Welch
was the lawyer who was questioning the rabidly anti-communist Senator Joseph
McCarthy during McCarthy’s 1954 hearings to investigate communist infiltration
of the Army. McCarthy told one bold-faced lie too many, accusing a perfectly
innocent man, and Welch suddenly exclaimed in shock, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of
decency?”
It
was at that moment that America’s elected leaders and other influentials
realized that the post-war witch hunt for communists and fellow travelers in
American government and society had gone too far. It was at that moment when the American
people realized that we had let them take it too far.
Have
we seen a “Joseph Welch” moment with the revelation that the Obama
Administration has collected the metadata of phone numbers of every Verizon customer?
I think everyone assumes that if the federal government has the data from
Verizon, then it has it from every other telephone company. The most shocking
part of the revelation of mass snooping is that everyone agrees that it’s
absolutely legal, thanks to the Patriot Act, which Congress keeps renewing.
Will
we as a nation now put more pressure on Congress to rescind the Patriot Act or
rethink many of its provisions? Will right-wing Republicans finally recognize
the inherent contradiction in their national security positions, that they call
for less government interference in our personal lives and then support these
assaults on personal liberty? Will
Democrats no longer cravenly cave into every demand for greater spying,
warrantless searches, drone killings and invasions built on fantasy premises?
Let’s
hope so, because collecting and analyzing the metadata of all of our phone calls
is a monstrous invasion of privacy. Collection of metadata is ripe for abuse by
both the federal government and individuals.
Obama’s
excuse is that computers are sifting through the information, not humans, and
that no one is listening to the contents of the phone calls. Note the clever rhetorical misdirection that
the President employs. He wants us to focus on what they’re not doing (or say
they’re not doing), so we’ll forget what they are doing. But there is so much information that we can
gain from knowing whom you called, who called you and where and when all the
parties were at the time of the call.
What if some future Joe McCarthy with access to the files wants to
investigate Nation or Jewish Currents? What if the president
wants to gather evidence about every major donor to the campaign of a potential
rival? Couldn’t this metadata be used to
help plan the assassination of a foreign leader?
This
gross invasion of privacy—this pilfering of civil and human rights—predates the
Obama Administration. Obama apologists say at least it’s not torture and at
least he didn’t start a war (at least not yet: Syria awaits.) It’s the same
type of misdirection.
Let’s
not focus on what the Obama Administration isn’t doing. Let’s focus on what it
is doing, and although it may be legal, it is not right and it offends the
sensibilities of many, if not most Americans.
It’s
time for a total repeal of the Patriot Act.
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