Congress
is still dragging its feet on fixes more than a year after Edward Snowden's
alarming revelations first came to light.
By and
In a more innocent time not so long ago, perhaps only a million
or so people in this country fell under the government’s suspecting glare.
Achieving that distinctively fat FBI file might have required marching against a war or traveling to leftist lands.
Achieving that distinctively fat FBI file might have required marching against a war or traveling to leftist lands.
These days, there’s no precise way to figure out what it takes.
And once you get on that dreaded terror watch list, there’s no certain route to
getting off it and flying without fear of having to spend some serious quality
time with a pack of TSA goons.
Just ask Stephen Hayes.
The conservative journalist and frequent Fox News guest is trying his best to
get off that list. He doesn’t know how he got on it exactly, but he suspects it
has something to do with a trip he and his wife took that involved flying with
one-way tickets to Turkey and then carrying on their overseas adventure by land
and sea.
Being a staunch conservative, this puts Hayes in the awkward
position of potentially sympathizing with innocent people trying to travel
while Muslim. Still, he does manage to weave his predicament into his usual
narrative by pinning the blame for this spooky nonsense on the Department of
Homeland Security’s “large, lumbering, inefficient bureaucracy.”
Sure. That explains everything.
Thanks to Edward Snowden and his dramatic whistle-blowing, at
least you don’t have to be paranoid any longer to know that we’re all being
watched. Every email and every phone call gets perused at some level as a tiny
crumb of metadata.
Harnessing the wonders of technology, your unopened mail is photographed before delivery too.
The really scary part is that so little has changed since these
revelations began to roll out more than a year ago. The same characters
continue to lead the intelligence agencies with the same arrogance we were
accustomed to. The Obama administration has unveiled a few modest changes without producing the kind of overhaul
that’s needed.
Congress hasn’t shown any serious leadership either. Two privacy
bills now pending aren’t likely to sail to Obama’s desk this year due to the uncertainty over which party will
control the Senate after
the mid-term elections.
Privacy advocates can’t agree on whether one of them, patriotically
dubbed the USA Freedom Act, would make things better. The American Civil Liberties Union says that legislation would mark a
step forward, while Daniel Ellsberg and other famous whistleblowers have joined
forces to call for the bill’s defeat.
Most of those folks are united, however, in opposing another
bill known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). That
legislation would essentially “militarize the Internet,” warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
a nonprofit civil liberties group specializing in cyber issues.
Instead of guaranteeing that your privacy will be protected in
this digital age, CISA’s foes say it would bestow greater freedom to private
and government snoopers to poke around in your business for no good reason.
Meanwhile, the government has some serious work to do to protect
us all from humdrum fraud never seen before on such a massive scale. With
record-breaking scams carried out against the throngs who patronize Target and
Home Depot, better safeguards are clearly required.
As Washington dallies on security policy, it’s not just failing
to protect us from Big Brother’s whims. Our leaders are also falling down on
the arguably simpler job of making it possible to buy mulch, paint, and a pile
of nails without any fear of getting robbed by a bunch of digitally savvy
thugs.
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords,
a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy
Studies. OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org