Why NSA, FBI, and Other Folk Will Continue Spying on Americans

            I'm writing this blog post shortly after a Federal court has ruled illegal — illegal, not specifically unConstitutional — "The unprecedented and unwarranted bulk collection of the entire U.S. population's phone records by the government" of the United States, and not long before the US Congress debates extending key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act beyond their expiration date of 1 June 2015.

            Moving into a major election year, the Congress is not going to cut back significantly on surveillance of Americans nor are they — or any other moderate-to-highly visible group of politicians — going to cut back significantly in years without major elections. The surveillance of Americans will continue, along with anyone else heavily using electronic communications for two basic reasons.

            First, because large-scale bulk collection of data can be done and is routinely done by various political States and a hell of a lot more by "Non-Governmental Organizations" in a broad sense of the term: including commercial operations. American and others spill our guts to the companies, so the data are out there; and being out there, that data will be collected, sifted, analyzed, shared, sold, and used: by commercial operations and by security operations.

            Second, because no politician with ambitions, and only a vanishingly small number of politicians of any sort would be dumb enough to be totally honest on the subject on record.

            Let me repeat a thought experiment. Question to the President of the United States, or would-be President: "Sir (or Ma'am), given that the President's main duty is to protect the American people, will you do everything possible to prevent an attack on US citizens?" Answer from the President (or candidate):

          I'm not going to ad lib some bullshit clichés here, and you won't get a good sound bite; so I've e-mailed my text to your smart phones but will read it for the record.

          First off, Thomas Hobbes in the 17^th c. said that the first duty of any Sovereign was to protect his, her, or its subjects, and that's true enough; but Hobbes, at one time notoriously, followed that premise about protecting subjects to a logical conclusion that so long as the Sovereign provided protection, he, she, or it had to be obeyed absolutely; and Hobbes pushed his argument to recommend what we'd call totalitarian government.

                   The first duty of the President of the United States is "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States": my first job is defending America, and performing that job can cost the lives of some Americans or, at times, a lot of Americans. The first job of the President includes preserving the US Bill of Rights, and those rights can endanger Americans.

          Most Americans most of the time would be safer in a police state. That we don't have a police state protects racial and ethnic minorities and people with unpopular opinions, but the net effect, even among minorities, is a loss of lives of people who'd survive better under an authoritarian of even totalitarian regime. That "tree of liberty," as Mr. Jefferson said, "must be refreshed from time to time" with blood, but not just "the blood of patriots and tyrants" but also of average, innocent folk who'd be not be killed — or wounded or maimed — if America were as rigorously policed as Germany under the Third Reich: but, in a non-racist way, with equal opportunities for all trouble-makers to be neutralized.

          So, my duty is to protect Americans, but limited by — as the truism has it — limited by balancing safety with liberty.

         And balancing safety and liberty with concerns beyond liberty.          So: Will I do "everything possible to prevent an attack"? No, I will not.          What is possible to be done pretty obviously includes things that have been done. What has been done has been very well documented by chroniclers and historians, and in our time by courageous people working for groups like Amnesty international.

          There has been at least one regime that has tortured children in front of their parents to break the parents and get them to cooperate in suppressing antigovernment activity — or minimally to terrorize the parents and population. Will I order the torture of even one child to prevent an attack that might save many Americans? No, I will not. I will leave it as an absolute prohibition, literally absolute: no torturing of children, not even if doing such evil might — always might — do good.          Great powers including the United Kingdom and the United States have bombed cities to flaming rubble to pursue war aims. The US invaded Iraq on the possibility it might become a threat. Would I order a military nuclear attack on a foreign city to preempt a terrorist attack on a US city? I would not. It's bloody arithmetic, but violating the taboo against nuclear weapons and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners wouldn't be justified even if it saved the lives of three or four or five thousand Americans.

          Get the point?

          Toughen up, people. If you're going to be free, you and your children are going to have to take risks. If we as a country are to behave morally, some of us who might've lived long, healthy lives will end up dead or wounded or maimed.

            So, I'll protect your butts but also your freedom and that of your descendants. I'll do what I can to keep you safe, but I will also "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and try to keep us, as a people, decent human beings.

          If you don't like it,
                   impeach me. OR

                   don't vote for me as President. OR

                   vote against me for re-election.
 

            Now, what are the odds on such a speech getting made, or, if made, the speaker's having a career in US politics?

            So long as politicians can't say, "Hell, no! I won't do everything possible to protect you," they're going to have to do such relatively innocuous "things" as spy on us.

"Oh, Right; I'm the Mommy now": Mini-Epiphanies (24 March 2013)

         I'm not writing here about those "Eureka!" moments, grand epiphanies or satoris. I've never had grand anything, but I have had the little epiphanies: "ah-hah" moments or "Oh, yeah" moments — or "Oh, shit!" moments on something not just immediate and personal.

         A colleague of mine — call her Katarina for future reference — described hers at a shopping mall one day watching some unattended kids misbehaving. "Harrumph!" she thought, or maybe something stronger. "One of the mothers should do something about that." And then it hit her, "Oh, right; I'm the mommy now" — and she strode over and, figuratively, kicked some tween and teen ass.

         That's an important moment: when we realize we're "the mommy now" or, in unisex formulation, "the adult in the room," or at least the closest responsible person in the mall.

         My experience was somewhat different; it was having confirmed how difficult it could be for me to to be accepted as an adult, and as an authority.

         I started teaching with one course in Rhetoric 101 (College Comp/"Freshman English") at the University of Illinois at Urbana. I was twenty-three- or twenty-four-years old and 5'2" tall (say 157 cm.) and still had my hair, a fair amount of it and still dark. Since I got my course the Friday before classes started, I was definitely "low man in seniority" and ended up teaching in the Armory in a classroom that lacked not only air-conditioning but also ventilation. I arrived early and wore my three-piece weddings, funerals, and interviews suit. I got talking with a nice young woman waiting with me outside the classroom. Eventually:

         "Well," I finally said; "I guess we'd better go in."

         "Nah," she said; "we've got time."

         "I have a lot to write on the blackboard," I said.

         At which point she stepped back, looked me over, kind of pointed, and said with mild amused/bemused disbelief, "You're the teacher?!"

         "Why the hell else would I be in a three-piece suit in this heat?!" I responded. And I walked in.
         That student and I got along, and the class went fine, all things considered. For one thing, they were very tolerant of my ignorance and inexperience, and, well, just good people. Last day of class I took them out for a kind of class party at a local dive. You have one guess who alone of the group got stopped at the bar and had to show two pieces of ID and still got hassled to buy a beer.

         It could have been worse. My ID were legitimate, and I was an adult.

         Part of my entry into adulthood came at age seventeen or eighteen when I took over as president of a charity group and had to deal with a group of guys who'd embezzled the profits of a dance their high school fraternity had run and took off to Florida for a very long weekend. My previous job with the charity was what would later be called "Media Relations," and I was well aware that we couldn't afford the bad publicity of having the guys arrested. So we covered it up; most centrally, I covered up a really reprehensible theft. However, this was not exactly a loss of innocence for me.

         Much later in life, when I was one of "the older guys" on Miami University's Student Affairs Council, another faculty member and I were talking with one of "the younger guys": an Ayn-Rand Libertarian mostly, but a young person who'd just compromised and cut his first political deal. My colleague kidded the guy with an allusion to loss of virginity, and I started to throw in, "Yeah, I remember—" when my colleague cut me off with, "Rich, I don't know anything about your sex life, and God knows I don't want to know anything about your sex life, but politically, you were never a virgin."

         That's an overstatement, but OK; politically, by seventeen or eighteen, by the time I took over as president of that charity — I was no innocent.

         What the theft taught me, what dealing indirectly with the thieves taught me, was the important insight, "Everybody feels justified."

         That was a kind of "Oh, shit" moment.

         As Steven Pinker notes somewhere in his monumental The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), it's a real problem that murderers and others who commit violent acts typically feel justified; indeed they are in their own minds moral people, doing justice upon their victims.

         Not everybody feels justified; some people feel guilt and remorse. But most of us, most of the time, do feel justified, even when we do bad things, even when, indirectly, we steal from crippled children.

         My second confirmation into adulthood came on 23 November 1963. I typed that correctly: 23 November, the day after President John F. Kennedy was murdered.

         I was saddened, and appalled by the murder of President Kennedy, but it didn't shake my vision in the universe or anything like that. Three American presidents had been assassinated before, President Lincoln quite famously; and I knew of the attempts to kill Franklin Roosevelt — and had been alive during the known attempt to kill President Truman. (I only learned of the attempt on his life by the Stern Gang in researching this paragraph.) Anyway, however much some of my fellow citizens believed "It can't happen here," in my universe, such shit happened, and "It" — any "it" that happened elsewhere or in earlier times — could indeed "happen here" in the United States.

         Nah, what shook me up a bit was a petty thing, and personal with me.

         When Kennedy died, I put a black ribbon across the seal of our fraternity at the entrance of the house. I was a house officer and had the permission of the chapter president to do so, and it was the custom if we mourned the death of someone in the chapter. I thought we should make some gesture, and the single black ribbon was decorously restrained (the seal was inside).

         One of my fraternity brothers tore off the ribbon, primarily, it got back to me, to get back at me for a gesture he thought stupid — and in part just to hurt me.

         He later apologized, after other Greek houses on campus lowered their flags to half-staff and such, but he threw in that, yeah, he did what he had done mostly just to hurt me.

         This was my introduction to malice: doing harm to another without profit to oneself.
         I ended up writing my master's essay on malice among some of Shakespeare's major villains, and the idea of malice is pretty central to my dissertation. "Everyone feels justified" — or many of us do, much of the time, even when we shouldn't — and "Some people are just no damn good," or, more exactly, many of us will act maliciously, hurting others while not helping ourselves. Or not helping ourselves except insofar as we feed our pride.

         And just how dangerous that occasional maliciousness can be was taught to me by a former student, after he'd graduated and had gone to law school and — before moving to the really big show of international law — served as a small-town Ohio attorney. A young man himself at the time, the attorney told me that his father had never hit him but that as a child and teenager he had feared his father. He had clients, though, who really lived the dumb-ass slogan "No Fear." When I wrote him and checked my memory of what he had said, he wrote back that some of his clients "had no fears or boundaries … they feared no person or adult figure … (one guy, Robert "Rip-Off" Jones was heard to say (moments before his death by gun), 'I'm not afraid of you or your gun.'" These guys "were largely socialized by the streets" and "having no fear was part of their problem, and definitely a problem for others."

         It's definitely a problem for others when "No Fear" and no limits are combined in a large human being with desires to lash out suddenly or (and ethically worse) act with a cold-blooded malice.
         It's probably a good thing none of these guys — or their little sisters — were in the group my colleague Katarina confronted at the mall. I'm not sure many guys with no limits would find themselves saying, "Oh, right; I'm the Daddy now" and start setting limits for others.

         That's a depressing thought, and I won't end on it.

         For another thing I've learned, in an "oh, yeah" moment while reading depressing books on human nastiness — another insight that comes through is, "Well, yeah, but most of us most of the time feel justified because we're doing OK." All of us, at one time or another, can do some really bad shit; but, again, most of us, most of the time, don't.

         I'm sure the first class I taught sensed my fear and noted that I looked sixteen — but they cut me some slack. Sometimes, most of us, can be downright kind.