Balancing security, privacy
Published 2:47 pm Saturday, June 15, 2013
Lawmakers have an elastic interpretation of “probable cause.” Cast a wide enough net by indiscriminately corralling emails, social media and phone calls of millions of American citizens, and you may head off a conspiracy.
For many Americans, however squeamish about the constitutional horror of a government medusa monitoring every pressure-cooker order from Amazon, the ends justify the means. But beware collective resignation and what it gets you.
The National Security Agency’s aggregation and noodling of “metadata” does violence to the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee, that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects shall not be violated.
At its core, the N.S.A.’s operation Prism is anti-Madisonian. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, his “if men were angels” tract, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” In the data-centric Internet era, against the backdrop of executive overreach, a self-controlling agency is a contradiction.
When the national security state and civil liberties collide, look for insight from the (American) West. Westerners are hidebound when it comes to personal liberty, just as they’re beneficiaries of the military and federal largesse which define the West, from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation to Naval Station Everett. In a democracy, lawmakers are obliged to harmonize liberty and security.
Idaho’s Sen. Frank Church, the father of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, understood the need for checks and accountability, even in the shadow of the Cold War. Transcripts of the Church Committee hearings and programs like COINTELPRO that infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans have a contemporary resonance. Times change, human nature doesn’t.
Those asking the tough questions today include Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Colorado’s Sen. Mark Udall. In a June 12 letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 13 senators demand that the board review N.S.A. programs to ensure they are conducted within the statutory authority granted by Congress. Additional signers include Washington’s Maria Cantwell, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Montana’s Jon Tester.
There’s a secret to the secret keepers: There are less privacy-killing means to monitor terror networks. While the N.S.A.’s cyber reach may be legal under section 215 of the U.S. Patriot Act, it still doesn’t pass the gut check. A democracy, predicated on liberty, must do better.
