I keep seeing various politicians standing up on their back legs, demanding the NY Times be drawn, quartered, shot and pissed on for breaking the story on the Department of JustUs spying on financial records. I’ve written about the tedious events earlier.
The rhetoric coming out of the pundits, pols, and press wanks is astounding. You hear the same kind of mindless rehashing of White House speaking points: Despicable. Treason. Execution. Jail Time. Giving Comfort to the Enemy. Thwarting the War on Terror. National Security.
Please spare me the deluge of drama: The NYT didn’t publish the nuclear missile launch codes. If someone had asked the NYT, nicely, to sit on the story for a few weeks, odds are the NYT would have played along precisely for reasons of National Security. The JustUs folks figured they could bully the New York Times and the reporters involved, because they DoJ was sloppy and got caught.
What bothers me is that the NYT found out about the program. Reporters find out about this kind of bad madness via a leak that says “look over here, or under that rock”. The leak probably happened because an individual saw just how far SWIFT was reaching. Perhaps the monitoring has crossed that line from investigating cement heads and the war on terror, into hardball domestic spying. I don’t know.
I do know that good security people, doing a righteous job, don’t talk about this stuff with their families, let alone reporters, unless something is very wrong and the bosses won’t stop it. That is the little sidebar that, I hope, a reporter is chasing hard right now.
Unlawful groups determined to wreak havoc already assume that the US government is spying on them. Skilful criminals assume that everything is being looked at by the police. This is rudimentary field-craft: A mindset of complete paranoia is what a criminal has to assume to act outside the law.
I hate to break it to the various operators from the US government, but skillful criminals don’t have a file folder on the top of the desk, labeled “Plans For World Domination”. That is over the top, even for Austin Powers, or James Bond.
Following the money, which is the ostensible excuse for fishing in the SWIFT banking transaction database, is sensible. It is sound reasoning and a good investigative tool. Not The Only Tool, just A Tool. Informants are a tool. Perusing websites are a tool. Reading the paper is a tool. Surveillance on a house, a person or an apartment is a tool. Wiretaps are a tool. Opening snail mail, or email is a tool.
With one pesky caveat, I don’t mind the security forces using the tools. If a warrant is required, then you have to get a warrant that details exactly what you’re looking for, where, when and why. A judge eyeballs the warrant and says yea or nay. Any judge looking at that kind of warrant will keep it quiet. If an investigator can’t find a suitably compliant judge to sign off on it, then they’re pathetic, lazy and the kind of pud who should be guarding the torn tickets at an Andy Williams matinee concert in Branson, Missouri.
If the DoJ has asked for a warrant to go fishing for two months to see what they could shake out, I could live with that, barely, but I’ll let it slide as it is time-limited. There are no absolutes here. Occasionally the rules might have to be bent, or stretched a bit and each case on its merits.
I’ve heard the argument of “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from the government, as they’re trying to protect the world from terrorists”. I can’t buy that for a Mississauga Minute, which is about 11 seconds, for those who don’t know how long a minute is in Mississauga.
This is the same argument that the Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities used to drag anyone they didn’t like into open Senate Committee session. McCarthy used the waving of paper at witnesses as his ‘proof’ that the witness was a Communist. He never actually let people see the evidence on the paper, only the waving of paper for newsreel and television cameras.
Anyone called by the Committee was asked, in closed session, to name all their friends, relations, acquaintances, or passers-by whom they thought might be suspect. If they couldn’t come up with names, their career was over, as they were a ‘hostile’ witness and Sen. McCarthy would start the paper waving and ranting. This was later quoted in Hollywood as “Not only must you have talent, but you must have informed too!".
There was a certain Ioseb Jughashvili used to do the “You have nothing to fear” and paper waving act too. You might know Ioseb Jughashvili by his more common, westernized name: Joseph Stalin.
A vigorous, slightly suspicious media will keep tabs on the bullies who wrap themselves in the flag and ask citizens to swallow that kind of poison from the buffet.
Technorati
RoadDave 