As part of their slowly domestic spying series Salon ran an invaluable article by Tim Shorrock on Wednesday about plans for the formation of a new Church Committee in the wake of what everyone hopes will be a Democratic victory in November. In one respect it does little more than add some confirmation to what many people, myself included, have long suspected, namely that what we already know about Bush Administration lawbreaking is only the tip of the iceberg. In this particular instance it’s their penchant for using illegal surveillance to keep tabs on American citizens that’s under the spotlight.
The great achievement of the article is to paint a broad yet convincing outline of the government’s gigantic (and super secret) database of mostly useless things. The financial information, personal information and who-knows-what-else information of foreigners, criminals and citizens all lumped together in one place; ladies and gentlemen the United States Government proudly presents: Main Core.
Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and stores — without warrants or court orders — the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
What a great name, huh? “Main Core”, it’s ominously evil but still has the imprimatur of government stupidity. (Incidentally, one of the anagrams for it is “Coma Rein”, that seems appropriate.) It’s a term I’ve seen before, but this is the first thing I’ve ever read that lays out a simple overview of just what it is: a massive dumping ground for all the information gathered (electronically or through direct surveillance) of anyone. It’s been around since the 1980s, it’s almost certainly chock full of illegally gathered information and your government, the same outfit who’s vaunted No-Fly List can’t tell the difference between people with similar names, is using it right now.
Slightly earlier in the article an ACLU man points out that if the 400,000 people on the No-Fly List were really terrorists, “our cities would be ablaze”. That, right there, is the nut of this. This is a database of “Americans considered to be threats to national security” but if this many American people were real threats to national security the Revolution would’ve happened by now and the people who created the database would’ve long since been put up against the wall and shot. It is absurd.
Absurdity does not make it harmless however. Patrick Radden Keefe detailed some of the harm in The New Yorker a couple of months ago. In an article appropriately titled “State Secrets” we get the detailed account of how the government used illegal means to prosecute, so far unsuccessfully, a charity in Oregon. The theater of the absurd includes:
- FBI agents, trying to recover classified information which had been accidentally leaked to a defense attorney, telling the attorney not to even think about the contents of the file they were hoping she could retrieve from her own archives.
- Defense attorneys being forced to write a brief at a secured location on a government computer because they had to guess about classified information the government was using and their guesses were therefore classified as well.
- The government refusing to confirm or deny whether or not they were eavesdropping on telephone calls between attorneys and their clients thus abrogating attorney client privilege.
One of the things the original Church Committee discovered was that the government had been eavesdropping on telephone conversations pretty much since the invention of the telephone. Moreover, it built on itself over time, each new violation becoming justification for the next. Now we have many more ways to communicate and it should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that the government is listening and recording.
It’s not a threat to the Republic, though it could become one if the country lost its collective mind for ten or fifteen years the way it did for a couple right after 11 September 2001. But that will never happen because this country isn’t insane. That’s the whole reason the government has to do these things in secret, they are as abhorrent as they are stupid. The Salon article cites the dark scenario where the database would be used to round up the suspicious in the event of a national emergency or the suspension of the Constitution. While I’m sure those plans exist, no doubt in some heavily locked and guarded file cabinet, they are the result of underemployed bureaucrats being told to contemplate ludicrously improbably nightmares, little more. Messes are always easier to clean sooner rather than later though, so if there is to be a sequel to the Church Committee, let it be seated and empowered as quickly as possible.
