In Michelle Malkin's post, here, and in a number of other heavy-hitters' blogs, they've been discussing the new Rasmussen poll which indicates 64% of Americans polled agree that it's okay for the NSA to listen in to cell phone calls from furriners to Uhmurricuns.
Well, I'm about 64% in favor of it, myself. The remaining percentage points go toward the fact that I have overseas friends who occasionally (rarely. You never call, you never write... oy!) -- and an ex-fiance in southeast Asia, for whom I still have strong feelings, and with whom I would enjoy continuing to have intimate conversations... without worrying that somebody is listening to us call each other by our old, disturbingly cute nicknames.
But the majority of my mind is stuck on the basic reality, that information is both an intelligence necessity and a commodity. The NSA is supposed to be gleaning intel from every lawful (and even not so lawful) source, in order to protect us from the Big Bad Thingy. Plus, when any other commodity crosses our borders, our Customs agents have the right to inspect those packages. Why should a call or an e-mail coming into our house from Malaysia be any less subject to inspection than a box marked as sculpture from Colombia? They open it up, take a quick peek to see that it's nothing harmful, and they move on. No Big. We're not trading in state secrets, we're not sending plans for attacks, we're just trucking on the open electronic international highway, and the NSA cops won't need to stop us, as long as we're obeying the laws.
Update: A friend has e-mailed me saying he's a member of the remainimg 36% who absolutely don't trust the gummint not to abuse their power -- the concern is that we seem to have insufficient Constitutional safeguards to prevent them from using, for example, current "hate speech" laws to get at people for making statements against political figures. It's true, the "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" defense does sort of echo arguments which led to at least one of the rather abhorrent periods in history. And I'm told they even had a constitution, beforehand.
Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I genuinely believe that we have constitutional protections... and we had lots more until the feel-good movement to legislate what was in the mind of the person (e.g. "Hate Crime" laws -- but blessedly, so far, no Hate Speech laws. Fortunately, we still are allowed to speak our minds, even when what we say is so offensive and stupid we make Dick Durbin, Howie Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Teddy Kennedy, et al look good) rather than what was on his hands -- that is, actions & results (murder, arson, assault, treason, etc.).
He's right. There is a very big risk. But there's also an extremely giganto-rama-jumbo risk that we cripple our defenses and leave ourselves open to repeated 9/11 events. Trade-offs suck, but we do still seem to have most of our regular constitutional protections (except a big part of the first one, due to the BCRA, but that's for another blog), and probably will keep them. Unless we hamstring our intel & defense departments so totally that the other guys win.
No comments:
Post a Comment