Have your say! It's a free country. For now.

Richard Wahl writes, literally, to inveigh against my review of a "Frontline" program he hadn't even seen. Gee, that's so completely atypical of people who use the Postal Service to express themselves.

Skipping past his, ah, unique interpretations of the Bill Clinton years (too bad nobody ever exposed that president's "deceit," eh?), let's focus on the period actually covered in the "Frontline" program by Hedrick Smith. "If I remember right, Carter and LBJ did it too," Wahl writes, referring to unwarranted domestic spying. Well, LBJ did, and so did Nixon, and both were outed by the Church Commission and supposedly dealt with through FISA and other reforms. As Smith reported, the Bush administration has completely stepped around such reforms. Even John Ashcroft -- the former AG who's looking better and better each day that his successor twists in the wind -- has lately started distancing himself from the President's aggressive snooping on his own citizens.

Meanwhile, Maureen Sweeney of Overland Park left voice mail expressing another viewpoint I've been hearing: If the data is being held by the private sector, why isn't the outrage being directed at corporations instead of the government?

There are several ways to answer that question, but I'm going to do it by referring to a fascinating new book by Cullen Murphy, the former Atlantic Monthly editor, whose book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America provocatively looks at the unexpected ways in which the U.S. is starting to resemble the ancient superpower.

"America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities that once were thought to be public tasks—overseeing the nation's highways, patrolling its neighborhoods, inspecting its food, protecting its borders," Murphy writes. He notes that Rome, too, offloaded a great deal of public works onto private patrons.  Then as now, privitization may make sense in the short run. "But how will the consequences play out over decades, or centuries? In all likelihood, very badly," he concludes.

So, just because the data is sitting in private hands is no reason to believe the government should wash its hands of responsibility for it. After all, it's not just anyone who can requisition data on millions of our citizens on the grounds that there might be an Al-Qaeda link buried deep in that haystack.

Comments

[SaveFarris]

I'm not positive, but it's possible Mr. Wahl is referring to the Gingrich/McDermott dustup which, while happening on Clinton's watch, didn't seem to be perpetrated by the First Couple themselves.

[Stephe Sprouse]

Wow. You get all the fun mail.

To respond to Ms. Sweeney's question regarding outrage:

We were asked how we felt about all this information residing in the hands of public companies that do extensive data-mining and the conclusion that my wife and I came to was that most of what data-miners collect is information you give away freely, like when you apply for loans or credit cards, or is readily available through public records. The roll of government, we felt, was not to use that information to score our 'threat level' or pour through it themselves, but to put the laws and protections in place to keep that information from being abused, misused and shared willy-nilly.

If you're mad that a marketing company knows you down to your shoe size and blood type, thank your government for allowing that information to be collected and shared in the first place.