Our president is back with one of his grand conceptions, ideal compromises, and works of staggering political genius. This one, like the others, is designed to please every special interest involved, though it may leave out a minor matter or two. Like national security. And the kind of obsessive attention to detail that national security calls for.
But who cares about all that boring minutiae? In their sweeping vision and righteous indignation, the brilliances at the White House and in Congress have decided that the National Security Agency is getting much too concerned about national security. Specifically, about everybody’s phone calls, or at least a record of them. And that means everybody’s. In the whole world.
Our snoops, both civilian and military, those nosy parkers, are now able to amass all that metadata and use all those mysterious algorithms to trace a lone call from one party to another to another and so hop-skip-and-jump along till they notice, say, that one of those phone calls could be traced, after a discreet inquiry or two, to an address in Abbottabad, Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan-which just might be the number of a Bin Laden, O.
Which means a Navy SEAL Team Six could be dispatched to pay a courtesy call to said address at 1 o’clock in the morning, which happily proved said occupant’s final hour. You just can’t ever tell where attention to detail-the smallest detail-might lead.
But why bother? The political repercussions of all this snooping are too much trouble to deal with. So,deftly as always, our commander-in-chief has come up with the ideal solution: Just park all this data with the phone companies!
Who knew our president is such a fan of private enterprise? But these public utilities should make the perfect buffer when the ACLU, Pat Leahy (D-Vermont), et many al., raise a ruckus about our snoops getting too snoopy. So just leave all this data, and maybe the few small clues buried here and there in that worldwide haystack, for Ma Bell or somebody like that to take care of. Political problem solved.
As for any problem this solution might raise for our intelligence agencies, there’s no need to worry about it. For we’ve now got the word of the usual unidentified “senior administration official” that the effect of this change would be “small.” It’s just a little tweak, we’re told. How assuring. Only the more persnickety among us might express a reservation or two about this neat arrangement. Or maybe just anybody who ever had one of those lick-and-a-promise, introductory orientation lectures in G-2 (military intelligence) back in the Basic Officers Course years ago.
So here’s a little advisory note: Next time a slew of airliners goes crashing into skyscrapers, the Pentagon, and various other unscheduled destinations, don’t call your local phone company for help. That’s when our troopers, cops, firefighters, and emergency responders in general are suddenly recognized and appreciated. If only for a little while-until the immediate danger is past and outfits like the CIA, FBI, DIA, and I&A are once again described as dangers to Americans’ privacy.
It occurs to some of us that privacy may not be our most pressing need when aboard a hijacked airliner or trapped in an American outpost under attack, whether a compound outside Benghazi, Libya, or the Pentagon itself. At that point our needs may be more immediate and urgent, like survival. But in their clean, climate-conditioned offices, the experts-in political maneuver, not necessarily national security-have decided that our intelligence agencies are the real and present danger. And the usual experts won’t change their minds till all hell breaks loose. Again.
Every time our president comes up with one of these brainstorms, the prim visage of a now forgotten American statesman comes to mind: one Henry L. Stimson, who was secretary of state, war, and of just about everything else at one time or another under every president from William Howard Taft to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Call him the utility infielder, relief pitcher, and Unidentified Manin Background of every American administration in the first half of the 20th and Most Terrible Century.
Mr. Stimson entered not just bureaucratic history but legend when, in one of his less prescient moments, he closed down the government’s secret code-breaking agency (“the black chamber”) with the high-sounding explanation, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Barack Obama is not the first American statesman to think himself too refined for the dirty work of snooping, otherwise known as protecting the United States of America from all enemies foreign and domestic.
Nor would this be the first time American intelligence work was outsourced to one of our fine private companies. On the morning of December 7, 1941, American code breakers deciphered a message to Tokyo’s ambassadors in Washington that indicated an impending attack on U.S. bases throughout the Pacific, but, ho hum, Army communications were down that morning, so the warning to Pearl Harbor was sent by . . . Western Union. It arrived about six hours after the Zeros did.
Now our current president-and commander-in-chief!-wants to leave all these not so little matters that the National Security Agency has been handling, like its vast meta-collection of phone data, to the phone companies, and have our snoops get limited permission to peruse those records every time they think there might be some little coincidence tucked away in there that could use a closer look.
But why sweat the small stuff? It’s all probably meaningless, like the 14th part of that diplomatic cable of December 7, 1941. If that little history lesson isn’t enough to tell us our president is on the wrong track again, maybe the word of an expert in these sleuthing matters might help: “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”- Holmes, Sherlock. Even the clues that aren’t there can turn out to be key, like the dog that didn’t bark. Elementary, my dear Watson.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 04/09/2014