Peggy Noonan wrote in WSJ:
Too much security can produce a kind of madness.
Three items on the continuing National Security Agency
controversy: the information that came out this week, a prescient warning from
a veteran British intelligence hand, and a prophecy from an interesting source.
Siobhan Gorman and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reported in
this newspaper that the NSA, which is supposed to have only limited authority
to spy on U.S. citizens, has built a surveillance network that covers
substantially more communications than had been disclosed. The system is able
to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic: "In some cases it
retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and
also filters domestic phone call made with Internet technology." Sources
on the story were current and former intelligence and government officials.
Also this week, a finding was revealed that the NSA violated
the Constitution for three years running by collecting as many as 56,000 purely
domestic communications without appropriate privacy protections. The secret
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court slammed the agency for
"misrepresenting" its practices to the court, and noted it was the
third time in less than three years the government misrepresented the scope of
a collection program.
All this in just the past few days. Makes you wonder what
might be coming in a Labor Day weekend document dump, doesn't it?
***
Readers of my columns and blog posts see an NSA theme: There
are too many built-in dynamics that make the national-security state want to
grow, from legitimate fears of terrorism, to bureaucratic pride, to the flaws
in human nature. And there are too many dynamics that will allow it to grow.
The aftermath of 9/11 happened to coincide with a new burst in American
technological innovation and discovery: The government has the ways and means
to do pretty much anything now, and if they can do it they will do it.
If the citizens of the United States don't put up a halting
hand, the government can't be expected to. It is in the nature of security
professionals to always want more, and since their mission is worthy they're
less likely to have constitutional qualms, to dwell on such abstractions as
abuse of the Fourth Amendment and the impact of that abuse on the First.
If you assume all the information that can and will be
gleaned will be confined to NSA and national security purposes, you are not
sufficiently imaginative or informed. If you believe the information will never
be used wrongly or recklessly, you are touchingly innocent.
If you assume you can trust the administration on this issue
you are not following the bouncing ball, from Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper, who told Congress under oath the NSA didn't gather "any
type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans" (he
later had to apologize) to President Obama, who told Jay Leno: "We don't
have a domestic program." What we do have, the president said, is
"some mechanism that can track a phone number or an email address that is
connected to a terrorist attack."
Oh, we have more than that.
Almost every politician in America lives in fear of one big
thing: a terrorist attack they can later be accused of not having done
everything to stop. And so they'll do anything. They are looking to preserve
their political viability and historical standing. We, as citizens, must keep
other things in mind, such as the rights we are born with as Americans, one of
which is privacy.
I happened to pick up "Open Secret," the memoir of
Stella Rimington, who in the early 1990s served as director-general of MI5, the
British domestic spy agency. I knew a little of her. She was the agency's first
female chief, she fell into spy work by accident, and she didn't come from a
fancy English family, meaning she didn't proceed professionally with an air of
entitlement or a crouch of guilt. So I thought she might have her head screwed
on right regarding the surveillance state. She does.
In the preface of the 2002 edition she is already concerned
about a loss of civil liberties. Terrorism didn't begin on 9/11, she says, it
has been with the modern world since at least the late 1960s, and it isn't
going away anytime soon. We must commit ourselves to do everything we can,
within the law and within our most valued traditions, to oppose and thwart it.
But, she suggests, you don't want to lose your country—the thing you are so
anxious to defend—in your effort to save your country.
In a career in what she calls "the secret state,"
she learned that at the heart of countering terrorism is intelligence, and the
most valuable sources against terrorism are human beings—long-term penetration
efforts. This must be heavily supplemented by technical intelligence—phones,
the Internet—and the more expert the better.
But democratic nations must always balance "the
citizens' right to live their lives in freedom, with minimum interference with
their privacy from the security agencies" against the governments'
responsibility "to protect their citizens from harm." That balance,
she warned, had already begun to swing toward "more emphasis to our safety
than our civil liberties." It has become more acceptable "for the
government . . . to take more powers." She laments this. Pointedly: There
is a danger, she observes, that "security can become an industry in itself
and will not be protecting what is truly at risk."
Terrorism will continue to appeal to extremists, to
"weak minded" individuals drawn by passionate causes. But lack of
attentiveness to our liberties will not help us succeed against them, and it
can damage us. I wrote in the margins: "She's saying we can't become
suicide bombers of our own rights."
Finally, I heard this week from a respected former U.S.
senator, a many-termed moderate conservative who was never known as the
excitable type. He wrote in reaction to Nat Hentoff's warnings regarding the
potentially corrosive effect of extreme surveillance on free speech. "All
this scares me to death," the man wrote. "How many times do we have
to watch government, with the best of intentions, I am sure (or almost so), do
things 'for us'? Now 'security' and 'terrorism' argue for and justify the case
for ever more intrusions—all in the name of protecting us. The truly
frightening thing is that we are told we have to depend on government to police
itself. Not a comforting thought, for we already have far too much evidence of
the lack of such self-supervision. These actions, as Nat Hentoff said, will
sooner than later curtail free speech.
"If so, I am fearful that this will ultimately lead a
nation of sullen paranoids, ever more dependent upon government, ever more
fearful of it. A free society, it will not be."
"A nation of sullen paranoids." Boy, is that it.
This picks up on a point a friend, a veteran of Republican White Houses, said
near the time the controversies were beginning. He told me of a sophisticated
person he knew, experienced in journalism and the ways of government, who
thought the U.S. government might have had the reporter Michael Hastings
killed.
He said, musingly, "The future is paranoia."
Unless, of course, we stop it.
A version of this article appeared August 23, 2013, on page
A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: 'A
Nation of Sullen Paranoids'.
Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights
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