Six Degrees of Osama Bin Laden
If I'm understanding the administration's
Domestic
Spying program properly, the NSA is playing the Six Degrees of Separation
game with Osama Bin Laden in place of Kevin Bacon. Granted, they're not
literally using Osama, but rather known al-Qaeda members. The NSA is checking
out not only who the terrorists are calling, but who those people are calling,
and who those people are calling, and who those people are calling, and perhaps
who all of those people are calling as well. Bush claims that the administration
isn't "trolling", but it certainly looks that way. I'd say
"trawling" is accurate. How
else could they have accumulated the phone records of tens of millions of
Americans?
The administration defends itself by saying that they're just seeing who's
calling whom and not listening in to the actual calls. I suppose that they think
that they're being proactive by hunting through the phone calls of Americans
for hits, but the administration claimed that they were being proactive by
invading Iraq. Is the administration now comparing Americans to Saddam Hussein?
Is this his way of saying, "We've met the enemy, and he is us"?
Senator Jon Kyl doesn't appear to realize this.
"This is nuts," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. "We are in a war, and
we have got to collect intelligence on the enemy."
Yes, I consider this a violation of the
4th Amendment of the
Constitution. The
FISA
court was set up to deal with gaining search warrants in matters of
national security. It's a special court whose proceeding are closed to the
public and cases classified. Its sole purpose is to determine if the government
can conduct domestic surveillance on agents from foreign powers. Although the
FISA court has a
track
record for approving all, or almost all, requests, the Bush White House felt
obligated to do an end run around them anyway. Sounds like an implication of
guilt to me.
For my fellow Americans who say things like, "If you haven't done anything
wrong, you've got nothing to worry about," I say, how do you know you've
done nothing wrong? From the government's perspective, guilt by association is
still guilt. Let me use a hypothetical. Let's say that the plumber I've hired
buys the materials for the project from an Arab American whose son is at a
college where he has a friend who has a brother that hangs with wannabe
terrorists. How far does the government investigate? Who do they get warrants
for? The money I give to my plumber to buy materials from the store owner gets
sent to his son in college. Maybe his son gets told by his friend that his
brother needs money but doesn't explain what it's for, or lies about it, or his
brother lies about it, and the money is used to buy materials used to facilitate
a terrorist attack. Am I guilty of supporting terrorists? Maybe I'm safe in
this chain, but what about the law abiding Arab American store owner in my
hypothetical scenario? We're potentially looking at the new McCarthyism.
Where does it end? Terrorists today, drug dealers tomorrow. Not bad, right? Ok,
but what happens if whoever has access to that database uses it to eliminate
their political opponents? Maybe they can snag someone because they called up a
number associated with pornography, once. Not bad either, despite the fact that
porn is a multi-billion dollar industry and is supported by the 1st Amendment.
Ok, then how about any donations you make to organizations that criticize the
president? Maybe you didn't, but what about everyone you know, and everyone they
know, and everyone they know? If it's guilt by association, then you may be
just as bad. And what happens when the political winds shift? For all of you
Bushies out there, if Hilary were in the White House and went after supporters
of Republican aligned groups, say, the NRA, would you still feel safe?
That's the potential of a database like this. Once acquired, it can be used to
whatever ends whoever occupies the White House deems necessary. Once we start
heading down that slippery slope of sacrificing Constitutional rights for the
alleged sake of national security, it isn't long before we find ourselves
living in a mirror world of Orwell's 1984 or 1930's Germany.
Know your rights. Read the
Constitution.
<< Home |
