Short Memory: The NSA Scandal That Wasn't Really News After All

Allow me to address the current NSA situation in its historical context.

Remember back in 2001 when Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, which granted unparalleled surveillance and detention powers to the federal government? You know, the law specifically named the way it was in order to allow its proponents to go McCarthy on anyone who opposed it by calling them unpatriotic? Now think back to 2007, when the PATRIOT Act was made permanent by Congress. Each of these votes occurred during one of Bush Jr's terms, whom Democrats should know as "that president you're not allowed to blame anymore".

Well, let's spread the blame around a little. It was his administration that created the situation we're in right now. It was his that pushed for making that situation permanent by law.

Now I don't know if the GOP really intended to pass that kind of power to the next president the way they did. For all I know, it's equally possible that this program of theirs was the same as the NDAA scandal - wherein Republicans in Congress use riders to fill the Defense Department budget bill (which is what the National Defense Authorization Act is and always has been) with unsavory bits that the president can't excise by line-item veto but has to approve carte blanche in order to fund, well, the military - in that they get to blame the Democrat for their own ideas and thereby fracture the opposition. Maybe they were so confident in following up Bush with another opportunist hack named John McCain that they never imagined the NSA's system being used by a Democrat. I really don't know. What I do know is that this surveillance has been going on a lot longer than the current media firestorm over Edward Snowden's actions would lead you to believe.

I was in 6th grade when the PATRIOT Act was passed, and I completely bought into the mindset presented by its backers that if I wasn't doing anything wrong, I didn't have anything to hide. After all, this was the way things worked in school. If I wasn't doodling in class, why would I be so protective with my arm when the teacher walked by? Now that I'm in college, that's a moot point given how little my teachers care about laptop use in class. In fact, I'm pretty much obligated to use my laptop everyday or risk missing things during lectures or not being able to put enough time into my written assignments, much less all my online quizzes and exams. That being said, I realize now that the argument above about not having anything to hide was basically constructed for people who shared the same mentality that I did in elementary school: black-and-white, with no room for shades of gray or complexities.

This isn't to say that I'm not still torn about the current surveillance debate. After all, none of us wants the US government observing our electronic communications, but some of us undoubtedly need it. That would be the Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev's, the Timothy McVeigh's, and Wade Michael Page's among us, who I don't think any of us would say should've gone unobserved. Yet for all intents and purposes, it appears that they did. Is this simply to say that the men and women whose job it is to find and stop madmen like these are human? Likely. As in all human endeavors, there will be errors and missteps, which can allow tragedies to happen. However, we also have to consider that increasing the vigilance with which we engage in surveillance operations will by definition affect us all. As was posited back in 2001, "if you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide", right?

Taking this conversation to the present day, we arrive at the fallout of the Edward Snowden case and the  unprecedented amounts of information he leaked regarding the PRISM program, created by the Protect America Act of 2007 and renewed last year until 2017. Included were records implicating companies like Verizon Wireless, Google, Yahoo, and Apple in a vast network of data harvesting that encompassed almost the entire world, all leading back to the NSA. In the clamor for answers, we've seen two sides develop with not much in between. The first, represented by at least one FOX contributor, is taking a similar argument to that which was used in 2001: leaking of government documents, even those proving that government agencies are behaving unethically, is treason and should be punished as such. Now this is a man who clearly believes that his side has something to gain from the continuance of not just the spying program, but also the political ideology which gave it birth. This would be the neo-conservative movement, symbolized by the likes of Cheney and Rove, and still pushed by FOX News to an extent. On the other side, we have perhaps the only instance in which Michael Moore and Glenn Beck will agree with each other.

The message we got from the executive branch thus far has been this:

"You can't have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society."

Now as tempting as it is to retort cleverly with a certain quote from Benjamin Franklin about what is deserved by those who sacrifice liberty for security, I think we need to look at what President Obama said here in more realistic terms. To be clear, human societies need both law and law enforcement to function properly. We admit that this is the reality, inasmuch as we don't live in Sir Thomas More's Utopia yet. If law enforcement doesn't have the tools it needs to get the job done, then laws simply go unenforced. On the other hand, we want to avoid a police state as much as possible while still providing those supposedly sworn to protect us with the ability to do their jobs. If it seems depressing to know that we still don't have a solution for this dilemma yet, then it should comfort you (at least slightly) to know that the US is no exception in that regard, as pretty much every human civilization since the dawn of agriculture hasn't been able to do it either.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: if it looks like I'm not offering a solution here, then it's because I don't really have a complete solution in mind. This is a complex issue and if the most I can do is at least convince readers of that fact, then I feel like I've done my job with this post. The last thing we need in a time that demands reasoned debate is retreats into polarized histrionics. I guess what I'm also trying to say is that anyone who tries to draw you or me into the trap of "STOP BLAMING BUSH!!!11!!" needs to be accosted with a history book posthaste. That's where this program began. We can quite literally state that if it weren't for the Bush administration, then we wouldn't be in this mess, among the many other messes we're currently in as a result of his presidency's failures and outright lies. The connections to the Obama administration come into play here in 2008, where he defended a revised version of the plan and stated his reservations for doing so, and the Senate vote in 2012 that occurred on his watch. Even taking into consideration the fact that PRISM was "can’t be used to intentionally target any Americans or anyone in the U.S." but rather foreign nationals living abroad who could pose a threat to our national security (and US citizens living abroad on a very limited basis), we have to admit that we're dealing with some very complex moral arguments on both sides of the issue.

The sooner we admit that, the closer we come to the state of mind necessary to debate this logically. Violent revolution is not the solution we need, but neither is continuance down the road to a total police state. If anything, these kinds of programs need to be highly regulated if they can't be removed entirely. Even transparency has its risks. As much as we need to know what our government is doing supposedly on our behalf, I also wouldn't have wanted the Operation Overlord plans to be revealed prematurely, even "for the sake of transparency".

I hope we can arrive at a happy medium, but I'm not entirely confident that we will. After all, who says our ethical philosophers are any better than those of Rome or the Greek city-states? They wrestled with these same dilemmas. Perhaps that's why I take issue with claims of American exceptionalism, at least in practice: just because some of our nation's solutions to age-old problems of human society are different hasn't made those problems go away. We still fight over rights stated to be "inalienable" and granted by our Creator, as we have from the days before the Revolution and as we likely will until the end of time. If anything, we feel them more strongly than they've ever been felt before, due to the high standards we set for ourselves in this nation's founding documents. The question, it seems, is this: will we ever be wise enough to collectively realize America's position in regard to historical context? And if so, will we be strong enough as a people to do something about it?

The Allure of Conspiracy Theories, or Even More Intellectual Hipsters

Holocaust denial.

Roswell.

The Apollo program.

9/11.

Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Benghazi.

Aurora.

Now Sandy Hook.

You've seen the documentaries, the books, and the Facebook posts. Maybe you even did some serious research into the claims made by these various "theories". I hesitate to call them actual theories because I actually like science, and a scientific theory has nothing in common with any of the above-mentioned conspiracies. In at least two of those examples, science has actually done a thorough job at debunking the ideas in question. Even Buzz Aldrin got in the action back in 2002, debunking some dude in the chops with a mean right hook.

For as long as we've had public access to the internet, these kinds of conspiracies have been able to spread and mutate at unprecedented rates; that's part of the price we pay for nearly global availability to a good portion of all human knowledge since the dawn of writing and beyond. Misinformation has always been a part of our history as a species, and now the situation is infinitely more complicated. Keeping up with and debunking the kinds of messages which used to be relegated to sandwich boards worn by scraggly-bearded street "prophets" is a never-ending task, and that only refers to the things that aren't so far out there that no debunking should even be necessary. I'm looking at you, Time Cube Guy.

The question I always have is "why". Why should I believe that the US government falsified all seven manned Apollo lunar missions, including the one that didn't even land on the moon, and none of the hundreds of thousands of people involved (much less the KGB) ever spilled the beans? Why should I believe that the September 11th attacks were the result of controlled demolitions when even the so-called smoking guns underlying the conspiracy are perfectly explainable using physics (see Popular Mechanics link above) and have subsequently been corroborated by thousands of independent scientists? Why should I believe that the Obama administration hired and then recycled "crisis actors" who "couldn't even cry convincingly" to pose as lawyers and parents for two different mass shootings, even though they should've known that the crazy corners of the internet would be all over it like, well, moon-spiracy nuts on out-of-focus Photoshops of Apollo capsules?

The other "why" question I have in mind is "why do people even fall for this stuff?" I don't think I really know the answer to this, because I would probably be a rich psychologist by now if I did. What I will do is try relatively hard to figure out why conspiracy theories seem so exciting to the people who believe them, and how they can be so laughable for those of us who don't.

As the so-called Sandy Hook truther movement is still fresh in the minds of everyone with an internet connection and especially a Facebook, we'll first take a look at that. Not necessarily at their claims, which are assuredly addressed in detail elsewhere, but at the underlying factors behind the spread of the ironically-named truthers.

One point that bears remembering at the moment is that American sociopolitical discourse involving guns is functionally retarded, and I mean that in a purely psychological way, as in "we are years behind the rest of what we describe egotistically as the first world". It's now gotten to the point where our gun debate in the US now plays host to both crackerjack Examiner screeds about "false flag Illuminati psy ops" (actually, don't click that link because the author gets paid by the click) and drooling NRA lovers who feel that the First Amendment gives them the right to heckle the father of a murdered Kindergartner during a congressional hearing by shouting "THE SECOND AMENDMENT!" as he talks about why nobody needs military-style weapons.

Now, the Second Amendment and its interpretation are the subject for a different post. In fact, interpretation of said amendment isn't really my job, since I'm neither a constitutional law professor nor a federal judge. What is relevant here is the fact that our discourse on guns has become so polarized that to suggest moderation is, at least for the folks on the "all guns, all the time" side of the debate, inerrant "proof" that you yourself are culpable in a vast, decades-long disarmament conspiracy. Oh, you didn't know that you were suddenly complicit and have in fact been complicit for your whole life? Well, that's easy enough to address. The hardcore conspiracy nut will simply tell you that you're either lying, or that they possess some secret knowledge not known to the rest of the world and certainly not known to you (unless of course you were lying).

And here we've arrived at one of the hallmarks of conspiracy theories: secret knowledge that can be used as a weapon against your perceived enemies, and specifically the belief that said knowledge elevates the believer above the rest. Call them what you will - the masses, sheep, Kool-Aid drinkers (though we all know the folks at Jonestown drank Flavor-Aid instead), what have you. The very fact that you know something they don't (which, incidentally, will probably turn out to be false) makes you better than them, or at least it does in Conspiracy Theory Land.

For some historical context regarding humanity's obsession with secret knowledge, we should to go back about two thousand years to the beginnings of a movement we now know as Gnosticism  Not agnosticism, which is the philosophical position that one does not and cannot know whether there is or isn't a God after all, which seems rather pragmatic when you put it that way. No, Gnosticism is an English adaptation of a Greek term based on the word gnosis, or "direct knowledge". As an adjective, "Gnostic" is typically applied to religious/philosophical groups that emerged after Christianity that were bent on discovering gnosis, or true knowledge of life, the universe, and everything. Their teachings frequently referenced supposedly secret ceremonies, rituals, and teaching that were not only traceable to apostles or other leaders in the early Christian church or even to figures in the Old Testament, but also that were in fact the "true" way to attain salvation.

The Gnostics were naturally derided by early Christian authors, mainly because various gnostic sects of the day worshiped just about any biblical figure you could think of as being the actual savior, whereas everyone else apparently just wasn't hip enough to, say, worship Cain or the snake from Genesis. There were also sects who believed that Jesus the spirit possessed the body of Jesus the man, or that wisdom was personified as a female member of the godhead, or that the God of the Old Testament was actually a demon holding the spirits of humanity captive, or that God was actually a hermaphrodite, etc... I think you get the point.

Basically, all of these Gnostic sects can be seen as 1st century equivalents of the conspiracy movements we see today for the reason that they all relied on a unique belief they thought to be secret and/or ancient, resulting in an over-arching assumption about reality that would ultimately "save" them from the corrupt systems that make up the world around us. In other words, they were snooty, pseudo-intellectual hipsters who believed the world to be just like The Matrix, and they were such hipsters that they did this 2000 years before The Matrix even came out. Whoa. It's like Hispter-ception. They used this "secret knowledge" of theirs to parade around as quasi-enlightened individuals, simply because their beliefs were so much more complicated than everyone else's at the time and were therefore true, because apparently simplicity of belief equates to simplicity of mind. If that's truly the case, then I can only imagine them trying to wrap their heads around all the things we now take for granted as a result of that tiny little equation known as the theory of relativity.

I like simplicity. I like Occam's Razor. If your solution or explanation is too complicated, it's probably not the best. In fact, it's probably stupid. If, when confronted with a mass shooting at an elementary school, you have to resort to "reptilians pulling the strings behind the global bankers pulling the strings behind the UN used President Obama as a tool to use Adam Lanza as a tool (or did they?!) to fake a mass shooting at an elementary school so that he can pass dictatorial executive orders to bring Agenda 21 and the UN Weapons Treaty into America... just like Hitler!", then I don't really have time enough in my day to deal with you. First off, stop to breathe. Run-on sentences don't do anyone any good. Second, the sheer ridiculousness of the premise is defeated by the vastly simpler explanation, which is that a crazy kid got a hold of his mom's guns and shot people with them.

Now, the great thing about believing in conspiracy theories is that you can justifiably resort to ad hominem attacks on anyone who opposes you. What, a physicist debunked your pet moon landing hypothesis? Just scream "Sheeple!" and call it a day! It's really as simple as that. Is your name Sheriff Joe Arpaio and do you doggedly cling to a third-rate hack "journalist" from World Net Daily (who makes his living selling fear), all in an attempt to retain some semblance of relevance through press conference diatribes about the manufactured controversy surrounding President Obama's birth certificate? No problem: just keep promising a bigger bomb shell at your next press conference, and keep sending deputies to Hawaii on the tax payers' dime.

Conspiracy theories can also be comforting in the sickest way possible, because they claim to give us a scapegoat onto which we can pile our collective problems. Housing market got you down? Blame the global bankers/Jews! Don't like the president but don't want to air your real grievances for fear of being called a racist? Just pretend he was born in Kenya, because every single person of African descent was obviously born in Africa: where else would they come from? Do you casually admire Adolf Hitler's racial ideologies because you, as a person of Germanic descent, need to artificially inflate your own fragile ego while accusing others of nursing a 70-year victim complex? Simply assert that "some reports" about the Holocaust were exaggerated! See? Conspiracy theories can be easy and fun, provided you don't have enough properly-firing synapses to see through them.

In short, belief in conspiracy theories is so deliciously tempting for at least two reasons: the believer can feel as if they've been initiated into a secret club of those who know the "truth", and anyone who disagrees with you is simply a non-believer who can be summarily shunned and derided. It's like the ultimate in juvenile non-logic, because all you have to do to be "right" is be afraid and eat up everything the bloggers tell you to believ-




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Oh my... I... I think just figured it out. So instead of being right by listening to experts (physicists, chemists, law enforcement, astronauts, witnesses, etc.) and studying their respective testimonies, all I have to do is turn over my heart and soul to some basement blogger on WordPress and suddenly I get to call myself an expert now? Well gee, if that's all I gotta do, who needs a degree from MIT or even a basic working knowledge of  history and scientific principles? The world jut became so much simpler! I'm right, everyone else is wrong and most likely culpable in the same cover-up the guy on Examiner was raging against the other day, and any contradicting evidence to my ideas is also part of the cover-up. How convenient!

Of course, the real world doesn't really work like that. The real world, as shown increasingly by science, is based on some pretty simple principles. There's our old buddy e=mc^2 again, allowing everything from a basic understanding of light as energy, to the foundations of nuclear physics. I tend to view all these conspiracies through the same lens. For instance, I can quite easily believe the "official narrative" about the Holocaust because I've actually been to Neuengamme concentration camp and have seen what Christian-in-name-only, supersessionist lunatics can accomplish when they set their minds to it. Also, it makes far more sense to me that decades of theoretical and eventually practical astrophysics would culminate in not one, but six successful manned ventures to the moon, not counting the hundreds of probes and rovers before and after the Apollo program. The idea that determined terrorists would take flight lessons for years before hijacking and crashing passenger jets into buildings makes far more sense than the controlled demolition nonsense getting passed around on the internet, mostly because the alleged holes in the "official narrative" aren't holes at all. By the way, it bears mentioning that whenever you see the term "official narrative" in association with anything even mildly controversial, you can know for sure that you've spotted another conspiracy theorist.

Are you confused as to whether a given viewpoint represents scientific inquiry or fear-mongering conspiracy? Here's a handy guide:

• Science starts with a hypothesis, then collects data, and concludes with a theory designed to match the data. Conspiracies begin with a conclusion, then manipulate existing data into becoming ex post facto "proof".
• Science is falsifiable, meaning experiments are conducted with the expressed purpose of disproving previous hypotheses and theories. Conspiracies pass themselves off as being incapable of falsification, as if only the existence of the idea were proof enough of its veracity, which works to disregard all evidence to the contrary as delusions perpetrated by a nebulous enemy, e.g. Illuminati, Jews/global bankers, Masons, reptilians, etc.
• Science is cumulative and incremental, in that a gradual accumulation of data ultimately leads to an increasingly-complete understanding of a given principle. Conspiracies tend to leap into being rather suddenly, beginning with a single over-arching hypothesis - "someone is out to get me" - and accelerating into a full-fledged conspiracy mythos.
• Science is essentially the pursuit of the simplest possible explanation for natural phenomena. Conspiracies thrive on complex, drawn-out plans which demand acceptance merely because they have the illusion of being far-reaching and all-encompassing.

Remember, folks: if it sounds ridiculous, chances are it's probably ridiculous.