Outrage over the US government’s broad harvest of communications data is like antioil rhetoric from activists who drive sport-utility vehicles.
Suddenly, America teems with libertarians because a UK newspaper reported that the National Security Agency monitors telephone, e-mail, and internet traffic more aggressively than most people knew.
Yet many outraged Americans eagerly publish personal information via social media and approve tracking of their financial lives by credit-reporting agencies. Can privacy really be that important to those folks?
Granted: Facebook postings and submission to credit scoring are voluntary; governmental surveillance of communication records is not.
NSA, however, seems to have confined itself to data-mining aimed at spotting communication patterns indicative of terrorist plotting. Spies are not randomly reading messages. They just collect a lot of data.
To be sure, popular concern about the government’s meddling in private lives is healthy. The NSA program, watched by a panel of federal judges acting in secret, does strain the perpetual tension between freedom and security. It needs control, even if the mechanism must stay hidden from public view.
Where, though, was American worry about liberty in 2005 and 2007, when the US enacted laws telling the public what kind of energy to sell and therefore use?
With its communications scanning, the NSA fulfills a constitutionally stipulated vision for government: “provide for the common defense.” Its exertions have foiled terrorist plots.
Some will argue that restructuring energy markets serves, per the Constitution, to “promote the general welfare.” Yet the results are a broken and costly ethanol program and solar and wind businesses struggling to survive despite munificent taxpayer subsidies.
Welfare? Yes. General? No.
Energy fiascos happen when Americans, with no ideological regret, surrender fuel choice to a government claiming to know more than they do about energy at the point of consumption.
The blessings of liberty relate to more than electronic chatter. They interweave with welfare, defense, and other constitutional values into the fabric of effective, meaning restrained, governance. And they always require defense.
(Online June 7, 2013; author’s e-mail: [email protected])