The NSA data grab scandal is much worse than you think. In retrospect, we should have listened to those on the liberal left who warned us about the Patriot Act. We ignored them because they are typically wrong about everything. But sometimes those people who disagree with us are actually right. In this case those people who criticized the Patriot Act are being vindicated and all those Republicans and Democrats who signed off on this in the name of national security are about to be embarrassed.
We should have known better. The problem is that if you allow the government to have access to this information, for any reason, at some point the data will be abused. We don’t know if the Obama administration has limited itself to hunting terrorists, but ultimately it was only a matter of time before someone misused this data.
Under this administration the IRS abused power by targeting the Tea Party and other conservative groups. How can we be sure that it started and ended there?
The Obama campaign has been bragging about his massive data base and the use of this information to win elections. Following are two links confirming this. The first is from Cyber News Network with the transcript of an interview by Maxine Waters earlier this year:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/rep-waters-obama-campaign-database-has-information-every-individual
She said that the Obama campaign had database that “will have information about everything on every individual.”
“And that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before,”
There was also in interview as recent as May 19th, where the person who set up the data mining for the Obama campaign was bragging about it:
The chief scientist of the campaign, Rayid Ghani, said that they used this data to help Obama win the election. He is now the chief data scientist at the University of Chicago. His program is called:
“Data Science for Social Good.” That is a pretty ominous title when we now know the NSA has data about everything from everyone.
Obama was probably re-elected in large part because he was better at data mining then his opponents. Imagine what they could do if they really did have information on everything about everyone.
It is even more frightening when one reads the interview by Snowden, the man who leaked information about the program:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video
“The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to,” he said.
He describes the problem with a clarity is that stunning:
“Now increasingly we see that it’s happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they’re collecting you’re communications to do so.”
“Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.”
His point it that it wouldn’t even have to be the government who does this. Compare this to the current IRS scandal. We don’t know, yet, who was the mastermind of this or even if there was a mastermind. What we do know is that confidential information was exploited resulting in an abuse of power that may have influenced a national election.
Right now there are a handful of people like Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Diane Feinstein who still appear to be more concerned about tipping off potential terrorists than in protecting our personal privacy. We are probably going to see an attempt to stifle any investigation by trying to prosecute Snowden. There will be a full scale effort to suppress this story. I don’t think that is going to work.
This story is going to explode and it will destroy anyone who gets in the way. That includes the President and those members of congress who seem oblivious to the problem. I really think this is a game changer. I think this will be that rare issue where Liberals line up next to Conservatives united in opposition to a threat to all of us.
At the end of World War II, in his speech accepting the surrender of Japan, General Douglas McArthur said the following:
The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.
Men since the beginning of time have sought peace…. Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.
McArthur was naïve in believing that we would find a peaceful way to end conflicts. The Korean War, the Vietnam War and the two Iraq wars dispelled that theory. But what we have been able to do is to avoid nuclear war.
We are now on the verge of creating a weapon potentially more dangerous than a nuclear weapon. We are on the verge of compiling all of the personal information on every human being who ever used a phone, a cellphone, an e-mail or even surfs the web and making it accessible to government. Knowledge is power and this type of knowledge would inevitably result in absolute power. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are very fortunate that this scandal broke now, rather than later. It is impossible to overstate the danger. It is equally impossible to overstate the need to get this fixed now. The only solution is to prevent the government from ever gaining access to this information, for any reason at any time. Ben Franklin said it well long ago:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
This was true in 1775. It is even more true today.
TDM