Forget Snowden and Focus on the NSA
The NSA works for us. The power to govern lies with We the People and flows from us to the government, not the other way around. The NSA does not dictate to us what the appropriate constraints on its activities ought to be. It may suggest, but We the People decide what controls we want on our government. When the governing violate the constraints imposed by We the People, without our knowledge, someone like Snowden needs to take the risk to let us know.
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
Listening to the pundits finger-wag and vilify whistle-blower Edward Snowden for the past few weeks has me in a serious lather. I’ll admit that the recent heatwave in Genova, Italy (my part-time home along with San Diego, CA) and my upcoming trip from here to Las Vegas for FreedomFest probably has me even more fired up than normal. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to drive in Italy in the heat. I swear it makes an already anarchic driving society even more lunatic, but I digress. I’m usually one to pshaw conspiracy theorists, but the vehemence of the vile attacks on Snowden’s character by those who have scant information to go on has even my eyebrows raised. He may be an angel. He may be a demon. But why the hell is that even the focus? That’s like finding the lost city of Atlantis in a tropical sea and obsessing over the clarity of your goggle lenses!
Snowden has been referred to as a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood” in the Washington Post, a grandiose narcissist in the New Yorker, and Fox New analyst Ralph Peters and Donald Trump want to bring back the death penalty for Snowden. Seriously people? Talk about going off half-cocked and gunning for bear.
Where is the focus on the Constitutionality of the NSA’s spying? Oh but not to fear, Jed Babbin of the American Spectator assures us that the NSA is “a whole lot more trustworthy than most of the rest of our government,” and isn’t like the IRS. Oh that’s comforting, given the NSA’s track record. For the love of Pete, in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was created specifically to limit the powers of the NSA after project SHAMROCK came to light, a project that Senator Frank Church claimed was, “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.” That is until now of course.
Let’s not forget that the NSA is responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin incident, reporting falsely that an attack had occurred on the USS Maddox, which ultimately led to the Vietnam war. Ooops on that one too?
Now we’ve got National Intelligence Director James Clapper admitting in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee that his statement before Congress that the NSA did not have a policy of gathering data on millions of Americas had been “clearly erroneous”. Right, you lied to the people you serve, but we’ll trust your judgment anyways.
A month after the Guardian broke this story, Snowden’s worst fears may be coming to pass, namely that nothing changes. We have no Frank Church to lead the charge as he did in the 1970s, instead we have the likes of Cheney defending the NSA and calling Snowden a traitor.
The power of government must at all times be vigorously constrained because power will always end up being abused. Perhaps we get lucky and have angels running the show for a while and we grant them all kinds of powers under the theory that they are there to protect us. History has shown that angelic bureaucrats are a quickly fleeting dream. Hell, if the NSA is so good at making sure this data doesn’t get into the wrong hands, how did Snowden get it? Doesn’t look like he is exactly their poster child!
Liberty comes at a price. Living in a society in which individuals are free to live their lives as they see fit, rather than living in a one-size-fits-all world comes at a price. The more protection we ask for, the less freedom we have. Keep this in mind.
“All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” ~ James Madison