Eavesdropping: We're All Very Bad People Now

Glenn Greenwald nails it.

It really is amazing how the White House continuously talks to Americans the way a third-grade teacher explains to his 8-year-old students why Johnny had to go to the principal’s office – because he was "very bad." This cartoonish lecture – about how we shouldn’t worry that the Administration is engaging in illegal, rights-infringing conduct because they’re only doing it to the "very bad people" — is the same one which they trot out, with great success, whenever they want to justify their lawless behavior, from their torture policies to Jose Padilla’s indefinite incarceration in a military prison. Since they’re breaking the law and violating basic Constitutional guarantees only for The Very Bad People, why would any Good Person object?

And now, it turns out, the Very Bad People are you and me and all other Americans.

The administration’s principal political defense was to continuously assure Americans that they were eavesdropping only on international calls, not domestic calls. Many, many Americans do not ever make any international calls, and it was an implicit way of assuring the heartland that the vast bulk of the calls they make – to their Aunt Millie, to arrange Little League practice, to cite just a few of the administration’s condescending examples – were not the type of calls being intercepted. The only ones with anything to worry about were the weird and suspect Americans who call overseas to weird and suspect countries. If you’re not calling Pakistan or Iran, the Government has no interest in what you’re doing.

That has all changed. We now learn that when Americans call their Aunt Millie, or their girlfriend, or their psychiatrist, or their drug counselor, or their priest or rabbi, or their lawyer, or anyone and everyone else, the Government is very interested. In fact, they are so interested that they make note of it and keep it forever, so that at any time, anyone in the Government can look at a record of every single person whom every single American ever called or from whom they received a call. It doesn't take a professional privacy advocate to find that creepy, invasive, dangerous and un-American.

Embrace the anger.