having read this thread
I credit Another Scott with the courage of his convictions, although I strongly disagree with most of the conclusions to which these have led him in this instance. I credit him, however, with intellectual honesty as opposed to the merely perverse contrarianism we have seen times past from one or two other (cough, cough) regulars.
Return with us to a more innocent era—let us say, the late Peter O'Toole's twentieth birthday in 1952, which happens to have been the day I was ejected from amniotic paradise. The NSA was three months and two days from its own fraught birth. The world of signals intelligence was a considerably simpler place, the bandwidth far narrower and the electronic information content several orders of magnitude more modest measured against today.
Today, we face The Terrorist Threat. Back then it was merely Stalin's nuclear-armed USSR. As Ashton's granny could tell you (had she not expired of pure bile since that time), this was nevertheless reason enough for certain liberties to be taken with our, er, liberties. So let's imagine the Post Office of 1952—or today—operating with the same lighthearted approach to the Fourth Amendment that the Deep State brings to bear upon e-communication today. Imagine that everything you have ever sent through the mail—every personal letter, every bill, every parcel—has been opened, photographed and cross-filed under the names of sender and recipient. No one has ever bothered to eyeball the contents, but there are filing cabinets full of these 8 x 10 glossies all through the decades. Who would have a problem with that?
I would.
Freeman and others have pointed out the dangers of what one analyst has called "turnkey totalitarianism": create a surveillance apparatus this comprehensive, this far-reaching, and the likelihood is that one day it will be deployed. But my objection starts way in advance of that line. I grew up in an era when the notion that the beastly Red Russians couldn't even write or phone one another without Big Brother sharing the line filled us with indignation on behalf of the enslaved peoples so deprived of privacy.
The NSA denies my right to privacy, but asserts absolutely its own privacy rights. Fuck that noise. sauce, goose, gander. The more I learn about Snowden and what he has done, the more I am disposed to admire him.
I remind Another Scott that my line of work, unfortunately, has put me right up against some of the middlingly thuggish elements of Homeland Security since 2003. Many of these are bad, stupid, brutal people, pumped-up school bullies with truncheons, handcuffs and the various other apparatus of the modern police state. I don't see a lot of conscience or sensitivity to civil liberties in this lot, and I'd be surprised if the NSA is significantly more enlightened.
cordially,
