It has been a year since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA.
I appreciate what Snowden did. His decision to leak the stolen documents has done the conservative movement an enormous favor. It has blown to smithereens the greatest single myth of conservatism: “If the American people knew about this, there would be an uprising.” No, there wouldn’t.
Here is a variation: “If the voters knew what is being done to them by the Conspiracy, they would throw out the conspirators at the next election.” No, they wouldn’t.
I have heard variants of these arguments for 50 years. Conservatives don’t learn. They think that by exposing the Bad Guys, they will defeat the Bad Guys. They’re wrong.
Snowden has proven, as no one in my era has better proved, that exposure of the Bad Guys in government has no negative effect on them.
If exposure does come, and the public does nothing to thwart the hidden Bad Guys, then the Bad Guys no longer have to worry about further exposure. It will be old news. At this point, they can do even more to secure their position of power. The pressure blows over. There may be a time of bad publicity, but this does not change anything fundamental.
Before Snowden, the best examples were the big bankers, who were bailed out a taxpayers’ expense in 2009. They got richer. The public knows. The public groused a little. Did this hurt the bankers? No. They got bonuses for their failures. Congress bailed out the big banks, and there were no negative public sanctions on either Congress or the big banks. It’s business as usual.
The voters know. The voters have done nothing. It’s old news.
But Snowden’s revelations have gone far beyond the big bank bailouts of 2009. They have thrown light on a power grab by the government that is perpetual. It was generally hidden. James Bamford’s book, The Puzzle Palace (1983), did good work. It had no negative effect on the NSA. But he did not have incontrovertible evidence. Snowden did, and he released it. He got worldwide publicity.
The NSA is more powerful than ever. From now on, any further exposure is old news. No harm, no foul.
THE NSA NOW HAS CARTE BLANCE
Glenn Greenwald is the reporter who blew the NSA’s cover by reporting on the revelations of Edward Snowden in June 2013. Today, about a year after his first story appeared in the Guardian, he has written a book about the event.
Has the NSA’s budget been reined back from $50 billion a year to, say, $25 billion a year? No. It is nice that we learned that the NSA’s budget is $50 billion a year, but it is completely irrelevant in terms of doing anything about it. Congress is still paying the money, and the NSA is still spending it.
Has the spying center in Utah been shut down? No. It is going to come online as promised. It has all kinds of snafus associated with it, as any government bureaucracy does. But Congress has in no way reined it in. The public has not demanded that Congress rein it in.
Is there any indication of a mass political movement inside either of the two political parties to bring the NSA under control, let alone abolish it? No. The public doesn’t care one way or the other. All the public needs to know is that the NSA is stopping terrorism, and the rest of it is irrelevant. The public says A-OK. No problem.
Has the public adopted encryption systems for e-mail? No. Greenwald talks about the fact that, when Snowden first contacted him, he refused to encrypt his own e-mail. That was what Snowden required. Greenwald admits he didn’t know anything about encrypting e-mail. He makes the obvious point that almost no reporters ever encrypt their e-mail.
Here’s the reality: nobody cares. The NSA now knows this. It can issue its denials. Nobody in Congress is going to call the NSA’s bluff. The only way to stop a bureaucracy is to cut its funding, and there is no attempt in Congress to cut the NSA’s funding. I don’t think this is simply because Congressmen know that they can be blackmailed forever by the NSA. I’m sure they can be. But I think the basic reason is this: the voters back home don’t care. If the voters don’t care, and Congress is dealing with a massive bureaucracy that defends itself in terms of protecting the public against terrorism, then why take the political risk? There is no positive political payoff, and there is potentially a serious series of negative political payoffs.
Around the world, it is getting cheaper and cheaper to monitor people’s movements. In major cities, but especially London, there are surveillance cameras everywhere. Nobody cares.
The longer the procedures go on, the less likely there is any possibility of reversing them. The tradition is accepted. The practices become customary. They become part of our basic acceptance.
That which we do not think about is immune from reform, let alone abolition. If we don’t think about it, the bureaucrats have free rein.
