Published January 29, 2006 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
By Aaron J. Brown
If you’ve managed to avoid the recent condemnation and subsequent defense of the government’s domestic wiretapping, I can understand. Constitutional debates are boring. That aside, it might interest you to know that you can currently see a satellite image of your house right now on Google.
The pictures are a couple years old, thus I could see my car parked in front of our old house in Hibbing. We’ve moved to the country since, so the pictures aren’t as detailed, but I can see our small dirt road surrounded by forest.
That will surprise some more than others. Technologically-inclined folks already knew about this. Still others would say, “No big deal. I’ve seen my house before.” Others might be a bit alarmed, if not outright paranoid. This small taste of the technology shows that the government can know anything about us it wants, and we might never know about it.
We live in a big world that keeps getting smaller. That’s why we should care about the Bush Administration’s practice of tapping domestic phone lines without a warrant. Sure, we see plenty of partisan debates on the news, but this one really shouldn’t be about party.
Polls indicate that opinions about wiretapping policy tend to follow party lines. Republicans overwhelmingly approve of President Bush’s unwarranted wiretapping, while Democrats and independents largely oppose it. I’d bet that the numbers would be exactly opposite had former President Clinton wiretapped people without a warrant. It seems the only time people are bothered about wiretapping is when it’s done by people they didn’t vote for.
Defenders of the practice, including the President, say that they have a right to secretly monitor phone numbers of people who might have communicated with terrorists or other criminals during war time. On the surface, that seems reasonable. But the argument is no different than saying we should have martial law in places where numerous crimes take place.
This whole business of being “at war” needs to be cleared up. President Bush declared our current war not on countries, specific people or even specific terror groups, but on terrorism itself. Even though we captured Saddam Hussein (who was not involved in 9/11), marginalized (but not captured) Osama bin Laden and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan we are no closer to “winning” the War on Terrorism. That’s because terrorism is a generic noun, not an enemy we can shoot. We can’t win a war on terrorism any more than we can “defeat” teen pregnancy. We can guard against specific threats, but just as prom night and hormones remain omnipresent, we must remain vigilant.
So, unless you’re willing to remain “at war” forever and ever and ever, maybe we should give a rip about these so-called “wartime” Constitutional shortcuts.
There’s not much we can do about the satellite images of our houses on the Internet. That’s public information. But it’s worth your time to insist that our personal communication should never be monitored by the government without cause and due process.
We live in a country where technology erases the physical walls and social boundaries that have protected our privacy in the past, but we still have choices. We’re either going to live in a country where every citizen has equal freedoms, a right to privacy and due process under the law, or we aren’t.
The erosion of free speech, search and seizure protections and other Constitutional freedoms might take a few more years, or a few more decades. But, just as a plugged sink drain and running water will flood your house, you can count on overflowing tyranny if we don’t fix the problem. Remember, it always starts as a small thing. Soon enough we’ll be able to see it from space.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.