Who's Paranoid Now?

Our Surveillance State is in the news again, and in a big way. Over the past few days, my Google Alerts have been spitting so many articles and op-eds into my inbox that I'm finding it hard to keep up. Secrecy, spying, and civil liberties violations are the order of the day, all of it perpetrated by a government on steroids.

I won't even try to cover everything here. More and more developments are coming to light even as I write, including the identity of the whistleblower. I will, however, link to Glenn Greenwald's terrific (as usual) piece at the Guardian that got the ball rolling.

I was already worked up about the Supreme Court's June 3 decision in Maryland v. King allowing law enforcement to collect the DNA of people that have been arrested--arrested, not convicted--and check that DNA against a database to see if any other crimes turn up. Never mind that this kind of fishing expedition is strictly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, and good luck getting your record expunged if you happen to be acquitted. Databases are the wet dream of the police state. And clearly "innocent until proven guilty" is a quaint relic of the halcyon pre-9/11 days.

Two days later, Greenwald broke the story about the National Security Agency indiscriminately sweeping up the phone records of millions of Americans in massive suspicionless searches. This revelation was quickly followed by others describing PRISM and BLARNEY, programs used by the government to mine our Internet usage data.

First I want to say that anyone who has been paying attention is not even halfway surprised. (That's not a shopping mall they're building in Bluffdale, Utah.) And I mean paying attention to independent truth-tellers like Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, and Cenk Uygur, not the shallow propaganda of CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the rest of the corporate rah-rah media. Unfortunately, nearly every time I've tried to make the case about our out-of-control National Security State, I've gotten the unmistakable uneasy looks we give the guy on the street corner ranting about conspiracies and black helicopters.

Now I wonder if I'll still get those looks. If nothing else, I guess I'm glad this information is finally filtering out to the mainstream shills of conventional wisdom. Of course, Republican opposition to this kind of surveillance isn't motivated by a principled stand against federal power, just a knee-jerk dislike of President Obama. But I'll take it. Obama is far more likely to respond to their criticisms than those of progressives.

Meanwhile, the president's reaction to the backlash has been characteristically dismissive and condescending. In answering questions from the press, he feigned shock at the notion that American citizens might object to being tracked. "Come on, guys," he seemed to be saying. "We're just protecting you. If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Besides, we're only collecting metadata."

This last argument proves how disingenuous Obama is. The metadata he's referring to is, in fact, a rich source of information about you and should enjoy rigorous Fourth Amendment protection, no less than the content of your phone calls and e-mails. Think of it like this: if an e-mail message were a snail-mail letter, metadata would be the envelope it came in. That envelope may seem insignificant, but it actually tells us a lot: who wrote the letter, who received it, where they both live, when the letter was sent, if it was forwarded, returned to sender, etc. Aggregating this metadata--looking at not just one envelope but, say, three months' worth of them--creates a fairly detailed picture of your life. And don't believe for one minute that the NSA will stop at metadata. If there's anything we've learned, it's that whatever technology is capable of doing, the powers-that-be will want to do.

If they don't, the terrorists will win. (Cue the fear-mongering.)

I'm skeptical that the NSA brouhaha will result in any positive policy changes. Even if it did, those changes wouldn't survive the next terrorist attack. This country is incapable of responding to any attack, terrorist or otherwise, in a remotely rational way. But I'm certainly grateful to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden who believe Americans have a right to know what their so-called "public servants" are doing.