Two recent events, the Congressional action on FISA and viewing a spy movie ("Bourne"), have me thinking again about security.
I emailed my senators, Durbin and Obama, to congratulate them for voting against the FISA alterations. Obama answered--likely a staffer sending a rationalized position statement. Since it is official communication I consider it public:
Thank you for contacting me regarding your concern about the President’s domestic surveillance program. I appreciate hearing from you.
As you know, the 109th Congress came to a close without legislative action on the issue of domestic surveillance. After months of negotiations with the White House, Republican leaders were unable to produce a bill capable of drawing enough support to break a bipartisan filibuster. A day before the Judiciary Committee took up a “compromise" bill that I believe afforded the President too much power without sufficient oversight, a bipartisan group of senators expressed to Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter their reservations about his proposal.
The domestic surveillance debate is still ongoing, but the shift in party control on Capitol Hill has clearly had an impact on this critical debate over the balance of power in our system of government. On January 17, 2007, after conducting its wiretapping program without court approval for over 5 years, the Justice Department announced that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court had approved its program to listen to communications between people in the U.S. and other countries if there is probable cause to believe one or the other is involved in terrorism. Then, in early February, the Justice Department announced that it will give the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees of both chambers of Congress access to previously withheld documents on the NSA program. The congressional committees with jurisdiction over this issue hailed the agreement as a step in the right direction.
I am disappointed that at the last-minute, Congress passed hastily crafted legislation to expand the authority of Attorney General Gonzales and the director of National Intelligence to conduct surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists without a warrant or real oversight, even if the targets are communicating with someone in the United States. As you know, this legislation was signed into law by the President on August 5, 2007, and expires after six months.
Providing any president with the flexibility necessary to fight terrorism without compromising our constitutional rights can be a delicate balance. I agree that technological advances and changes in the nature of the threat we face may require that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), enacted in 1978, be updated to reflect the reality of the post 9/11 world. But that does not absolve the President of the responsibility to fully brief Congress on the new security challenge and to work cooperatively with Congress to address it. I am hopeful that Congress will revisit this extraordinary grant of powers before its 6-month expiration date to develop legislation that meets this challenge while protecting the rights of Americans.
The American people understand that new threats require flexible responses to keep them safe, and that our intelligence gathering capability needs to be improved. What they do not want is for the President or the Congress to use these imperatives as a pretext for promoting policies that not only go further than necessary to meet a real threat, but also violate some of the most basic tenets of our democracy.
Like most members of Congress, I continue to believe the essential objective of conducting effective domestic surveillance in the war on terror can be achieved without discarding our constitutionally protected civil liberties. I look forward to working with my colleagues in Congress, and with the President, to meet this uniquely American challenge.
Thank you again for writing. Please stay in touch as this debate continues.
There is a reflexive statement of position here---we need improved security. This is not actually obvious. A better way of putting it would be we want better security. But history suggests we don't need it, and also that we won't get it even if we try harder.
History also suggests that even when we ignore warnings we get by OK. Hitler's ambitions were known by many, he announced his intentions in print, his achievement of various steps on the way were noted, and still American businessmen and British establishment types were opposed to actions against Hitler. Still, the British survived the worst Hitler could throw at them, and we picked ourselves up and got to work, with the observed result.
We had intel that could have warned us about Pearl Harbor, but it didn't rise to actionable. We lost significant naval strength in one attack. Nonetheless, we easily caught up in numbers, and although it was a hard fight, we bottled up Japan's navy and took back the islands Japan had captured.
So democracy did not need invasive, all-seeing intelligence to survive. Certainly once the war was on we did what we could, and with the British worked crack codes. But we had hugely important help, first from Poles that knew the commercial version of the Enigma, and later from the Germans themselves, through the Abwehr officers that hated Hitler, mainly Canaris, and diplomats that felt the same. If Germany had been unified in its war ambitions we would have had a very difficult time.
Simply put, there were, and are, more people on the side of democracy than against it. Only when we act as an empire do we lose natural allies. If a real threat against us arose, we would have many friends, and likely our enemies would be internally fractured (as we are now). What is most certainly the case is that terror is not a threat in any strategic sense. The only threat is a weapon, not a group---nuclear devices separated from state control. And since nuclear engineering is large-scale and expensive, it's usually quite noticeable to even casual observation, through news sources and commercial satellites.
Consider other events we missed or got wrong, and survived: 1) The rise of Mao-tse-Tung and communism in China, 2) The Berlin blockade and eventual Wall, 3) The removal of said Wall, 4) The Soviet bomb, and H-bomb, 5) Sputnik, 6) Collapse of Eastern Bloc, 7) Collapse of Russian communism, 8) Israeli nuclear weapons, 9)South African nukes, 10) Indian nukes, 11) Pakistani nukes, including A. Q. Khan's efforts, 12) The Chinese joining the Korean War, 13) The oil embargo of 1973, 14) Iraq invading Kuwait, 15) Osama, 16) WMD. When I read "Legacy of Ashes" about the CIA, others will likely come up.
Need more? Can we agree that we've actually done OK without Big Brother? Or rather one that works? We have one now but it remains to be seen whether it's of any value in looking for things we don't already know about. It would be very useful for known targets, of which the best known are our own citizens.
I am opposed to the continual creep of intrusion, the metastasizing of off-budget black operations, the glorification of heavy-handed covert action, and of course the effort to pacify the world, which is likely only to piss off our current friends.
