Hypocrisy Alert: It's Coming
By Cori Dauber
Rantingprofs
Pay careful attention in the coming days.
I've argued before that one problem with news reporting is that it's utterly context free. So an enormous fuss is made over one story and then a few weeks or months (or years) later a fuss is made over another story with no acknowledgement that there is a relationship between the two.
Example: On more than one occasion since September 11th ABC News has created a firestorm by smuggling radioactive material into the United States.
When this happened, as you might imagine, they got the predictable response.
The truth of the matter is, no matter how much money we spend or how much effort we put into port security, it's difficult to imagine that we can ever guarantee the borders are sealed against any particular kind of threat. All that can be done is to reduce probabilities and manage risks -- the borders are too long, the coasts are too long, the number and size of ports is to large and, for God's sake the amount of shipping entering the country every day is too large.
But just remember the upset over ABC's stories about nuclear material getting through -- the horror! nuclear material might be smuggled through, and the government couldn't stop it before it got into the country! -- and line that up against the upset you'll hear over the next days over this nuclear surveillance story.
'Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants'
Was this program legal, was it appropriate, was it handled correctly, I don't know.
My point is that in the surge to angst over today's upset (surveillance nation!) the press will be downplaying any sense of risk. (Nuclear materials inside the United States? psshaw! Those paranoid, neocon Bushies again) something they have all the more motivation to do given the apparent racial profiling angle.
So -- when the government failure is one of preventing nuclear material from entering the country, then the story is that the world is awash in nuclear goo and it could be on any ship, anytime, and headed this a-way. When the government failure is perhaps being too quick on the draw without search warrants, the very idea that nuclear material could be in our cities is preposterous, the stuff of right wing conspiracy fantasists. (After all, that one alert soon after September 11th wasn't froma reliable source, and it didn't turn out to be true.)
The problem is that real policymaking involves balancing tradeoffs between competing values when what is at stake is not clear harm but only the ability to play the percentages, to reduce the probability of harm with no crystal ball. And, at the end of the day of course, when nothing bad has happened, if civil liberties were sacrificed at some increment (and rhetoric aside, we're almost always talking about an increment), was that a needless reduction in innocent people's rights -- or did nothing happen precisely because of that program?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, notice the cascade effect of leaks. Somehow each leak seems to justify the subsequent one. The justification for leaking this program, arguably even more sensitive than the NSA program, is that, here too, participants were "concerned" over its legality.
Do these agencies not have IGs with full clearance? Do these employees not have access to the House and Senate Intelligence committees, whose members have clearance? Since when did the best way to handle "concerns" become a full vetting in public? Their concerns now become trumps, since once these programs become public they are to a large extent unable to continue in the same fashion as before.
I'm all for personal integrity and standing up for what you believe in, but there's a degree of confidence in your own opinion here that's completely alien to me.
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