“We’ve seen this before,” says Daniel Ellensberg,
whistleblower from the Rand Corporation who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the
New York Times.
Then, yes, we get to see Tricky Dick, in glorious black and
white, cued along with sinister music.
And that’s it. More black-and-whites of the left’s favorite
punching bag. But no context. Just the assumption that since the left regards
Nixon as a villain, the EFF’s audience for this video – and just might who that
be but perhaps the youngsters who will swallow it all without bothering to look
for any historical context – will know
what connection Nixon has to warrantless surveillance. (Meanwhile, no sinister
photos, black and white or otherwise, of Barack Obama, the current president
currently presiding over the current surveillance dragnet we’re supposed to be
upset about.)
Here’s where I say: Don’t get me wrong. Nixon was, in many
ways, a villain. His administration’s prosecution of Ellensberg and its
attempted prohibition on publication of the Pentagon Papers were wrong. That he
was impeached and resigned over the subsequent Watergate investigation, in
which paid White House spies tried to bug the Democratic National Committee’s
headquarters is justified.
But making Nixon the sole identified villain in warrantless
surveillance is, at the foundation of the argument, wrong. To make the
accusation fair, we ought to be seeing black and white photos of Messrs. George
W. Bush and Obama, along with their own creepy music, right alongside those of
Tricky Dick. Leaving them out of the video effectively gives them a pass and
fails to connect today’s younger audience, to whom Nixon is a historical figure
they may have read about in the textbooks, with current administration abuses
and rationalizations for continued abuse.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which has led to
current surveillance abuses, started first during the Bush Administration and
continued by the Obama administration came into being as a result of Nixon’s
abuses of the Fourth Amendment as his administration pursued enemies using
government entities (abuses also proved against Nixon predecessors Lyndon B.
Johnson and John F. Kennedy). The act was sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy
(featured in the EFF video) in 1977 and signed into law by President Jimmy
Carter in 1978.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the act has been amended and/or
extended a few times. And abused many times, including by the White House’s
Current Occupant.
But, of course, what was done by Bush and what is being done
by Obama is all for our own good, you see:
Once a critic of President George W. Bush’s hawkish
policies, Mr. Obama was ready with an explanation for why he has preserved and
extended some of them when a reporter asked him at the health care event if he
could assure Americans that the government was not building a database of their
personal information. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama
said. “That’s not what this program’s about.”
But he argued that “modest encroachments on privacy” were
“worth us doing” to protect the country, and he said that Congress and the
courts had authorized those programs.
A National Security Agency telephone surveillance program
collects phone numbers and the duration of calls, not the content, he said. An
Internet surveillance program targets foreigners living abroad, not Americans,
he added.
“There are some trade-offs involved,” Mr. Obama said. “I
came with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We
scrubbed them thoroughly.” In the end, he concluded that “they help us prevent
terrorist attacks.”
That makes me feel all warm inside. “Nobody is listening to
[our] telephone calls,” Obama says. “That’s not what this program’s about.”
My, my, my. Are we supposed to believe that? If it were
Nixon saying, it, no way. But apparently, as far as the EFF and its supporters
are concerned, President Obama gets a pass as long as we’ve got Dick Nixon to
kick around. So, EFF, and Ellensberg, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Wil Wheaton, as
you deliver proper umbrage over the surveillance state, be sure you’re not
protecting anyone. Not even your bestest of best buddies.
What Nixon did was terrible. What has continued in the name
of warrantless surveillance today is unpardonable (Hear that, Gerald Ford?). Leaving
Bush and Obama out of the picture is like condemning the common cold without
talking about the Spanish Flu.
We have this today from Georg Mascolo and Ben Scott at
Slate.com:
[W]e’re left to confront was may be [Edward Snowden’s] most
dismaying revelation: That basic expectation of private communications on the
Internet is now commonly seen a fiction.
Also, per Mascolo and Scott, those foreign governments
raising proper umbrage over US surveillance, are you prepared to come clean
with the kinds of snooping y’all are doing? (Hear that, Germany and Brazil?)
Glass houses, and all, folks. Glass houses.
Mascolo and Scott conclude their screed by saying this, and
I echo what they say: “[J]ust as President Obama has declared his intention to
end the war on terror, he should also take a strong interest in lending an
effort to reset his policies on surveillance to restore the balance between
security and liberty – and in so doing, restore some of the trust the Internet
has lost.”
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