Letters to the Editor

• Enabling technology

  [Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I guess I disagree with some of the people stipulating that people "out there" don't care about these issues. My experience is that they all have opinions, they all do care. But they see the situation very differently.

  When twit gave the list of apologia, yes these are frequent government lines from the Administration. But they know they will work because they are frequent opinions among the populace. They all have "enabling technologies" in our culture that make them adoptable. Here is the list twit gave, with what I have heard from average people, and where I think some of it came from:

  1. 'If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about'.

  Comes from a combination of places. Employer drug tests was a big formative place for this excuse. So was media coverage of trials and congressional testimony that treated people who "pled the fifth" as guilty -- why hide if you've done nothing wrong?

  2. 'If you're dead, you have no need for rights'.

  I was shocked to hear this from someone who was otherwise arguing and expressing himself quite well, and was as well, quite well informed. He lived near ground-zero for 9/11. In his mind, right to life trumped all, expressed by this phrase, exactly. He was taking time off from many liberal stances to endorse the "limited" use of torture.

  3. 'This is the result of a few bad apples acting on their own'.

  The MSM hates "conspiracy theories". Hand them a lone gunman explanation for something, or something that minimizes the need to keep something secret from, well, the MSM, and they believe it the way scientist believe in parsimony.

  4. 'We can't reveal details, as it will impair National Security'.

  Comes directly from the action flicks, as does the related expression "I can tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." Highly related to the scenes in these movies where the CIA and NSA has technology that we on the outside "can't even dream of yet." Also related to the absolutely huge number of people who are closed lipped about the information at their companies, believing it to be a total necessity to keep tons of confidential information.

  5. 'The President is using the powers inherent in his role as Commander in Chief to protect the American Public'.

  MIC stuff. Refering to the President as Comander in Chief. There was a program on NPR about 9 months ago that detailed how all of our embassies in most countries have been gutted and the power transfered to CINCs in those countries. As more and more of the government's projection of power becomes military, and more and more of our vocabulary and movies are military related, it becomes natural to forget that the President is not a "protector" and is not the Commander in Chief of more than 1.5 million Americans.

  6. 'The appropriate people have been briefed in full, but, of course, cannot discuss this'.

  People have been conditioned to believe that "Loose lips sink ships." Compartmented knowledge is accepted because it exists in everyone's workplace. And the public on this one may not know who the "appropriate people" are. I read a lot, I don't know exactly who the minimum group in Congress that needs to be informed is, every time.

  7. 'This is no different than previous administrations, including the Clinton Administration, have done'.

  Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that on the surface at least, have become common practice over several administrations. See WT's piece about the changes in our government at the cabinet level.

  8 'Everything changed after 9/11'.

  For a lot of people in this country, they did. I found I was in the minority at work in disliking and disapproving of MP's at the airport IDing me and walking around with M-16s. I went on a travel tour in 2003, and more than half of the people on the tour were congratulating themselves and others on how brave they had been to get on an airplane to Europe. I have otherwise reasonable friends with medical training that think that it is likely that someone will spread smallpox in my home town soon.

  9. 'The technology has changed, and so we need to change with it'.

  The MSM has always been uneasy about the Internet, and they have conveyed that quite well to their viewership. People have seen a huge amount of technology added to their lives, that they don't understand well, and that makes a lot of sci-fi level fictions seem like they have reality. Combine this with fears about sexual predators, and pornography on the internet, which IMHO was at least partly a smokescreen to keep people off of private companies creating masses of private data, and this becomes a widespread belief.

  10. 'You want the terrorists to win'.

  People believe that we have a lot of dichotomies that we don't have. E.g. the trade-off between civil liberties and safety. In order for the trade-off to be inevitable, we need to have optimized our safety at the current level of civil liberties, otherwise such trade-offs are meaningless. But people don't understand that, and no one is explaining it to them. The people who give them their news are undereducated on such things.

  Permalink Sunday, March 18, 2007 08:58 PM