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.