Conservatives and the Surveillance State

Nothing about the Bush admin has struck as more peculiar, nor more disturbing, than the Republican Party (and conservatives in general) embracing an unregulated surveillance state in the name of national security. We are at war, they justify, and the war on terrorism, like McCain's war in Iraq, can last for a hundred years. A permanent state of war. But then, war is peace, dictatorship is democracy, and dumb is smart thanks to our increasingly Orwellian political discourse.

Glenn Greenwald, who is sometimes just too much for me, manages to express the dangers of this here on Salon.com when he examines the implications of contract employees accessing Barak Obama's passport application. Such records as, or course, are deeply private*.

The domestic spying arm of the U.S. Government has grown steadily over the last several decades but has exploded since 9/11. Virtually all imaginable categories of invasive information about the private lives of innocent Americans -- from telephone calls and email correspondence to health and prescription records and even the most innocuous incidents -- are now collected and stored in digital dossiers by the U.S. Government and are accessible to untold numbers of public and private employees. This explosion in domestic surveillance has been accompanied by the patently foolish assumption that government officials are so well-intentioned, honorable and interested in using this data only for our own Good that we can trust them to compile and use it without external checks -- such as judicial warrants -- because the danger of abuse is so low.

Look carefully at the words I have emphasised because that is exactly the way the policy is sold. How can any genuine conservative believe this? How can any genuine conservative embrace the resulting policy?

For that matter, how can any Republican be comfortable with constructing this surveillance state and handing it over to President Hillary Clinton? Or any other liberal who actually believes that the State is good and always knows best? As Julian Sanchez of the Los Angeles Times has noted,

Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can -- and repeatedly have -- abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters. . . .

But it is done by the Federal government, which has only your best interests at heart. So sleep tight tonight, knowing that your government is patiently at sifting through your records, keeping us safe from 6 month old Vietnamese babies, and answering the phone at 3am, all to keep you safe.


* as a former Social Security employee I can tell you exactly what a crock this is.

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