PRIVACY ? (the state of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people) Synonyms: SECLUSION? SOLITUDE? CONFIDENTIAL?
SECURITY? (the state of being free from danger or threat)
Synonyms: SURETY? SAFEGUARD? GUARANTEE?
If honest confession is good for the soul, my journaling today should, at least, give my soul some comfort. I’ll begin with a remembrance... of Daniel Ellsberg (now 82 years old), who as a United States military analyst employed by the Rand Corporation in 1971, released to the New York Times a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government’s decision-making concerning the Vietnam War. I believed Ellsberg was right about the mindless, unmanaged and probably unmanageable chaotic war in Vietnam just four hundred miles across the South China Sea from where I was living at the time. As a civilian I had spent some time in South Vietnam, and I had witnessed firsthand the disorder and confusion all over that country. I had wondered how it could be possible that my country didn’t know that the war wasn’t winnable; and that if there were a chance that it was winnable, it would take a long time and many thousands more lives would be lost. Ellsberg provided documents, “The Pentagon Papers,” which showed that our government had known for a long time that the war was probably not winnable. I thought of Ellsberg as a genuine patriot... a hero. Some other Americans thought of him as a despicable traitor.
A couple of comparisons: Daniel Ellsberg, who grew up in Detroit, went to Harvard on a scholarship where he earned an A.B. in economics; studied at Cambridge on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, returned to Harvard for Graduate School then left to join the U.S. Marine Corps where he served as a platoon leader and company commander, returned to Harvard and earned a PhD in Economics. After Ellsberg knowingly violated federal law by turning over classified information to a newspaper, he surrendered to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts in Boston saying, “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly on my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”
Edward Snowden, born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, moved to Maryland where he dropped out of high school. He enrolled in a community college to get the credits he needed for a GED. He joined the United States Army but was discharged after breaking both of his legs in a training accident. Earlier this month he disclosed details of a classified NSA spy program to the press and acknowledged that he had done so in an interview with the British newspaper, The Guardian. He went to Hong Kong where the interview with The Guardian took place. In that interview he said, “I’m no different from anybody else. I don’t have special skills. I’m just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what’s happening and goes, ‘This is something that’s not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.’” The “something” that he feels is “our place to decide” is whether or not our government should keep track of to/from whom/where we send and receive phone calls. The actual phone messages are not the point of the record-keeping, but the government had decided it might gain information about terrorists by having computers analyze the to/from/where information. It was understood that to listen in... to collect the actual messages... would require permission from a Federal judge. At last account, Mr. Snowden is in hiding. His future plans are not known.
MY CONFESSION: I am CONFLICTED. I’m glad the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is included in The Bill of Rights. It guarantees me and other citizens privacy under force of the law. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It means that I have the right to be secure in my person, my house, my papers, and my effects. Government officials (police officers, elected representatives of my city, my state and my country) are required to obtain a warrant and have probable cause before searching for information about me in any except public places. The Fourth Amendment is generally interpreted to mean that citizens have an inherent right to privacy. When the amendment to the constitution was created and included in “The Bill of Rights” there were no telephones and no Internet. The intent at that time was that the government couldn’t intercept our mail or other private messages without a court order. The safeguard was a safeguard against government intrusion into the private lives of citizens. Who could have imagined Google and Facebook and the Internet in the Eighteenth Century! ...So, under the terms of the Constitution, Google and Facebook can glean from my Internet activities whatever they can find about my private life so they can sell information about me to private companies willing to pay to know what I might be willing to buy... but the Government has no right to do it. I’m left wondering which slippery slope I prefer.
In addition to our guaranteed right to keep government from knowing our private messages, among several other rights guaranteed by the Constitution, we citizens of this richest, most powerful country in the world expect the government to keep us as safe as possible from harm that might be done to us by forces within the country or from other countries. Since I was in grade school and was required to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution, I have assumed that my country will do everything in its power to protect me.
“We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States.” I understand that the Preamble is not law. It serves only as an introduction to the Constitution. I assumed when I was a child learning to say it that I was supposed to feel safer from harm because I am an American than I might feel if I were a citizen of almost any other country. As I grew through childhood and adolescence, I was taught which other countries guaranteed individual safety to their citizens. Somewhere along the way I became aware that I was more secure than some other Americans. In a small town in Arkansas where I was an elementary school kid, I attended a nice, well-furnished school for white children. The building was a proper school house with wonderful playground equipment in the school yard. The teachers were white. All of us kids were white.
My mother once took me to a Christmas program at the school for Negro children in our town. My mother called it “The Negro School,” and she absolutely forbade me to refer to it by the name that most other people in that little town used. Even now, I can’t bring myself to write that name in my journal... and that was a time before the word black had come into common use when referring to African Americans... I’ll never forget... the difference. The building wasn’t a proper school house. It was just a small unpainted house which had been built originally on “that side of the tracks” as a place for a family to live, not for children to go to school. It was small. It was a shack. There was one teacher for all the grades; and, of course, that teacher was an African American lady. Thinking about it now, I’m guessing the teacher might have had an eighth grade education. She and my mother were friends. I don’t know the circumstances that made their friendship possible.
That was a time between 1941 and 1945. My country was at war. My father was too old to be drafted, but some of his brothers and some of my mother’s brothers and some of my cousins were soldiers. I’m guessing that learning the Preamble to the Constitution, made me feel secure, that even in a time of war my country was determined to keep me safe. I still believe that.
Somewhere along the way from childhood to old age, I became aware that ambiguity isn’t just a language issue. Sometimes “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” The issue Mr. Snowden has decided for himself and for all of us is that privacy trumps national security. Dr. Ellsberg decided private citizens have the right to know what the government knows, that government should not be able to hide its decision-making from citizens.
This other datura, like the jimson weed, is also poison.
