Joe Klein calls the NSA leaks a “non-scandal”:
Far too many people get their notions of what our government is all about from Hollywood; the paranoid thrilled is a wonderful form of entertainment, but it’s a fantasy. The idea that our government is some sort of conspiracy, that it’s a somehow foreign body intent on robbing us of our freedoms, is corrosive and dangerous to our democracy. This remains, and always will be, an extremely libertarian country; it’s encoded in our DNA. We now face a constant, low-level terrorist threat that needs to be monitored. A great many lives are potentially at stake…and our national security is more important than any marginal–indeed, mythical–rights that we may have conceded in the Patriot Act legislation. In the end, the slippery slope, all or nothing, arguments advanced by extreme civil libertarians bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the slippery slope, all or nothing, arguments advanced by the National Rifle Association.
There were moments in Snowden’s explanation for his actions when I thought: uh-oh. Much of it seemed sincere; but some of it – an “architecture of oppression” – seemed a little paranoid to me.
Look: I understand the paranoia. For twenty years, I lived on a visa which could have been revoked at any moment because of my health; I had to report my address regularly; I eventually had to give them my blood; I was an object of the immigration security state. At least every three years, I went before nameless officials who could go through any and every aspect of my life and health records and decide whether I should keep my current life in America or lose it. It remains grueling. Even now, I am taken aside and interrogated every time I enter the US where I am now a legal permanent resident. But was anyone as such out to get me? Nah. Just a system based on a false analysis of what HIV is – an analysis originally made by Jesse Helms. In that sense, someone was, I suppose, out to get me. But that was from 1987, as that bigot triumphed over science and the first, humane, Bush administration. What was in place since was just a system staffed by people doing their jobs following rules constitutionally and legally applied.
You have to let go of the idea that this is some architecture of oppression – which suggests an active agency of persecution – and a system of laws (misguided or not) that we the people have endorsed through our representatives. And could repeal at any time. You have to let go of it for one reason alone: it simply is not true.
(Thumbnail photo by Flickr user ctj71081)
The Dish 