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?