NSA, go away and mine America’s data for the ever elusive terrorist threat some other day

Upon learning of the news about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) sweeping affronts to the basic notion of civil liberty, I couldn’t resist putting in my two-cents. If you haven’t heard it, read it, or watched it on the news yet, the NSA, with the acquiescence of the Bush and Obama administrations, has undertaken a data mining project that would make Orson Well’s Big Brother jealous.

In 2007, the NSA project named PRISM was developed to mine private pieces of digital information across a broad spectrum of digital information providers from cell phone companies to internet service providers. It appears that the purpose of this vast and preposterous information gathering extravaganza is to track down the ever present and ever ambiguous other known as the “terrorist” and his/her larger group or cell.

Few Americans would deny the importance of stopping global terrorism, but we have little asked whether this is even an achievable goal and, if so, at what costs to the fundamental liberties and freedoms which so many Americans think they possess? It can’t be said with enough force or enough times: if we are willing to sacrifice the very ideas and practices which we have created as part of our American identity, then the terrorists have won more than just the battle, they’ve won the war.

No great civilization in human history hasn’t faced internal and external threats; It appears inevitable that with great power come great challenges. But just as clearly is the main lesson we can extract from these challenges: turning away from the ideas and behaviors that made the civilization great in the first place is a one-way ticket to inevitable collapse. In America’s case, it may not be a collapse, however, but an absolute suffocation of all the principles, beliefs, and virtues that has made America what it proclaims to be. Whether or not America has actually ever lived up fully to its own rhetoric is really beside the point.

The point is that without the hope in the principles that underlie the American dream (i.e., individual privacy; freedom of speech; freedom of assembly, etc.), the greatest experiment in human freedom will have come to an avoidable failure.

I truly mourn for those who have been lost since the September 11, 2001 attacks. But I’d like to think that their memory and their wishes would be best served by never allowing a totalitarian state wrap itself around the American people in the guise of our ultimate protector. We owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves.