Burning the Village to Save It
by Lee H Goldberg

The start of the Soviet Union's devolution from a superpower to a collection of struggling nations is often marked as the fall of the Berlin Wall, back in 1989, but its real roots lie in a much earlier confluence of internal and external forces. And while not nearly as invasive as the Soviet-era techniques practiced by the then KGB, the National Security Agency's (NSA) recently-exposed wholesale collection of domestic phone traffic records hints that some of the same forces may be afoot here, and provides a cautionary tale about the perils that face our own nation today.

Historical perspective shows that the pressures of the Cold War and the USSR's own imperial ambitions drove its leaders to adopt unsustainable levels of arms expenditures that helped further weaken its struggling economy and hastened its eventual demise. But the country's totalitarian system of internal surveillance and control also proved to be an equally corrosive force that slowly devoured the country from within. Meanwhile, the tight control the Soviet state held over even the most basic sorts of information amplified the effects of its socialist economics, which already seemed designed with the sole purpose of discouraging innovation, initiative or efficiency. The end result was that the Soviet economy slowly digested itself, thanks in good part to the extraordinary levels of human, technical, and economic resources being diverted from productive efforts in order to track its entire population's movement and communications.

It would seem that the very tools crafted by the USSR to render it secure against external enemies created a toxic environment that poisoned its economic and social fabric from within. Unfortunately we may have gotten an early warning sign of similar political forces beginning to appear here in the United States. USA Today's May 11 story provides the alarming details of how most major carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Bell South - only Qwest Communications had the guts to challenge the constitutionality of these actions, which did not even bother with the fig leaf of legality offered by the extremely lenient FISA court. For their efforts they were threatened by the NSA that their reluctance might affect their ability to obtain future classified work with the government.) have been providing the NSA with complete logs of all calls placed on their systems.

Had this been the first incident of its kind, one might be able to chalk it up to an over-conscientious leadership who neglected the agency's charter to uphold our constitution in their haste to protect immediate national security interests. Unfortunately, recent revelations that the NSA has had this program in place since at least 2001 and that they insisted on bypassing even the minimal checks and balances provided by the extremely lenient FISA court (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court's 11-judge panel that grants law enforcement agencies the power to perform domestic surveillance is structured to favor government interests and weed out only the most questionable cases. It can even grant post-facto permission for emergency wiretaps that could not wait for approval. In fact, the court modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of its operation. Even in the more troubled times, following 2001, they have only questioned, or changed, 179 of the 5645 requests for surveillance filed by the Bush administration.) and CALEA laws suggest that this latest abuse of our basic civil rights is part of a darker, more troubling pattern. This, and our government's other recent activities - including warrantless domestic wiretaps; secret detention (and in some cases torture) of suspects without due process; and the Nixonian practices of monitoring and infiltrating legally-constituted political groups that oppose the administration's policies - indicate that the basic principles our country was founded on could be at risk.

And, much like the former Soviet Union, our economy may also soon feel the effects of these so-called security measures. Besides the potentially chilling effect that the extra costs of continuous surveillance will have on the telecommunications carriers, the requirements that every communication technology must provide hooks for so-called lawful intercept can only hinder the innovation and flexibility that has been the hallmark of the networking equipment industry. It's also unsettling to imagine the hundreds of millions (or, maybe, billions?) of citizens' tax dollars being spent to indiscriminately record and archive the tens of billions of calls placed every day in America -- while we scrape for funds to feed and arm our troops, rebuild our shattered Gulf Coast and improve our crumbling educational system.

The illegal use of the Nation's security assets to spy on political opponents by both Democratic and Republican presidents during the 1960s and 1970s (see my editorial History Lessons) underlines the fact that our national security depends on maintaining public accountability for how they are used as much as the intelligence they produce. Sadly, accountability seems to be in short supply these days, as Gen Michael V Hayden, the very person who oversaw the NSA's telecom data mining program, is now in line to head the CIA, and the congressional inquiry into the government's recent warrant less wiretapping activities was shut down because the NSA refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to continue their work.

This quiet, steady and systematic erosion of our Constitutional rights and the due process of law should sound an alarm that transcends party lines and makes common cause of all patriotic citizens, be they Republicans or Democrats, Greens or Independents, liberals or conservatives. If we ignore it much longer, we may find that the bruised and polarized nation which we have been fighting for control of has slipped through our fingers and suffered the same fate of a Vietnamese village which, some decades ago, was burned to the ground to save it.

Comments? Questions? Hate mail or Federal subpoenas? Write me at LHG at EN-Genius dot net.