Amid the back and forth that this place is justly famous for, there are some real concerns about privacy, the need for privacy and the natural desire to make the country safe.
All I want to do here is point out the bleeding obvious, because it's obvious yet I am not hearing many commentors make these points.
Let's jump the secret squiggle, and ask a few pointed questions.
The first point is simply a nod to the Founders.
Why did they bother to write the Constitution? Why compound the error by adding the 4th Amendment? Why did they create a Democratic Republic, even if some of that appears to have been ceded to corporations and their money?
By and large, the Constitution serves only to limit the power that a government holds over the people, by endowing the people with inalienable rights, and forbidding the government from making laws abridging those rights. Right?
We have the right to privacy in communications, and personal effects that we consider to be private. We did not vote to reduce those rights and allow government to know who we called, for how long, and where we were when we made that call. No one asked that, it was not part of a campaign platform, we didn't vote on those questions.
Related to that is my deep suspicion that the government is fully aware that we, the people, do not consent to this, because they choose to keep their interpretation of the current laws secret. We are not allowed to know why they think this legal, we are not allowed to know that Verizon is handing over information. We are not even allowed to know that they have been asked.
We are not allowed to know that anything we may put on Dropbox is subject to harvesting, or that our Google searches will become part of a government database.
Why are we not allowed to know? I understand that governments need to keep secrets, I get it. What I do not get is how a democracy is supposed to work if the laws that govern it are secret. How do we, the people, make informed choices and decisions when we do not know the basis on which the government is conducting the business of the people.
I want to stress that. The people are not the enemy, and the government are our servants. We did not vote to change that. They changed it, and they kept it a secret.
Call them whistleblowers, traitors or call them patriots. I don't hold much with labels. Look at what they did. One guy, a soldier, showed us just how easy it is for a twenty-two-year-old kid to learn the secrets, and spill them. The other, a rather more discriminating and slightly older guy let us know that the government is spying on the American people, in America.
These guys may be anything you want them to be, but what matters rather more than that is what they revealed. Are they criminals, or are they exposing criminality?
The "F" in "FISA" stands for "foreign". Surely that means something? Keeping everything secret, however, has another spin-off. It means that no one can ever challenge this secret legal interpretation. No one can have standing because, until the other day, no one could have standing because the fact that they were being spied upon ... was secret. That sounds like a government end-run around the Supreme Court to me, and effectively dismantles our democracy because it removes one of the three branches of government that the Founders put there as a necessary check and balance.
Indeed it appears that the only real check is now the current Administration. Do you trust them, and any who might come after?
They sell us this argument based solely on the premise that there are bad guys out there who want to hurt us. "They hate us for our Freedoms". Would that be the freedom from government intrusion that now appears necessary to keep us safe from government intrusion? The kind of intrusion that previously required a warrant, and "reasonable suspicion of probable cause" to obtain? The kind we could challenge, in a real courtroom with lawyers and everything?
The very idea that we need to ramp up security in this manner, to prevent terrorism is deeply flawed. About as flawed as the argument that suggests that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide. Not only is it a complete nonsense, promulgated only by those who have never had cause to fear a government hell-bent on persecuting political opposition, it is deeply flawed within the concept of America, where we do not have to justify privacy because we have an inalienable right. Government has to justify the intrusion, and not in secret.
The entire war on terror appears to have done little other than make more enemies, radicalize more people and foster a hatred of the United States.
How about we change tack, and quit invading other countries, quit interfering in their internal affairs, and quit allowing our corporations to steal their natural resources.
And how about we force that change by refusing permission to spy on us. It is not "the government against the people", it is our government. They work for us, we do not serve them.
Sunlight is a great disinfectant. If these revelations make it hard for the government to spy on us, and possible for us to have a national conversation, then how is that a bad thing.
You may consider Manning and Snowden to be criminals, but please remember, we are choosy about which criminals we prosecute.
So ask yourself why these two are being indicted, yet other who have done massive, knowable and quantifiable harm to this nation, its people and its interests, are still walking the streets and appearing on talk shows.