Trigger Warning: Contents below are of a wonky/political nature and may inspire yawning, boredom, and in some cases, extreme eye glazing from those who have better things to do than watch Frontline documentaries on a Saturday night.
I’m really not trying to be dense here, and I
haven’t been mining this story extensively, but I’m having a hard time wrapping
my head around this Edward Snowden/NSA leak explosion thing because there seems
to a bit of a paradoxical angle to it all.
Let me see if I can get this sorted out:
Snowden’s decision to leak all these millions of documents
to Glenn Greenwald and a few others has, in the words of the NSA and
administration, threatened our national security. This may be true. It probably
is true, but that’s not what I can’t wrap my head around. What I can’t wrap my
head around is what Snowden's ability to leak details about NSA's secret program reveals about the efficacy of that secret program.
So as we learn from Snowden’s leaks, the NSA ––hello there
fellas!–– has been collecting anything and everything on us it can tap into:
phone records, emails, library accounts and God knows what else. And as we
learn the full juicy colored details of how two administrations and the NSA
have been keeping full frontal tabs on us all, we have demanded to know what
purpose this unprecedented level of data collection on US citizens serves.
And we are told––what? This unprecedented level of data
collection on US citizens serves as a necessary means to detect and root out
possible threats to our national security.
Threats to our national security like, um the Snowden leaks?
So how well is this program working again, NSA?
The very fact that Snowden was able to get such a massive
leak out to the press demonstrates the glaring fallacy of their argument, doesn’t it?
Oh but he was using aliases and encrypted codes in his
emails and communication.
Phew, that’s a relief. Because anybody with an intent to harm the
country wouldn’t think to do that.
I guess I don't understand how the NSA can argue that the
broad reach and extensive depth of their data collection on Americans has been
working (and is therefore warranted) to keep America safe when their very
system failed not only to prevent Snowden from posing a threat to national security, but failed to keep themselves
safe from (embarrassing) exposure. Something about their argument for their program and against Snowden seems awash in self-invalidation.
It’s also not as though this particular secret program, with
its capability to spy on Americans was the only system the NSA had developed in
order to collect information that could pose threats to our national security.
But I leave further exploration of that topic to Frontline’s 2 part series,
“United States of Secrets.”
As I said earlier, it’s entirely possible I’m being dim
here. it's possible I'm missing a large piece of the argument/situation/scandal but unfortunately this is
about the condition of my brain right now. I suppose this is what happens when I have actual things I
need to get done for school.
