This dog has had its day
by David Benjamin
“Are you really willing to give up your liberty for security?”
— Sen. Rand Paul
MADISON, Wis. — Rand Paul
and the anti-government anarchists who live in cinder-block bunkers
with a ten-year stash of flashlight batteries and Cheez Whiz are the
unexpected good guys on the issue of telecom metadata collection by the
Feds. They want it stopped. Sen. Paul even has a major government agency
— the Inspector General’s office at the Department of Justice — in his corner.
Even
the House of Representatives, usually cheerleaders for the national
security state, have voted overwhelmingly to curtail the FBI’s sweeping
Patriot Act authority — established in the days of panic after 9/11 — to
gobble up virtually every contact made by every citizen with a
cellphone, iPhone , smartphone, landline, laptop, desktop, tablet or the
e-mail account that they access at the Public Library.
The
well-polled American people are as unanimous as we can get. We don’t
want the FBI (and by extension, the NSA, CIA, DIA, Secret Service, Delta
Force, even Gibbs, DiNozzo, Abby, Ducky and McGee) horning in uninvited
on our every call, text, tweet, Instagram and Facebook joke.
In
an age of vicious political polarization, we’re all together in wanting
to keep the Feds from tapping our phone and intercepting our WiFi. So
what’s the problem? Why can’t we cut off the snoops?
Well,
there’s the Senate. It used to be run by a kickass welterweight named
Harry Reid, who brooked little intraparty dissension. But now, the boss
is Mitch McConnell,
who, try as he might, can’t get the Pentagon-huggers in his party to
make nice with its Tea Party paranoids. Neither faction appears to have
any discernible contact with the interests of either the American people
or reality.
The Republicans’ inability to compromise with the
Republicans on Patriot Act reform poses a stark choice for the Senate.
Democrat Patrick Leahy put it plainly: “We either take the House Bill or
end the Patriot Act.”
OK, cool, because the DOJ’s Inspector
General has come up with a pretty good case for Door Number Two. Since
the attacks of 11 September 2001, when the government started raking in
telecommunications metadata like a Japanese factory ship strip-netting
every living thing on or above the ocean floor, the FBI fishermen have
gotten nothing from their efforts. Not a minnow.
Bupkes.
In
the great Washington data bonanza — gazillions of wired and wireless
contacts over the last 14 years stretching from Madawaska to Tijuana and
all over the globe — the eavesdroppers on the party line haven’t once
tuned in on, discovered or halted one measly plot. Not even a couple of
teenage malcontents talking about the pipe bomb they want to plant under
the driver’s seat in the car of Mr. Strickland, the universally hated vice-principal at Hill Valley High.
I
had that conversation in 1966 about a vice-principal named Mr. Wendt.
Kids have been talking — on the phone — about bombing Mr. Strickland for
at least a century, hundreds of times a week, but the FBI is clueless. I
mean, if they can’t find teenagers openly (but wishfully) plotting, in
standard English, the murder of a high-school tyrant, what are the Feds’
chances of exposing one of those (mythical) terrorist “sleeper cells”
who encrypt their data and converse in Arabic pig-Latin?
The FBI’s metadata harvest is better equipped to find out about the orders I place at Victoria’s Secret for camisoles
and slingbacks. And it has no trouble tapping my calls to a
substance-abuse hotline or to the bookie who helps me lay fifty bucks on
the nose of a nag named Nora’s Knickers in the fifth at Hialeah.
But,
seriously, what the Feds can or can’t find out doesn’t matter. There
might be lots of “conspiracies” out there, jabbering away among the
wires, fiber optics and broadband spectra. Most consist almost entirely
of empty spite, magical thinking and hot air. Phone-company metadata
won’t help us find any of them.
Besides, it’s all protected by the First Amendment.
We
know now, from experience, that conventional forms of domestic
intelligence — and plain old police work — have found and foiled
virtually every serious effort at jihadist violence in the U.S. since
9/11. Over these years, we’ve seen more “terrorism” from school
invasions, Dirty Harry cops and outlaw bikers.
We
know this. Mitch McConnell probably knows, too. But he can’t seem to
decide what to do about it that best serves his political interest.
However, here’s Mitch’s silver lining. He can sit back, relax and serve
the American people more truly and benevolently than he ever has before —
by sitting back and relaxing.
On June 1st, if Mitch and the
orchestra do nothing, the Patriot Act, with all its wiretapping,
threat-mapping, color-coding and neocon Manicheism, will expire, passing
from our lives in much the way that we kissed goodbye to the Alien and
Sedition Acts (1798-1801), the Espionage Act of 1917 (1917-1921), the
Smith Act (1940-1957), and the ethereal Communist Control Act of 1954.
Nobody
wants G-men poking into the petty and private dialogs we carry on among
ourselves, and few of us are willing to tolerate this sort of intrusion
in the name of a riot act that has proved itself immaculately impotent.
The Patriot Act did little more than soothe America’s jangled nerves in
a time of tragedy. It’s like the Rottweiler we bought to scare away
burglars and snarl at the things that go bump in the night. But old Pat
lost his bark ten years ago. He went blind and his teeth fell out, his
hips went haywire, his bowels collapsed, his liver failed and he’s been
on life support at the animal hospital since last Thanksgiving.
Let the dog die, Mitch.
Friday, May 22, 2015
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