Fear and
Distraction > Truth and Transparency
Recently
we have seen events and tragedies across our nation and the globe, which have
brought a wide range of emotions to the political forefront. Fear, anger,
sadness, despair, confusion, etc. play into the aptly named “big scary world”
syndrome, and the promise of safety and security causes people to relinquish
small amounts of personal freedom with no thought. What’s more, is that during
these times when citizens are essentially begging to be stripped of liberties,
our legislators are busy slipping other things right under our noses.
In
April of 2012, months before the election, President Obama signed the STOCK
Act; introduced to bar anyone from federal workers, to the President, from
profiting on the use of information gained on the job. Great idea, right? But
originally introduced in 2006, the STOCK Act died in committee, and again in
2007, and again in 2009. In November of 2011, when 60 Minutes reported to the
American public that several members of Congress had traded on insider
knowledge, it only took 5 days for the Act’s co-sponsors to jump from 9 to 94.
Guilty conscience at it’s finest. But only a year after passing the STOCK Act,
on the same day American’s taxes are due, and the same day of the horrific
bombings in Boston, that same act that took 6 years to pass, lost all intended
transparency in less than one minute. It was decided that disclosing the
trading activity of members of Congress is a “threat to national security”; a
line that seems to be a theme.
Three
days after the bombings in Boston, CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) passed the House with a 288-127 vote. Pretty strongly in favor.
This Act would “encourage voluntary sharing of cyber-threat information to the
government.” But many large companies such as Facebook and Microsoft were
skeptical, citing customers’ privacy as reason for their non-support.
Fortunately for Americans, notice of the act grew and disapproval petitions ran
wild across the web. Thanks to what the Huffington Post calls “privacy
advocates” the measure hit a wall in the Senate. Personally, I thought the
House and Senate were my privacy advocates. Apparently not.
After
Sept. 11th, 2001 our nation was reeling. People demanded answers
about how this could happen, and what would be done to prevent another attack.
People got their answer just one month later, when under President G.W.
Bush, the USA PATRIOT Act was enacted with massive bi-partisan approval. The
Act allowed law enforcement to utilize their full investigatory potential,
while loosening the methods through which they are used. In the heat of the
moment, this sounded like the right answer for keeping us safe. As time went on
however, we realized that the flaws in the Act far exceeded the benefits. The ACLU reported that in 2003, for the first time in history, “secret
intelligence” wiretaps outnumbered criminal wiretaps. My grandfather always
told me that if an idea takes you longer to explain, than it did to come up
with, it’s not a good idea. Well it took us a month to come up with the USA
PATRIOT Act, and President Obama signed a 4-year extension, which brings us to
12 years of explaining it.
President
F.D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 just over three months after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. This act allowed all persons deemed a “threat to
national security” to be placed indefinitely in internment camps on our own
soil. Over 100,000 Japanese, German, Italian and many other U.S. citizens were
imprisoned for no reason other than their ethnicity. Admittedly not our
proudest moment as a nation, but it shows the power of what can be deemed acceptable under moments of intense national fear.
Times change, people do not. Professor Howard Zinn writes about the 1700’s terrorist equivalent in “A People’s History
of the United States”. The
Governor of New York wrote to England in 1712, “About 25 blacks and 2 indians
set fire to a building then killed 9 whites who came on the scene” and
the Royal Appointed Governor of South Carolina wrote, “…we have had a very wicked and
barbarous plot…of the negroes rising with a designe to destroy all the white
people in the country…but it pleased God and was discovered…” After
these incidents, many more fires were attributed to slaves, and legislation was
passed that any slaves gathering in groups of two or more were to be whipped. This successfully reached the goal of quelling slave gatherings, in which the injustices could be discussed, and rebellions could be planned.
This
should not be read as some conspiracy piece, but rather one that highlights the
need for Americans not to let emotion cloud our view of the world around us.
After tragedies like Boston and 9/11, peoples’ worlds stopped turning; but the
world itself did not. It’s important that we all stay vigilant and demand
further adherence to our Constitution through the watchful eyes of citizens. In
addition, we owe it to ourselves, and future generations to honestly scrutinize
the long-term decisions we make. Only then can we ensure that fear and
distraction do not trump truth and transparency.
