Letters To My Country

July 8, 2013

"We don’t live in Jefferson’s world. We live in a world where, even if the NSA was abolished, Americans would be far more secure from attacks foreign and domestic than in Jefferson’s day, when multiple foreign powers could’ve credibly invaded and conquered us, and Americans on the frontier were engaged in ongoing skirmishes with understandably hostile Native Americans."

—

Conor Friedersdorf, ably responding to the objection that we can’t have a civil libertarian government like Jefferson wanted because of the world in which we live. (via hipsterlibertarian)

LTMC: Indeed. America currently has no less than 16 Intelligence Agencies, There are three civilian intelligence agencies that share responsibilities with the NSA in particular (CIA, FBI, DHS I&A ). Washington Post noted in 2010 that the U.S. intelligence community includes 1,231 government organizations and 1,971 private contracting companies, and that “[m]any security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste.” For example, “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.”

The idea that if the U.S. downsized the National Security State the Government would suddenly be unable to protect us is absurd. But even if we assume arguendo that downsizing the National Security State would leave us more vulnerable to outside threats, is this risk really that bad when compared to the risk of the government sending you or one of your loved ones to prison for something so trivial as insulting someone in a video game? Particularly when it’s not an isolated occurrence?

We are now living in an era where the President thinks he can kill American citizens without trial or judicial review. The Government is getting warrants approved where the “particular things to be seized” include all data about every phone call received by every customer of a major U.S. carrier. The Post Office photographs every piece of mail it receives. The NSA has access to virtually everyone’s data. The TSA has yet to apprehend a single terrorist, but it has managed to humiliate, degrade, and sexually assault millions of people, while making travel more expensive, commerce more difficult. In addition, the criminal code of both the federal and state governments have become so broad that virtually anyone can be convicted of a criminal offense for behavior that most people would consider mundane.

Would I trade all of this away in exchange for a slightly higher risk that I might die in a terrorist attack? Yes. Yes I would. And while most of us in the “civil libertarian” camp would argue that the things named above make us less safe in one way or another, I would make this trade even if I believed these things actually did make us more safe. There comes a point where the additional protections offered by increased security measures are not worth the liberty one must sacrifice to obtain them. We may not be able to return to the “Jeffersonian ideal,” but surely we’ve gone too far in the other direction.

6:10pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxpB55Ds

(Notes: 125)