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pseydtonneI was driving back from New York on Sunday when I heard the President say "If somebody from al-Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why." I thought I was hallucinating. I had to look online later to make sure I hadn't missed the statement.
This isn't about bashing W, convenient as that could be. This is about something a little more subtle. I suspect the President was speaking off the cuff, which is unlike him. I suspect his usual handlers were on vacation. He normally speaks like a sales person, giving the public a compelling reason to buy. On Sunday he gave us something closer to his own reasoning. There is very little WIIFM (what's in it for me) in "we'd like to know why".
I'm not even hear to argue about the legality of these actions. Afterall, there are enough judges friendly to the cause for him to get the subpoenas and permission to tap legally that any Patriot-Act-based approaches may be redundant. I'm not saying that's great news: I'm just assuming the White House can do what it wants because it's already been doing it.
I'm only worried that this assumes no one would usually get a call from Al-Qaeda. I'd like to think this is the case. However, let's imagine they decided to do some fund raising... via telemarketing. Imagine this interruption of your dinner:
"Hello, sir or madam. I'm calling about a special need in your neighborhood right now. There are insurgents trying to stop the Great Satan from spreading its hegemonic capitalist disease. The only way they can make Satan go away is burning down your neighborhood, and they need your money to do that. I'm wondering whether Al-Qaeda can count on your support this year to help make the world a less sinful place."
Everyone who got this call would suddenly be tapped. After all, Al-Qaeda is calling them and W wants to know why. Now the list is the entire phone book. Then the Feds would have to listen to all of our phone calls. This would take a lot of people listening to a lot of other people -- on a level of the Stasi's spying.
If you're not familiar, the Stasi was the East German equivalent of the KGB. It spent a lot of resources to spy internally. In fact, it recruited up to one-third of the population to spy on the rest. When the files became public, a lot of spouses learned they were being spied on directly from bed. A lot of people got divorced.
Then again, we're not capable of that level of internal spying. Think about it: we blow time on LJ talking about our secrets at one level or another. We share. If you had a job listening to phone calls, even if they weren't calls in your state, you'd wind up talking. You couldn't help it. Unless you got paid enough to shut up, you'd talk. "Hey, I totally found nothing about al-Qaeda but I learned how dumb various celebrities really are."
Some of you may say, "jeeze, bro. You've just given The Terrorists (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bad Guys In Movies Foundation) a way in!" Hey, I didn't give away the Executive Branch's secret for how it chooses wire tapping customers. In fact, neither did the New York Times. I think we found the loose lips here. I'm seeing something, so I gotta say something.
Let's face it: what I have just described is far-fetched. So is the solution. We're not getting any great evidence and we're not seeing weekly terrorist events. Why do we get a state of emergency response when there isn't such a state anymore? What would be wrong with conducting investigations of crime in a fashion that a republic can scrutinize, improve, even support?
-O.T. Thaw, Ps/d
This isn't about bashing W, convenient as that could be. This is about something a little more subtle. I suspect the President was speaking off the cuff, which is unlike him. I suspect his usual handlers were on vacation. He normally speaks like a sales person, giving the public a compelling reason to buy. On Sunday he gave us something closer to his own reasoning. There is very little WIIFM (what's in it for me) in "we'd like to know why".
I'm not even hear to argue about the legality of these actions. Afterall, there are enough judges friendly to the cause for him to get the subpoenas and permission to tap legally that any Patriot-Act-based approaches may be redundant. I'm not saying that's great news: I'm just assuming the White House can do what it wants because it's already been doing it.
I'm only worried that this assumes no one would usually get a call from Al-Qaeda. I'd like to think this is the case. However, let's imagine they decided to do some fund raising... via telemarketing. Imagine this interruption of your dinner:
"Hello, sir or madam. I'm calling about a special need in your neighborhood right now. There are insurgents trying to stop the Great Satan from spreading its hegemonic capitalist disease. The only way they can make Satan go away is burning down your neighborhood, and they need your money to do that. I'm wondering whether Al-Qaeda can count on your support this year to help make the world a less sinful place."
Everyone who got this call would suddenly be tapped. After all, Al-Qaeda is calling them and W wants to know why. Now the list is the entire phone book. Then the Feds would have to listen to all of our phone calls. This would take a lot of people listening to a lot of other people -- on a level of the Stasi's spying.
If you're not familiar, the Stasi was the East German equivalent of the KGB. It spent a lot of resources to spy internally. In fact, it recruited up to one-third of the population to spy on the rest. When the files became public, a lot of spouses learned they were being spied on directly from bed. A lot of people got divorced.
Then again, we're not capable of that level of internal spying. Think about it: we blow time on LJ talking about our secrets at one level or another. We share. If you had a job listening to phone calls, even if they weren't calls in your state, you'd wind up talking. You couldn't help it. Unless you got paid enough to shut up, you'd talk. "Hey, I totally found nothing about al-Qaeda but I learned how dumb various celebrities really are."
Some of you may say, "jeeze, bro. You've just given The Terrorists (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bad Guys In Movies Foundation) a way in!" Hey, I didn't give away the Executive Branch's secret for how it chooses wire tapping customers. In fact, neither did the New York Times. I think we found the loose lips here. I'm seeing something, so I gotta say something.
Let's face it: what I have just described is far-fetched. So is the solution. We're not getting any great evidence and we're not seeing weekly terrorist events. Why do we get a state of emergency response when there isn't such a state anymore? What would be wrong with conducting investigations of crime in a fashion that a republic can scrutinize, improve, even support?
-O.T. Thaw, Ps/d
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-04 01:55 am (UTC)But seriously, there are almost certainly a number of probing attacks taking place all the time on this country. The question is whether monitoring all phone calls and emails is going to help or hinder stopping these, and whether the benefit from it is worth the increasing ability of the government to monitor and control its own citizens?
You might also be interested in this essay...
no subject
Date: 2006-01-04 10:05 pm (UTC)Maybe a badly worded statement (I only disagree with the word "YOU," as if Al Queida would ever call Dante T. Blando), but this is always the discussion that turns my stomach. You certainly remember a guy you and I used to know, he was a propylactic made of very exotic matieral, we used to call him Guy Smiley behind his back. You know the one. As I recall, we couldn't stand him because he could stay the most banal, useless, stupid things and Endicott teenagers would tear out each other's hair trying to get to him.
On the other hand, your criticism of Bush here seems to be that he isn't like our beloved Guy Smiley. Now I'm not trying to call you a hypocrite but this illustrates how easy it is to criticize against our established values system depending on how a person is percieved. Or has your time in sales changed your perception of Mr. Smiley?
I feel like, all politicians lie - and what it comes down to is, some politicians make you snicker when you do it, and some moisten the private areas of the women around you. Which is better? I'd rather have a Bush in office than a Clinton, because they're both lying sacks a lot of the time; at least the "enlightened" don't buy it when Bush does it. As much as most Bush-bashing is so mainstream that it's similar to liking a boy band (you don't really, really like the boy band, you're just told to like the boy band, so you comply), I'd rather have that than a situation like we used to have; where I got accused on a weekly basis of sexual assault and/or stalking because I'm tall and assertive, and meanwhile a guy who's using his power and influence to cheat on his wife is surrounded by so-called "feminists" having a love-in, hanging on his every word.
(continued in the next comment)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-04 10:05 pm (UTC)I don't understand how you can say that this situaton isn't "in a fashion that a republic can scrutinize, improve, even support?" Who doesn't criticize Bush? Please don't go down this road, man, you're too smart. If I had a nickel for every time since 2000 an American used their First-Amendment rights to claim that Bush has taken away their First-Amendment rights, I could buy everything. If being able to criticize a President is truly the hallmark of a working republic, shouldn't Bush be the Left's most favorite President ever? They get to excersize that republic practically every time they open their mouth, every time they listen to popular music, everytime they buy a t-shirt or a bumper sticker, and on most of the websites they visit. Bush isn't going to be all like "oh okay, some people think I'm stupid, so I'm gonna align myself with the fringe Left." Who would do that? Would you align yourself with the fringe Right because of something that came out of Bush's mouth? No. Then we mustn't expect him to do the same.
So, answer me this: In the most perfect sequence of events in your mind, what would be the "proof" you'd like to see that 1. there is an ongoing threat against us by Islamic fascists, and 2. the protections the Bush administration has put in place are working to keep it at bay? I'm serious. I'm not being a shill. I may not be the brightest bulb on the Non-Belief-Specific Holiday Tree, but isn't "success" against terrorist threats defined as no terrorist attacks?
Now I know that there is the risk of that being exploited, say, if there's no real terrorist threat... but by whose system are we evaluating these events? Al Queida had been planning 9/11 since the first WTC bombing in 1993. What do you still do (besides masturbate) that you were doing all the way back in 1993? There's hard and fast proof that AQ can focus on something for 15 years, and there's also hard and fast proof that Americans in general can't focus on anything for more than 15 minutes. I think a lot of people looked around on September 16, 2001 and said "okay, nothing else has blown up, we must be safe for the rest of time." So what I'm getting at here is, yeah, the Bush administration's hard-line against the real or percieved or manufactured threat of terrorism may be - or may look like too much.. but I think you and I can both agree that most Americans' take on everything is getting extremely short-lived and fickle. The divorce rate is over 50% in this country, for fuck's sake. Were our parents really truly the victims of a misogynistic, paternal society in which all women wanted to cut off their husband's penises and run away to San Fransisco and get a sex change? Or do we just no longer have the balls to stick it out in a less-than-perfect situation?
When I was at WHRW we used to have this station ID that featured a sound bite from Frank Zappa, where he espouses his infamous views on censorship. Once a censorship mechanism is in place, he says, to keep undesirable words off the air, then they can use that same mechanism to keep undesirable ideas and political thought off the air.
And as much as he deserves it sometimes, whenever I hear people go apeshit about Bush, I start to think about that station ID.