NSA Spying on Americans
I
suppose I will weigh in with my two cents on the NSA collecting the phone
records of Americans. Despite my
Republican leanings, I am deeply disturbed by this development. I will not argue that there are times when the
government has a legitimate need to access a person’s phone records, even
without that person’s knowledge- such as in terrorist investigations, which is
(supposedly) what this is to do.
However, the fact that the government is gathering this information is
not nearly as troubling as the revelation that no one seems to have oversight
over the NSA.
One
of the brilliant ideas of our founding fathers was a system of checks and
balances. This prevents too much power
from accumulating in the hands of any one individual,
or small group of people. Every group’s
power is limited by another group.
Typically this applies to the legislative, executive, and judicial
branches, but for this reason every agency in the government is also
responsible to another. This is
especially vital for agencies that gather information on citizens- information
that can easily be misused. However, CNN
has reported that the Department of Justice had to drop an investigation
against the NSA because it was denied security clearances (http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/11/nsa.phonerecords/index.html). In theory, the NSA is responsible to the
executive branch, but the Department of Justice’s inability to investigate the
NSA casts doubt on how strong that accountability is, and furthermore if the
Department of Justice cannot investigate the NSA, how can the judicial branch
investigate it to determine if the executive branch is executing the laws lawfully,
or how can the legislative branch limit its power? I find it deeply troubling that part of our
government has obtained immunity from, of all things, the government
itself. If our own government cannot
investigate the NSA- if our own government cannot place a check on the NSA-
then who, or what, can? Our system of
checks and balances has broken down- and without some sort of control over the
NSA, what prevents them from further gathering power? This, I think, is far more troubling than the
government gathering phone records in and of itself, although that is
troubling. Given the quantity of data,
and the inherent uncertainty in determining who is a terrorist, it’s highly
unlikely that this system would actually be able to distinguish suspicious
patterns accurately. At best, this is an
enormous waste of money, at a time when the deficit is far too high, at
worst…well, a program that gathers information on civilians, on whom there is
not enough suspicious cause for the judicial branch to be involved, operated by
an agency that is above governmental oversight…highly disturbing, I must say.
On
the subject of the government gathering phone records, I feel even if it was
done by an agency with proper governmental oversight such that the potential
for abuse was minimized, I’d still be opposed.
The program would recognize suspicious trends. However, in order to operate accurately one
would need to have a fair idea of terrorist’s phone numbers in order to trace
the numbers that called them. In this
case, the government would have suspicious cause to get the records of the
terrorist’s phone, and thus could find the numbers that dialed it
frequently. The only situation where
this could find potentially useful information is to identify numbers that call
“likely” terrorist numbers. However, who
are these people dialing “likely” numbers? I fear that likely numbers will be those in
Middle Eastern countries. People from
those areas, legitimate and terrorists will both dial those numbers, making it
impossible to determine between a legitimate immigrant dialing old friends, and
a terrorist getting orders. Thus, for
its stated purpose, this program is worthless.
However, there is great potential for abuse, for the government to know
things like who politicians in the other party are contacting. Or who I am calling. Additionally, in general, a small government
is far better than a large one, and this expansion of the government’s powers
is completely unwarranted. In general, I
feel as though the Republican party has forgotten its
basic standards of a small, fiscally responsible government. (However, since I do feel like the government
has to have an active, strong rule in things like protecting the environment,
I’m certainly not advocating a libertarian position.)