Spies Like Us?

I have to begin this post with a modest amount of full disclosure:  without going into the details, I have a family connection to the National Security Agency that may influence my perspective on its work, although I would like to believe that it doesn't.  That said, here are my thoughts on the disclosures this past week about NSA's data-mining from telephone records.

There are, frankly, compelling arguments on both sides of this fence.  There has been a tendency to talk about the death of privacy in an Internet-connected world.  I disagree.  When it comes to privacy, I don't think Internet users surrender their privacy when they use a keyboard, a tablet or a smartphone any more than their predecessors did when they sat down at a writing desk or picked up a land-line receiver.  However electronic and world-wide it is, the Internet is still a mix of open and closed communications systems, and the users of each have appropriate expectations in using each one.  If I maintain a Web site anyone can access, and post information on it, that information is fair game for anyone and everyone who sees it.  If I send an e-mail to a family member or friend, whether the subject is politics or cats who love cheeseburgers, I have every reason to expect that the contents of that e-mail will remain, absent specific permission to the contrary, between me and the recipient.

Nevertheless, we live in a dangerous world, one in which danger has become easier to transmit than at any other time in history.  And, in our history, the right to privacy has never been absolute; the Fourth Amendment protects us from "unreasonable searches and seizures" (my emphasis).  Long before the Internet was invented (and then, with the help of Al Gore, expanded), courts spent decades carving out "reasonable" exceptions to the warrant requirement for an arrest or search.  Like it or not, what is "reasonable" is always a moving target, and its speed is accelerating along with our ability to share ideas, feelings--and threats.

Barack Obama is enough of a constitutional scholar to know the history of this balancing act, and the logic behind it.  As a senator, he took steps in an attempt to address and, hopefully correct this balance.  Which is why he is comfortable defending NSA's work, and why I think he should be, given the limits of that work. And it is why the public, thus far, seem to agree with him.

Which is not to say there is no reason to be concerned about this.  Government overreach, regardless of who is in charge, is always a potential problem.  And it can turn into a source of grotesque political hypocrisy that threatens our ability to come together in the face of common danger.  As citizens, all of us need to find our own sense of balance between the competing needs of privacy and security--and make sure that the political leaders of both parties respect it.  Not to mention the Supreme Court, which has just decided that mandatory DNA collection is constitutional (and you know how bad a decision is when Justice Scalia is the dissenting voice for civil liberties).

And now, back to more immediate problems, like the fact that state-sponsored capitalism is destroying America.