{"id":2688,"date":"2002-11-24T11:18:53","date_gmt":"2002-11-24T11:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=445"},"modified":"2002-11-24T11:18:53","modified_gmt":"2002-11-24T11:18:53","slug":"maybe-were-not-thinking-this-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2688","title":{"rendered":"MAYBE WE’RE NOT THINKING THIS THROUGH"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenter Ray Yang articulates something I\u0092ve been thinking about in his comment below<\/a>:<\/p>\n

You know, the debate, about what types of new powers we allow the government to fight terrorism, is definitely a debate we should be having. However, must we have a sacrificial goat prior to having the conversation?
\nAs far as I can tell, the TIA program itself is guilty of nothing more than poor PR (that seal, putting John Poindexter at the helm, and not being sufficiently obsequious to the insufferable Will Safire). According to the publicly released information, they will experiment with data the government already has, and ‘simulate’ data the government doesn’t have, to test the effectiveness of various data-pooling, data-mining, and analysis techniques. The program collects no data of its own.
\nThat seems like a noble goal, especially when you realize that the biggest customer for this program is likely to be America’s foreign intelligence agencies, which collect their data abroad. At that point, the question isn’t whether you want to give the government the ability to be more intrusive into our lives, it’s whether you’re willing to let the government be aggressive abroad in our defense.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u0092ve tried in the past to have it both ways\u0085to support the \u0091informed pack\u0092<\/a> and to criticize what I see as potentially heavy-handed intrusions into civil liberties. It\u0092s probably time to try and figure out where I stand in this.
\nFirst, I\u0092ll try and deflect criticism by pointing out that I\u0092m not alone in wanting to have my cake and eat it too. Talk Left celebrates<\/a> the demise of TIPS:<\/p>\n

We especially liked this from the July 17 Boston Globe editorial, Ashcroft vs. Americans<\/a>:
\n“Ashcroft’s informant corps is a vile idea not merely because it violates civil liberties in a narrow legal sense or because it will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent terrorism by overloading law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports about Americans who have nothing to do with terrorists. Operation TIPS should be stopped because it is utterly anti-American. It would give Stalin and the KGB a delayed triumph in the Cold War – in the name of the Bush administration’s war against terrorism.”
\nGood riddance to Operation Tips, and may the Total Information Awareness program<\/a> meet the same fate.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u0092s at 9:39 in the morning. But if you look back<\/a> to 6:10 the same morning, there\u0092s a laudatory post about Gary Hart and his prescient views on terror, with this quote: <\/p>\n

What does he say about fighting the terror war?
\n“Aside from governmental vigilance, Hart stresses the need for an alert citizenry. “The tag line of every speech I’ve given over the last two years on this subject is: ‘You in this audience are now front-line soldiers.’
\n“This war’s being fought in our streets and cities. Nobody’s going to ride in. The 82d Airborne isn’t coming. The 1st Marine Division isn’t going to be here. It’ll be the Colorado National Guard. The cops on the beat. The fire and emergency management people. We’re all going to have to get into this. Now, why can’t the president say that?”<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now I don\u0092t mean to single Jeralyn (author of Talk Left) out \u0085 I\u0092m in pretty much the same boat, here, as are a host of people up to and including much of the Democratic leadership (actually, I\u0092m too generous \u0085 the Democratic leadership happily worked with the Clinton administration to cut civil liberties off at the knees).
\nBut we can\u0092t have it both ways. If we empower the citizenry \u0085 and I\u0092m not even talking about arming them at his point, just training them on what to look for and who to call when they see something \u0085 well, doing that looks a hell of a lot like operation TIPS to me.
\nAnd we can\u0092t have hearings on intelligence failures and \u0093why didn\u0092t we know\u0094 on one hand and, on the other, criticize efforts to centralize some data and make sure that the arms of the government are working in a coordinated fashion.
\nSo how do we balance these?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commenter Ray Yang articulates something I\u0092ve been thinking about in his comment below: You know, the debate, about what types of new powers we allow the government to fight terrorism, is definitely a debate we should be having. However, must we have a sacrificial goat prior to having the conversation? As far as I can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}