Nat Hentoff on the NSA and Privacy

Today’s Washington Post reports that the National Security Agency violated the rules on domestic surveillance thousands of time a year since Congress granted the agency broader surveillance powers in 2008. Note this revelation did not come to light because of forthright disclosure from the professionals that run the agency, the congressional oversight committees, or the FISA court. Rather, whistleblower Edward Snowden provided this information to the Post. The U.S. government has made it clear that it wants Snowden locked away in a prison cell incommunicado. 


Over at the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan interviewed Cato senior fellow Nat Hentoff about the implications of the surveillance state. Here’s an excerpt:

A loss of the expectation of privacy in communications is a loss of something personal and intimate, and it will have broader implications. That is the view of Nat Hentoff, the great journalist and civil libertarian. He is 88 now and on fire on the issue of privacy. “The media has awakened,” he told me. “Congress has awakened, to some extent.” Both are beginning to realize “that there are particular constitutional liberty rights that [Americans] have that distinguish them from all other people, and one of them is privacy”…


He wonders if Americans know who they are compared to what the Constitution says they are.


Mr. Hentoff’s second point: An entrenched surveillance state will change and distort the balance that allows free government to function successfully. Broad and intrusive surveillance will, definitively, put government in charge. But a republic only works, Mr. Hentoff notes, if public officials know that they—and the government itself—answer to the citizens. It doesn’t work, and is distorted, if the citizens must answer to the government. And that will happen more and more if the government knows—and you know—that the government has something, or some things, on you. “The bad thing is you no longer have the one thing we’re supposed to have as Americans living in a self‐​governing republic,” Mr. Hentoff said. “The people we elect are not your bosses, they are responsible to us.” They must answer to us. But if they increasingly control our privacy, “suddenly they’re in charge if they know what you’re thinking.”


This is a shift in the democratic dynamic. “If we don’t have free speech then what can we do if the people who govern us have no respect for us, may indeed make life difficult for us, and in fact belittle us?”

More thoughts from Nat Hentoff here.