"All the infrastructure a tyrant would need"

ShrinkRap posts have become long recently, trying to get some clarity about the struggle between protecting our individual rights and protecting our physical safety.  At the risk of running off any few remaining readers, this article from the Atlantic magazine by Conor Friedersdorf, "All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need," is a must read.  It made me stop and reconsider where I was leaning in this argument -- especially one of his last points about "balancing the very rights of our Constitution against a threat with an infinitesimal chance of killing any one of us."

In other words, I had been thinking of it as a more or less even balance between personal freedom and personal safety.   This reframes that as constitutionally guaranteed basic rights vs a very very small likelihood of harm from terrorists.   Here is a condensed version of the Atlantic article:

"Let's assume that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, their staffers, and every member of Congress for the last dozen years has always acted with pure motives in the realm of national security . . .  and that Americans are lucky to have had men and women so moral, prudent, and incorruptible in charge.

". . .  [but] The American people have no idea who the president will be in 2017. Nor do we know who'll sit on key Senate oversight committees, who will head the various national-security agencies. . 

"What we know is that the people in charge will possess the capacity to be tyrants -- to use power oppressively and unjustly -- to a degree that Americans in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, or 2000 could've scarcely imagined. To an increasing degree, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils.  Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after. Behold the items on an aspiring tyrant's checklist that they've provided their successors:

• A precedent that allows the president to kill citizens in secret without prior judicial or legislative review

• The power to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial

• Ongoing warrantless surveillance on millions of Americans accused of no wrongdoing, converted into a permanent database so that data of innocents spied upon in 2007 can be accessed in 2027

• Using ethnic profiling to choose the targets of secret spying, as the NYPD did with John Brennan's blessing

• Normalizing situations in which the law itself is secret -- and whatever mischief is hiding in those secret interpretations

• The permissibility of droning to death people whose identities are not even known to those doing the killing

• The ability to collect DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if they haven't been convicted of anything

• A torture program that could be restarted with an executive order

"Even if you think Bush and Obama exercised those extraordinary powers responsibly, what makes you think every president would? . . 

"Perhaps Congress would assert itself. Perhaps the people would rise up. Then again, perhaps it would be too late by the time the abuses were evident. (America has had horrific abuses of power in the past under weaker executives who were less empowered by technology; and numerous other countries haven't recognized tyrants until it was too late.) 

" . . . we're allowing ourselves to become a nation of men, not laws. . 

"This isn't an argument about how tyranny is inevitable. . . .  We have safeguards . . .  Stop casting them off because you fear al-Qaeda. Stop tempting fate.

"Stop acting like the president takes an oath to keep us safe, when his job is to protect and defend the Constitution. Doing so keeps the American project safe. . . .  And we're so risk-averse . . . that we're "balancing" the very rights in our Constitution against a threat with an infinitesimal chance of killing any one of us . . .  [Here the author points out that, even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, the probability of death from these attacks for each person, each year, is about 0.001%.] . . . This is why we're letting the government build an Orwellian spy state more sophisticated than any in history? . . . 

"I am not saying that terrorism poses no threat -- of course it does. Of course we ought to dedicate substantial resources to preventing all the attacks that can be stopped without violating our founding documents, laws, values, or sense of proportion. For the national-security state, loosed of the Constitution's safeguards, is a far bigger threat to liberty than al-Qaeda will ever be. . . . "

Ralph

PS:  On reflecting a bit, this is the purist argument, and part of me cheers.   On the other hand, we live in a political world.  Just imagine that Obama did not take every legal opportunity to prevent an attack, and then we had another major attack.  Would the Republicans just sympathize and say, "Well, our guy Bush didn't even respond to the CIA's telling him an attack was imminent . . . so we won't hold this against you"?   I think not.  They would run political campaigns about the Democrats being weak on national defense for the next decade.     The American public -- inflamed by our ratings-hungry media -- may just not be mature enough to have a democracy.