Living in the Government's Fishbowl
By Alan
Caruba
You have
to wonder why all the data gathering by the National Security Agency, Homeland
Security, and the FBI failed to identify and surveil the perpetrators of the
Boston Marathon bombing? When even the Russians warned national security
authorities about the Chechen brothers, Dzhokan and Tamerlan Tsaraev, they were
reportedly interviewed and then ignored.
“Are you
planning to make bombs to kill infidels?”
“No, sir.” “Okay, have a nice
day.”
It is useful
to recall the extraordinary fear that the 9/11 attacks generated. Americans
were ready to accept any means possible to avoid further attacks. The Patriot
Act came off the shelf and was enacted swiftly even though most members of
Congress barely had time or perhaps even made the effort to read it.
On June 6,
an unidentified “senior administration spokesman” said, “Information collected
under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence
information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety
of threats.” The latest revelations about the scope of that intelligence
gathering, combined with those about the misuse of data by the Internal Revenue
Service, led The New York Times to say of the reassurances being offered—just
trust us—“The administration has now lost all credibility”; amending that
shortly after to “…on this issue.” Too late. You told the truth the first time.
The Times,
along with many conservatives, was wary of the Patriot Act, saying it was
“reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.”
The Fourth
Amendment to the Constitution says “The right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and
seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable
cause, supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
S.T.
Karnick, the Director of Research for The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based, free market
think tank, said, “The audacity of monitoring everyone’s phone calls in hopes
of catching a small number of terrorists demonstrated the unconstitutionality
and self-contradiction at the heart of the mass government surveillance. There
is no probable cause for which to search any particular individual’s call
records, merely a probability that someone somewhere used a telephone to assist
in the planning or commission of a crime.”
That
document was leaked and if it were not for such leaks to the news media we
would not know even a fraction of what the current and past administrations
have been doing with regard to the invasion of the constitutionally protected
privacy of Americans.
Dr. Yuri
N. Maltsev, PhD, professor of economics at the A.W. Clausen Center for World
Business of Carthage College, responded to a Heartland Institute invitation to
address this issue saying, “Our Constitution is openly and brazenly violated
and it reminds me of how Russians, Chinese, Cubans, and many many others lost
their freedom and paid dearly with tens of millions of innocent lives.”
Seton
Motley, president of Less Government and, like myself, a Heartland policy
advisor, also responded to the invitation, saying, “This is just the latest
example—but maybe the worst—of the Obama administration’s complete disregard
for the Constitution and the freedom from government overreach it guarantees
us. Here’s hoping the stunning totality of all we’ve lost will cause us to rise
up and demand that it all be restored.”
We have
learned that we now all live in a government fishbowl.
In the
aftermath of 9/11 the Bush administration did what it thought must be done to
avoid a comparable attack, but the Obama administration has turned the Patriot
Act into an excuse to ignore the Constitution and impose a potential police
state on all of us.
In a June
6 Wall Street Journal opinion by Elizabeth Goitein, a co-director of the
Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, warned
that “The most tangible problem is the invasion of American’s privacy. The
so-called metadata collected by the NSA includes information about our calls, such
as the numbers we call, the numbers of those who call us, when the calls were
made, and for how long. This information may seem relatively trivial at first
blush. Yet, pieced together, these details can paint a detailed and sensitive
picture of our private lives and our associations.”
Add in the
information gained from surveillance of our data on the Internet and you have
NO privacy whatever.
It is time
to increase restrictions on the way the IRS can use the information we are
required by law or regulatory fiat to provide. Indeed, it is time to eliminate
the income tax and replace it with a Fair Tax. It is time to remove the IRS
from the enforcement of Obamacare and to repeal this noxious law.
It is time
to overhaul the Patriot Act and to put strong limits on the capacity of the
federal government to indiscriminately gather information on every U.S. citizen
with massive data gathering systems in the name of national security.
© Alan
Caruba, 2013
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" and shared on dozens
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