Wiretapping -- Another View Posted by Michael Signer

One gets the feeling of a rising hysteria on both sides of the NSA debate -- yes, Democrats are right that a rule of law has probably been broken, and that legal and political consequences should follow.  This analysis, however, is separate from the issue that unfortunately is the sword upon which the American left is impaling themselves again and again -- a failure to evince sufficient conviction on most matters of national security and homeland protection. 

On the other hand, the President's audacious Rove-led political offensive of the last week or so affirms, as always, the essential shamelessness of this team's willingness to politicize issues of national security.  Not only does politics not stop at the water's edge -- it takes over the entire ocean, as we saw when they staged the Iraq vote three weeks before the 2002 midterm elections.   

Along all of these lines, a provocative and counterintuitive (for many) analysis of the NSA scandal by Judge Posner is in this week's new TNR:

We must not ignore the costs to liberty and privacy of intercepting phone calls and other electronic communications. No one wants strangers eavesdropping on his personal conversations. And wiretapping programs have been abused in the past. But, since the principal fear most people have of eavesdropping is what the government might do with the information, maybe we can have our cake and eat it, too: Permit surveillance intended to detect and prevent terrorist activity but flatly forbid the use of information gleaned by such surveillance for any purpose other than to protect national security. So, if the government discovered, in the course of surveillance, that an American was not a terrorist but was evading income tax, it could not use the discovery to prosecute him for tax evasion or sue him for back taxes. No such rule currently exists. But such a rule (if honored) would make more sense than requiring warrants for electronic surveillance.

Curious everyone's thoughts on this -- especially those who heretofore have been absolutely certain that not only was the wiretapping illegal (a constitutional and rule of law question), it was substantively wrong, too (a national security question as well).

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

This analysis, however, is separate from the issue that unfortunately is the sword upon which the American left is impaling themselves again and again -- a failure to evince sufficient conviction on most matters of national security and homeland protection.

Personally, I don't care what you think Michael, since we on the left will never find favor with you and your centrist allies. No matter what lines Bush crosses, you yellow-line centrists would cross most of them with him, and say that the full-hearted critics were failing to evince sufficient conviction on issues of national security and homeland protection. If it turned out Bush had ordered all Muslim males in the US to be castrated, and thereby turned into langorous and docile eunuchs, you would say "that's OK, as long as he writes a law and gets a court order". If it turned out that Bush had ordered that some sort of Sci-Fi brain-scanner be inserted into all American heads, to read all their evil terrorist thoughts, the Judge Posners of the world would say, "that's OK, as long he promises only to read my terrorist thoughts, and not to read my bank account or speedometer, or tell my mom that I sometimes think thoughts that involve the F-word."

In this case, the fiercest and most principled critics of Bush are on both the right and the left, and imagine themselves to be defending the most venerable traditions of American liberty. Isn't there any line that you middle mind folks aren't willing to cross, even to save your own cowardly hides?

Of course, none of us wants to die. But how much "conviction" in favor of security is "sufficient" - and how much is way more than sufficient, and in the realm of the excessive. Franfly, I'm happier with my convictions than with yours and Judge Posner's.

I also wonder why you give a damn about the American left and its supposed habits of self-impalement, since you are not on the American left? Is it just a sporting interest? Don't you want us to impale ourselves to death, so you can have the whole Democratic party for your centrist selves?

I'm sure you think there are lines you wouldn't cross. But I just don't believe you. I think that no matter where the conventional middle drifts, you and your cohort will follow them there. You will do what you always do - you will hold your finger up to the wind and declare that the "sufficient" amount of concern for topic X is whatever the most recent polls show the American people think common sense about X consists in. And if we try to stop you and the rest of the country from running off a cliff into the fiery pit of hell, you will lecture us on our insufficient concern for staying warm, and our foolish habit of disregarding the myriad phobias of the American masses.

Only a small percentage of the public possesses any durable convictions to begin with. The rest are media-driven gluttons of current conventional opinion. Some of us therefore think you actually have to pick a side first, even if its the minority side at the moment, and then fight for the hearts and minds of your fellow citizens. You have to try to lead them somewhere, not follow the panicky mob everywhere it runs. But the centrist Democrats, and the political pros, and the Washington in-crowd, and the Bush-bootlick Republicans are all lying down, and throwing away their country.

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