight. “Sacred” is not too high a word to use for these natural rights, because they are endowed by The Creator. When “Life” is no longer sacred, something is lost. The same is true of “Liberty”. We would do well to remember the admonition of Benjamin Franklin:
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
It is naive to believe that this government, and all future governments can be trusted to use all that data for only noble purposes. Stipulating the improbable, that they avert their gaze from the actual content, even the meta-data can be used for other purposes and by other agencies… maybe the IRS? This may not be a battle we can win, but it is an important one to fight, to loudly voice our outrage. Tacit approval will embolden the tyrants. Nineteen eighty-four is running late, but it’s coming… it’s coming.
