Hendrik Hertzberg (cc photo: Spencer Selvidge/Texas Tribune)
“There are reasons to be concerned about intelligence-agency overreach, excessive secrecy, and lack of transparency,” wrote Hendrik Hertzberg in a New Yorker piece (6/24/13) about NSA surveillance revelations. “But there are also reasons to remain calm.”
It’s his reasons to remain calm that make me nervous.
“They have not put the lives of tens of millions of Americans under ‘surveillance’ as that word is commonly understood,” Hertzberg writes; with “every American’s phone calls,” the government is merely recording “the time and the duration of the calls, along with the numbers and, potentially, the locations of the callers and the called.”
Really? If government agents followed Hertzberg around, keeping tabs on where he went and how long he stayed there, and entering these facts into a government database, I would think he would acknowledge that he was under surveillance—even if the agents didn’t get close enough to overhear his conversations. Likewise, if the government had a record of who was contacting whom through the mail—who, for example, was getting a periodical-rate mailing from the New Yorker every week—surely this would be understood to be a surveillance program.
But, Hertzberg reassures, none of the info the NSA collects on every phone call is “ever seen by human eyes except in the comparatively tiny number of instances in which a computer algorithm flags one for further examination, in which case—at least, since 2008—a judicial warrant is legally required.”
So unless your pattern of phone calls are deemed to be somehow suspicious—and who knows what that means, because, as Hertzberg stresses, they’re looking for people who are calling “unknown, unsuspected terrorists”—the government won’t go to a secret Star Chamber to get rubber-stamp approval to listen in on your actual conversations. This is what Hertzberg means when he says, “From what we know so far about these NSA programs…they have been conducted lawfully.” Feel reassured yet?
Hertzberg goes on to say of NSA spying programs:
The threat that they pose to civil liberties, such as it is, is abstract, conjectural, unspecified. In the roughly seven years the programs have been in place in roughly their present form, no citizen’s freedom of speech, expression or association has been abridged by them in any identifiable way. No political critic of the administration has been harassed or blackmailed as a consequence of them.
It’s a defense often made of NSA surveillance, and it’s peculiar: It’s as if it’s not possible for the government to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights (to be protected against “unreasonable searches and seizures”) unless it violates their First Amendment rights at the same time.
In reality, of course, our civil liberties are violated—concretely, certainly and specifically—whenever we are subjected to an unreasonable search, which is to say one that is conducted without a judge having been convinced to warrant that there is probable cause to believe that we’ve done something wrong. It’s not OK for the government to sneak into our homes just to have a look around—even if they don’t use what they saw there to mess with us.
What is going on at The New Yorker? You can’t even count on Jon Lee Anderson to give the truth any longer. And Sy Hersh? Geesh. He gives credence to Bobby Baer, a talking peace for the CIA (still). And as for Susan Orlean, give me a break. I like the movie “Orchid Thiefs” that Meryl Streep did as an adaptation of Orlean’s work. But when Orlean came to the Highland Park area if Los Angeles for a piece on Galco’s soda pop shop, she did not even note in her article the correct kind of clothing that the owner wore…Are there any good journalists left at The New Yorker? Is it still even the best place to publish fiction and poetry if you write in American English? I worked on the Mississippi Queen years before it burned down with a poet who had been published in The New Yorker. He manned a little iron cage booth in the bottom of the ship that logged in all of the food items. His iron cage was right beside an ice freezer where an amazing ice sculptor used to get drunk on good whiskey so that he had it in him to whip out ice sculptures on a moment’s notice and then get back to his other job on the Mississippi Queen. I am starting to think that that poet I worked briefly with was the last good writer who published in The New Yorker.
The Fourth Amendment
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Its almost as if the media is working in collusion with the state to deceive the people. But of course that would be an absurd conspiracy theory.
Nunya Biz: It has been established for a good while that the CIA has plants at CNN. So why is that a crazy conspiracy theory?
Remember that one time you Googles Al Qaida?
NSA remembers!
What makes me more nervous, is not the Government spying on us. All governments do it, and it is up to us to tell them when and where to get their noses out of our business, not unlike the small child who gets into everything, one has to be vigilant, and occasionally “take it away” from the child.
What makes me more nervous, and has always been the real and actual “Violation” of our privacy and constitutes the unreasonable “search and seizures” is the Corporate meme of “we have the right to buy anything we want, and we have the right to record everything you do and say so we can sell it and make more money”.
And there is where the real danger lies, as few people realize that the Corporations are the most avaricious and greedy ones when it comes to your ‘personal data’. They will snoop, sniff, peel back, examine and other wise poke into every single minute item in your life, and do so with glee under the ‘Right to make another dollar”. You will not get a say in what they find out about you, and they will sell your family down the river if they think it will make a profit for them. They will even gather false data, declare it ‘safe and sane’ and then sell it to the highest bidder. Does anyone ever bother to read the public statements from many of them, who actually do admit to spying on your transactions and you movements, all in the name “Serving you better”. Sadly the punch line is not Un-similar to the outer Limits episode where the aliens come to earth and show us a book “How to serve Humans”, only it turns out they want us for the main course. The corporations want only to serve us better, as in “Trussed and coated with gravy” for selling.
That is the real reason that Corpse Press is so adamant against Snowden, because it will eventually come to light that it is the Corporation doing the spy all along, and they are mad because Snowden didn’t pay for it, he got his data for free.
I have a feeling if Bush was still president there would be a much larger outcry over government survailance and PRISM from the media than now under Obama. It is “only Nixon can go to China” but in reverse.
@Padremellyrn I totally agree with you. Corporations – rather than being equal to individual persons in the eyes of the law – are becoming defacto governments.
If someone HAS been blackmailed using information gathered from the NSA’s surveillance programs, how would Hertzberg know? Isn’t the point of blackmail to keep someone silent?
The burning question for all those who make claims about top-secret organizations-
If it’s “top-secret,” then how do you know?
How the hell can Hertzberg make ANY claims to knows what’s really going on when it’s, well… top secret?
Besides, with regard to the “threat of terrorism,” when you have architects and engineers from all over the world saying the 3 buildings that fell on 9/11/2001 were controlled demolitions, then that’s what they were whether we like it or not.
Hard science is not a conspiracy theory. But the idea that we have to give up our civil liberties in order for the govt to better protect us from terrorism, is the stupidest conspiracy theory I have ever heard!
It is therefore impossible not to conclude that the govt (granted, a corporate-controlled government) is covering up, and was directly involved in perpetrating that heinous 9/11 terror attack on the American people for the sole purpose of getting us to agree to lose our civil liberties. Thereby making a totalitarian corporate dictatorship easier to install, as they are working towards now, not least with Obama’s top-secret TPP.
If we don’t have the guts to speak the obvious, for fear of being called a “conspiracy theorist” by those who believe the dumbest conspiracy theory of them all, then… come on! Any “journalist” who still sings along with the chorus of government lies is clearly a joke.
This talking head works for the government…;Plain and simple.
You’re right, Mirza–the same Democratic partisans and “liberal” backsliders telling us to move on ’cause there’s nothing to see here (were) would be screaming bloody murder if Bush were at the helm. I’m counting the days until the end of Obama’s presidency–maybe then these folks will awaken from their long stupor and realize what’s been lost.
Hertzberg is a tool for the military / industrial / academic complex!
Padremellyrn, That was a Twilight Zone, episode 89, To Serve Man, 1962 March 02. But it is a good parallel. The Patriot Act; IT’S A COOKBOOK! And the main character was a journalist.
Good article.It correctly says that when your rights are infringed upon(as outlined in our constitution)that any attempt to explain the good of that infringement, is at its heart nefarious.
You know Tim…It is not just the left that has taken to this idea that this kind of backslide is good as long as the man in charge is “our man”.I heard Rush Limbaugh state as much.Saying it matters WHO is in charge when this type of power is used.As if a Sarah Palin would be good and Obama bad.I could not disagree more.This is how a tyrant-when he arrives, has the tools in place to use for his tyrannical pleasures.
Thanks there Hendrik, Good job spewing the government line.
The check is in the mail
Dear Government – put me on your no call list.
Did it ever occur to Hendrik Hertzberg that many people are self-censoring because of the NSA spying? One needs look no farther than the sources who are refusing to be interviewed out of fear of retaliation or even prosecution. Of even greater consequence are the many people who had thought of becoming more politically active and outspoken but will not now out because they are concerned about being targeted for scrutiny by the NSA. How could Hertzberg not consider these outcomes when he wrote that no one’s freedom of speech and association has been violated by the NSA spying? I thought that the only loyalty of a journalist is to the truth; does Hertzberg have some other agenda?
I had no idea how important it could be to keep a diary, but now I need not worry – the government is doing it for me!