Letters to the Editor
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A couple of comments...
1) It is easier to blackmail the press than the Congress. It is just as effective, if the press runs what you want it to run, an out of line representative or senator is toast. This was done to control the Monica Lewinski scandal, the Washington Post ran stories against the administration in part because they were told that if they didn't the Washington Times would run stories saying they were colluding with the White House.
2) I don't think that TIA became "basketball". It became the Advanced Research and Development Activity Office (at least in this country).
3) CALEA says warrants "or other lawful authorization" and doesn't define the latter. Does anyone know what this means?
4) http://www.newsfollowup.com/dom_spy_agncy.htm gives a long list of the agencies and laws and government programs for domestic surveillance.
For years now, whenever stuff like this came to light, invariably someone would start talking about slippery slopes. I know there are others on this site who appreciate energy landscapes and know that it is possible to be in places where everywhere you turn you are on a different slope, and all of them are slippery (I'm tempted to make an analogy to the nowhere differentiable surfaces that exist just before...chaos). Here are some of the slopes we have traveled down:
One Percent Doctrine: At the top, we need to consider a scenario even if it has only a one percent chance of happening. At the bottom, a fact is true even if it has only a one percent chance of being true.
Ticking Time Bomb: At the top, extraordinary measures are needed if someone knows how to stop a ticking time bomb that will kill a million people. At the bottom, extraordinary rendition and torture are necessary, the Geneva Conventions are "quaint".
The FISA Wall: At the top, law enforcement needs just a little help from intelligence to put a truly bad person away. At the bottom, we can't distinguish between intelligence gathering and criminal investigations, the FBI starts to spy, the NSA gathers information on Americans.
The Powell Doctrine: At the top, the military is gun shy if there isn't the use of overwhelming force, an exit plan, and a clear justification. At the bottom, we start pre-emptive wars on bad intelligence, disregarding the warnings from the military because we believe them to be "chicken".
Congressional Oversight: At the top, the President's hands are tied by the need to make sure any covert operation could withstand congressional scrutiny. At the bottom, an off-the-shelf operation unit outside the oversight of Congress.
Electronic Spying: At the top, the laws are outdated due to information that knows no international borders. At the bottom, if our laws will not permit surveillance, find a country that will: the extraordinary rendition of the search warrant.
The list goes on and on, but this surveillance thing is not going to be a genie that can be put back in the bottle without a lot of work. Any warrant laws the Congress writes can be subverted by finding a friendly, or even an ignorant, government and taking the operation offshore. They did it with the black prisons, they did it with Guantanamo and Bagram, they did it with TIA and RAHS. Or they turn to private enterprise like Narus STA ("You want your company's IP to be secure, don't you?"). Nobody even notices anymore that if the Supreme Court shuts them down on something, and they just take infinite time to "study the problem in order to bring our programs under compliance."
Glenn is right to ask if we know which program we are talking about. There are probably tens of them, it would cost the surveillors nothing to ritually shut one down whenever the outcry got too loud. People like Comey are, unfortunately, sticking fingers in a dike that looks like Swiss cheese. More than half the crashing dot.com wannabes whose businesses were in any way related to information transaction, search, natural language processing, or pattern recognition reformulated themselves as security businesses, practically on September 12, 2001.
...And it's damn near illegal to pass a law that puts a single company out of business in this country, regardless of who controls the Congress.
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pessimism
I own Dr. Strangelove - it is one of the best movies ever.
This all might get a lot worse before it gets better.
Given that none of the yahoos in charge here could competently conspire their way out of a paper bag, all we would need would be a simple tendency in our government (and media) toward a more authoritarian structure for this to roll and eventually snowball.
It is not as though Octavian just woke up one morning and decided to be emperor - it took several decades for the republican strength and structure of Rome to decay. Before Octavian was even in place to make his move, all the power players already knew that monarchy was on the table. It sounds better to SAY you are fighting for the republic, but, you know . . .. Until the day he died Octavian/ Augustus would periodically carry on about how he was going to step down and restore power to the senate.
The problem with fighting the Communists was that a lot of people really did not want global thermo-nuclear war. Everybody got kind of freaked out about that, and then things simmered down. Symmetrical war isn’t fun for anybody. The Islamist terrorists now, though, appear to want exactly the same kind of fight that some people in our country want, without either side really having anything at risk. The Islamists get a power vacuum in their own territories and all the recruits they can handle. America doesn’t really want the LAND there, don’t even want to have to deal with any of the people, and certainly not to look after or defend them - she just wants money and power.
The power rangers here in America get to keep a furnace of fear and hate stoked to bursting just by prosecuting a war at little actual cost or difficulty to their own selves, and that furnace helps trip all the little levers and gears that inch opaque actors closer and closer to more absolute power. The Christianists will help - just tell them they can go nuts against abortion and make all the gay people illegal, and even kill them some Moslems. Everybody gets to denounce secularism, subvert the rule of law, advance policy by violence, and feel like a righteous badass.
Once that process is in motion, then everybody with any power who is close enough to sniff what is cooking in the cook-pot will no longer be on any one side or another, they will just start figuring out how they can get a seat at the head of the table when it is time to start eating. History is full of countries like ours and people like us, and the really bad times always seem to come around eventually.
ps - and can we start calling VP Cheney the "Grand Vizier" yet?