Obama, Orwell and "Modest Encroachments" of a "Classified" Kind

Imagine a society in which every key stroke, telephone conversation and online transaction is recorded by the government. This information is sifted at will and out of sight; there is no oversight of the program save for the presence of a few token monitors who are tolerated only to lend it a veneer of legality.

And while there are episodes of sudden lucidity, these are few and far between, an occasional aside offered to lull the grazing herd back to sleep. Do not worry, they are told, Big Brother is watching over you. With his soothing voice lingering through their ears, they forget that this is precisely what they should be worried about.

No, I am not writing about a fictional dystopia or communist society of the forgotten past. I am talking about the America of today.

This week President Obama acknowledged, albeit elliptically, that the U.S. government has been spying on the American public through the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA, a sprawling bureau whose activities are clouded in secrecy, has been illegally monitoring the communications of American citizens and who knows else. And Obama admits it.

What’s more, instead of opposing these illegal activities Obama has chosen to expand them. As president, Obama – an expert in constitutional law – has decided that in order to safeguard democracy in America the government must transgress democracy’s every principle. 

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But let us try to enter his world for a bit.

 Like a schoolmaster, the President lectured the audience that “you can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy.”

This is a very difficult mathematical theorem to wrap one’s head around. Judging by the recent Boston bombings and school shootings, we must still enjoy at least some "privacy" from this decades-long program. Or am I mistaken?

But then again, he did say that the surveillance program was directed solely at foreigners.

So the greatest threat to national security is – contrary to all existing evidence – not the troubled people among us whom we have neglected, but those people out there. We should not worry about rehabilitating people at home but, rather, fear those evil people lurking out on the dark horizon. Yes I know, I have never actually seen, met or spoken to one of those people, but I have heard they exist (Mr. Obama told me). And they are out to get us!

Not so quick, though. Lest we get the wrong idea, professor Obama stepped in to assure us that evil does lurk amongst us because our borders are not totally impermeable to foreigners. We must guard against people whose very existence is “illegal,” to use the political term now in vogue. “Illegal” immigrants, with their “illegal” existence, simply cannot be trusted.

They grow our crops, build our roads and – gasp – even pay taxes! Look at all the opportunities they have to wreck our finely tuned democracy. We must thank Obama for his great foresight and steadfast leadership. Remember, anyone whose skin is not white is suspect; that is, anyone except Mr. Obama. 

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I would continue this parody, or rather, exposition of Washington-style logic, but the rest of Obama’s presentation was farcical enough and too important to leave unaddressed.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the speech was the word choice, it being strewn with contradictions that Orwell would have appreciated.

To cite a typical example, Obama took pains to emphasize that the surveillance program was not a cloak and dagger set-up. On-lookers were assured that the agency’s investigations were not “secret” but “classified.” The significance of this semantic difference was not satisfactorily explained. Perhaps it too is “classified.”

Then Obama went on to say that far from offering the American people a simple “trust me” the program is regulated by “congressional oversight and judicial oversight.”

That same day Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the congressional intelligence committee, stated that all the success stories touted by the President all could have been solved by traditional, that is to say, legal methods:

“As far as we can see, all of the useful information that it has provided appears to have also been available through other collection methods that do not violate the privacy of law-abiding Americans.”

Wyden and another member of the intelligence committee – the “congressional oversight” that Obama referred to – have repeatedly denounced the NSA program as an assault on basic civil liberties that runs counter to the ideals of democratic governance.  

There was a senator on the intelligence committee, however, who staunchly backed the necessity of NSA surveillance. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the committee, stated that there were cases which definitively show that the “program has worked.”

This happens to be the same Senator Feinstein who several months ago expressed surprise upon hearing that the operative definition of “combatant” in American drone strike attacks includes any male of adult-age. Her shock was untimely, seeing as ‘The New York Times’ had prominently published this information months earlier.

Perhaps Senator Feinstein should study the existing open-source literature before making sweeping claims about the American intelligence system, a system which she apparently knows very little about. 

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Echoing Feinstein’s unsubstantiated claims, a former defense official said that “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack.”

This statement, made by the former chief of staff to Leon Panetta, likely reveals more than the author intended. If the government truly is targeting only the information of foreigners than the amount of data they collect would surely amount to less than a proverbial “haystack.”

So there you have it, a former top defense official divulging the news that the U.S. is trawling through much more information than it currently claims – and indiscriminately so.

But Obama’s speech still takes the cake. It is not every day that you hear the President praise, and without even the slightest hint of irony, “modest encroachments.”

Yes, he admits, these activities may be illegal, antithetical to democracy and violate your civil liberties, but only in a “modest” way.

Perhaps there is a good reason for this apparent contradiction but Obama did not provide it. But then perhaps this too is “classified.”