If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past few days, then you know that the American left has a new issue they’re trying to beat up President Bush over: a leaker (whom I’d like to see strung up) disclosed that the NSA has been conducting a massive data-mining project, looking for patterns in the telephone numbers that U.S. phone users (the majority of whom, presumably, are U.S. citizens) call. The purpose of this data-mining is to identify people who are calling on terrorists or terrorist support organizations, so we can do something about potential attacks.
I’d write something about the stupidity of blasting those who are protecting you, but Rick Moran at Rightwing Nuthouse has done a much better job of that than I could:
THE HYSTERICAL DRAMA QUEENS OF THE LEFT:
The news that billions of phone records are stored in a faceless, lifeless, dumb brute of a computer data base has set off a tantrum on the left the likes of which have not been seen in this country since the Civil War. Whipped into a frenzy of outrage not by any actual “spying” or “eavesdropping” by the NSA’s data mining of call records but rather by the idea that the government now has the exact same information available to it that your phone company has had all along, Members of Congress as well as the left side of the blogosphere have given in to hysteria and have allowed their imaginations to take flight about the program, positing all sorts of sinister scenarios where we are a hair’s breadth away from some kind of third world dictatorship.
Their reasoning (or unreasoning) goes something like this; if the NSA wanted to, it COULD abuse the program. Or, THERE IS THE POTENTIAL for mischief by the government if the program’s parameters were violated. The point, of course, is not to demonstrate anything untoward that has actually happened but rather to flaunt a self-image of themselves as saviors, crucified for their beliefs, manning the battlements, waving the bloody shirt, DEFENDING DEMOCRACY while the rest of us peasants look upon them with doe-eyed admiration and worship.
I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the exaggerations about the “danger” that the country is becoming a dictatorship, a word they throw around with the practiced ease of someone who has no idea what an actual dictatorship looks like. I’m sick of the ginned up outrage against anything and everything the Administration has done in the past 5 years to protect us. I’m sick to death of these immature, emotionally unstable, intellectually dishonest philistines whose foot stomping tirades have begun to resemble the wailings of teenage girls who put on melodramatic, angst ridden histrionics over the tiniest of slights.
Read the whole thing, please.
In this morning’s news comes something that I confess I was surprised to read: the majority of Americans (according to a snap overnight poll conducted by ABC, that well-known conservative lapdog organization) are “not bothered” by the NSA’s data collection and mining efforts. 66% of those polled said they wouldn’t care if their own calls were collected and analyzed.
I think the ferocity of the left’s attack fooled me into thinking that they represented Americans in general. I’m relieved to see that’s not the case.
The details of this poll have some other interesting nuggets of information. As you might expect, there was a large difference in the results between those who self-identified as conservatives versus liberals — but a surprise in there for me is that even amongst Democrats, 45% find the NSA program acceptable.
Something the poll doesn’t mention, but which I’ve read elsewhere, is that a substantial portion of the American public misunderstands what the NSA program actually is. This misunderstanding is not surprising given the misleading — and sometimes outright false — descriptions that the lamestream media has published. In particular, an interesting percentage (I believe the number was 38%, but I can’t lay my hands on that report right now) believe that the NSA’s program includes monitoring conversations (it does not; it only records the phone numbers called). If that’s accurate, the level of support in ABC’s poll is even more remarkable, and even more out of whack with the left’s attacks.
Thinking politically for a moment, this implies that the Democrat’s reflexive Bush-bashing on security topics is not likely to serve them well at the ballot box. Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Kennedy: more bashing, please!
In the old blog, Jeff said:
ReplyDeleteI am against this program. I don’t consider myself a Democrat, nor do I consider myself a Republican, I might be a little more liberal than conservative but I don’t fit easily into one place on the political spectrum. There are various reasons why I am against this program, and I’ll try to explain a couple of them here. I don’t know about the legality of this. I’ve heard the President and the phone companies say everything they’re doing is within the law, and I’ve heard the law professors say that they can’t think of a way this would be done legally, regardless of the legality, why didn’t congress know this was going on? Regardless of political affiliation it seems many congressmen were caught very off guard by this and are now asking questions (among them, why didn’t we know about this?). It’s one thing to keep a program like this secret by not telling the public about it. It’s another thing to keep it so secret that many (if not all) members of the legislative branch don’t know about it.A second point, related to the first is that Alberto Gonzalez, when testifying before congress (although not under oath, why not?) about the previous information to come out about NSA wiretapping citizens in the US making or receiving international calls (without a warrant, even though the FISA would allow them to do it, then get a warrant up to 72 hours after the fact) told congress that the NSA program was very limited in scope. While these two programs are not identical, they are somewhat similar.I can think of some scenarios where this database could be dangerous to the privacy of Americans, although I do agree that it alone is not nearly as bad as many people think it is. But I don’t like the direction things are going. While they might only have a phone number in a database, it isn’t difficult at all to find out whom that phone number belongs to (especially if the phone companies are so willing to cooperate). Last, just like I think the dangers of the program are somewhat overblown, I also think the dangers to national security by this program being uncovered are overblown as well. I like to think that the real bad guys aren’t making phone calls and communicating over the internet in the same way normal people do (if so I would hope they would have been caught long ago). My guess is that they’re using strong encryption online and pre-paid cell phones that can’t be traced back to them when they need to communicate over the phone or internet. So this program doesn’t directly affect them. So you have to question exactly what this program is doing, and why the fact that it’s known is so harmful to our security. I can think of one possible thing this program is doing to protect our national security: analyzing the phone call links of those people that aren’t directly a threat, but might know someone that is (whether they know that person is or not). These are people that feel they have nothing to hide, if they did have intentions to commit crimes they would be taking measures to protect themselves like I mentioned above. So even with this information out in the open that the NSA is creating a database of our phone records, they aren’t going to feel the need to change anything, and the NSA will still get all the data just as they did before. I also don’t understand why you and Rick Morgan among others are so quick to dismiss the potential for abuse. There is a potential for abuse, I don’t have any credible evidence that this database will be abused, but you don’t have any way of ensuring that it won’t be abused. Is there anything to stop the government from using this database for analyzing the calling habits of groups that are in no way affiliated with al qaeda?Would you still be in support of this program if it did include names associated with the phone numbers? What if it included gps tracking data from cell phones (the FCC requires all new cell phones to include gps tracking units)? Is there anything to prevent this sort of data collection in the future?And please remember, it’s not only the American left that is up in arms over this program. Arlen Specter was asking questions about it, and said he plans to have congressional hears over the program. He is not a crazy American left “Moonbat” but rather a Republican senator. This is not entirely related, but not completely unrelated, I have to wonder and will ask, what is your take on using encryption on the internet? Obviously the bad guys use it, should be try to prevent that? Should we try to prevent the non-bad guys from using encryption so that all of the encrypted traffic the NSA collects is from bad guys and they don’t waste their time cracking unimportant communications?
In the old blog, Jeff said:
ReplyDeleteI’m sorry to leave another comment so soon, but I overlooked this story I meant to include in the previous comment. What is your take on this story:Is there any reason for this denial of clearance? These are DOJ lawayers that seemingly should have the proper authority to look into this matter. Who denied them the clearance?This is one example of a reason I am weary about the story above.
Great comments, Jeff — thanks! I’ve answered them in a new post: NSA Datamining…
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