Has Privacy Lost Some Of Its Sanctity?

By now most Americans have probably figured out the real story in the latest revelations of the Bush administration’s domestic spying. Most Americans don’t seem to mind, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
USA Today’s disclosure that the National Security Agency, after Sept. 11, 2001, began assembling a database of records of domestic calls has worked up Congress the most.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) held up a copy of the newspaper to shame everyone in the chamber and beyond. As the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Leahy couldn’t have squandered such an opening at a time when his party is getting luckier by the week in the run-up to the November elections.
The conservative universe, on the other hand, is pulsating with anxiety over the possibility of both housing falling to the Dems. In that case, Sen. Leahy would become chairman of the Senate committee most closely involved with the impeachment of Bush so many Democrats are counting on.
For many Republicans, the prospect of a loss in November might have been bearable if the Harry Reids, Nancy Pelosis and Howard Deans had earned victory on other own. It’s President George W. Bush’s brazen flaunting of his lameduck-ness that’s troubling. If, anything, the latest revelations have stiffened the Bush administration’s resolve in pushing the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden, the former chief of the NSA, as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Now don’t get me wrong. The issues here are serious. The NSA, according to USA Today, attempted to keep track of all phone calls made in the United States and use them in an elaborate data-mining operation. The agency did not go to any court for approval. Rather, it simply asked several major telecommunications companies to turn over huge volumes of call data. Only one refused.
President Bush and the telephone companies insist their actions were strictly in accordance with the law. Doubtless, the ambiguity of the law permits such straight-in-the-eye assertions. How else could these companies have provided the feds with records on over a trillion calls without breaching privacy laws?
The implication that the United States has such a surfeit of al-Qaeda suspects is certainly amusing. But it is no laughing matter to our elected representatives. The absence of public debate and judicial review in the whole process is less troubling than the enormous scope for abuse of the process. Where’s the public outrage?
It doesn’t exist, according to the Washington Post-ABC News poll. Some 66 percent of Americans said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found. Maybe public expectations of privacy have undergone a major shift in this age of terrorism.
Or is it technology? With so many people blabbering into their cell-phones on sidewalks, hospitals, restaurants – and yes – public libraries with such abandon, can we conclude that privacy has lost its traditional sanctity?
Culture, too, has played a part. People have learned to live with data-mining. After all, telemarketers, credit-card companies and email spammers seem to know our preferences almost as well as we do. With everything revolving around your social security number, there’s little telling who’s watching which planet for what purpose.
So what’s the big deal if the government is invading a space Corporate America has long trespassed on? Especially when there hasn’t been another 9/11?