This dog has had its day

FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#721)

This dog has had its day

by David Benjamin

“Are you really willing to give up your liberty for security?”
— Sen. Rand Paul

MADISON, Wis. — Rand Paul and the anti-government anarchists who live in cinder-block bunkers with a ten-year stash of flashlight batteries and Cheez Whiz are the unexpected good guys on the issue of telecom metadata collection by the Feds. They want it stopped. Sen. Paul even has a major government agency — the Inspector General’s office at the Department of Justice — in his corner.

Even the House of Representatives, usually cheerleaders for the national security state, have voted overwhelmingly to curtail the FBI’s sweeping Patriot Act authority — established in the days of panic after 9/11 — to gobble up virtually every contact made by every citizen with a cellphone, iPhone , smartphone, landline, laptop, desktop, tablet or the e-mail account that they access at the Public Library.

The well-polled American people are as unanimous as we can get. We don’t want the FBI (and by extension, the NSA, CIA, DIA, Secret Service, Delta Force, even Gibbs, DiNozzo, Abby, Ducky and McGee) horning in uninvited on our every call, text, tweet, Instagram and Facebook joke.

In an age of vicious political polarization, we’re all together in wanting to keep the Feds from tapping our phone and intercepting our WiFi. So what’s the problem? Why can’t we cut off the snoops?

Well, there’s the Senate. It used to be run by a kickass welterweight named Harry Reid, who brooked little intraparty dissension. But now, the boss is Mitch McConnell, who, try as he might, can’t get the Pentagon-huggers in his party to make nice with its Tea Party paranoids. Neither faction appears to have any discernible contact with the interests of either the American people or reality.

The Republicans’ inability to compromise with the Republicans on Patriot Act reform poses a stark choice for the Senate. Democrat Patrick Leahy put it plainly: “We either take the House Bill or end the Patriot Act.”

OK, cool, because the DOJ’s Inspector General has come up with a pretty good case for Door Number Two. Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, when the government started raking in telecommunications metadata like a Japanese factory ship strip-netting every living thing on or above the ocean floor, the FBI fishermen have gotten nothing from their efforts. Not a minnow.

Bupkes.

In the great Washington data bonanza — gazillions of wired and wireless contacts over the last 14 years stretching from Madawaska to Tijuana and all over the globe — the eavesdroppers on the party line haven’t once tuned in on, discovered or halted one measly plot. Not even a couple of teenage malcontents talking about the pipe bomb they want to plant under the driver’s seat in the car of Mr. Strickland, the universally hated vice-principal at Hill Valley High.

I had that conversation in 1966 about a vice-principal named Mr. Wendt. Kids have been talking — on the phone — about bombing Mr. Strickland for at least a century, hundreds of times a week, but the FBI is clueless. I mean, if they can’t find teenagers openly (but wishfully) plotting, in standard English, the murder of a high-school tyrant, what are the Feds’ chances of exposing one of those (mythical) terrorist “sleeper cells” who encrypt their data and converse in Arabic pig-Latin?

The FBI’s metadata harvest is better equipped to find out about the orders I place at Victoria’s Secret for camisoles and slingbacks. And it has no trouble tapping my calls to a substance-abuse hotline or to the bookie who helps me lay fifty bucks on the nose of a nag named Nora’s Knickers in the fifth at Hialeah.

But, seriously, what the Feds can or can’t find out doesn’t matter. There might be lots of “conspiracies” out there, jabbering away among the wires, fiber optics and broadband spectra. Most consist almost entirely of empty spite, magical thinking and hot air. Phone-company metadata won’t help us find any of them.

Besides, it’s all protected by the First Amendment.

We know now, from experience, that conventional forms of domestic intelligence — and plain old police work — have found and foiled virtually every serious effort at jihadist violence in the U.S. since 9/11. Over these years, we’ve seen more “terrorism” from school invasions, Dirty Harry cops and outlaw bikers.

We know this. Mitch McConnell probably knows, too. But he can’t seem to decide what to do about it that best serves his political interest. However, here’s Mitch’s silver lining. He can sit back, relax and serve the American people more truly and benevolently than he ever has before — by sitting back and relaxing.

On June 1st, if Mitch and the orchestra do nothing, the Patriot Act, with all its wiretapping, threat-mapping, color-coding and neocon Manicheism, will expire, passing from our lives in much the way that we kissed goodbye to the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798-1801), the Espionage Act of 1917 (1917-1921), the Smith Act (1940-1957), and the ethereal Communist Control Act of 1954.

Nobody wants G-men poking into the petty and private dialogs we carry on among ourselves, and few of us are willing to tolerate this sort of intrusion in the name of a riot act that has proved itself immaculately impotent. The Patriot Act did little more than soothe America’s jangled nerves in a time of tragedy. It’s like the Rottweiler we bought to scare away burglars and snarl at the things that go bump in the night. But old Pat lost his bark ten years ago. He went blind and his teeth fell out, his hips went haywire, his bowels collapsed, his liver failed and he’s been on life support at the animal hospital since last Thanksgiving.

Let the dog die, Mitch.