The brouhaha over revelations that our government is collecting telephone and Internet data on all of us may be a good thing for Americans, who appear to have become increasingly inured to the reality that our rights are slowly but steadily being lost.
That process certainly didn’t start with the Obama Administration, but the president and his associates have shown great enthusiasm for its continuation, if not acceleration.
Before we start in on this, it is important to acknowledge that this is not a black-and-white issue. There is a trade-off between personal privacy and national security, despite what we would like to think as we pursue our daily routines – going to work and the store, dropping the kids off and picking them up, watching the news, doodling around on our computers, playing golf, watering the lawn, shooting guns, jogging, feeding the dog – whatever it is that we like to do every day.
We were doing all that, at least figuratively, when those terrorists slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
As we watch our freedoms erode – and not just because of security concerns, it’s worth thinking about why it’s important to sustain them.
At the risk of sounding preachy, government, by its very nature, is inclined to mushroom-style growth. It’s like ivy. If it gets a foothold, it attaches itself and doesn’t go away. Of course, it looks good until you realize you’re overrun.
If we designate people to protect us, which usually implies restriction on behavior in some form or fashion, they are going to identify ways in which they can do that better. And that usually means more regulation.
There is an uneasy tension between freedom and comfort. Liberty can cost us comfort and security. Security can cost us liberty.
Many of us take great consolation in the fact that, under our Bill of Rights, we can say pretty much whatever we want to, worship the way we please, publish what we want to without the government swooping in to take us to jail, gather in public to march, protest, demonstrate, carry signs and otherwise express our views in a nonviolent way, or join whatever group we want to, or complain to the government when we don’t like what’s going on.
Those are all freedoms provided us by the First Amendment of our Constitution.
But what happens if, say, as occurred in the 1970s, a Ku Klux Klan leader gives a speech recommending overthrow of the government? Or the Nazis want to march through a Jewish community? Or teenager burns a cross on the lawn of an African-American family? Or Westboro Baptist Church pickets the funeral of a serviceman killed in action?
All those are the subjects of landmark cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects the expression of views that others might find outright despicable, as long as it can be shown that the communication of those views does not constitute a distinct threat of actual hostile physical behavior.
Our system of justice, though, is unwieldy and we regularly hear of abuses of the law in this area. Local officials and judges often do whatever they want, and it takes a long time for the wheels of justice to grind to the right conclusion – if they ever do.
Plus, our neighbors and allies – Canada and Britain in particular – are aggressively leading the way toward restrictions against “hate speech,” even in religious forums. What happens if these kinds of freedoms continue to erode here in the States?
When we consider our national security, we can certainly see why the government says it is interested in learning who is communicating with known terrorists, why it wants to find threats before they materialize into real bombings or other attacks. But with these measures come uncomfortable impositions. Airport searches. Bureaucrats nosing through our e-mails.
As former CIA employee Edward Snowden, who “outed” the National Security Administration’s data collection efforts, said, “while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they’re collecting your communications to do so.”
So we’re all being swept up in this web of surveillance, which violates the Fourth Amendment, because these searches are clearly occurring prior to any warrants being issued. That is not probable cause.
However, we have to seriously weigh the question of whether is it possible to effectively stop terrorists without resorting to combing through phone and e-mail records. This is a new world we’re living in, post-9/11.
And if we do permit that kind of scrutiny, how do we stop government officials or judges, eyeing us all through rainbow-colored glasses, from extending the reach of scrutiny to other realms that really might? Where do we draw the line, which in the U.S. has always favored liberty over security? Is that rapidly changing.
The situation we find ourselves in has no easy answers. It brings to mind the same kind of tensions our nation experienced when it found itself at war with Japan – and had to figure out what to do about the implied threat posed by Japanese immigrants and citizens. We know the story of how many were unjustly imprisoned – for lack of a better word – and lost nearly everything.
Though it might have stopped a few enemy sympathizers (or plants), it was injustice in the vast majority of cases, and America has been dealing with guilt over it ever since. Was it right? We don’t think so now.
That’s the whole problem with this thing. Are all Muslims potential terrorists? Of course not, just like the vast majority of those Japanese should not have been in concentration camps. So how do you effectively distinguish between those who deserve the attention of our security forces vs. those who don’t? It’s a tough call, full of valid concerns on both ends.
Although the Patriot Act, which plunged us into this whole sinkhole of diminishing freedoms, was instigated by President Bush, the list of continued constitutional impositions or violations for which the Obama administration is accused, is extensive, ranging from concerns about the Chrysler bail-out deal (constitutional Takings and Due-Process clause violations) to Obamacare (individual mandate) to making appointments during congressional recess (congressional advice and consent) and far beyond.
So what if those extend to our rights to free-speech, or religion, or assembling, or publishing, etc. erode, as they appear to be? At the risk of sounding paranoid, could all that recorded material come back to haunt Americans in the future? It’s almost unthinkable, yet a lot of what’s happening now was unthinkable 20 years ago.
The chorus of outrage over these NSA revelations, from both sides of the aisle, should not fall on our deaf ears. If we give up our liberties, we won’t get them back.
Not without a revolution, anyway. The Founding Fathers could tell us that.