A RE-CAP, AND A NIGHT CAP
“Why not complete openness, with the only limit on transparency to preserve the secrets to building the nuclear bomb.”
Our evening began with a general consensus (a rare commodity at the Pub!) that there is a critical need for national security and an essential role for secrecy in gathering and using intelligence to combat terrorism. But consensus did not last long, and there were soon heartfelt criticisms over NSA overreaching with its bulk data collection and flagrant violations of civil liberties, as revealed by Hero-or-Traitor Edward Snowden. From there we tackled the importance of transparency, personal privacy protections and more active Congressional oversight, with a call for internal and external constraints to help organizations like the NSA better conform to the rule of law, especially in matters of openness and civil liberties.
We took on the intelligence community itself and its apparent disorganization due in part to its sheer size and the number of different acronyms taking on different responsibilities (NSA, CIA, DoD, DEA, FBI). One member raised the issue of private companies being contracted to gather intelligence, which not only complicates oversight but adds commercial interests to the already fragile balance between national security and the Fourth Amendment.
Consolidation and reorganization is what’s needed, many suggested, along with more stringent and active oversight. Others countered, however, that no amount of oversight or reorganization can resolve the underlying incompatibility between intelligence gathering and the Fourth Amendment. The NSA has its mission and some felt that oversight is simply not effective against its massive arsenal.
One hope (wishful perhaps) was that the larger debate could push the intelligence community to re-engineer its internal culture to be more responsive to issues of privacy. It was then argued that in order to bring about effective oversight with the public truly engaged we really need the kind of subversion and civil disobedience that Snowden, Manning, and Wikileaks displayed, following in the footsteps of their whistleblowing forefathers who brought us the Pentagon Papers and the revelations about Hoover’s FBI. Snowden, however, was by no means a universal hero. A couple of voices were quick to paint him a criminal, arguing that the secrets he revealed put Americans both at home and abroad at serious risk.
“There is no honest election in Chicago.”
While some dismissed the method, there was general support of the motive. We generally agreed that Snowden offered the world proof of a certain universal truth that government cannot be trusted. There was also support for the necessity of “extreme cynicism” and distrust. When somebody posed an alternative – that of a benign government – the response was an overwhelming chorus of laughter, ridicule, and dismissal. And yet as we all quickly discovered when our 20-year-old bartender pulled up a chair and when Owen Franken’s son joined the discussion, the degree of trust (or distrust) also depends on your age.
For the current generation of life-long internet users, there is a degree of trust that our older members found disconcerting. Is there a generational shift in our understanding of privacy? Do the current under-thirty Millennials trust government more than previous generations? The Millennials were outweighed in number during our debate, but they seemed to speak for an entire generation. They suggested that we have no choice but to trust (“everybody knows everything, you just need to trust”) and that privacy is a thing of the past (“anyone who thinks that what they do on the internet is private is seriously mistaken.”) And while they acknowledged prior government abuses, for them that’s history and not experience (“it doesn’t touch me personally”).
“The hum of information.”
As the evening drew to a close we turned to technology itself, a subject to which we could easily devote an entire evening. We discussed the internet’s role in forming a political spirit, which seemed impossible due to information overload (“one stops caring altogether.”). For some, information on the internet is “thin”, with plenty of information (perpetual background noise, so to speak) but little depth. For others, “the internet is not thin, it’s all there, you just need to know how to find it.” And still others asked, “how can you trust what you read on the internet? how can you know what is true, what is false, and what is manufactured?”
It was impossible to cover ever facet of this crucial topic, but we were nonetheless able to visit most of the territory, debating our way through the entanglements of many underlying issues. We closed with the agreement that today’s debate also raises the vision of an as yet unimagined future whose technological advances will prove even more difficult to manage. The debate on the politics of privacy, which has a long history, will clearly have a long future as well.
– Peter
the political pub 