Data spying row has not helped Obama’s pro-government case
Who is watching, reading and listening? The question has always been there. Most of us have carried on texting, surfing and chatting in a benign fog of semi-ignorance, dimly aware that the companies who give us our digital window on the world store everything we’re interested in somewhere.
The news that government is also listening in on a massive, non-specific scale is sobering. It takes the vexing question at the very heart of this republic, of what the right balance is between our liberty and our security, to the next level.
And it has left that trained constitutional lawyer otherwise known as President Obama floundering for an answer.
He has already been struggling to explain why his administration has been hounding leakers – or whistleblowers, depending on your definition – like no administration before. He has already had to explain the kill list that comes with stealth warfare conducted by drones. And he has had one of the most awkward weeks of his presidency when it was discovered that the feared IRS, the taxman, was targeting Tea Party groups.
In 2007 Barack Obama the candidate may have railed against the domestic spying programmes born under his predecessor. He has not only inherited them. He has doubled down on them.
The president has been trying to convince sceptical Americans that government can be a force for good. By ushering in the surveillance state, he has not helped his own argument.
Americans have always been very sensitive about government intruding in their lives. The struggle of the frontier-dwelling individual against the dead hand of Washington is the stuff of legends.
This is, after all, one of the arguments used by the gun lobby to rail against background checks for gun buyers. Will they object now that their emails have been read and their Facebook pages scrutinised?
The National Security Agency, whose nickname used to be the “No Such Agency” because of its hyper-secrecy, may well need to tell us about some of the specific terrorist threats it has uncovered if we are to accept this mass infringement on our privacy.
By the way, I would also like to know why their trawls didn’t pick up the Boston bombers.
I will leave you with one irony. President Obama meets his Chinese counterpart Xi Jin Ping in a secluded ranch in California this weekend. It is described as an informal summit to cement the most important bilateral relationship on the planet and to clear some of the sour air between Beijing and Washington.
Much of the pungent odor has been produced by Chinese state-sponsored cyber assaults on everything from Pentagon weapons programmes to the New York Times to Wall Street banks and law firms. The Chinese are snooping into America using the internet like no-one before. Obama wants to read them the riot act.
Trouble is that they, too, read the Guardian and the Washington Post, the two newspapers which uncovered the domestic spying stories. Now hit delete!
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