Some thoughts on technology, trust and legitimacy:
Washington forgot the main lesson from the nuclear age: that the existence of such powerful weaponry can never be protected by secrecy or technology. Their only defense in possession lies in legitimacy.
Snowden’s torpedo, unleashed perhaps by himself or by some third party, struck at the government’s most vulnerable joint, the weld between Washington and the governed.
Snowden said what many were already prepared to believe — even Obama’s liberal supporters — that the administration is a lying, corrupt, power-mad collection of unscrupulous men. Like a jilted woman, people didn’t believe Snowden because they knew him; they believed in Snowden because they knew Obama. The sense of betrayal may have even been more acute on the Left. In Snowden’s words: “I believed in Obama’s promises.” And how many of those said to themselves, “So did I and chose poorly”?
The solution to the current crisis of privacy is not technical. It is political. It cannot be found in uninventing the computer; only in creating institutions the public can trust to control such power, in the same way it trusts certain governments to control nuclear weapons.
Once again, the wisdom of the Founders is revealed, even as we have turned our backs on it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: The unmediated president.
I think that these are impeachable offenses. Whether or not he will be impeached is a function of whether or not a sufficient number of people in the general public come to agree.
It won’t happen in the current election cycle — the House won’t make the mistake of impeaching again without having the Senate on board (particularly given the inevitable race riots that might ensue). But if this becomes a major issue, perhaps the issue next fall, and results in either a huge Republican takeover of the Senate, or enough Democrats themselves calling for removal, it could happen after the next election. The big quandary would be whether or not we wanted to have a President Biden. If he’s found to have participated in the scandals, and there is a sufficiently strong Republican majority in the senate, then we may have a President Boehner. That doesn’t thrill me, but it would be a huge improvement over what we have today. And it will be a result of the people speaking, as ultimately, the Founders would have expected.
[Update a while later]
Is the US still the land of the free?
In a police state, to be sure, people like Drake and Swartz might simply disappear, and people like me wouldn’t be writing about them. So no, this isn’t the United Stasi of America. Nonetheless, one still ought to ask, how far can one trust the security and law-enforcement complexes to police themselves? My answer would be: You can’t.
Power often seems to infect the powerful with tyrannical instincts. Shroud their transactions in secrecy and the danger multiplies. The people involved aren’t necessarily bad. First and foremost, in fact, they are bureaucrats — as muddled and incompetent as everybody else, with banal bureaucratic interests to advance. The NSA disclosures should remind us of this by drawing attention to the sheer size of the interests involved. Are NSA contractors who specialize in data mining likely to highlight the ineffectiveness of that technique? Is America’s law-enforcement industry — with its professionalized, para-militarized and literally uncountable agencies — going to call a halt to its own growth or ask for its powers to be curbed?
No. We’re going to have to do it for them. And more importantly, for us.