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Boing Boing has a snippet from a press release by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-CA. He questioned Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez about the NSA’s secret domestic wiretapping program. Among the questions was this: does the Administration believe it has the authority to wiretap purely domestic calls between two Americans without seeking a warrant? Gonzales’ response: “I cannot rule that out.”

This is worrisome on many levels. It oversteps constitutional principles and settled law, but it also underscores the problems created by favoritism in politics. When a president appoints public servants based on whether they will support him or not, what he ends up getting are yes men, not public servants. Yes men aren’t primarily concerned with upholding the law, and moral/ethical/civil issues pale in importance when compared with their boss’ desires.

I hope I’m not the only one to whom this seems reminiscent of communist practices. I grew up in Romania during Ceausescu’s regime. My father and grandfather suffered persecution at the hands of Romania’s communist regime. We found a microphone in our phone’s receiver once. I don’t need to go into the details, but what I can say is that I only expected phone tapping to be something commonplace in communist countries with totalitarian regimes, not in a free, democratic society like the United States.

While in Romania, we would think wistfully about the States, and dream that we too, might one day be able to enjoy that freedom. Well, that freedom we wanted so much is now turning into something scary. In the name of protecting us, our government encroaches more and more upon our rights as citizens of this great country, and to me, it’s unbelievable. I’m getting flashbacks, and I don’t like it. The parallels are striking. Communists used the pretext of protecting citizens from the “evil influences of Western culture” as the reason of closing off borders, wiretapping, censoring newspapers and television, and restricting all manner of cultural exchange. Here, the government use 9/11 as a pretext for browbeating us into agreement, and for what?

For the chance to feel safer? Do any of us really feel safer when there’s more crime inside the United States than in most other civilized countries? For the chance to waste our time standing in line and looking undignified as we undress and take off our shoes at airport checkouts, and as nameless employees rifle through our personal belongings to look for “suspicious objects”? Am I the only one who can’t help seeing how pointless this all is? As a country, we’ve spent billions by now on “making America safer”, and what’s the ROI? Can someone quantify it for me? Seems to me all we’ve gained is a whole bunch of confusion, stress and more national debt. Where’s the payoff? Oh wait, don’t tell me… we need to turn over more of our rights to the government before we can see the results… Is that it? Boy, oh boy, we are clueless, aren’t we?

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