The surveillance
debate is turning political America today into a booby hatch, spreading
paranoia across the ideological spectrum. Tea Party mistrust of anything Obama paired
with Snowden-is-a-hero fervor on the Left does not leave a shrunken middle much
ground to stand on.
Even
the watchers seem helpless. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which is supposed to protect privacy, says it lacks tools
to verify how often the government breaks its rules or be sure that reported
violations are unintentional mistakes.
All
this shakes down to an overriding question: Can we trust anyone about anything
or are we doomed to live in a mental ward of our own making, furtively on the
watch for what “they” (terrorists, our own government, whistle blowers, whoever)
may do to us at any moment?
As
disheartening as Washington is these days, a closer look at the other side of
the debate is just as depressing. Now Eric Snowden is disavowing his father for
suggesting that Glenn Greenwald does not have his best interests at heart and
is using him for his own ends.
A
close look at Greenwald’s outpost in Rio de Janeiro by a sympathetic journalist
is not reassuring. Waging cyberwar on his own country in the name of his vision
of oppression, he partners with Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker from a
well-to-do American family, who he calls the “Keyser Soze of the story, because
she’s at once completely invisible and yet ubiquitous,” referencing “The Usual
Suspects” in which Kevin Spacey played a mastermind masquerading as a nobody.
The
household, which includes Greenwald’s gay partner and occasional visiting
allies from the Guardian, is the
epicenter of a war on his country enabled by American mass media and
politicians into a lopsided debate over privacy vs. security which keeps
shedding much heat but little light.
The
mistrust that bin Laden seeded in America on 8/11/01 is still bearing fruit.
Can we ever get back to where we can trust anyone again?
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