By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
"How ironic is that? We wanted a president that listens to all Americans -- now we have one." That was Jay Leno's take
on the Obama administration's expanding NSA spying scandal, which has
gone beyond Verizon phone records to include Google, Facebook, Yahoo and
just about all the other major tech companies except, apparently, for Twitter.
The
NSA spying scandal goes deep, and the Obama administration's only
upside is that the furor over its poking into Americans' private
business on a wholesale basis will distract people from the furor over
the use of the IRS
and other federal agencies to target political enemies -- and even
donors to Republican causes -- and the furor over the Benghazi screwup
and subsequent lies (scapegoated filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail), the furor over the "Fast And Furious" gunrunning scandal that left literally scores of Mexicans dead, the scandal over the DOJ's poking into phone records of journalists (and their parents), HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' shakedown of companies she regulates for "donations" to pay for ObamaCare implementation that Congress has refused to fund, the Pigford scandal
where the Treasury Department's "Judgment Fund" appears to have been
raided for political purposes -- well, it's getting to where you need a scorecard to keep up.
But,
in fact, there's a common theme in all of these scandals: Abuse of
power. And, what's more, that abuse-of-power theme is what makes the
NSA snooping story bigger than it otherwise would be. It all comes down
to trust.
The justification for giving the government a lot of
snooping power hangs on two key arguments: That snooping will make us
safer and that the snooping power won't be abused.
Has it made us
safer? Anonymous government sources quoted in news reports say yes, but
we know that all that snooping didn't catch the Tsarnaev brothers
before they bombed the Boston Marathon -- even though they made
extensive use of email and the Internet, and even though Russian
security officials had warned us that they were a threat. The snooping
didn't catch Major Nidal Hasan before he perpetrated the Fort Hood
Massacre, though he should have been spotted easily enough. It didn't,
apparently, warn us of the Benghazi attacks -- though perhaps it
explains how administration flacks were able to find and scapegoat a
YouTube filmmaker so quickly . But in terms of keeping us safe, the
snooping doesn't look so great.
As for abuse, well, is it
plausible to believe that a government that would abuse the powers of
the IRS to attack political enemies, go after journalists who publish
unflattering material or scapegoat a filmmaker in the hopes of providing
political cover to an election-season claim that al-Qaeda was finished
would have any qualms about misusing the massive power of government-run
snooping and Big Data? What we've seen here is a pattern of abuse.
There's little reason to think that pattern will change, absent a change
of administration -- and, quite possibly, not even then. Sooner or
later, power granted tends to become power abused. Then there's the risk
that information gathered might leak, of course, as recent events
demonstrate.
Most Americans generally think that politicians are
untrustworthy. So why trust them with so much power? The evidence to
date strongly suggests that they aren't worthy of it.
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