First off, let me assure you that the Obama administration isn’t interested in your phone calls. You’re interested in your phone calls. Your mother is interested in your calls — especially if she’s not getting enough of them. If you’re lucky, the people on the other end of your calls are interested, though that can’t be demonstrated for sure.
But the National Security Agency isn’t.
To hear self-described civil libertarians tell it, the news that the Obama administration sought and received access to the entirety of the Verizon phone network on April 25 is an unspeakable intrusion on our personal freedoms.
But get this straight. Verizon has 120 million customers. One-hundred. Twenty. Million. Whatever it is the NSA is searching for, it isn’t your use of a phone-sex line. Or your jokes about Barack Obama. Or your gambling problem.
Or anything — anything — about you, dear reader.
The thing is, no matter how important you are to yourself, you’re exactly that unimportant to the computers at the National Security Agency.
No one’s listening. Big Brother isn’t watching. You are not the droids they’re looking for.
NSA computers are using automated programs to mill through billions of calls and texts and whatever else in search of specific patterns. What patterns? What is the NSA looking for?
We don’t know. Perhaps the warrant, which was sought in the last week of April, was executed in relation to the Boston Marathon bombing. Perhaps the administration knows of a specific terrorist threat it is trying to counteract and about which it is not speaking because it does not want to throw the nation into a complete state of panic.
According to the report in The Guardian by radical leftist Glenn Greenwald, who has been a stalwart opponent of the war on terror from its very outset in all its forms, the warrant runs for three months ending July 19. It was authorized by Roger Vinson, a judge whose most newsworthy previous act from the bench was a ruling in which he found ObamaCare unconstitutional.
In other words, the court order was approved by a federal judge notably unfriendly to the administration.
This is an indication that, for those who deal with these matters intimately, as Vinson does, the order was not controversial but entirely within the legal framework of policies approved by Congress and affirmed by the courts.
Indeed, earlier this year the Supreme Court specifically ruled against the argument that such mass electronic metadata-gathering represented a specific constitutional threat. to any individual plaintiff in the case it heard because “it is highly speculative whether the government will imminently target communications to which respondents are parties.”
In other words, the very fact that the surveillance is so unbelievably broad as to encompass nearly a third of the US population is actually a protection against the abuse of the information that might be gathered. There’s just far, far too much of it.
Greenwald is a man of principle — though I believe his ideas are very dangerous — and has been critical of the Obama administration’s wholesale adoption of terror-war techniques created by the Bush administration, against which he raged as well.
He and others like him have proper intellectual and moral standing to rage.
Others interested in demonstrating intellectual consistency need to be careful. Since Obama is, in fact, doing things very similar to what Bush did, those who supported Bush’s actions will be engaged in partisan hypocrisy if they attack the Obama administration for trampling on civil liberties.
And those who attacked Bush better not defend Obama if they want to retain a shred of credibility. That includes the president himself, who, as senator heatedly opposed a provision giving telecom companies immunity because they’d cooperated with the Bush administration’s wiretapping program.
“Ever since 9/11, this administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand,” Obama said in 2008.
“No one should get a free pass to violate the basic civil liberties of the American people — not the president of the United States, and not the telecommunications companies.”
He changed his tune. So sue him.