The NSA Scandal - Presidential Crime and The Shriveling of Freedom

The early ACLU reaction is to consider the Bush NSA unleashing as potentially illegal and deserving formal criminal investigation. This is, I believe, an appropriate response. This is MASSIVELY illegal, and I fear little will happen. (The previous sentence was written immediately before the following happened:)

UPDATE: NYT: Specter will hold Judicial Committee hearings.

"And McClellan said Bush ''is going to remain fully committed to upholding our Constitution and protect the civil liberties of the American people. And he has done both.'" The Press Secretary was then strangled internally by his own outraged colon. (OK, I Made that last bit up).

UPDATE #2: HUGE DEFEAT FOR PATRIOT ACT

From today's ACLU press release :

"Eavesdropping on conversations of U.S citizens and others in the United States without a court order and without complying with the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is both illegal and unconstitutional. The administration is claiming extraordinary
presidential powers at the expense of civil liberties and is putting the
president above the law. Congress must investigate this report
thoroughly. We also call upon Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to
appoint a special prosecutor to independently investigate whether crimes
have been committed.

"The Patriot Act already provides law enforcement a wide array of
surveillance powers and it vastly expands the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. These disclosures show that the kinds of safeguards
many members of Congress are trying to build into the Patriot Act are
urgently needed."

I have assumed for years that the NSA was doing something like this; I "forget" who mentioned it, but there was a discussion where a retired NSA guy was quoted who said sure we do this, but there's a six-month backlog for translation.

(Trip...whirrrrrrrr....Trip....whirrrr...)

It's easy to shrug this off as inevitable in an information age where the government already struggles with too much information. (One of the big issues is that feds have been buying up all the massive private databases worldwide they can - only American citizens have had some legal protection against this ).

But the implications are absolutely staggering; all that's protecting our privacy and independence at this point are old government habits of protecting privacy, not the technology, not the will of the information collectors, and now, if this blows over, not the law.

It's too easy to see this as the inevitable result of technology. Yet the essential threats to basic freedoms by the collection of information have been the same since long before William the Conquerer's Domesday book (recall that he killed something like 10% of the population he was counting.) Centralized secret information is almost inevitably used to centralize political power and supress dissent - from William to the KGB to the COINTELPRO anti-dissent operations of the FBI under Nixon in 1960s and 1970s. I can all but guarantee that unrestrained NSA monitoring - especially if automatic - of Americans' email, cellphones (quickly becoming the dominant phone system) will be used against lawful political dissent. The temptation will be too great. It was the huge COINTELPRO abuses that created a lot of the current law that the NSA is almost certainly breaking.

Of course, this may blow over: automatic computer monitoring is now normal, and becoming expected. But this is the tremendous cultural blow. This is where substantive American freedom (not the Bush magic incantation version of the word, as the Laird puts it) our ability to choose the course and direction of our own lives, is really dying. It's shriveling up in credit reports, in key words, in knowing you're being watched and recorded in what may soon be a majority of the things you do, and if it is by machines rather than men, so much the worse, for with things there is no appeal to reason. Like a cop told me once - pay your ticket, the computer never, ever forgets.

I may see something of this in my students, who by and large seem quiet and resigned and acquiescent, at least compared to what I think American college students should be. Relentless information gathering is a part, absolutely unbridled marketing and the insane relentless avalanche of commercial messages is a part. Trangressions never omitted or forgotten would be another.

I wonder if we have already lost our belief in being let alone.