Running amok at NSA

Public opinion on Edward Snowden is divided in the United States. He is identified alternately as a traitor and a patriot, a treasonous worm who “should swing from a tall oak tree” (according to Fox News) and a brave whistleblower to whom America should be grateful (according to civil rights groups who have in recent days sponsored ads on Washington buses proclaiming, “Thank you, Edward Snowden”).
Snowden, already a household name around the world, is of course the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who earlier this year disclosed, to several news outlets, 1.7 million classified documents that revealed operational details of a global surveillance system by the US government, hitherto conducted covertly.
What both sides in this public debate seem to agree on, however, is that what Snowden, 30, has disclosed could indubitably be identified as the most significant leak in recent US history, surpassing in gravity Daniel Elsberg’s leak to the New York Times in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers and, more recently, Bradley Manning’s release to WikiLeaks in 2010 of 250,000 US diplomatic cables.
It’s a given that the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed the inward preoccupations of the American psyche, but these attacks did so in such an unsettling way that the nation appears to have lost that balance, even distinction, between national security and intrusive surveillance. The US appears, in short, to have run amok, violating the right to privacy of American citizens by collecting extensive data (known as “metadata”) on their mobile phone conversations, and intruding into the most intimate details of people’s lives by accessing their Internet and social media communications.
If you don’t want to resort to hyperbole by calling all this Orwellian, then let’s call it an attempt to run roughshod over the constitutional rights of the American people — rights accorded them in this case by the Fourth Amendment, that protects individuals against “unreasonable searches,” and by the First Amendment, that protects the flow of unhindered free speech. An infringement of these rights is a very, very dangerous violation of constitutional law.
The White House, along with the NSA and the Justice Department, has contended that the 2001 Patriot Act justifies these practices. The courts, however, beg to differ. Earlier this week, one courageous federal judge, US District Judge Richard J. Leon, ruled that the NSA’s daily collection of America’s phone records is almost certainly unconstitutional. He said: “I cannot imagine a more indiscriminate invasion than this systemic high tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely such a program infringes on that degree of privacy that the founding fathers enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.”
Moreover, last Wednesday, in a 308-page report, a five-member White House panel recommended major curbs on NSA’s electronic surveillance program, but it remains to be seen whether President Obama will accept the recommendations.
This type of spying (for what else should one call it?) is not, as the Snowden leaked documents have shown, confined to the US. The NSA has embraced a culture of brazen global snooping. The NSA has listened in on private cell phone conversations of world leaders all the way from Brazil to Germany. In June of this year, as a case in point, it was revealed that Brazil was the top NSA target in Latin America, with the country’s President Dilma Rousseff having had her cell phone communications monitored. This, predictably, enraged the Brazilian head of state, who later canceled an official visit to Washington that was to include a state dinner.
Another high-profile victim of this alarming practice was, as is well known by now, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was so furious over reports that NSA had listened in on her private cell phone conversations that she confronted President Obama when they last met. “This is like the Stasi,” she reportedly told him, referring to East Germany’s feared intelligence and secret police agency, known as the most effective and repressive in the western world. (Movie buffs would recall Stasi’s sinister depiction in the 2006 German drama film, The Lives Of Others.)
There is no record of how Obama, who came into office pledging greater transparency and accountability, responded.
In any case, without Edward Snowden, Americans would have been left in the dark about the subversion by their government of cherished American values and civilized international norms.
It is difficult to say whether this whole sorry affair is a projection of big power hubris or just a “leader of the free world” running amok. In either case, it’s all quite tawdry.