The real scandal
Edward Snowden, the techie who revealed top secret National Security Agency collection programs, has opened a debate that was overdue: how much privacy are we willing the sacrifice for an uncertain security upgrade? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it is understandable that we launched a massive effort to improve intelligence collection and enlarge the intelligence apparatus. We had been attacked. We needed to know more about what other threats were out there. The US government grounded all commercial aircraft that day. In retrospect, that was an over-reaction, since no other plotters were found, other than those who seized and crashed four planes. But at the time it was a perfectly reasonable, though costly, precaution.
It is now almost 12 years later. Very few Americans are being killed by terrorists–on the order of a dozen per year, mostly abroad in Kabul. The odds of being killed by lightning are higher. Maybe that’s because what we have done has worked well. Maybe what we did was overkill. But with time comes perspective and maybe wisdom. President Obama has vigorously defended the surveillance programs that Snowden revealed. They had been briefed to Congress and appear to have been legal. Now they should be debated in public. My bet is that most Americans will not regard what the US government is doing as excessive, until it is clearly abused and the abuses made public.
I for one don’t really much care if my emails and text messages are stored in some vast data base under a mountain in Utah. I long ago started assuming that it was all available as soon as I touched the QWERTY keys. I also have been known to go skinny dipping. I’m just not all that self-conscious. But other people are and deserve their say. I have no doubt but that abuses are possible, ranging in import from trivial to gross. One only need read how government misbehavior led to Daniel Ellsberg’s escaping judicial sanction for publishing the Pentagon papers to know that Washington is capable of doing terrible things.
I doubt Edward Snowden, if they ever get him into court, or Wikileaks’ Bradley Manning, who is in court now, will be so lucky. The government will be anxious to try and convict these two and throw away the key, as a lesson to others who might contemplate revealing classified material. Both would like to be considered whistleblowers, who are protected under federal law. Neither is likely to find that relieves them of the burden they took on when they signed the forms needed to get a security clearance.
So I am not scandalized either by what Snowden has done or by what the government was up to. I’ll await his fate in court.
But his $200,000 salary working for a government contractor is something else, if his claim pans out. That’s an outrage for a 29-year-old with a GED who started work as a security guard less than ten years ago. I don’t care how good he was as a systems administrator. He shouldn’t be paid more than the top US government civil servants. Half their salaries would be more like it, if that. The vast outsourcing of government work started with Al Gore’s reinventing government and has continued apace ever since, with a big push after 9/11. It is not “reinventing government.” It is waste, fraud and mismanagement. I hope someone notices and gets excited enough to stop it.
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5 thoughts on “The real scandal”
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Thanks for shifting the focus of this issue to include government contracts. I agree that outsourcing has made government more expensive, not less.
Booz Allen says today his job only pays $122,000 a year – does that help? (And he only worked for them for 3 months.)
So, about that $400-a-night hotel room that he just checked out of. Maybe he wasn’t so flush as to be able to consider financing it indefinitely? The question then arises as to how he planned to support himself in the future. It will be interesting to see where he turns up – Pyongyang? Beijing? the nearest Ecuadorian embassy?
As for Al Gore’s bright idea to outsource the government: yeah.
I don’t see much of a problem with this alleged “scandal”. In a globally interconnected world, where a wannabe terrorist can learn how to make an explosive device and become an actual terrorist in virtually just a few clicks, authorities can hardly protect the normal, law-abiding citizens without infringing on people’s privacy to a certain extent. I’ve also heard that, according to opinion polls, most Americans are not concerned about the issue of “oversurveillance” by the NSA, which, in my view, shows that they are realistic enough to understand the challenges U.S. security and intelligence agencies are facing in their efforts to keep the nation as safe as possible. After all, I wonder how imprudent (it is the softest word I could recall) one should be to share highly confidential information by means of electronic communication.
I guess that, in the end, the major effect of these revelations will be that mass media have gotten yet another source of sensation to exploit in the next few weeks.
This would have been a gift beyond price to the Republican Party – except that the program was instituted by George Bush’s administration with the approval of both parties in Congress. The sensational flight to China of the leaker is probably responsible for all the attention the story is getting now – after all, there have been newspaper stories in the past about super-sized data-mining efforts that nobody seems to have paid any attention to.
It’s one more topic “we need to have a national discussion about”? Ok, but it probably won’t produce any more changes than those discussions on stem-cells and race and gun-ownership we were supposed to have but put off for another day. Unless Snowden accepts a job working for the Chinese government, the story should die down soon. If he had read about the lives of Westerners who spied for the USSR and then fled there to spend the rest of their lives working as translators or whatnot, he might have considered his actions a little more carefully.
It is one issue how much snooping the government is doing. It is another issue with how much secrecy that snooping is surrounded. I think it was a good thing that Snowden brought that latter issue on the table. You can’t have democracy when people are clueless about what their government is doing.