Smitty Invests in Tin Foil

ABC News reports today that the government is tracking the call patterns of journalists. Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you Creeping Totalitarianism®, by the Bush Administration.

If you really want to get creeped out, read all the comments at the bottom of the article (which is itself quite short). Here's a selection:

"'Bout time you guys are roped in."
"Excellent the media needs looking after, traitors most of them....."
"good, you seditionist creeps deserve what you get."
From a claimed journalism student and veteran: "I hope they catch every government leaker of classified secret information and put them in prison for life. And any reporter publishing known classified secret information should be shot. It's called treason, not first amendment rights."
And the finally, the icing on the already inedible cake:
"You do realize people are being paid by the Bush administration to attack the press publically on comment pages like this. I personally was offered a job doing it."

If the last one is true, it's despicable but I'm not surprised (see here for a list of dirty tricks we know this administration and its stooges to be capable of). If the first four are genuine and the last one is not true...

You know, I just saw this very interesting movie called V for Vendetta. It's about people who got scared and sold away their liberty to someone who promised to protect them but did so by keeping them scared. Let me see... H.L. Mencken had something to say about that:

he whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Ah, Mencken. Always trenchant. Of course you can argue successfully that the current hobgoblin is not imaginary. Hardly matters. I'd rather die than give up liberty. This quaint notion was one of the driving factors behind my desire to join the service. Am I the only person left who feels this way? A life spent monitored by the government, a life controlled by disinterested third parties bent on maintaining their power by ordering my existence, is not a life worth living, not at all.

The monarchist philosopher Thomas Hobbes (who, let's recall, was writing against the backdrop of English Civil War) argued that free men would willing band together and give up most of their freedoms--if not all of them--for protection from one another and from outsiders. Hobbes is famous for describing life in the state of nature (an entirely mythical state that presupposes man at some point lived outside society, which he didn't; whether Hobbes believed in a genuine state of nature or not I can't say) as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and consists of a "war of all against all."

Hobbes was not the pessimist some people think; he argued the Leviathan should only act to prevent one man causing harm to another. Hobbes was thus essentially the first modern libertarian. Unfortunately, he either never considered the possibility that the Leviathan, who had no checks on his power, might one day rather drastically curtail the rights of his subjects in the name of public safety, as has happened in numerous cases in the past. Whether Hobbes truly believed his Leviathan would be above that sort of thing, or whether he thought it didn't really matter, I don't know.

In any event, it matters to me. I think our particular Leviathan is grown to big for its britches and needs to be cut down a bit. I find myself wondering whether that might ever actually happen. Given the course of American history--a nigh unbroken uptick in federal power from July 4, 1776, until today--I doubt it.

Boy, this got off topic in a hurry. Let me rein it back in.

The idea of secret warrantless wiretaps may not be all bad (though it's mostly bad in my book) if the targets have verified links to terrorism before the wiretapping starts. That's where I stand. I don't believe that prior verification happened, ergo, I don't think the NSA wiretaps were justified.

Leaking information to the press, when the information involves the government breaking its own laws and engaging in clandestine illegal surveillance of its own citizens and/or breaking the laws of other countries and organizations (the EU for example) in ways that contravene human-rights treaties to which we are a signatory (illegal secret prisons in Eastern Europe for example), does not meet the threshold for treason in my book. In fact leaking information to the press is a felony, spelled out in federal regulations. Using the government's national security apparatus to catch people in felonies seems... petty.

To then start surveillance on the press... Nah. No justification. I brought Hobbes into this because, as I said, Hobbes never discussed what the Leviathan would do if he took his power and then decided to abuse it. Similarly, tracking the phone calls of members of the media opens you up to a vast realm of information you don't need. With this government especially, but with all governments generally, I don't trust them to not use information they shouldn't have.

Which is a really long and round-about way of saying, this here is bad news. Really bad, in my opinion. Totalitarianism doesn't always come to you in the form of a revolution, but one is required to bring a totalitarian government down. Let's hope this tide turns before one becomes necessary.