TGIF:
It’s Not Edward Snowden Who Betrayed Us
by Sheldon Richman
June 14, 2013
When you cut through the fog, the NSA controversy is about whether we should trust people with institutional power. Edward Snowden’s courageous exposure of massive secret surveillance separates those who say yes from those who say, “Hell no!”
The trusting attitude can be found among progressives and conservatives alike (with notable exceptions). Matt Miller, an occasional guest host on the progressive network MSNBC, left no doubt where he stands when he flippantly wrote in the Washington Post,
- Do you empathize more with those who govern and who in this case
are charged with protecting us? Or has the history of abuse of power, and
the special danger from such abuses in an age when privacy seems to be
vanishing, leave you hailing any exposure of secret government methods as
grounds for sainthood?…
- Is there potential for abuse? Of course. An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.
- Is there potential for abuse? Of course. An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.
Miller’s progressive colleague Richard Cohen said much the same thing in much the same tone:
- The National Security Agency has been monitoring telephone calls and
e-mails and even social media stuff of the sort you shouldn’t have been
doing anyway. [!] To this, a whole lot of people have expressed shock.
Oaths to the Fourth Amendment have filled the air. Unreasonable searches
are simply unconstitutional, they assert without asserting that
anything has in fact been searched or seized. It has merely been noted
and, if suspicious, referred to a court for the appropriate warrant.
- The programs certainly can be abused. (So can local police powers.) But oddly enough, proof that this has not happened comes from the self-proclaimed martyr for our civil liberties, Edward Snowden.…
- The programs certainly can be abused. (So can local police powers.) But oddly enough, proof that this has not happened comes from the self-proclaimed martyr for our civil liberties, Edward Snowden.…
- In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less
mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual
grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of
the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur
misgovernment at a distance; and sniff the approach of tyranny in every
tainted breeze.
Both Miller and Cohen, along with others others, try to diminish the disclosures by asserting that the government is only doing what Google does every day. The difference between, on the one hand, surveillance by a coercive monopoly with the legal authority to use aggressive force and, on the other, commercial offerings from one of several competing service providers seems to elude them.
The editorial board of the Post agrees with its columnists:
- Just as it is important not to exaggerate the national security risks
of transparency, it is also important not to give into the
anti-government paranoia [!] of grandstanding politicians such as Sen.
Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who on Sunday invoked the tyranny of King George III
to criticize programs that are the result of a checked, deliberative
process across three branches of government. Part of what makes this
different is that if enough Americans expect more privacy after the
debate Mr. Snowden incited, their representatives in Washington can act
on their behalf.
For every ridiculous thing said by someone on the so-called Left, you can find an equivalent on the Right. Mark Thiessen, once a speech writer for President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, devoted his Washington Post column to assuring those of us who distrust power that “Big Brother is not watching you.” About the mass collection of telephone logs, Thiessen says we have no grounds for concern:
- In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that there’s no
reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus no Fourth Amendment
protection, for the phone numbers people dial (as distinct from the
content of the call), because the number dialed is information you
voluntarily share with the phone company to complete the call and for
billing purposes.
“The leaks do not describe the many ‘inward-facing’ restrictions directed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to the government that describe the conditions and limitations on when and how the data can be accessed and how they can [be] used,” Thiessen writes.
In other words, trust them. The components of government will limit each other. What’s that you say? The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied before the Senate Intelligence Committee and the American people when asked if the government was collecting information on millions of Americans? He had to lie. It was for our own good. (The head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, lied too.)
As is said in the law, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
David Brooks, the New York Times resident conservative, portrays Snowden as an alienated character, like Holden Caulfield, who “has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years,” who was an inadequate neighbor, and who has his priorities screwed up:
- But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is
the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the
fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so
individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of
how to knit others together and look after the common good.
- For society to function well [Brooks continued], there have to be
basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and
deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret
N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.
What these pundits won’t understand is that distrust of power, which lies at the very heart of the centuries-old liberal tradition, is responsible for so much of what is good about civilization. It is when people not only distrusted power but also grasped that they were justified in doing so that liberation began its slow progress, and zones of personal freedom began to be carved out.
Lord Acton’s dictum “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is only liberalism’s the most famous statement of distrust. Before Acton, David Hume, one of the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, noted,
- Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving
any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of
the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no
other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we
must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his
insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good. Without this,
say they, we shall in vain boast of the advantages of any constitution,
and shall find, in the end, that we have no security for our liberties or
possessions, except the good-will of our rulers; that is, we shall have
no security at all.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-its-not-edward-snowden-who-betrayed-us/ --
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