I'll be honest. I started out thinking it was no big deal. This world holds many dangers, I reasoned, and sometimes they can be avoided or prevented. Keeping a very close watch on things can help with this.
Which is what the NSA purports to be doing. Keeping watch.
Then I did some thinking, and realized something is not right.
Who can be trusted with the kind of raw power they are harnessing?
How can it be properly checked if so few are even allowed to know about it?
Out of purported necessity the United States government has hidden much of itself, burying many of its doings under a cloak of abject secrecy. Woven of a culture long disciplined to furtiveness, and reinforced by the constant threat of prosecution and ostracization among the ranks, it has become an entangled mesh of deceit so layered and multiform that God alone can pierce it completely. Who knows what-all is happening underneath it. Apparently you have to have a few stars on your uniform to legally know much about it at all.
As for the average American citizen, we know next to nothing.
We know they are watching us and gathering information on us.
What and who are they watching? What kind of information are they gathering? And how much?
Classified: Top Secret
We know they are sifting said information, and their fellow citizens, to find "enemies".
What is their sieve? And who passes through it?
Classified: Top Secret
We know that the interpretations of written law allowing all of this to be "legal", along with guidelines and particulars regarding any "oversight", are themselves under the cloak.
Classified: Top Secret.
Um.
Hold on a minute.
What?
It's the last one that gets me.
I think the first two classifications are part of the real-world difficulties of National Security. Some of the dirtier and more unsettling aspects, to be sure, but in my opinion necessary to at least some degree. But I think the last one, when coupled with the first two, our current strategy in other words, takes the notion of "National Security" well into the realm of tyranny. I'm no constitutional scholar, and I'm certainly not a lawyer, but it seems obvious to me that something is terribly wrong with that strategy. Constitutionally wrong.
It seems to me that when a "law" is knowable only to a few then it is no longer law. It is fiat. And when it governs the use of such immense power the ramifications become very very unsettling, even to someone who is very much a layperson on these matters (me).
How can such a strategy possibly square with that quaint old notion of We The People? How can a free and just society possibly exist under such overtly hostile AND secretively "legal" government surveillance?
Who will watch the watchers? They've literally made that illegal.