David Simon, the creator of HBO's "The Wire" says this about the Snowden leaks:
The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.
And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening. As happens the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused — particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic surveillance of any kind.
Simon's point is that the problem isn't with the program itself, but with its potential for abuse, and that's my problem with it, too. And it's because I think the potential and likelihood for those abuses is more damaging than whatever benefit we receive from this program, the program needs to be severely curtailed. I know it won't be, but that's my position for what it's worth.
For all the time, money, and manpower that is going into the development of this massive data mining operation, does it pay off? Did it prevent the Boston Marathon Bombing? Could it have? Did it stop Adam Lanza? Could it have?
For me there's an analogy here to the way we Americans deal with healthcare issues. We have this enormously expensive, highly technologized system that produces mediocre outcomes. The WHO ranks the U.S. #38 despite our spending more than any other country. We do all this expensive, sophisticated stuff, but we still don't get the job done as well as others do. Because getting the job done–whether it's producing better healthcare outcomes or catching criminals–requires another approach, a more human approach, a more realistic approach than the one American technocrats instinctively are inclined to take.
Any government has legitimate police powers. Bad guys, whether crazies like Adam Lanza, predators like Bernie Madoff, or criminal warlords like those shown in "The Wire" will always be with us, and they have to be checked. But the idea that we have to do everything in our power and use any means necessary to exterminate them is as absurd as thinking that we can exterminate death and disease. We need to contain and mitigate, not eliminate. And the same goes for terrorism. We need a containment policy, not an extermination policy.
The whole NSA apparatus is born of and justified to the public from an obsession to eliminate the possibility of another 9/11. But we never ask why 9/11 happened in the first place. We never seek to understand the causes that create that kind of blowback, and we never accept that our own stupidity and bullying abroad abets the cycle of violence that comes back to bite us. The challenge is to break the cycle of violence, but it's easier to create this massive, expensive, technologically sophisticated but rather clumsy and easy to abuse surveillance infrastructure and then to vilify those who point to its folly.
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