For the last decade liberals have
proclaimed ourselves to be the “reality-based community.” The
idea, starting with the Iraq War, was that conservatives were seeing
monsters under the bed, that they were ignoring real threats, and
that this attitude was leading us to disaster.
It did. Iraq was a disaster. Katrina
was a disaster. The Great Shitpile, meant to cover it all up, caused
the Great Recession, another disaster. For Republicans, the ultimate
disaster was President Obama, and their denialism has continued from
the day of his election to today.
But if Democrats are to be useful, if
we're to become a true governing majority, we can't take our eyes off
the ball of reality. With the so-called NSA Scandal, we have.
Democrats didn't like the Patriot Act.
I didn't like it. We didn't like the powers it gave the National
Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI, to
gather and hold telephone records and Internet records. But the
reality is, that was passed by Congress, it was approved by the
courts, it became the law.
For some reason we decided that, once
Barack Obama became President, this law professor and Constitutional
scholar would ignore a law passed by Congress, would somehow disavow
the Patriot Act and, at the same time, magically keep us as safe as
the Bush people thought we should be.
What we know now is that he didn't
ignore that law. As with all other laws, President Obama has
faithfully executed his responsibility as the law gave it to him.
The
cloud computing resources foreseen by the law's authors have been
accessed. The telephone records and Internet cache records that were
seen as accessible under the law have been obtained.
What followed is the same use of cloud
computing that we see in dozens of other “big data” applications
all the time, the same thing that lets Amazon recommend songs to us,
that lets Google instantly deliver cogent results to us, that gets us
directions when we talk to Apple's Siri. Clouds combine
virtualization, parallel processing, and server rooms containing
hundreds of thousands of commodity PCs to deliver “big data”
applications that analyze vast amounts of unstructured data on
command, and deliver those results in a scaled way to whoever asks
for them.
If you don't think the NSA should be
doing what it's doing, then you're saying you can Google and they
shouldn't.
The result, according to the
Administration, is that “dozens” of serious attacks have been
thwarted. The only scheme that got past the screen was the Boston Marathon
bombing, in which two 20-somethings, acting on their own, built
home-made bombs out of pressure cookers and readily obtained
instructions, then personally set those bombs along a crowded street.
On balance, a pretty good record. It
seems that, using these new powers granted by the Congress, there are
only two kinds of conspiracies that have any hope of success. One is
something planned by another government, and kept secret by the
policy of that government. The other is the kind of rogue, random
attack we had here.
In terms of public safety, the record
isn't so good, but that's because the laws are fucked. We're losing
10,000 people/year to gun violence in this country. This is close to
the toll taken on our military at the height of the Vietnam War,
between 1967-1970. Typically these are law-abiding citizens,
sometimes little kids, who are getting at guns when they shouldn't,
or getting their hands on them when they're angry.
We're rightly angry over the reality of
handgun violence. The law has failed there. But the law hasn't failed
when it comes to the NSA. It has merely been used.
Now, if liberals have a problem with
the Patriot Act then, as the President says, let's have that
argument. Let's have a commission, as The New Yorker's Hendrik
Hertzberg and others have suggested, that will see how the law is working, and
recommend changes. If you don't like a law, change the law.
But when liberals attack the President
for obeying the law, and for using a law that Congress passed, then
we're joining the Teahadists. When we run around screaming that “the
NSA is listening to all our phone calls” or “the NSA is watching
what we do on the Internet,” things that aren't true, when we put
these things out into the culture in order to increase the paranoia
people already have about government, its leaders, and its powers,
we're playing the Tea Party's Game.
We can't afford to do that. We already
have one Silly Party. It's up to Democrats to be the Sensible Party.
If the law is wrong, change it. But if technology exists, don't deny
it. Don't feed the paranoia machine – that's the other side's job.
You keep your head. You stay grounded in reality.
The fate of the nation is at stake.
