This morning (5/11/2006) in the USA Today, I
read an article with the headline, “
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls”. The article was by Leslie Cauley, and appeared in the on-line version of the publication.
According to the article, the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.
There is no warrant for specific records, and according to the article most records are from customers that are not suspected of any crime.
I remember reading that President Bush had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop sans warrants on international calls, but according to the article the NSA has actually been given access to “records of billions of domestic calls.” The article states that customers names and other information are not associated with the data the NSA is collecting, but anyone with a clue knows that connecting a person’s name with a known phone number is usually easy; I would expect something like that to be trivial for an agency such as the NSA. I don’t believe the government should be spying on it’s own citizens, and unless I am specifically under court-ordered investigation for a crime, I don’t believe the government has any business investigating with whom I speak on the phone.
While this letter is triggered by the specific actions of the NSA mentioned in the article today, the problem is much deeper than just that single issue. We constantly tell other countries they need to embrace democracy and freedom and improve the civil rights of their citizens. I guess it’s do as we say, not as we do, eh? Almost every day on the news there another invasion on my privacy. Another civil liberty trounced. No fly lists. Government ID. Prisoners held by us indefinitely without charges. Dispensing with Geneva conventions. After seeing all these things, I find it difficult to believe that the leaders in Washington represent the will of the people. How many people, if asked, would agree to let the government track every call they make without a court order or suspicion of wrong-doing? Hold a man with no hearing or charges for years? Use torture in an interrogation? With no public check or balance? The answer is almost no one until someone makes up some mumbo-jumbo BS about fighting terror to scare them into giving up the basic right not to live in a police state.
I hate to risk invoking Godwin's Law with this letter, but where is the line between patriotism and fascism? The parallels between current events in the US and WWII Germany are striking: War launched on false or misleading pretense, control of popular feelings through fear of outsiders, religious intolerance and fundamentalism partly cloaked in us-vs-them patriotism that allows a self-righteous leader new levels of un-balanced control, meticulous and copious secret government records including serious domestic spying – I don’t need any tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories to make this frightening list because the topics are in the headlines every day.
We almost impeached our last president for what (after Kenneth Starr spent about $45 million investigating) turned out to be basically poor choices in his personal life. Why can we do nothing when the very most basic values of the country are under siege from our own government - when the leader brazenly ignores law, science, reason, and good judgment to treat us like fools. But we are not all fools. There are no weapons of mass destruction. The mission is not accomplished. We are not better off today than we were in 2001. Two-thousand-four-hundred-and-counting dead serviceman in Iraq later, we are not safer today than we were then: real bad men like Osama Bin Laden are still out there (despite the fact that the TSA took my toenail clippers on the way through Atlanta).
So for the record, I don’t want to give up anymore of the rights and freedoms that make living in a “free” country worthwhile. I would rather fight terrorism by accepting the risk, whatever it truly is, of being killed or injured by a terrorist. I would rather fight terrorism by using our wealth and prosperity to rebuild, better than before, the things terrorists destroy. I would rather fight terrorism by reaching out with non-intrusive diplomacy to countries and cultures not like our own, and finding some common ground to base a peaceful co-existence upon. You cannot pick and win fights with everyone you disagree with – most of us learned this basic fact in kindergarten.
I believe that we, the people, can be strong in the face of the enemy. Someone please help us take rational precautions against attacks without resorting to stoking our most irrational fears into a cowardly retreat from our basic principles.
