The single greatest blog post ever written about the Bush administration contains this wise dictum at its heart: “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”
Thus, it should raise eyebrows when former Bush administration official Richard Falkenrath's prominent defense of the National Security Agency's massive, secret, illegal telephone record database project involves repeatedly assuring us that the information stored has been “anonymized,” meaning “stripped of individually identifiable data, such as names and place of residence.” The idea of an anonymized phone number is a bad joke. The National Security Agency is no doubt aware by now that last week I placed some phone calls to (212) 989-9706 and (212) 254-5723. To discern the identity of the mystery man behind those contacts (my father, as it happens) you would need to … punch the numbers into Google.
As it happens, that doesn't work for my phone number. But like every other adult in America, I've given my phone number to dozens if not hundreds of companies for one reason or another over time. This information, linking names and addresses with phone numbers is, in turn, widely available through any number of commercial databases, which is where those annoying telemarketer calls come from. What's more, to state the obvious the phone companies know everybody's phone numbers and if, as the Bush administration contends, they're allowed to violate telecommunications privacy laws in the name of national security they have direct access to all this information anyway.
Apologists for the program have also been assuring us that it's all OK because the NSA is only recording our call patterns not actually monitoring the content of the communications. This is, however, false. Just a few months ago the last NSA domestic spying scandal was about the fact that the Bush administration did, in fact, authorize the agency to listen in on conversations without acquiring a warrant. Why, exactly, they wanted to do this was somewhat unclear. Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA at the time and who Bush is trying to put in charge of the CIA, made a cryptic reference to a “subtly softer trigger” than the traditional -- i.e., legally mandated – probable-cause standard. Now it seems that the new revelations explain the old ones: Computer analysis of the database provides the subtly softer trigger and the government is, in fact, secretly listening in on an unknown proportion of our calls. What's more, there's no objective standard or external monitoring of which calls get tapped – it's all just left up to the vagaries of what the relevant officials want to do.
This is, in all likelihood, a terrible idea. I don't like the language of “privacy” which, I think, obscures what's at stake here. The problem is the massive potential for errors and abuse. There's simply no justification for doing anything like this under cloak of secrecy and without any meaningful oversight.Congressman Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has taken to the pages of The Los Angeles Times to assure us that “congressional leaders from both parties … have been regularly briefed.” As Nancy Pelosi explained to a group of progressive journalists about a week before the latest NSA stories came out, the briefings have been so heavily classified as to make it hard for Democrats to ignore that characterization, but if the briefings have been so regular, why won't the administration release the dates and lengths of these allegedly regular briefings?
What's more, briefings -- where the White House sends someone to say some stuff that may or may not be true (yes, it's shocking, but this administration sometimes lies to people) – aren't oversight, where Congress, acting as a co-equal branch of government, inquires into the operations of the executive branch to make sure there's no mischief going on.
The potential for mischief, meanwhile, is large. Allegedly, the purpose of this phone records database is to search it with some kind of computer algorithm to somehow try to locate terrorists. Whether there is any sort of algorithm, or whether it works, or how it works nobody can say. And nothing in the current administration's record inclines one to believe that something is true just because they say it's true. After all, until last week there position was that there was no such database. Far and away the most obvious use for the information they've illegally attended is the much less high-minded one of pinpointing and persecuting leakers and whistleblowers -- see a story you don't like show up in The New York Times and run a search to see which federal employees have made calls to Times employees or vice versa.
Alternatively, it could just be misused by people who have to be in office. The other big story of last week was that the CIA's executive director was fired for taking too many bribes, while the top man at the agency also left for reasons that appear to be at least loosely related. Handing over our privacy to an idealized group of super-honest, super-competent, super-diligent intelligence operatives is one thing, but handing it over to the real world of a dysfunctional intelligence community, including some criminally corrupt managers, all overseen by a pathologically dishonest, secretive, and inept White House, is another thing altogether.
It's tempting to adopt a pose of “reasonableness” and focus merely on the potential for abuses and dirty dealings here, but the time for that is probably past. Does this administration have any powers it hasn't abused?
Early polling on the NSA program has been mixed, at best, but the good news is that Americans' perceptions of George W. Bush's character have caught up with the realities. A late April Gallup poll shows that most people realize Bush picks bad subordinates, isn't trustworthy, doesn't share their values, doesn't care about people like them, and can't manage the government effectively. Under the circumstances, who could possibly think it's a good idea to let him oversee, in secret, a vast stockpile of private information about virtually every person living in the country? Democrats are perennially leery of taking on Bush's counter-terrorism policies, but if they stand firm on this issue, they'll win.
Matt Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
