On Government Surveillance

I've been trying to follow all of the details on the controversy over the government grabbing all of our telephone records.  The spin has two themes: either it's an egregious violation of citizen privacy and dangerous government overreach that will lead to tyranny, or it's a relatively innocuous data mining project intended to uncover potential terrorist communications.

I remember during the Bush years when Liberals (including Obama) were convinced that the Bush administration was spying on them.  I remember overwrought college professors going on television to decry their certainty that somebody in the Bush Administration was listening into their conversations.  I imagined some analyst sitting in a cubicle listening to these blowhard academics railing on and on to their friends about the evil George W Bush and just yawning.

Back then I went in search of actual stories about people who had been arrested, harassed, or even interviewed about something they had said in a private conversation on the telephone.  I didn't find a single example.  So I decided that, most likely, the Bush people were telling the truth.  That they were only listening to conversations involving known foreign terrorists.

Then the congress passed a law tightening the rules and requiring FISA court approval before the government could listen to conversations.

The current issue is different.  It doesn't appear to be about listening in, but just collecting data on all of our phone calls.  Who we called or received calls from, how long we talked, when the call took place, etc.

So what do I think?  I have trouble imagining how it's constitutionally permitted for the government to gather and store this information.  What I can imagine is hanky panky of the sort we've recently learned the IRS has been up to. 

Suppose we get into campaign season again.  Let's say I decide to run for Congress.  The Democrats decide to try to destroy my reputation so their candidate can win that particular seat.  So one of their willing accomplices in the Obama administration signs onto the telephone database and looks up my call history.  Suppose they find somebody in my call history that's been a conservative activist, in my case most likely somebody active in the Pro Life movement.

They use that information to run ads that claim that that Pro Life activist and I are tight.  Maybe that person has been arrested at some point in the past when picketing Planned Parenthood.  All of a sudden their ads tell everybody that I'm a woman hater and support rape and want to deny medical care to women.

And that's the mildest form of hanky panky they would use to destroy me based on those telephone records.  Imagine a government that goes the rest of the way to totalitarianism.  At that point, all they would need to raid my house and take me away to prison in the middle of the night is to find a single telephone call I may have had with someone else they deem a threat to their authority.

So I believed that when the issue of surveillance came up during the Bush years that it should be narrowly targeted to terrorist organizations.  I still believe that.  And I'm convinced that this latest issue is overreach and can easily lead to tyranny.

I'm disappointed in the legislators who are now working overtime to convince us that this is no big deal, we can trust them, and it's only being used to catch terrorists.  Sorry, no sale.