Today the NYT reported that the Whitehouse has listened to conversations American’s have been having without getting court orders (illegally). This in conjunction with the patriot act represents a significant increase in the distrust of Americans (and people in general). Religions traditionally have had two parts: fear mongering (do this or you go hell) and trust mongering (trust everybody and you will be trust worthy). When considering the evolution of religion it’s easy to see how these disparate aspects have been beneficial to the longevity of any group they’ve been associated with; the questions remain, however, which is more valuable and how do we make the more valuable aspect pervasive. I believe I know what the answer is and that is the former.
Trust first and trustworthiness will follow.
There are some who would disagree with me and I’m curious to know how my fellow 8&5ers feel. I’m also curious to know your thought for the best method to increase the level of trust within the different areas of our influence: our friends, family, community, country and our world. I for one think that my parents helped me develop the level of trust I’m able to give but I can’t discount the influence of Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street and also the Christian Sunday school I was raised with.
I heard a bit on the news this morning about that NY Times story. I’m pretty sure they said that the Times sat on this story for a year as part of an agreement with the White House, because breaking the story would jeopardize ongoing investigations. Talk about trust! I mean, it’s not as if I trust the Times these days as much as (rightly or wrongly) I used to, but, come on.
Not that it couldn’t be much, much worse. Take the recent workers’ demonstration in China that was put down by the Chinese millitary. No one even knows how may people died, because the government’s media control is so intense. From what I read, no Chinese newspapers were allowed to report the story. People have internet access, but the government blocks material that mentions keywords relating to the event, including the town where it occurred. The only reason the government eventually acknowledged the story (in their version, the mob attacked the police, who fired back in alarm) was that foreign journalists had caught wind of it.
There are some republican senators that are saying some really extreme stuff about how serious this is. I kind of think this is the begining of the end, and it may not take long. I’ve got 5$ that says Bush will be impeached… something I never thought would happen…
Any takers?
On the other hand I think that listening to known terrorists international calls seems like a much more effective method of discovering terrorist plots then random subway searches and the other bull shit like that… If you search only the people that want to be searched you are very unlikely to be searching someone with a bomb. Personally I think that if we are serious about fighting terrorism I would rather the govenment did it in ways that are secret, don’t affect me personally, and actually have a chance of stopping people from blowing up buildings. But without some transpanency how would we even know what was going on…
The 911 commission report (although of very little real intelligence value) stated that we could have stopped the attack on 911 with a few small changes in the way we processed and disseminated the intelligence we legally obtained. Allowing the NSA to spy on American citizens in direct contradiction of the law regardless of weather they think they’re terrorists or not is a truly terrible idea. I’m not a big fan of “slippery slope” arguments but if we need to spy on someone I believe it’s important to change the laws accordingly so Americans don’t start to think its ok for our gov to break the law to protect our safety. Having said that, I don’t think the patriot act is a good thing, and I believe it overstepped many of the basic protections of our privacy our laws have provided (searching a house without notification, allowing for prosecution of a crime without revealing all evidence to a defendant). I sort of see the logic in your argument, Erik, but we would have to be able to trust the government not to take advantage of their new power for a purpose other than fighting terrorism, we would also have to trust them not to make a mistake. The initial post here was about trust of people, now we’ve moved into the area of trusting government. Our current government has done nothing to make me trust them to use intelligence… intelligently, or to expect them to protect us as citizens as well as others who deserve respect and freedom (Guantanamo bay).
And as far as your last line:
“But without some transparency how would we even know what was going on…”
We can actually do very good job of preventing terrorism by being just slightly pro-active instead of re-active… and as the 911 comish pointed out, we needed no more intelligence to stop the highjackers; we just needed intelligence to interpret the intelligence.
[…] e President to do exactly what we chastised him for doing just one week ago and covered by this posting at eightandfive.com. Why is covert action not always a good thing […]
[…] While five years since 9/11 seemed like an eternity, it has whizzed by at a breakneck pace…and rather than do the right thing and allow the law to expire, we have extended the life of something that allows the President to do exactly what we chastised him for doing just one week ago and covered by this posting at eightandfive.com. […]