The sky is falling; the sky is falling!

I understand that what I am about to write  will upset many of my liberal friends, but I cannot read all that has been written recently on the subject and remain mute. The persons screaming about the Government  tracking cell phone conversations (they're not, just who calls who, when, which the police can get at any time anyway) are many of those who scream the loudest about “why does the Govt. take so long to track down and apprehend terrorists and/or criminals?”. The cell phone dump in Boston was a prime example of using that data to apprehend murderers. If you are so paranoid that you feel  threatened if the Government knows who you called ,  and when, then I am truly sorry for you.

 These persons weave a web of "what if” around the issue of personal data which is 10 years too late in the first place, and based on the absurdly hypothetical in the second. I was concerned more when the Government monitored what I read ,  until I realized that in factual matters for me, it was irrelevant.  The inevitability of computer network interconnectivity was obvious 20 years ago.  Reality is that if Snowden at the NSA had remained silent, we would all be going about our business with no thought to who we called or why it matters.

  If you seriously  believe that the elected government and those whom it controls (the NSA, etc) are worse enemies than Al Qaeda and such domestic terror threats as we know exist, then you are a fool; and a Tea Partier at heart  A more proper concern would be the issue of who uses the data and what for.  Oversight committees exist for that purpose.  If your life, like mine, is an open book,  then  let them collect away.  If they ever attempt to use any of such data for actual suppression  of civil rights of law abiding citizens, then let’s have a revolution.

   Otherwise those screaming  “4^th amendment” are as bad as the “2^nd Amendmenters “  they ridicule over the handgun issue.  The reality is that I know many liberals (myself  among them) who believe that the gun lobby is egregiously in error in their reading of the 2^nd amendment.  Likewise many of us believe the wording in the context of 1789 meant to apply it to “A well regulated militia.”  Some are unwilling, however,  to apply the same logic to the current brouhaha over phone communications. The USSC ruling on phones (Katz) relates to recording conversations (wiretaps) only.  In addition to the Katz standard, a search occurs when law enforcement  “trespasses on the searched person's property”, which, since cell conversations are broadcast  by a middleman (the carrier) makes the records the property of the carrier, not the individual. Seizure doesn’t even apply, since no cell carrier went to federal court to try to avoid releasing said info in the first place, and the standard for bad seizure relates to the unwillingness of the person whose property is being “seized.”   

And finally, a person like Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden deserves no sympathy or thanks for what they have done for a very simple reason. They are dishonorable men, both of them, because they released their respective information  while still in the employee of organizations they had made commitments to. Manning has no defense for what he did, since he is covered under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Transmission of  any classified material he inappropriately copied /kept/ released which in any manner aided entities with which the US is in conflict would constitute  a capital offense in time of declared war by Constitutional definition. In Snowden’s case, he had options. He could have resigned and then given such information as he had, i.e. “The government tracks cell phone data” to the media ,  as Daniel Ellsberg did re: the Pentagon Papers.  Doing it while a NSA employee is simply dishonorable , not to mention stupid. It would be interesting to know if the fact alone was even classified; since all the hoo-ha is not related to alleged improper use of the data, simply it’s transference to the government.

When the second submarine to which I was assigned transited the end of the Cowal peninsula and entered The Minch, the water between the Hebrides and the Scottish mainland , we were, over a period of several years, met by Soviet intelligence gathering vessels. They were there because another traitor had released crypto information to the Soviets, which they used to decode Atlantic  Fleet Submarine operating orders. The man in question, John Walker,  is lucky to be in federal prison and alive.  Whatever motivated these two, and I’m not convinced it wasn’t simply  the desire to be seen as “moral watchdogs,”  the gist of what they did is the same.  The vast majority of us have the same reasons to be concerned about who knows who we called and when, as we do to fear a meteorite strike in our front yards.