Drum’s core – and legitimate – worry about the NSA program:
I find it quite likely that NSA isn’t currently abusing the phone surveillance program … but someday there will be a different president in the White House, there will be a different head of NSA, and there will be different professionals running the program. What will they do with all that data the next time something happens that makes America crazy for a few years? I don’t know, but I do know that if they don’t have the data in the first place they can’t abuse it.
But if they don’t have the data, they also cannot use it. Waldman shares Drum’s fear:
They aren’t just looking through people’s records willy-nilly; mostly all this information is just there waiting, and they look at an individual’s records only once they have reason to suspect they might be connected to something fishy. But it isn’t because they can’t, it’s because, they say, they’ve chosen not to.
And that may well be true. But is the next administration, and the one after that, going to do the same? Especially if it’s run by people who not too long ago were torturing prisoners; claiming the president had the right to order the arrest of an American citizen on American soil and throw him in jail for life with no charges, no trial, and no access to legal counsel; asserting that the vice president existed in a legal netherworld between the executive and legislative branches that left him immune to any rules or oversight he found inconvenient; and a hundred other abuses of power that we’ve already almost forgotten by now?
I haven’t forgotten. So this may be a golden opportunity to reform the security state – while we have a president and a potential bipartisan coalition who are sympathetic to the cause. But again, that requires real engagement with public opinion, which by big margins support PRISM – and an acceptance that the program we have has a legitimate purpose. Almost every single thing the government does can be abused. That doesn’t mean the government should be barred from doing anything that could lead to such abuse. It means more accountability.
The Dish 