While some pro-surveillance folks may be content to hint that the world is a far more dangerous place if we don’t let the NSA have access to everyone’s electronic communications, there are others willing to go a lot further:
And so, when a law enforcement task force of the FBI found out in August of 2001 that al Qaeda had sent two dangerous operatives to the United States, it did … nothing. It was told to stand down; it could not go looking for the two al Qaeda operatives because it was on the wrong side of the wall. I believe that FBI task force would have found the hijackers — who weren’t hiding — and that the attacks could have been stopped if not for a combination of bad judgment by the FISA court (whose minimization rules were later thrown out on appeal) and a climate in which national security concerns were discounted by civil liberties advocates on both sides of the aisle.
Got that? Anyone advocating for basic civil liberties is to blame for 9/11. Holy fuck. This kind of thinking is about as anti-American as I can think of. As we’ve discussed, protecting civil liberties is at the core of the American way of life. “Give me liberty or give me death” is the phrase that Patrick Henry chose, and apparently Stewart Baker believes the American motto should be “you’re all going to die if you fight for civil liberties!” Shameful.
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Forty years later, though, we’re still finding problems with this experiment. One of them is that law changes slowly while technology changes quickly. That usually means Congress has to change the law frequently to keep up. But in the context of intelligence, it’s often hard to explain why the law needs to be changed, let alone to write meaningful limits on collection without telling our intelligence targets a lot about our collection techniques. A freewheeling and prolonged debate — and does Congress have any other kind? — will give them enough time and knowledge to move their communications away from technologies we’ve mastered and into technologies that thwart us. The result won’t be intelligence under law; it will be law without intelligence.
Basically, shut up with the debate, just let us go back to spying on fucking everyone. If we actually have to “debate” and “protect the Constitution,” some “bad guys” might talk without us knowing about it. And then we’ll all die.
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He then tries to flip the whole thing around and argue that supporters of civil liberties are actually anti-technology, because they’re trying to limit the government’s use of technology. That’s ridiculous, since many of the loudest supporters of civil liberties come from the tech and innovation communities. No one thinks the government shouldn’t make efficient use of technology — but that’s very different from saying it’s okay for the government to either convince or force companies to cough up all sorts of private data on everyone or risk the wrath of the US government. That’s not a fair fight. The government has the power to compel people and companies to do things that they would not do otherwise, though I guess an extreme authoritarian like Baker either doesn’t realize this or doesn’t see it as a problem.
At the end, he makes a bunch of claims about how it’s the US government’s job to “protect” everyone — though I’d like to see where that’s laid out in the Constitution. As mentioned above, he makes some valid points that other countries are just as bad, if not worse, but that’s hardly a compelling argument, because that just allows others to flip it around, and claim that the US has no moral high ground, since it’s ignoring the civil liberties of the public — something that Baker notes he directly supports in this testimony — for some vague and impossible promises of “safety.”
