Why NSA Spying Matters

John Judis was a relatively low level political activist, primarily concerned with the Vietnam war, in the 1960s

Well, he relates the systematic program of surveillance and harassment against him:

President Barack Obama has assured us that we need not be worried about the National Security Agency listening to our phone calls or monitoring our Internet use. The NSA’s programs, he said, represent “modest encroachments on privacy” that are “worth us doing” to protect the country from terrorists. Count me among those who are not reassured by Obama’s statement. I know better—from my schoolboy knowledge of the Constitution and from my own experience during the '60s with unwarranted government surveillance.

I don’t usually like to base moral judgments on what the Constitution does or does not allow, but in this case, it makes sense to do so. The Constitution had two very different purposes: One was to create a functioning government; the other, forged in the wake of the American revolution, was to establish constraints that would prevent the abuse of state power. The First Amendment was designed to do the latter; and so was the Fourth, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The administration’s obsessive pursuit of press leaks threatens the First Amendment’s freedom of the press; and the NSA’s surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on general warrants—on indiscriminate searches without probable cause.

………

I had my own vague vision of what a socialist America would look like, but almost everything that I did was directed at immediate issues like ending the Vietnam War or later impeaching Richard Nixon. I was not a bomb thrower. I advocated running candidates in elections. I taught classes on Marx’s Capital and American history at a school we organized in Oakland. But during this period, I was under almost constant surveillance by the FBI and by other intelligence or police agencies. I received regular visits from the FBI (I told them I wouldn’t talk to them), and they also visited my parents and friends.

As my FBI file, which I later obtained, attested, my movements were being monitored even when I didn’t know it. (Most of it is, unfortunately, blacked out.) In organizing demonstrations, I encountered people who turned out to be government agents. I was pulled over by the police with guns drawn for no apparent reason. And I also received inquiries about my tax returns from the IRS even though I was living on about $3000 a year during much of this period. These inquiries, which to this day may or may not have had something to do with my politics, certainly make me sympathetic to the rightwing groups who were barraged by inquiries from the IRS—whether or not these inquiries were directed by higher-ups in the administration.

………

Obama says that the debate over the NSA’s activities is “healthy for our democracy” and a “sign of maturity.” But I think it’s a sign of forgetfulness—of Constitutional amnesia—on the part of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, not to mention the administration’s vaunted intelligence chiefs who want to divert attention from the subject of the leaks, which is their own behavior, onto the leaker. I am hoping Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress remind the administration what the Constitution was designed to do and what the original FISA legislation was meant to do, but judging from the performance of most congressional leaders so far, I am not holding my breath.

When people (like the contemptible Lawrence O'Donnell^* this evening) say that they "feel safer" because they are much less likely to be observed in the vast morass of data, they do no not get it.

The question is what happens with all that information when someone in power, whether it be the President of the United States, or minor data entry clerk like Edward Snowden, or a law enforcement official like J. Edgar Hoover decides to make you their business.

You do not get lost in the haystack when they decide to come for you.

That's why we have a 4^th amendment.

^*Seriously, he is so in the tank for Obama that he would endorse an order from Obama for O'Donnell's own execution.