The High Price of American Gullibility

From CounterPunch, conservative Paul Craig Roberts on the continuing erosion of civil liberties:

If "national security" is a justification for elevating the power of the executive, where is his incentive to find peaceful solutions?

Emotional appeals to fear and to patriotism have led close to half of the population to accept unaccountable government in the name of "the war on terrorism." What a contradiction it is that so many Americans have been convinced that safety lies in their sacrifice of their civil liberties and accountable government.

If so many Americans cannot discern that they have acquiesced to conditions from which tyranny can arise, how can they understand that it is statistically impossible for the NSA's mass surveillance of Americans to detect terrorists?

Floyd Rudmin, a professor at a Norwegian university, writing in CounterPunch (May 24, 2006) applies the mathematics of conditional probability, known as Bayes' Theorem, to demonstrate that the NSA's surveillance cannot successfully detect terrorists unless both the percentage of terrorists in the population and the accuracy rate of their identification are far higher than they are. He correctly concludes that "NSA's surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists."

The surveillance is, however, useful for monitoring political opposition and stymieing the activities of those who do not believe the government's propaganda.

Click here for the rest.

Some observations.

First, and this kind of thinking is why I love Roberts, we have a huge Constitutional problem: American Presidents have a massive incentive to go to war and keep it going indefinitely whether it's good for the country or not--"national security" means more Presidential power; power hungry Presidents want to go to war, just to have more control at home, and that's obviously what's happening right now. Some Constitutional scholars really need to put their heads together and work this problem out like right now. The Founding Fathers, I'm sure, never envisioned an America with enough military power and economic backing for the creation of endless wars which exist simply to expand executive power, thereby utterly obliterating their carefully crafted balance of power between federal branches. This is a serious defect in the Constitution; it stands to completely undo everything for which this country stands.

Second, the willingness of so many Americans, by accepting continual downgrades of the civil liberties that make our nation unique, to undo everything for which this country stands continues to amaze me. I'm not sure which Founding Father said it, because the quote seems to be attributed to either Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry, depending on who's doing the quoting, but it's worth repeating again and again: "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." That is, all this domestic spying bullshit is so unAmerican. How the hell can anyone support it?

Finally, go read the statistics article linked in the excerpt above. If the calculations are correct, the NSA "data mining" simply cannot do what Bush claims it does. Personally, I got a bit lost somewhere in all the number crunching, but, overall, it appears to be a compelling argument. Perhaps somebody who's better with math can give the essay a review for me, just to make sure. But, wow, the conclusion about NSA data mining being way more effective at spying on Americans than on terrorists is, indeed, frightening.

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