This summer, the right wing has feasted on a bounty of widely publicized scandals surrounding the Obama administration. The past five years of increasingly vocal opposition have been irritating to those of us who favor an ordered, centrally planned society, and the leaked revelations have provided the anti-government rabble with enough ammunition to send the public's faith in their government into a tailspin.

The tin-foil-hat crazies are claiming vindication. President Obama's approval rating among youth aged 17 to 30 has plummeted, and Congress is demanding more oversight of the intelligence apparatus. To those of us who find comfort in an unchallenged central power structure, this is jarring and upsetting.

One man, possessed with the gall to think that his independent judgment has validity against the consensus of thousands of national security professionals, has deemed it to be his right to tear the lid off of a Pandora's box of information. This incredible egoist, one Edward J. Snowden, is a traitor to the notion of strictly enforced social order. He has broken laws and shaken the nation's faith in authority.

Snowden revealed secret court documents and internal National Security Agency briefings that exposed an enormous array of surveillance capabilities and programs. Many Americans are outraged over the domestic spying conducted under this all-encompassing electronic dragnet. Almost all global communications are watched through telephone and email 'metadata' collection, as well as PRISM and XKeyscore, which collect nearly every byte of global internet traffic.

So what? The authorities have implored us not to be concerned, as these programs are only used against terrorists. Headphone-clad analysts are not listening to all of your phone calls. Sure, some analysts have occasionally snooped on pillow talk, love interests and celebrities, but the ends justify the means! The type of rhetoric surrounding the issue is hardly justified given this scale of an incursion into our privacy.

Besides, the collection of metadata is an incredibly useful tool for tracking suspects. Metadata includes a time-stamped record of the numbers a phone has called or messaged, its Internet connection history and its coarse location based on cell-towers.

The German newspaper Zeit Online performed an experiment called "Tell-all Telephone," which used nearly 39,000 pieces of cell phone metadata belonging to German politician Malte Spitz, collected over a period of five months. Using the same metadata that the NSA collects, Zeit constructed an interactive map, which allows you to track nearly all of Spitz's activities. By clicking the "play" button, you can watch Spitz travel, communicate and browse the web almost as if you were stalking him from place to place.

Presumably, the NSA could do the same thing. Between this and an almost all-seeing eye on Internet content, no electronic communication is concealable.

Innocent people, we have been promised, should not feel disturbed. If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. Archaic notions of privacy rights must be amended for the threats of today's world. In a nation racked with terror, the old mantra of 'innocent until proven guilty' has been necessarily discarded for its converse: 'guilty until proven innocent.' Today, we're all suspects. Our quest for total insulation from terror demands this.

The paranoids insist that we tailor public policy to assuage their fears, and those suspicious of this sort of power vested in a secret agency lack faith in authority. This reckless view undermines the principles our society is built on. Disagreement with the NSA's approach reveals a fundamental lack of faith in the agency's ability to protect our rights and our lives.
Intelligence leaders insist these programs have stopped dozens of terrorist attacks, including a bomb plot against the New York Stock Exchange. While the details of these cases, including the evidence proving that the attacks were stopped specifically by general warrant-style surveillance programs, remains secret, we must believe that they are true. Our ignorance of these programs' details is their strength. After all, these intelligence experts have dedicated their lives to protecting us. Their jobs rely on our trust in their ability to keep us safe, so we should have faith that they would never risk breaching that trust by misleading or lying to us. No patriot would ever entertain that!

We should feel secure. Our esteemed leader, President Obama, understands the issue of irresponsible domestic surveillance, and eloquently denounced the Bush Administration for engaging in it some years ago.

Then-Senator Obama slammed the USA PATRIOT Act for allowing our "own government [to decide] to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document ... through the phone calls that you made, the emails that you sent ... This is just plain wrong." He denounced Bush for "[putting] forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," and in his first inauguration, Obama posited that "for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

A man this wise would surely never permit surveillance overreach, nor would he completely contradict himself without good reason. When the NSA scandal went public, President Obama sagely reminded us that "[we] can't have 100 percent security, and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience." He went on to explain that "in the abstract, [people] can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance," between our safety and our ideals, in our choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.

While those who think in abstract principles raise alarms about 'turnkey tyranny,' those who focus solely on the situation of the immediate moment will have faith in the government, and push us ever forward toward a completely ordered, totally controlled society.
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