The Boys Who Cried Wolf

Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of links on the NSA wiretapping issue that includes this rather scathing piece by Max Boot. Boot argues:

I CAN CERTAINLY understand the uproar over President Bush’s flagrant abuses of civil liberties. This is America. What right does that fascist in the White House have to imprison Michael Moore, wiretap Nancy Pelosi and blackmail Howard Dean?

Wait. You mean he hasn’t done those things? All he’s done is intercept communications between terrorists abroad and their contacts in the U.S. without a court order? Talk about defining impeachable offenses downward.

Boot makes an important point here. The rhetoric on this issue is so incredibly overheated that it completely drowns out any reasonable discussion of the issues. Instead of substantive legal analysis about the needs for individual privacy versus the threat of terrorism, we get a whole host of idiots – including members of Congress – making idiotic comments about “impeachment” and determining without inquiry that obviously Bush broke the law, pissed on the Constitution, etc. Those infantile knee-jerk reactions have become entirely predictable and do absolutely nothing to the discourse in this country – and those on the right making their same predictable charges are just as guilty, but much fewer in number.

The fact is that terrorism is a threat. Groups like al-Qaeda can and do use sleeper cells within the United States to carry out terrorist threats. The 9/11 Commission specifically singled out FISA as a point of weakness in our anti-terrorist capabilities. Technology has meant that traditional wiretaps are no longer effective enough to deal with the nature of the threat. Techniques such as data mining do a much better job, but aren’t compatible with existing FISA regulations. Changing the system would require a level of disclosure that isn’t acceptable, and the President made the judgment call that his statutory and Constitutional authority allowed him to proceed with the wiretaps. Court precedent seems to support that conclusion.

Civil libertarians would be wise to approach this subject from a standpoint of balancing civil liberties with the need for the government to fight terrorism – yet the vast majority of those attacking this program are doing it from an absolutist position that is not shared by the vast majority of the American people. The argument that we should treat a member of al-Qaeda as though they were a common criminal doesn’t fly. The argument that there’s no terrorist threat doesn’t fly.

The fact is that Congress did have oversight of this program. It was reauthorized every 45 days. Procedures were altered on the basis of privacy and oversight concerns. The idea that this was some rogue program doesn’t bear any resemblance to the facts.

Like many of the issues around this war, the hyper-partisan nutjobs have taken over public discourse, and even formerly rational people like Andrew Sullivan have become slobbering ideologues who view the world through absolutist glasses. We can’t fight a group like al-Qaeda and play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules – in war those who see everything in black and white get people killed.

At the end of the day, like many issues, it’s a debate about values. The notion that privacy always trumps security is not a reasonable position. The position that security always trumps privacy doesn’t work either. At the same time, the notion that a journalist being able to speak with a foreign source safe from wiretapping trumps the ability of the government to fight terror isn’t a particularly worthwhile argument. If New York was in ruins, would it be right to say “well, 10 million people got vaporized, but at least Christopher Hitchens could share martini recipes with someone in Kabul without the NSA listening in”? Most people would say no.

The absolutists on this issue need to recognize that paranoid and angry is no way to go through life. If the government was going to turn into a tyranny, would FISA even matter? The technology exists, and so long as it does the potential for abuse remains with or without laws like FISA. The argument that this program is some horrendous infringement upon civil rights that will destroy American democracy as we know it is silly, facile, and dumb. The more groups like the ACLU keep crying wolf against the Bush Administration, the harder it will be to defend against real violations of human rights. Absolutists end up discrediting their own causes, and such profoundly unserious discussions of such serious and important issues does not help in the slightest.