I'm glad I live in a country with people who are vigilant in defending civil liberties. But as I listen to the debate about the disclosure of two government programs designed to track suspected phone and email contacts of terrorists, I do wonder if some of those who unequivocally defend this disclosure are behaving as if 9/11 never happened.
Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11. But I worry even more about another 9/11. I worry about something that's already happened once and that terrorists aspire to repeat.
I worry about that even more, because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: "Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again."
That is why I'll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and email addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any email, any phone call, anywhere, anytime.
So I don't believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower. Snowden is someone who needed a whistle-blower. He needed someone to challenge him with the argument that we don't live in a world any longer where our government can protect its citizens without using big data under constant judicial review.
It's not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale attack gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater.
A hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for linking on his blog to an essay by David Simon, the creator of HBO's "The Wire." It cuts to the core of the issue.
"The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data," wrote Simon. "The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don't know of any actual abuse."
Sure, secret programs, like the virtually unregulated drone attacks, can lead to real excesses.
But here is what is also real, Simon concluded:
"Those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically motivated enemy.
And, for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks."
Imagine how many real restrictions to our beautiful open society we would tolerate if there were another attack on the scale of 9/11. Pardon me if I blow that whistle.
Thomas Friedman writes for The New York Times.