Schwarz on Mission Creep
From Bill Moyers' Journal, a recent episode where the topic was eavesdropping on electronic communications. I've shamelessly copied a quotation from Fritz Schwarz, and dropped with no compunction Charles Fried's contention that such eavesdropping is absolutely necessary, because the NSA is like the cop on the beat in a small town — although we note that the cop on the beat does his job without opening anyone's mail.
[what follows I excerpted from: "Another Church Committee?", Bill Moyers' Journal, 26 October 2006.]
Bill Moyers' guests this week debated the need for greater oversight of executive wiretapping programs. Fritz Schwarz was lead counsel on the Church Committee, which lead to the passing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, representing one of the first major checks, aside from the Constitution itself, on an Administration's ability to eavesdrop on Americans suspected of consorting with foreign enemies.
As Schwarz explains to Bill Moyers:
You can have something that starts in a benign way. And then it spreads to the unbenign and that always happened. It was true with NSA, the National Security Agency, as proven by our investigation. They got every single cable that left the United States for 30 years, but they started only wanting those because they wanted to get information from encrypted cables that were sent by foreign embassies to their home governments… They then went to getting the cables of civil rights leaders, all of them, and any Vietnam War protestors, all of them… Secrecy plus lack of oversight leads to mission creep. And that leads to the move to the indefensible.
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on Saturday, 27 October 2007 at 01.38
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I wouldn't be surprised to someday learn that during the Bush administration communications of Democratic Party officials, national and state, those among congressional Democrats and, especially, Democratic national campaign operations, were monitored, with useful ones being passed on to Karl Rove's office and to RNC headquarters.
If called on this revelation, I'm sure Bush, Cheney, whoever, will claim it was deemed necessary for national security, to make sure those hate-America-first leftists wouldn't do anything that might undermine the war on terror/Iraq quagmire.
on Saturday, 27 October 2007 at 05.09
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"You can have something that starts in a benign way. And then it spreads to the unbenign and that always happened."
I figured they were talking about big government liberalism.
on Saturday, 27 October 2007 at 15.35
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Time and events are making it more clear, almost by the day, that the size of government and liberalism aren't what people who care about America, it's liberties and democracy, should be worrying about.
on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 at 07.35
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–government and liberalism, liberties and democracy– are all part of the same cloth. If you craft a government big enough to start doling out liberties, you have a behemoth large enough to take those liberties away.
on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 at 14.12
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With few exceptions, our government doesn't dole out liberties. The exceptions usually have been the result of arbitrary judgments arising in parts of American society, not government, about the moral worthiness of various minorities. Obviously, the miscarriage of justice Japanese Americans suffered in World War II was a glaring exception on both counts.
Under our system, rights are considered inherent. They belong to citizens by virtue of their being, period. Given the proclivities of the current administration, I understand how there might be some confusion.
Furthermore, government size has little to do with the level of liberty people enjoy. The U.S. government swelled during World War II to several times the size it had ever been. Yet, except for Japanese Americans, people's liberties remained intact and were fully restored after the war.
on Wednesday, 31 October 2007 at 07.53
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"Under our system, rights are considered inherent."
Agreed. But the enforcement of those rights may require a powerful government. And unscrupulous people may get in office and misuse this power, such as the Clintons, using the IRS and FBI against their critics.
"Furthermore, government size has little to do with the level of liberty people enjoy."
Maybe. I believe the adage, from critics of the New Deal, was that a government big enough to give you prosperity, is big enough to take it away. Instead of economic terms, I was thinking in behavioral terms. If we want a government that monitors us for racism, sexism, smoking, and trans fat consumption, such oversight could be used for other, less desirable reasons.