Yesterday was a banner day for disquisitions on surveillance. Pres. Obama's speech and a lengthy piece by David Cole on leakers Snowden, Manning, and Assange in The New York Review of Books with their careful analyses and measured judgments arrived almost simultaneously. What a motherlode of intelligence... I mean, sophistication.
How many brilliant speeches have we seen from Obama? Several, by my count, at least since his remarkable summation of the race issue before he was first elected President. He has an excellent nose for this sort of thing - just when it seems that opposing forces are closing in on him, questioning his objectivity, his liberal principles or his political judgment, he times and words his speech in such a way as to take both the moral and intellectual high ground, demonstrating a grasp of both history and the current alignment of political forces. Or so it has been in the past. His speech on surveillance was in some sense a paradigm of balanced judgment - at least if you think balance is always achieved by giving each side their due, identifying with their supposedly admirable goals while distancing yourself from radical views on either side. But maybe that's not what we needed this time.
No firebreathing radical Obama: his list of ways in which he will supposedly reign in the surveillance state he has set up (or expanded) is nothing if not cautious, not to say an empty wave of the wand in the direction of his (former) liberal supporters. Except perhaps for ending the blanket telephone surveillance program "in its current form" - in what new form it will be reinstated remains to be seen - he gave little more than lip service to the demands from consumers, industry and privacy advocates that the massive gathering of private electronic data be curtailed.
Cole, in his review of books by Rahul Sagar and James C. Goodale, carefully assesses the benefits and drawbacks of the classified document releases by Manning and Snowden, and seems to get behind some criteria Goodale has come up with by which leakers can be either praised or condemned for their behavior. Basically, the leaks must reveal real abuses, pose few threats to the security of U.S. operations or individuals, and be carefully tailored in scope to their limited purposes. After reading this I almost wanted to give the man a big hug and say, Thank you, James, for coming up with those judicious guidelines for the illegal release of secret espionage documents. Had Manning and Snowden only had such criteria in hand we would undoubtedly have for our perusal just the right selection of their 2 million or so documents on government spying; no CIA operatives would be in danger; and friendly foreign governments would be unaware that we were poking our noses into their leaders' underwear. Only, what would have compelled the President to address the subject of surveillance in even the unsatisfactory way that he did?
What neither Obama's nor Cole's cautious assessments puts on the table - what indeed both of them conceal, as do almost all other recent conversations on these subjects, is the underlying logic of the politics, programs and documents that comprise the various controversial initiatives. "Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in a repeat of 9/11", opines the President; and who could disagree with that? (Except that presumably most terrorists are also "troubled by our existing programs" - but we can let that slide.) The problem with this statement is that it assumes we all share a basic principle that in fact I doubt we share; indeed, that even Cole and Obama may not share; and yet this principle, so consistently shown to be inoperative over the course of history, is the very heart of the Patriot Act and everything that has followed from it.
The principle I am referring to may be stated in several ways; here are a few, since different versions may help different individuals understand what I'm getting at:
1.The possibility of pain creates the necessity of intrusion into everyone's personal affairs.
2. We should relinquish some important liberties in order to protect people from threats.
3. We are more afraid of random attacks than of pervasive surveillance.
4. The courage to endure potential hardships is less important than the prudence to prevent them, regardless of the means required to do so.
5. Privacy is only a relative good; security is an absolute.
Now, in my opinion, not a single form of this principle is justified, either in theory or in the historical practice of most nations. No one has ever tried to found or run a nation on such principles, nor would they be in any way admirable if they did. It is hard to imagine anyone mounting a demonstration or starting a petition to demand of the government that they collect or survey personal data on essentially everyone in the nation in order to deter threats to their security. There may be people who live in such fear of random violence - who vividly imagine themselves or their children as the victims of each new terrorist bombing - and would be willing to abide a principle of this sort. This is especially the case after the media barrage of worldwide reporting on actual and planned terrorist attacks, which gives the appearance of pervasive, present danger to what are in fact rare and widely separated events. But it is hardly surprising that a distorted epistemological position can lead to the distortion of a natural instinct, consistently embodied in democratic institutions over the course of many centuries, that resist the general substitution of security for privacy and personal freedom.
Still, even if people harbor such fears, they almost certainly do so with some misgivings. The person who is willing to stand on a street corner and rally people to the cause of government surveillance is a highly unusual and not particularly admirable exception, for their stance is one of promoting fear and weakness and diminishing personal integrity in the name of protection. Whereas the one who is willing to rail against such surveillance, even in light of our intermittent suffering at the hands of terrorists, is admirable for their courage and defense of individual freedom, and willingness to endure hardship for the sake of higher human goals. Dignity does not consist in prostrating ourselves before the godfather of information, be it Stalin or Ashcroft or Obama; it consists in having the courage to face the fact that freedom sometimes entails sacrifices of personal safety and comfort.
Obama's reference to the intelligence reports he receives every morning is close to an explicit adoption of the distorted epistemological position I just described, and his defense of a wide variety of government surveillance programs panders to exactly the kinds of fears associated with it. This, in my opinion, is not leadership, but mere political pragmatism; not necessarily the demagogic kind of pragmatism that validates widespread, base instincts, but the kind in which politicians would rather ride roughshod over liberties and progressive values than face a day in which fingers might be pointed at them for not doing enough to avert violence. This is the way of the world. It is, for example, the reason NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio will not really end the stop-and-frisk practices of the NYPD, but rather tone them down enough to pacify critics, especially those who associate them with racial profiling.
It is also the position of an executive who, having once pictured himself as the leader of a people, now pictures himself as somehow obliged to commend and uphold the patriotic instincts of the security forces whose one-sided perspective actually serves to harm the more fundamental interests of the nation they are trying to protect. "I'm Commander-in-Chief (Mayor, Governor, whatever) so now I have to let my lieutenants and foot soldiers know how much I appreciate all they've done." On this logic Obama also refused to pursue and punish those who were responsible for kidnapping and waterboarding. Applied to the NSA and surveillance in general, he is moved to exude flowery rhetoric in reminding us how much these people have our interests at heart, and assuring us that they won't abuse the information they're privvy to. But there is a subliminal message here too: that the situation is not really the man in charge showing gratitude for the support and performance of his staff, but the man who now has this overblown security apparatus around him and is afraid to cross them. Oh gentle souls of the NSA, CIA, USAID and the like, do not be offended, the President loves you, he just thinks you might ask in a nicer way for access to every piece of personal information on the planet. So that is the new norm: we must ask nicely for the security forces not to do everything they might conceivably want to do, because in point of fact, they run us, we do not run them.
This is why, sadly, 9/11 was a resounding victory for He Who Shall Not Be Named, not only in the short term loss of life and financial meltdown, but in the long term victory of totalitarian values over democratic ideals. Bin Laden (oops) could not have had a more complete success; he managed not only to cause enormous physical destruction but to unbalance the entire system of U.S. democracy. Surely this was the greater part of his goal - to bring Western civilization more in line with the harsh and neo-fascistic reality of life under extremist versions of Sharia law. By reorienting our leaders towards a defensive principle like the one mentioned above, he persuaded us that democracy has a much lower moral value than we believed; while government, ordained by no one to carry out its massive intrusion into our daily lives, operates no longer in the name of general or individual freedom but as a paternalistic overseer of our email messages, phone conversations, shopping habits and travel plans.
As for the individuals who take it upon themselves to release the details of this surveillance to the world, god help us if they have to first take classes at the Amy Vanderbilt school to learn the proper methods of revealing the dirt under the rug of our national security apparatus. These individuals are not always motivated by the highest ideals or guided by the common sense in the first place, so the notion that we can fine tune their actions is a bit ridiculous anyway. But to suggest that they should first read through and redact documents one by one so as to make sure no one gets hurt is like saying that a man who runs into a burning house with a water bucket should calculate how to toss it so as to avoid too much ancillary water damage. It stands to reason that what was released by Snowden and Manning is not even the tip of the iceberg, more like a snow cone on Pluto, compared with what we don't know about the U.S. espionage that is conducted in our name. Obama may be right about the hypocrisy of nations who criticize our espionage efforts while conducting their own. Then again, Joe McCarthy was right that Communism was an evil system. Neither Obama nor McCarthy add anything to their own ethical standing by pointing to the failings of others. So the German leaders are spying on our leaders? Goodness, what are they going to discover - that we are spying on them too? Then if we stop spying on them they will discover nothing, except maybe Michelle's secret recipe for lasagna or something equally exciting. Or perhaps that we are strong enough to survive external threats without such spying, that we have little to hide, and that we are an "open society" after all.
Nobody in their right mind believes that Muslim extremists around the globe can do anything more to us than cause occasional loss of life on a scale that is very minor as world conflicts go. All the terrorist attacks that have ever been carried out or planned in the U.S. do not add up to the annual loss of life or injury in automobile accidents. The astute observer will note that government surveillance of automobile travel has greatly expanded as well; one form of surveillance normalizes all other forms, an added negative effect of the runaway programs that are nominally directed only at terrorists. Automobile surveillance is if anything more pernicious than the other forms, not only because it involves tracking the personal movements of individuals who are suspectd of no crime, but because the red light cameras, speed cameras, toll cameras and alternate side parking cameras (they are now mounted on streetcleaning vehicles in some areas) mete out automated punishments for victimless crimes, while not clearly demonstrating any advantage whatsoever over human security forces (leading to the suspicion that they are really just more successful fundraising vehicles for local governments, the morality or accident toll of running red lights having little to do with it). Yet we tolerate even this; and indeed, from Montgomery County, MD, where speed cameras have proliferated like kudzu, to NYC, where the new Mayor has been a vocal proponent of this form of surveillance, putative liberal administrations have rammed these surveillance systems down the throats of the local population. Who among us will stand up and say, "Thank you, Mayor DeBlasio, for protecting these innocent pedestrians by tracking my movements with cameras everywhere I go?" About as many who are willing to say, "Please check my emails to prevent someone somewhere from carrying out some terrorist act". But this is what happens when a single terrorist act is allowed to undermine the moral fabric of a whole society.
Obama's speech is laced with suggestions that without these ubiquitous surveillance measures, terrorists will be popping up around every corner; moreover, that there is no other way to prevent them. In fact, all these measures did not prevent the Boston bombing; they did not prevent people from boarding planes with explosives; they did not prevent someone from trying to detonate a van laden with explosives in Times Square. So what is needed - even more surveillance? Or is it perhaps that surveillance of the kind that is being conducted is not the right remedy in the first place?
A long time before 9/11 I wondered: why aren't the cabins of commercial airlines secured? What if someone, perhaps just a distraught or crazy person with a weapon, barged in and caused enough mayhem to crash the plane? If the cabins had been secured, 9/11 would not have happened. The maniacs could have killed many people on board but they could not have crashed the plane and certainly not directed it to a particular target. A relatively simple screening operation could have prevented the Boston attacks; we don't like these bag checks at concert halls and baseball stadiums much, but they are far from being objectionable in the way that gathering of hundreds of millions of email messages is objectionable. There are many kinds of measures that have not been put in place, but they would cost money. Every truck or van that crosses a heavily used bridge or tunnel could be scanned - the technology is there, and it is minimally invasive to the lives of individuals. But it would cost money. Cheaper to secretly gather data from Google servers and install spy programs on computers of unknown people. No one who opposes the surveillance measures that Obama refuses to back down from need accept the charge of being soft on terrorism.
But we all do need to reject the logic of surveillance; we need to have the courage to realize that preserving democratic values may entail risks and hardships, at least until the forces who are violently opposed to democracy have been sufficiently dispatched. People have sacrificed their lives for those values again and again - that is the real lesson of the American Revolution, not the dubious reference to "surveillance" by Paul Revere and his buddies. When that dream dies, so does the nation that was built on it. Let's hope my title is wrong, and America is only sleeping. But the fact that the shining hopes of liberalism are leading the charge to undermine these democratic values is a very troubling sign.
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