Today my tweeting was heavily focused on the revelation that Verizon gave up a significant amount of information to the NSA. Among the many interesting pieces I read was an attempt by Slate’s Will Saletan to justify the surveillance. In a nutshell, Saletan argues:
- It isn’t wiretapping.
- It’s judicially supervised.
- It’s congressionally supervised.
- It expires quickly unless it’s reauthorized.
- Wiretaps would require further court orders.
See his article for further details. But in brief, his arguments seem to rest on the bases that the surveillance could be worse (true but not a justification), and that there are lots of nifty procedures to provide oversight (doubtful that they work). Below are the responses that I posted on Slate to Mr. Saletan’s arguments (slightly edited), providing my own translations for what I think the arguments really amount to:
- “It isn’t wiretapping.” Translated: it could be worse, so suck it up. Not a real strong starting point.
- “It’s judicially supervised.” Translated: the FISA court “supervises” the surveillance, which means that it probably usually rubber-stamps what the executive branch wants. But since it’s a secret court, we have no idea what’s going on.
- “It’s congressionally supervised.” Translation: Congress also “supervises” the surveillance, which means it also likely rubber-stamps what the executive branch wants.
- “It expires quickly unless it’s reauthorized.” Translation: the surveillance is likely reauthorized continually, making the authorization process a joke. And since we don’t know what’s going on, we’re not in on the joke. We are the joke.
- “Wiretaps would require further court orders.” Translation: it’s “only” metadata, which ignores the fact that metadata—when aggregated with other user metadata and external sources of data—is extremely revealing of private information. The argument that “[w]iretaps would require further court orders” also goes full-circle back to point #1 that it could be worse, which again is not real persuasive.
Saying that something could be worse is hardly an argument. We don’t justify burglary by saying that arson is worse. And “oversight” is meaningless when it is a rubber-stamp that is unseen by the public. Indeed, meaningless procedures provide nothing more a veil of lawfulness to otherwise outrageous conduct. As Congressperson John Dingell once famously said about procedure, “I’ll let you write the substance … you let me write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.”
Cross-posted to Infoglut Tumblr.