I’ve been fighting with my friends a lot lately. And my family members. And, well, my husband, too. The subject of the fights is the surveillance of Americans by their own government. The basic fight goes something like this. . .
Me: “This is not ok. The government should not be indiscriminately—and secretly—spying on hapless Americans.”
The friends: “Seriously, what difference does it make? Google and Facebook already know everything about us. There is no privacy anymore.”
Me: “Well, that’s a problem too. And there are things we can do about that, like say, regulation. But, there is qualitative difference when the government—who can arrest and prosecute you—gets into the act.”
Friends: “But I trust the government a lot more than I trust Verizon. Besides, I don’t have anything to hide.”
And on and on like this . . .
Honestly, this is an argument that pre-dates the Republic. In 1755, Benjamin Franklin famously wrote: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” And the balance between freedom and security is central to the Bill of Rights and to the pursuit of criminal justice in this country. But, the argument goes, the digital age has ushered in a brave new world. Citizens—myself included—announce our breakfast preferences, our vacation schedules, and the condition of our marriages to anyone who happens to be listening, NSA or not. On television, we watch “real people” argue with roommates, wrestle alligators, and cook blowfish at all hours of day and night. I get it. So why should I—who have porous boundaries between the private and the public—really care if Barack Obama or Dick Cheney or Vladimir Putin is paying attention. Why should I have the right to anything to say about it?
Of course, in response, we can toss around names like Brandon Mayfield—a suburban lawyer who was hauled into jail and wrongfully accused of the Madrid train bombing—and poor Richard Jewell, who was accused of bombing the Atlanta Olympic village after he reported a suspicious package to the police. And how about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who spent 19 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit?
In other words, the government has a lot of power and a track record of not always using it wisely. So our shield of “I don’t have anything to hide” might not protect us from the potentially life-destroying threat of arrest and prosecution.
And umm, writers and artists, listen up. In 2012, PEN International reported that 878 writers were arrested by their governments and either detained, imprisoned or killed. Yes, last year 45 writers were killed and 9 were “disappeared.” Need I mention Osip Maldestam, who was arrested and sent to Siberia for privately reading an unflattering poem about Stalin (“His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits/And his accurate words are as heavy as weights./Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,/And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming”) or Ai Weiwei, the Chinese sculptor and filmmaker who was arrested and still lives under a travel ban. Hey artists and writers and journalists, shouldn’t we all just be a little more careful before we toss our lot in with those who can suppress, arrest, and execute?
So for all those reasons, I believe to my core that we need to be more vigilant about guarding our privacy and our liberty from a potentially capricious government. But, truth be told, I personally don’t feel particularly threatened by Barack Obama and Keith Alexander. I find it unlikely that they have time to prosecute middle-aged poets who write mostly about baking pies, raising daughters, and an overwrought preoccupation with Thomas Jefferson. But, I still don’t like it. Even though I announce to the world what is growing in my garden and the score of the Portland Timbers’ games, I don’t want the government creeping into my kitchen and keeping watch over my domestic life, as uninteresting as it might be. This morning, I ran across a poem by Barbara Kingsolver called “On the Morning I Discovered my Phone Was Tapped.” According to the notes, it was written in response to an FBI investigation in the early 1980s that targeted 300 American human rights organizations “alleging links with international terrorism.” The poem, referring to the phone, says:
“I counted every time in a month
it had touched my mouth:
to talk to my mother, my sister
the doctor who knows my uterus,
a friend with cancer,
the man whose hands
touch me when I sleep.”
And this:
“If I am to live in a house where even my skull
has windows, and men probe
the soft parts of my brain for potential crimes,
I would rather give my secrets
Than have them stolen.”
In the thirty years since that FBI surveillance operation, the windows in our skulls have become barn doors, haven’t they? But I don’t think that’s a reason to let the FBI or the NSA or the State Police come right in without knocking. No, in fact just the opposite. I think the thing that bothers me the most about the NSA program and the arguments surrounding it is that we have so little privacy left that we had better hang on to it for dear life. The space where we can argue and grieve and be silly and imperfect and romantic and goofy and joyous and ugly and graceful is so small. It is the pool of light in a kitchen, the length of a phone call with a best friend, the size of a ribald text a wife sends to her husband. While we put a half-private face out into the public space, each one of us guards and protects an ember—however small—of an intimate interior life that is none of the government’s business. Facebook or no Facebook. So, I guess that’s what I’m trying to save. That’s why I’m arguing with my friends and my family and my husband. Whether the NSA is listening or not.
