Thank You for Surveilling

The most surprising aspect of the National Security Agency’s massive domestic surveillance operation, which hoards and mines data like dwarves do gold, is how utterly unsurprised everyone is. Secretive spying is apparently one of those heartbreaking realities you have to begrudgingly accept nowadays­—just as most people come to realize that every delicious dessert is actually part of a secret conspiracy to kill you.

But is the NSA really as benign as a beignet?

Initially I had some anxiety about living in a society in which the location, length and number dialed of any phone call I made is vacuumed up and stored in an NSA mega-warehouse more expensive than the Hoover dam. The fact that all this was actually legal, because of an eerily Kafkaesque system of secret courts, secret opinions, and secret law was more unnerving. But what was most disconcerting was the blithely bipartisan support the no-longer-secret surveillance received­—a collegial agreement between Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell is about as unsettling as a Bachmann-Palin 2016 ticket.

However, a few things reassured me: the fact that well-vetted and reliable 30-year-olds have unfettered access to national secrets, the completely honest reactions of officials confronted with their own dishonesty, and, especially, the ringing endorsement by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin, looking at America’s fledgling authoritarian state with a wry smirk the way warm-blooded humans might swoon over bumbling babies, agreed that it was “the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.”

“That’s the way it’s done in the U.S., and that’s the way it’s done in Russia,” the tsar-like autocrat fond of jailing dissident punk rockers and (allegedly) stealing Super Bowl rings reassured the nation. The delightful equivalence is all the more haunting when you remember that Guantanamo is basically a climate-controlled Gulag.

While Mother Russia mothers away, American officials are still seeking to soothe a rattled public with a gaggle of venerable public servants like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, the bald Clapper clapped out what some would call a bald-faced lie, averring that the U.S. does “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans.

The allegations made by whistleblower-traitor-leaker extraordinaire Edward Snowden that “I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap any body…even the president of the United States,” were roundly denounced by General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA.

When asked by Senator Susan Collins of Maine whether “he could tap into virtually any American’s phone calls or e-mails,” Alexander, head of an organization that can tap into virtually any American’s phone calls or e-mails, claimed that he knew of no way to do that.

But what are a few purported white lies among friends? Nothing can go wrong under the transparent oversight of a secret intelligence court, gagged Senators, and a tight-lipped executive branch.

Even better: some of the most ardent supporters of the program are the ones who have been most skeptical of massive government databases in the past.

Judge Roger Vinson, who authored the secret court ruling mandating that Verizon give call records on all of its American customers on an “ongoing, daily basis,” also ruled the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional. Uncle Sam turning Peeping Tom on phone records seemed fine, but requiring health insurance was a “bridge too far” in his words.

Lindsey Graham opposed gun registration as creeping tyranny, but is very content with letting the tyrants creep through his communications. Then again, one can always count on a Republican to fervently pursue the sham scandal rather than the real one, like those harping about the fictional death panels in Obamacare rather than the actual death panel determining who gets droned next.

You could expect Congress authorizing a wall of fire on the Mexican border before a firewall between the government and the governed.

Between strange bedfellows like Rand Paul and Ron Wyden, a genuine debate on national security and civil liberties risked eruption. Fortunately, the dialogue will be stifling by the much more pressing and made-for-TV spectacle of ‘Where in the World is Edward Snowden?’

Idrees M. Kahloon '16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Dunster House.