This has been blazing around the last few days, but for those who’ve missed it here’s David Simon’s critique of the media’s reaction to the NSA revelations. Anyone who’s ever watched The Wire will recognize a familiar plot element now being deployed for new purposes:
Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so…
Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.
Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.
There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones…
All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal. Why?
Because they aren’t listening to the calls.
It goes on, and if you love the smell of rant in the morning then it’s certainly worth your time. Other topics discussed include “your son’s devotional calls to 1-900-BEATOFF,” the FISA court, and why, at least in Simon’s opinion, it’s not really that scary when the feds intercept “every single fucking telephone call made from the United States over a period of months and years.”
UPDATE! Simon, in a later post, recognized a distinction that a few Slog commenters have pointed to:
While I still believe the differences between call data and a wiretap are profound, and that the standard for obtaining call data has been and should remain far more modest for law enforcement, the same basic privacy protections don’t yet exist for internet communication. There, the very nature of the communication means that once it is harvested, the content itself is obtained. And the law has few of the protections accorded telephonic communication, and so privacy and civil liberties are, at this moment in time, more vulnerable to legal governmental overreach. That’s a legislative matter, but it needs to be addressed.
Simon also noted that his own son disagreed with his original rant. (“Goddamit, kiddo, what am I paying college tuition for if you’re not going to follow me in rhetorical and philsophical lockstep.”)
