I Really Don't Get It

President Bush is whining about Congress' decision to let his wiretapping program to lapse. He says that the United States is in "more danger of attack" and that "we've got to give our professionals the tools they need to be able to figure out what the enemy is up to so we can stop it." Here, read the story yourself, if you're curious.

As far as I understand, the law regarding wiretapping that passed back in 1978 under our good buddy Jimmy Carter even allows the warrants to be obtained retroactively. Basically, if the feds decide they need to spy on someone right now, no time for bureaucracy, they can. Once the dust settles, though, they need to go through the appropriate channels and there needs to be oversight. This seems like a decent compromise -- federal agents have the ability to get information right when they need it if time is of the element, but they know their actions will be reviewed.

So what, exactly, would a warrantless wiretapping program do to defend the United States and its citizens? If someone can figure that out, let me know, but I can't even imagine Jack Bauer having a situation in which there must never be any review or oversight.

Where does the impulse to spy on American citizens with no oversight come from? What is President Bush afraid of? I find it hard to believe that he and his friends sit around with martinis indiscriminately spying on you, or me, or the Quakers. It may happen now and then, when some agent gets overzealous, but if there was some oversight, the feds would be able to avoid PR debacles like that.

Maybe there's some lust for unchecked power going on here, but I don't really want to believe that. I can't relate to it, anyway.

Meanwhile, six people are dead at Northern Illinois University. In 2006, 17,034 people were murdered. I wonder how many of these murders could truly be prevented by wiretapping at all, and I wonder how that number would compare with the number prevented by warrantless wiretapping. Furthermore, very few of those people, if any, were murdered by the "enemy" Bush mentioned above.

Not that statistics are all that useful when it comes to violence. You can't really assign a finite value to anyone's life, and comparing infinite numbers doesn't really work. At least, not for these purposes.

Listen, I'm not downplaying the danger or the significance of terrorism. I also don't want to downplay the danger or significance of genocide, organized crime, drugs, domestic violence, poisoned ecosystems, cancer, infectious disease, AIDS, or any of those other things that kill people. I will say, though, that if a nickel or a dime of every dollar spent in our crusade against "the enemy," as Bush says, were spent on help for the poor, medical and psychological care, education, public parks and programs, and all those other things that add so much value to our society, maybe we wouldn't see so many school shootings, so much gang violence, so much rape, or so much other violence.