When Information is Power

The news that the Bush government may be monitoring phone conversations of certain journalists is quickly followed by the Bush Attorney General stating that journalists may be prosecuted for leaking classified information, such as recent (and Pulitizer Prize-winning) stories did by exposing the existence of secret prisons and NSA spying on Americans. As legal pundit Jonathan Turley said to Keith Olbermann, the Attorney General doing the threatening may well have been part of a criminal enterprise that one of these leaks revealed.

This intimidation of an already docile press threatens all of us, unless we're ready to give up our role of an informed electorate in a democracy, let alone bring lawbreakers to justice. Maybe a dictator, his secret police and the rich oligarchy that loots the treasury and manipulates policy is all we want now.

How else does the increasingly Stalin-like Bush government (Stalin lite perhaps, or Stalin with a dopey face) threaten us with these survelliance programs?

In the New Yorker, Sy Hersh explained how telephone survelliance has been conducted since shortly after 9-11:

A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.”

All that data--who is calling a suspect number or even a place, and who is calling the original caller, etc.--generates so much "information" that there's not enough time or people to follow up on all of it. So some winnowing needs to occur. Hersh writes:

Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. “In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in,” the consultant explained. “But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they’re doing is a violation of the spirit of the law.”

Laws are enacted to prevent abuses, because things don't always work the way they are intended to, and either through stupidity or cupidity, ordinary people get hurt. Doing key word searches of telephone calls and emails has vast potential for abuse--and we know enough about knuckleheaded and bureaucratic law enforcement and investigative agencies at all levels to know that abuse occurs regularly. It can also easily be used for partisan political and commercial exploitation--and we sure know that any tool that provides personal information is going to be eagerly adapted.

So what does it all mean to you? The San Francisco Chronicle has a feature called "Two Cents," a kind of organized man-on-the-street interview format, in which citizens respond to the question of the day. On Sunday, the question was "Ever say anything on the phone you don't want the NSA to hear?" One response was the most succinct explanation for why (apart from Constitutional principle) this survelliance should bother ordinary people who naturally believe they aren't saying anything suspicious, and they certainly aren't talking to terrorists. Jo-Anna Pippen wrote:

I'm sure in the last four years I've said: 'Michael Moore, shotgun, Internet, ACLU, Berkeley, indicted, Hillary, drugs, cell, data, gay marriage, SpongeBob, peace, France, oligarchy, bomb, cell, Cheney, contraception, AT&T, Democrat, 29 percent, White House, turd blossom, tequila, Jeb, firewall, NBC and New York Times.' I'm probably on a watch list already."

As for how being on a watch list can affect you, don't forget the "no-fly" lists that keep people from traveling by air, though nobody seems to know who makes these lists, what the criteria for inclusion is, and how they can be corrected. Beyond that, all this information can be stolen (just today, news that computerized personal data on more than 26 million military veterans was stolen) or sold, which could mean it can prevent you from getting jobs, medical insurance, credit, and who knows what else, depending on who gets the information and how they interpret what's in it.

This is how it happens: with the excuse of national security, of battling a hated enemy, certain things must be done. And if you're doing nothing wrong, naturally you won't object--will you? Because to object implies that you are doing something wrong. So if it doesn't seem to affect you, why make a big deal of it? You just hope there are a lot of doors to knock on before they get to yours.

But as the power of the people erodes, you find that you are unable to object effectively to anything, because the law is no longer on your side and the press barely exists except as celebrity gossip wrapping around advertisements. As slowly but surely, your freedoms disappear, you find that your life and those of people you know--your children for instance--are being controlled more tightly. You become the servant to those you once elected as public servants. But the public now serves them. As do you.

It's like gas prices. They raise them and then lower them, but never to the level they were before. So you get used to $2 a gallon, just as we'll soon get used to $3 a gallon (in fact, up here where gas is currently about $3.50, we considered a price in Oregon of $3.07 a bargain.) Our freedom is already restricted beyond what is necessary to serve the interests of the whole society. We all know we serve the interests of the rich and powerful, but we are more or less content with the freedom left to us. The choice of menu at McDonalds. The array of cheap products at Wal-Mart. And so on. So we're already used to humiliation at the airline gates, which no one would have tolerated before 2001, even though taking off our shoes is unlikely to have any real effect on stopping terrorist attacks.

And since we're not terrorists, we don't worry about torture or indefinite detention without charges in secret prisons, or in Iraq, or at Guantanamo. And since we're not criminals, we don't worry about the fact that one out of every 136 residents of America is in prison, and that more than 60% of them haven't been convicted of anything--most are awaiting trial or charges.

So we adjust to each loss of freedom, each sense of self-worth and power, each sense of a citizenry with the duty to question authority. And when we give up privacy and a free press, we're giving up our ability to limit unwarranted intrusions and injustices that may become up-close and personal without warning, without reason, and increasingly, without remedy.