TPM Reader ML isn’t buying Simon’s arguments …
Ugh. I almost feel like Simon was trolling us all with his jousting match with a phalanx of straw men.
The first half of his tirade is against the person who thinks the NSA is listening in on our phone calls. I have seen precisely zero people argue this. The point has been that the metadata is problematic enough.
There are those of us civil libertarians who have understood for years that the severely warped legal environment surrounding the Fourth Amendment is highly corrosive. I, and I suppose many others, am perfectly aware that this NSA program is not *new*. I’m also perfectly aware that the program is probably legal under every existing rationale applied to the Fourth Amendment by our nation’s courts. This all began with a premise that was considered outlandish by many when the Supreme Court introduced it–that turning over information to a third party eviscerates its privacy protections vis a vis the government because we have no reasonable expectation of privacy once we turn this information over. (Never mind that this destroys relationships of trust between non-governmental third parties, e.g. between customers and their phone companies, that had existed for years prior to the SCOTUS intervention in these relationships.) What we, and surely David Simon, know is that this clever formulation allows the Court to constantly, repeatedly, and dangerously define down what expectations the American public are reasonably allowed to have. The reason, as Simon points out, that these practices have been in place for decades is because a short-sighted Supreme Court let the dogs loose on American privacy. Noted civil liberties squish Antonin Scalia recognizes the problem and has done so for a long time.
Also, consider the backdrop of these revelations. This week, the Supreme Court announced that law enforcement could collect DNA samples from non-criminals provided there was an arrest. There are thousands of pre-textual arrests a day, and a speeding ticket could lead to your DNA being logged and your being held in jail for 24 hours without trial, arraignment or access to counsel. We are a nation of mass incarceration, often for non-violent crimes like drug possession. So for many many Americans it is only ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ that they aren’t in jail, with the loss of autonomy and voting rights that entails. We have spent the last decade debating whether it’s OK for the government to visually inspect our genitals to determine whether we’re going to blow up a plane. This story is not merely about a single program, though that’s how the discourse has treated it so far. This thing is about a state whose relationship to its citizenry is out of balance. This is not the state the Founders envisioned. PRISM is an especially poignant occasion for us to commemorate that, but it’s hardly the only star in the constellation.
I’m deeply familiar with what a terrorist could accomplish with just a little fissile material. I’m not ignorant or engaged in hyperbole. I and many others see the costs piling up on one side and have no way of assessing the benefits. Until such time as we can test this program legally, or heaven forfend, assess its benefits, all we’re left with is a shrug and a ‘trust the cops.’
