In early June 2013 Edward Snowden fled his high-paying job at the National Security Administration and revealed, with documentary proof, that the federal government is operating a spy program, called PRISM (Protective Research Information System Management), to intercept, record and archive every phone conversation, email message, credit card use, Internet search – any electronic communication – anyone in the U.S. makes. [3]  Mr. Snowden was the latest whistleblower on the NSA since the Bush administration initiated, tried to cover up, then made legal retroactively, warrantless wiretaps – later allowed to stand by the Supreme Court.  As with earlier whistleblowers it was Snowden who was made to suffer, not anyone responsible NSA’s violation of the U.S. Constitution.

What concerns us here is the reaction of Harry Binswanger to this massive invasion of your correspondence. We begin with a few remarks on the idea of privacy vis-à-vis the government.

You’ve read the Fourth Amendment before but considering how it is being violated wholesale today it’s worth reading again. Keep in mind that “searches and seizures” are searches and seizures by the government:

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect you from private snoops who might acquire information about you without trespass or coercion. However a nominally private spy acting as an agent of the government is actually a government spy. The Fourth Amendment, along with the Fifth Amendment, by implication forbids the government from having people spy on you whether by force or payment.

All of which is to say that in a free society the government, without an explicit and valid warrant, doesn’t go through your mail, eavesdrop on your conversations, peep through your windows, break into your home or contracted data line and go through your stuff, or hire others to do it.

“Except when some government functionary decrees otherwise for your own good” is not in the Fourth Amendment.

The government’s recognition of the Fourth Amendment began to disintegrate with the founding of the IRS, whose mission was inconsistent with respect for financial privacy. The 9-11 attack furnished the government its longed-for pretext to spy not only on economic activity but on everything. The NSA (set up by President Truman in 1952 not long after World War II), instead of looking outward to foreign lands, began to look inward at Americans. With modern technology the spying can be done on an unprecedented scale. The government and its shills don’t call it spying though, it is “data mining” – just as torture is “enhanced interrogation.”

Soon patriotic whistleblowers came forward, some at great personal risk and financial loss, to tell the public what the NSA was up to, men such as Kirk Wiebe and William Binney (2002), Thomas Tamm in the U.S. Department of Justice (2004), Mark Klein at AT&T (2004), Russell Tice (2005), Thomas Drake (2005). [5]

William Binney, a former mathematician at the NSA, in a talk on July 13, 2012:

Edward Snowden, the latest whistleblower, claims that the NSA’s surveillance is even more extensive than that exposed by earlier whistleblowers. He claims the NSA, besides recording the customer logs of the top three phone companies, is hacking into Internet backbone routers to eavesdrop on traffic, and tapping directly into the servers of leading U.S. Internet companies, collecting email, Internet searches and credit-card transactions. [6]  Quoting from a June 10, 2013 interview:

Those who object to this surveillance get treated like unruly children. Here is Harry Reid, U.S. Senate Majority Leader, on June 6, 2013 right after Snowden’s revelations:

Snowden himself got the full monty from leftists and neoconservatives:  he is a “traitor,”  “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,”  etc.  John Yoo, the immigrant from South Korea famous for Bush administration memos justifying U.S. institutionalized torture, wrote in National Review Online:  “Edward Snowden should go to jail, as quickly and for as long as possible.” James Woolsey, famous for promoting Bush’s invasion of Iraq, said (December 17, 2013) that Snowden should be prosecuted for treason and after being convicted “he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.”

Peter Schwartz of ARI began his essay “Snowden and the NSA” with “What the National Security Agency (NSA) has done in spying on Americans is reprehensible – and what Edward Snowden has done is worse.” That is, exposing NSA’s reprehensibility! Mr. Schwartz goes on to call Snowden a criminal.

On June 21, Snowden’s 30th birthday, the Department of Justice charged Snowden on three counts, two under the Espionage Act, so that he now faces 30 years in prison, with more charges pending.

You couldn’t make this stuff up if you were writing a— hmm....

When Rand was working on her novel Atlas Shrugged she kept a file of news stories that portended a fascist America like the one she was fictionalizing and warning against. She called it her “horror file.” Years later when she published The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist magazine, occasionally she included a section called “From the ‘Horror File’ ” consisting of the latest such news stories. The revelations about the NSA by Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden et al belong in any Objectivist Horror File of today.

Four days after Snowden went public the Wall Street Journal printed an editorial entitled  “ ‘Big Brother’ and Big Data” (no byline).  It too is Horror File material.  Among its points:

•  “... the more such information the government collects the less of an intrusion it is.”  The author argues this paradox by confusing degree of intrusion with ease of searchability, but even then he is mistaken:  supercomputers and ganged microcomputers can search through enormous databases in microseconds.

•  “The search is for trends, patterns, associations, networks. They are not ... invasions of individual privacy at all.”  But the invasion is not the search, it is gathering the data in the first place. After that the data can, and doubtless eventually will, be searched in any number of ways.

•  “The alternative ... is [lower-tech methods of intrusion which would be even worse].”  (The editorial is subtitled with the take-home line:  “The alternative to automated sweeps is more privacy invasion.”)  No Mr. WSJ  Editorialist, the alternative is the Fourth Amendment and government doing its real job, as we elaborate at the end of this essay.

•  “... Edward Snowden, ... who proudly claims he exposed these surveillance programs, has provided no evidence of their abuse.”   Again, the author pretends not to understand that  the program itself  is the abuse. The evidence is merely to point at it. For now the politically connected might not be using the NSA’s surveillance to blackmail opponents, track political dissidents, etc. – who knows? – but that is immaterial, it still violates private property.

•  “What our self-styled civil libertarians [note the mockery] should really fear is another successful terror attack ... . Then the political responses could include [a long list of draconian measures]. Practices like data-mining save lives [earlier the author had repeated the government handout to that effect], and in doing so they protect against far greater intrusions on individual freedom.”  In other words, the government violating your rights protects you from the government violating your rights even more. If the government doesn’t violate your rights this-a-way, it will violate your rights that-a-way.

At the time, Harry Binswanger, besides being on the governing board of the Ayn Rand Institute and a founding member, ran the “Harry Binswanger List,” or HBL. It was an email publication  “for Objectivists, moderated by Dr. Binswanger, for discussing philosophic and cultural issues” (quoting the HBL website). A subscription cost $145 per year. In 2006 there were over 800 subscribers. [7]

On the day the Wall Street Journal editorial appeared – June 10, 2013 – Mr. Binswanger posted a message to his list titled

•  “the government having collected” – as if the collection were in the past. Mr. Binswanger softens the fact that the collection is ongoing and perpetual.

•  “ ‘meta data’ about phone calls and such” – hides the extent of the government’s invasion:  record and store everything you do online and over the phone.  The government uses the word “metadata” to fool people into thinking it’s not real data. Phone call “metadata” is the phone numbers, locations and times, which is real data, and as Snowden made clear in his exposé, the goal – substantially achieved – is all the data, including the audio.

•  “reportedly”  hides the source of the reports (on the benefits of the NSA), namely government officials and politicians. One must be skeptical when the fox reports on the hen house.

•  “it’s better to have all the sources of information we can”  insinuates the idea that we are the ones collecting the information, when in fact it is not we but they.  It’s as if Mr. Binswanger identifies with the police state apparatus.

In what follows we call the PRISM program “Panopticon,” a more descriptive name. The word was coined by the Englishman Jeremy Bentham in 1791 for a building he had designed that allowed watchmen to observe those inside without their being aware of it. [9]

Mr. Binswanger’s next sentence is mealy-mouthed backside-covering:  “... some reining in may well be called for.”  That is the extent of his criticism.  “May well” indeed.  He concludes by smearing critics of Panopticon as unhelpful alarmists.

Mr. Binswanger’s egocentric style annoys. He has no secrets? He speaks for himself, you on the other hand might have secrets and private places. His not having any is no reason to allow the government to force its way into yours.

The first paragraph of Mr. Binswanger’s “Excerpt of the Day” repeats the government handout: spying on you prevents terrorist attacks. [10]  His second paragraph assumes (following the Wall Street Journal editorial) that the U.S. government’s proper or unavoidable reaction to a successful terrorist attack is to descend to dictatorship. How else to explain his argument:

1. If the U.S. becomes a dictatorship the dictator can set up a spy agency and spy on you any way he wants.

2. Therefore the government spying on you now is nothing to worry about.

Mr. Binswanger believes “there is nothing inherently wrong with the government” spying on you. Note the qualification “inherently.” It sounds like he thinks Panopticon is wrong and right at the same time. It’s wrong, but not inherently wrong?

Whatever was on his fuzzy mind, Panopticon is just plain wrong. It violates the spirit of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments – the fourth regarding searches of property and the fifth regarding taking of property – as described at the beginning of this essay.  Panopticon erodes the First Amendment too – regarding freedom of speech and assembly – by focusing unwarranted police suspicion on innocent speech.

Panopticon is censorship’s natural ally. Surveillance helps determine who and what to censor.

On second thought don’t worry about it.  Mr. Binswanger’s got nothing to hide. [11]

The ARI Watch  Links page features several  videos of the whistleblowers  mentioned above.  Thomas Drake, former senior executive at the NSA and former Assistant Professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, is especially articulate. With his knowledge of history and political philosophy he makes sense of what is going on today.