I chose the wrong day to disengage from the internet. There is too much to digest in the new Washington Post revelations about the NSA tapping into the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Trust me, I will work through it and have something to say.
What I want to say as a preliminary and general statement is that we’ve been at war for 12 years and this is one of the consequences of that. Relatedly, we’ve made some rather dedicated enemies, and this is also a consequence of that. Privacy is a casualty of policies that make so many people want to harm us. It’s not a coincidence that we enacted the FISA laws and reopened the assassination investigations and made all kinds of reforms of the intelligence community as soon as the Vietnam War ended. There was no possibility that we would make those reforms while the war was ongoing. Every year that we’re at war is probably a year in which our privacy is diminished.
Yet, the pendulum can swing back. It did in the 1970’s. And it can happen again, perhaps near the end of this decade.
