OPINION
4 Piqua Daily Call
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THURSDAY, JUNE 27, 2013
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Commentary
Let’s have the surveillance state debate O
ne diverting aspect of The Guardian-inspired hullaballoo over NSA surveillance has been watching people bicker about it on Facebook. In the old Soviet Union, people walked in the woods or hid in the bathroom with the faucets running to whisper forbidden thoughts. Here in the USA, people post them online along with cute kitten videos and photos of Reuben sandwiches. Recently, I advised my Facebook friend Theo Jordan how to conduct an intrigue without government spooks catching on.Have a third party buy a prepaid cellphone anonymously, use it no more than twice, and then hide it in the backseat of a NewYork taxi.The Feds will go nuts tracking it over five boroughs, while you get busy digging holes. Theo, I should stipulate, is a dachshund with an active fantasy life. We’ve never actually met. Meanwhile, some joker who hides behind the name of a character in a Henry James novel excoriates Democrats who haven’t joined the Edward Snowden-Glenn GreenwaldChicken Little Brigade. “Watching all the Obots turn into good Germans would be funny,” he writes, “if it weren’t so horrifying.” Achtung, “Lambert.” You and Theo can use fake identities on Facebook, but The Shadow knows. Privacy in the 18th-century sense vanished with the Internet, and it’s never coming back.It’s childish to think otherwise. GENE LYONS Yesterday my wife Columnist dropped my binoculars, knocking them out of whack. Before I figured out how to fix them, I priced a new pair on Amazon. This morning, Facebook sent me an advert for Chinese-made Bushnells costing far less than the originals. By tomorrow, they’ll be back to selling me patent medicines somehow involving pretty women with preposterously large breasts. They don’t know that I suffer from maladies their “weird secrets” purport to cure, but they definitely know my age and gender. MasterCard recently shut me down because their computer algorithm correctly deduced that a guy who spends most of his money buying cattle feed in Arkansas probably wasn’t buying a huge HDTV in Mexico City.Amazon knows that I’ve read all the Henning Mankell “Kurt Wallander” novels and thinks I may have a thing for Scandinavian murder mysteries. OK, enough. Here’s the thing: The good news is that the most dramatic “revelations”in the Snowden-Greenwald stories turn out upon further review to be somewhere between greatly exaggerated and entirely false. Yes,NSA vacuums up telephone“metadata”and sifts it for suspicious patterns.USAToday revealed that in 2006.There was a big political fight about it, which the libertarian side lost. But no, they aren’t listening to your calls, and when the histrionic Mr. Snowden says he could have eavesdropped on anybody in the USA, he leaves out that doing so would have landed him in Federal prison, where he probably belongs. As the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin asks “What, one wonders, did Snowden think the NSA did? Any marginally attentive citizen, much less NSA employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications.” Secondly,NSA has no direct“PRISM”link into the servers of Google,Yahoo, and the rest. Upon detecting suspicious activity, it must seek a search warrant, whereupon the companies isolate the information sought and deliver it to an electronic “lockbox” for collection. The Guardian simply got this wrong, and was very slow correcting itself, while Greenwald himself made characteristically shrill attacks on everybody who questioned it. It’s thedifferencebetweenmeleaving,say,mytaxreturninthe mailboxandFBIagentscovertlyturningmyhomeandofficeupside down in my absence.Day and night,legally speaking. Anyway,let’s think this through.The NewYorkTimes’ estimable James Risen was absolutely correct on “Meet the Press” when he said, “We haven’t had a full national debate about the creation of a massive surveillance state and surveillance infrastructure that if we had some radical change in our politics could lead to a police state.” [my italics] However, the genie won’t fit back in the bottle. Like nuclear weapons, computer technology is here to stay. What with al-Qaida posting articles on its website teaching freelance jihadists like the Tsarnaev brothers to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” and Chinese hackers stealing industrial and military secrets by the truckload, unilateral electronic disarmament would be folly. An unmonitored Internet would be a conspiracist’s playground. For once, Thomas Friedman may be right: All that might be necessary to provoke a fear-based authoritarian political response in the U.S. would be a couple of mass casualty terror strikes on the 9/11 scale. So let’s definitely have that debate.Always mindful, however, of two things: First, the great enemy isn’t methodology but lawlessness. When J. Edgar Hoover targeted Martin Luther King,he used not NSA computers but tape recorders the size of electric typewriters. Two, cyber warfare beats the other kind hands-down.
Commentary
Our liberties can survive Obama the media. More of the citirom back in our history, zenry are now finally valuing Ronald Reagan gave a the Bill of Rights (not only the very apposite warning Fourth Amendment) as parts to those of us insistent on proof their very being. I was tecting our self-governing reheartened to see in Glenn public: Greenwald’s column that: “Freedom is never more “U.S. polling data, by itself, than one generation away demonstrates how powerfully from extinction. We didn’t NAT HENTOFF these revelations have respass it to our children in the onated. Despite a sustained bloodstream. It must be Columnist demonization campaign fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same, or one against him from official Washington, a day we will spend our sunset years telling Time magazine poll found that 54 percent our children and our children’s children of Americans believe Snowden did ‘a good what it was once like in the United States, thing,’ while only 30 percent disagreed. That approval rating is higher than the one where men (and women) were free.” While one generation is too soon for us to enjoyed by both Congress and President lose all of what distinguishes us from the Obama” (“Edward Snowden’s worst fear rest of the world, we are heading that way. has not been realized -- thankfully,” GreenThere is, however, an urgent awakening wald, guardian.co.uk, June 14). Furthermore, Greenwald wrote that “on going on. I pay attention to people’s letters to the editor in all media I read, and there the more important issue -- the public’s have been more quotes like this one from views of the NSA surveillance programs ... Rein Virkmaa, taken from the June 15 edi- a Gallup poll ... found that more Americans tion of the New York Post (owned by Rupert disapprove (53 percent) than approve (37 percent) of the two NSA spying programs Murdoch, no warrior for civil liberties): “If the only way to save our freedom is to revealed ... by The Guardian.” Meanwhile, there is an extraordinary destroy it, then what is there left for the terrorists to do? We’ll have destroyed our- rumbling to expose and make accountable Obama’s gluttonous contempt for the Conselves.” Also, consider the penetrating national - stitution’s separation of powers.The United - indeed, global -- impact of 30-year-old Ed- States is not yet a kingdom. But as Daniel ward Snowden’s disclosures of the U.S. Ellsberg recently emphasized: “Congress government’s ceaseless, massive spying on has given the president virtually a free us.A former contractor for the National Se- hand in deciding what information they curity Agency, Snowden has “opened an un- will know as well as the public. “I wouldn’t count on the current precedented window on the details of surveillance by the NSA, including (dig (Supreme) court with its current makeup this!) its compilation of logs of virtually all making the same ruling with the Pentagon telephone calls in the United States and its Papers.” (In 1971, Ellsberg startlingly recollection of emails of foreigners from the leased the Pentagon Papers and was put on major American Internet companies, in- trial for it because they revealed deep, dark cluding Google, Yahoo, Apple and Skype” secrets about the U.S. government’s conduct (“Leaker Charged With Violating Espi- of the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court onage Act,” Scott Shane, The New York later cleared Ellsberg in a historic freeTimes, June 22). (There are more than just speech decision.) If We The People don’t take back our emails from foreigners from these Internet country, Ellsberg warned, “not only Obama sources.) Why did he do it? Snowden -- now sup- but the people who come after him will ported by Glenn Greenwald (who broke the have powers that no previous president deeply clarifying story in The Guardian), had. Abilities on surveillance that no counJohn Whitehead, Judge Andrew Napoli- try in the history of the world has ever had” tano, Daniel Ellsberg and this reporter -- (“Daniel Ellsberg: ‘I’m sure that President came to realize that We The People are con- Obama would have sought a life sentence stitutionally entitled to know who is steal- in my case,’” Timothy B. Lee, The Washington Post, June 5). ing our identities. As for Snowden’s response to those citiSnowden, who was charged with criminality and violating the Espionage Act by zens who are passively part of “the new norBarack Obama, exclaimed in an online chat mal” and say, “I haven’t done anything on The Guardian’s website: “All I can say worth being tracked by any part of the govright now is the U.S. government is not ernment”: “Remember that just because you are not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it can- the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay.” not be stopped.” Snowden is now looking for defense atAnd when he said,“This country is worth dying for,” he reminded me of my father, an torneys to deal with charges of violating the immigrant who was gassed brutally and re- Espionage Act. But I should also add that, peatedly during his Army service in World in avoiding U.S. arrest, he is, as of this writing, reportedly seeking refuge in Cuba, War I. He also felt that way. Moreover, Snowden has defined himself Venezuela and Ecuador. These countries against Obama and his other critics: “I did are proudly part of the “anti-imperialist” not reveal any U.S. operations against le- Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our gitimate military targets. I pointed out America, or ALBA. (“U.S. warns countries where the NSA has hacked civilian infra- against Snowden travel,” James Pomfret structure, such as universities, hospitals and Lidia Kelly, reuters.com, June 23). But are these countries home to the and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively crimi- kinds of self-governing citizens you prize, nal acts are wrong, no matter the target” Mr. Snowden? You may have brought light (“Edward Snowden: NSA whistleblower an- to our constitutional separation of powers, swers reader questions,” guadian.co.uk, but you need to look more closely into new havens. June 17). This raises the question among more and Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned aumore Americans:When will Obama be held accountable -- under oath, with full due thority on the First Amendment and the Bill process -- for his criminal acts against us? of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Snowden will not be intimidated, despite Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the the scalding attacks on him as a traitor in Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.
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Where to Write
Public officials can be contacted through the following addresses and telephone numbers: ■ Lucy Fess, mayor, 5th Ward Commissioner, ward5comm@piquaoh.org, ArkansasTimes columnist Gene Lyons is a National Mag773-7929 (home) azine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the ■ John Martin, 1st Ward Commissioner, President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000).You can email Lyons at ward1comm@piquaoh.org, 773-2778 eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. (home) ■ William Vogt, 2nd Ward Commissioner,
ward2comm@piquaoh.org, 773-8217 ■ Joe Wilson, 3rd Ward Commissioner, ward3comm@piquaoh.org, 778-0390 ■ Judy Terry, 4th Ward Commissioner, ward4comm@piquaoh.org, 773-3189 ■ City Manager Gary Huff, ghuff@piquaoh.org, 778-2051 ■ Miami County Commissioners: John “Bud” O’Brien, Jack Evans and Richard Cultice, 201 W. Main St., Troy, OH
WASHINGTON (AP) — For U.S. policy makers, events that seem at first like positive developments can sometimes unexpectedly bite back. When federal budget deficits finally began to shrink in early spring as recovery from the Great Recession advanced, economic growth started inching down — not up. And when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested last week that continued economic gains might allow the central bank to begin withdrawing financial life supports “later this year” — a statement that sounded like good news — it triggered a multiday sell-off in the stock and bond markets. It’s not just economic policy. Foreign policy under President Barack Obama also hit a few recent snags. While in Europe, Obama reached out to Russia to negotiate new reductions in nuclear arsenals of both countries — and drew a quick rebuff from Moscow. Obama also welcomed a new initiative for peace talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban militants. But Afghan President Hamid Karzai renounced the formula the next day and refused to participate in the talks. “We had anticipated that at the outset, there were going to be some areas of friction, to put it mildly, in getting this thing off the ground,” Obama said of the Taliban outreach.
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