By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, June 07, 2013
The U.S. government is trying "to create a database
of every [phone] call ever made."
That's how one informed person described the National
Security Agency's effort to USA Today. That newspaper also confirmed that not
only is the government collecting every phone record from Verizon -- as first reported
by the British newspaper The Guardian -- it's also collecting similar data from
other phone companies.
It's important to emphasize that the NSA isn't listening
to the content of these calls. Indeed, it couldn't if it wanted to, given the
sheer volume of conversations. It'd be like one person trying to eavesdrop on
every single conversation in a packed football stadium.
The revelation has caused some giddiness among President
Obama's critics. This news is just the latest example of how so much of Obama's
"change we can believe in" has really been "continuity kept
secret from us." As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama routinely
tore into the Patriot Act as if it was worse than the Espionage Act of 1917.
Now, not only is he using the Patriot Act to spy on, well, pretty much
everyone, his Justice Department actually used the Espionage Act to label a
journalist a possible co-conspirator in espionage.
But after the schadenfreude wears off, the question
remains: Is this bad policy? Just because Obama might be a hypocrite for
employing the tactics he decried when his predecessor used them, it doesn't
mean he's wrong. One can flip-flop from the wrong position to the right one.
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor (he put away
the "Blind Sheikh" who masterminded the first World Trade Center
bombing), makes a strong case that the NSA program is not only legal, important
and necessary, but also that the outrage over these revelations is overblown.
Phone records -- as opposed to the content of phone conversations -- are not
private under the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, the "metadata"
collected by the NSA is essential for tracking terrorists' patterns before they
attack.
After every terrorist attack, everyone always asks,
"Why didn't the government connect the dots?" Well, what the NSA is
doing is connecting dots. Moreover, McCarthy notes in his National Review
Online article, this is no rogue operation. It's true, every branch of
government was kept in the loop. Congressional leadership was briefed. The
administration sought these warrants from a judge. This isn't a scandal so much
as it is a controversy over a legal policy -- to which I say, fair enough.
For McCarthy, the "problem here is not government
power. It is the government officials we've elected to wield it." In the
wake of the still-unfolding IRS scandal, the Benghazi debacle, and the myriad
failures of the hapless Eric Holder Justice Department, Americans rightly don't
trust these guys to color within the lines, as it were.
Still, I think McCarthy's missing something. No, I don't
have much confidence in this administration. But I don't have an abundance of confidence
in government generally. That's one of the things I love about America: The
default position is to be skeptical of government, no matter who's in charge.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but sometimes
it can work the other way around. Invention -- i.e., new technologies and
techniques --creates obligations and opportunities that never existed before.
Fifty years ago, nobody needed to charge their cell phones, because they didn't
have cell phones. Before the smallpox vaccine was invented, it would never have
occurred to someone in government to require that all children be inoculated
for smallpox. I'm not against mandatory inoculations; my point is to illustrate
that invention often creates new necessities.
The arrival of "big data" -- the ability to
crunch massive amounts of information to find patterns and, ultimately, to
manipulate human behavior -- creates opportunities for government (and
corporations) that were literally unimaginable not long ago. Behavioral
economists, neuroscientists and liberal policy wonks have already fallen in
love with the idea of using these new technologies and insights to
"nudge" Americans into making "better" decisions. No doubt
some of these decisions really are better, but the scare quotes are necessary because
the final arbiters of what constitutes the right choice are the would-be social
engineers.
Until recently there was great anonymity in crowds, but
the near-magic of math has changed that equation. Given a big enough data set,
data-crunchers can figure out a great deal about every face in the crowd.
I'm no Luddite. Just because government could, in theory,
poison people doesn't mean it shouldn't, in practice, inoculate people. But
we're in uncharted territory, and a healthy dose of old-fashioned American
skepticism seems warranted, no matter who's in charge.
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