There is something fishy about the recent disclosures of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) “metadata” monitoring of telephone calls, Internet traffic, and credit card transactions of innocent U.S. citizens. Start with the press. The Guardian, a London newspaper that bills itself as “the world’s leading liberal voice,” first disclosed that Verizon had turned over, pursuant to an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, millions of phone records to the NSA. The source of its gift-wrapped scoop was Edward Snowden, an apparently idealistic 29-year-old American, formerly a technical assistant for the CIA and currently employed by defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The Guardian and the Washington Post then broke the story of Prism, an NSA program that accesses the servers of nine leading U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs) and gathers data on audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs. Within a day, The New York Times had published an editorial damning the surveillance, stating that, “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.”
It is curious that Snowden would give his information and documents to The Guardian. Why not a U.S. newspaper, and why wasn’t Snowden worried that “the world’s leading liberal voice” might squelch a story that reflects so badly on President Obama? It is also curious that the Washington Post would be so quick to publish the ISP part of the story, and that the New York Times would be so quick to condemn the administration. Since Bill Clinton’s ascendency, those two leading papers have been lapdogs rather than watchdogs concerning possible moral and legal transgressions by Democrats. A compilation of their investigative scoops and editorial condemnations of such matters would be a thin book indeed. It generally runs the other way; they often serve as Democratic mouthpieces and spinmeisters.
Now take a look at various reactions. Nobody denied the surveillance programs’ existence. Instead, typified by a Wall Street Journal editorial and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s public statements, they were justified on the usual grounds of preventing terrorism and other misdeeds, with condemnations of the disclosers for compromising these useful programs. Surely the bad guys never suspected that their telephone and computers might be monitored, and will now resort to smoke signals and messenger pigeons to communicate, thwarting the good guys. Why the surveillance required information about billions of communications by innocent parties has not been answered, except for mumbles about “data-mining,” “pattern recognition,” and “if we told you more, we’d have to kill you.” Vacuous arguments were advanced about all three branches of the government signing off on the program, as if that were somehow a comfort. The ISPs issued masterfully legalistic denials that instilled no confidence they had not cooperated and would not continue to cooperate with the government. President Obama said that nobody’s phone conversations had been listened to or e-mails opened, but after the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s surveillance of AP reporters and Fox News reporter James Rosen, not everybody was convinced. All in all, efforts to deny, defend, denigrate, and defuse have fallen well short of standard Washington damage control.
Why? Consider the seemingly far fetched idea that the government wanted the NSA programs disclosed in this way. There will be further revelations, controversy, expressions of outrage from opinion makers, politicians, and ordinary citizens, investigations, and perhaps new regulations and legislation. Leakers may wind up in jail, but probably not anyone in the government. Ostensibly, it may become harder for the NSA to do what it has done. But what if all that is beside the point?
When memories of the particulars of this affair have faded, one well founded fear will remain indelibly in the collective consciousness: that the government can find out everything you say on your phone, everywhere you go from your electronic gadgets, every website you visit, every word you post on social media, and everything you buy with credit cards. Those who frequently express their love for the government and have led exemplary, flawless lives may have no reason to cower, but for the other 99.9999999 percent, that fear is profoundly disturbing and will undoubtedly affect behavior.
Libertarians cheered social media’s role in undermining authoritarian regimes during the Arab spring. The NSA revelations have made it clear that the technologies celebrated as tools of liberation can rather easily become tools of oppression. But what good is Big Brother if nobody knows he’s watching? Are you more or less likely to criticize a politician over the phone, lambast the IRS on Facebook, criticize Wall Street-Washington crony capitalism in a blog post, or attend a rally protesting our foreign policy if you suspect government surveillance? For the government, the details of individual lives revealed by their telephone calls, Internet usage, and movements will be, for the most part, unimportant. What is important is engendering a widespread fear that it can obtain such information and use it to harass, embarrass, blackmail, intimidate, arrest, or otherwise persecute anyone who says or does something the government does not like.
With this masterstroke the government will cow much of the population. We know whose interests are served―aspiring totalitarians. The government’s economic policy amounts to issuing debt to the central bank while piling additional tax, regulatory, and medical insurance obligations on business. A policy so fundamentally flawed must eventually fail, leading to social chaos. The government’s war on terrorism has been a foil for the further erosion of our civil liberties. We may be one financial market crash, series of bank runs, curtailment of welfare state benefits, or large scale “terrorist” attack from the imposition of “temporary” emergency measures―martial law, suspension of the Bill of Rights and free elections, confiscation of firearms, and mass detention and arrests. How convenient for our masters if the main modes of communication for the potential opposition are known to be under the government’s control. It could stop an “American spring” in its tracks.
If the NSA revelations are part of a blueprint for the imposition of a police state, then those responsible for those revelations are nothing more than useful idiots and denunciations nothing more than useful camouflage. This may all sound like paranoia, but after recent disclosures, a little paranoia is in order. Print this essay, file it away somewhere safe, and reread it in two or three years. Hopefully you’ll be able to crumple it up and throw it the trashcan―the demented ravings of a paranoid lunatic. Print it, because if that is not the case, Straight Line Logic and many other worthwhile websites and blogs will no longer be available on the Internet.