Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”
At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Notice that McConnell predicts that they'll be given that authority when "something horrendous happens". That's probably true. After 911 most Americans seemed eager to throw away their liberty for the false promise of security by the Nanny State. The more conspiracy-minded among you might be thinking that the government could sit back and allow "something horrendous" in order to convince the American people that total surveillance was necessary to protect them.
When Jefferson wrote "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" he was talking about the people monitoring the government, not the other way around. But I fear we are too far along the path to turn back now. The people have been conditioned to depend on government; after the next major attack, they'll demand a surveillance society.
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