Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Chicago and the new NSA toy

Today I heard on TV a former NSA chief explain how all the telephone and e-mail records are being used. The way he explains it is the only way they use the huge database is if they get a cellphone from a known terrorist and trace the calls back to the United States. He said having the big database is necessary in order to search for all the potential terrorist sympathizers he/she might have been calling over long periods of time.

My question is what makes NSA employees any different from those at the IRS? All government agencies are run by Political Appointees. If the Chicago politicians liked the information those “Rogue IRS Employees” provided they are going to love the potential the NSA has to offer.

Say a Republican contributor shows on his tax return that he made a $1000 dollar contribution to a Republican Candidate. We know these agencies talk to and coordinate with each other from the piling on that took place revealed by the current IRS scandal. (Once the information was gleaned it wasn't just IRS agents that did the harassing, it was OSHA, Treasury and FBI agents jumping on the band wagon.) This contributor has a name and address. How hard is it to get from there to a cell phone number? Then how hard is it to get to records of all the cell phone calls made in the past six months. And then how hard is it to zero in on the actual conversations that took place?

We are kidding ourselves if we think the potential for abuse is any different at the NSA than it is at the IRS. The more safeguards and oversight in place the greater the lengths political operatives will go to abuse it. I think the threat to our civil liberties far outweighs an occasional terrorist that might be swept up in the dragnet. Indeed, even if they are, so what? The FBI had the name of the Boston Marathon bomber and what did they do with the information? The sent an agent out to interview him. The bomber denied any involvement…. DUH! That seems to have been the extent of the Investigation prior to all those innocent people getting maimed and killed. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) knew about Mohammed Atta before 911. What did they do with it? Nothing.

Every year thousands of people die on our highways. Still driving gives us freedom through mobility. We accept the risk for the freedom an automobile gives us. I question if the disease of terrorism warrants the cure of expanded government and electronic surveillance into our personal lives. I doubt it is really worth the cost and the potential intrusion. I doubt that it is worth risking the abuses that are being demonstrated and that the government seems incapable of resisting.

When there is a terrorist incident what we discover (after a whole lot of digging and arm twisting) is how incompetent these government agencies often are. Think about how colossally stupid the IRS harassment was? Even Mitt Romney doubts it had much of an influence on the election. It was stupid because the longer it went on the more certain it became that those responsible would be caught. To the perpetrators it wasn’t stupid because it was wrong; it was only "outrageous" that they got exposed and held up to ridicule in the court of public opinion. Getting caught should have been the self-evident outcome from the beginning… right up there with robbing a convenience store.

During the Revolutionary War, one of the Bills of Rights was written as a consequence of British soldiers conducting dragnets from house to house. Does doing the same thing with phone or computer records make the practice any less intrusive? Do you trust Big Government to control the growing power they seek, when the evidence is they lack the will to resist the political temptations offered by what they already have?