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Blowing a Whistle
by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
JUNE 11, 2013
I’m glad I live in a country
with people who are vigilant in defending civil liberties. But as I listen to
the debate about the disclosure of two government programs designed to track
suspected phone and e-mail contacts of terrorists, I do wonder if some of those
who unequivocally defend this disclosure are behaving as if 9/11 never happened
— that the only thing we have to fear is government intrusion in our
lives, not the intrusion of those who gather in secret cells in Yemen,
Afghanistan and Pakistan and plot how to topple our tallest buildings or bring
down U.S. airliners with bombs planted inside underwear, tennis shoes or
computer printers.
Yes, I worry about potential
government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 —
abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more
about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened
once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.
I worry about that even
more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I
cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is
one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead
to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I
fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do
whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not
happen again.” That is what I fear most.
That is why I’ll reluctantly,
very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for
suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then
have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under
guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give
government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime.
So I don’t believe that
Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic
whistle-blower. No, I believe Snowden is someone who needed a whistle-blower.
He needed someone to challenge him with the argument that we don’t live in a
world any longer where our government can protect its citizens from real, not
imagined, threats without using big data — where we still have an edge — under
constant judicial review. It’s not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale attack
gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater.
A hat tip to Andrew Sullivan
for linking on his blog to an essay by David Simon,
the creator of HBO’s “The Wire.” For me, it cuts right to the core of the
issue.
“You would think that the
government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the
reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about,” wrote Simon. “And you would
think that rather than a legal court order, which is an inevitable consequence
of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been
discovered to the government’s shame. Nope. ... The only thing new here, from a
legal standpoint, is the scale on which the F.B.I. and N.S.A. are apparently
attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. ... I know it’s big and
scary that the government wants a database of all phone calls. And it’s scary
that they’re paying attention to the Internet. And it’s scary that your
cellphones have GPS installed. ... The question is not should the resulting
data exist. It does. ... The question is more fundamental: Is government
accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or
are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate
personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The
Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data
collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.”
We do need to be constantly
on guard for abuses. But the fact is, added Simon, that for at least the last
two presidencies “this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an
American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles
before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest,
grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon bombing before they occur.”
To be sure, secret programs,
like the virtually unregulated drone attacks, can lead to real excesses that
have to be checked. But here is what is also real, Simon concluded:
“Those planes really did hit
those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the
Boston Marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk
conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically motivated enemy. And, for
a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our
political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an
American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of
the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in
the haystacks.”
And, I’d add, not just
bloviating. Imagine how many real restrictions to our beautiful open society we
would tolerate if there were another attack on the scale of 9/11. Pardon me if
I blow that whistle.
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