Defenders of
National Security Agency (NSA) wholesale spying on Americans have asserted that it was and is legal, thanks to the
Patriot Act.
But it turns out
that all too often the NSA has broken the law—2,776
times over a one-year period, according to an internal audit leaked by the former NSA contractor and American hero Edward Snowden. That’s an average of more than 7.6 times per
day that the NSA violated privacy rules protecting the communications of those
residing in the United States. The New York Times reports that most of the violations resulted from operator
and system errors like “inadequate or insufficient research” when selecting
wiretap targets. For example, almost
70% of the violations occurred when a foreigner whose cellphone was wiretapped
without a warrant came to the United States, where a warrant was required.
There is no way to prettify
this pig: On its face, 2,776 instances of breaking the law in one year seems to
prove that there has been a complete breakdown in agency discipline and that
abuse of the Patriot Act is rampant.
The fact that it
looks as if most of the violations involved taking a shortcut doesn’t absolve the
NSA or the Obama administration. Here are some examples of other shortcuts: not
asking for a warrant to wiretap an American citizen; doing complete sweeps of
the metadata of millions of Americans; military trials to avoid civilian due
process; and, of course, the shortest of all short cuts—torture. We’re not
talking about a slippery slope here. What’s at issue is a mindset that is
willing to break the rules and in the process trample on the rights of millions
and to turn our society into a friendly police state.
It’s lose-lose for
the NSA. Saying that the number of errors was miniscule compared to the number
of wiretaps they are performing would indicate that the NSA is in fact spying
on a disturbingly enormous number of people. So either the NSA makes a ton of
mistakes or it’s doing massive spying.
That’s about as lose-lose as you can get!
Barack Obama assumed
the office of the President of the United States on extremely high moral
ground, which mainly reflected American and world disgust with the bumbling
butchery of Bush II that birthed two useless but destructive and expensive
wars, a torture gulag around the world and shocking new levels of spying on
American citizens. Barry even won a
Nobel Peace Prize essentially for not being George Bush.
After the continued
use of drones and continued revelations of spying abuses, Obama has lost all
that high ground. You can’t stake a claim to a higher morality merely because
you never ordered torture (especially if you have essentially suborned torture
by not prosecuting the creators of the illegal torture machine). That’s akin to
saying that you’re a better person because you only sell crystal meth to those
over the age of 18. Of course, if we apply this analogy to Obama’s NSA, it may
mean that you still “forget” to ask for ID most of the time!
Unfortunately the
answer is not to vote for Republicans in the 2014 mid-term elections, since the
Republican Party as a whole buys into the authoritarian state much more than
the Democrats do. Before we can stem the
slow drift towards a police state, we have to turn the Democratic Party back
towards a reasoned approach to fighting terrorists, one that depends on legal
police and intelligence techniques known to work. It would also help if we had
a foreign policy that did not overtly exploit and offend the people who
represent the terrorists’ constituency.
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