The Surveillance Imbroglio

Unlike some others, I am finding it impossible to get excited and all steamed up about the struggle now coming to a head in the Congress, over the Protect America Act, or the Surveillance Act, or the Spy Law, which, as near as I can understand, is due to expire in three days unless the House of Representatives acts otherwise, and the White House hopes it does.

There are several reasons for my indifference. One might be on the self-centered side, and it can be easily countered by ranting to me, "Just because you so seldom talk on the phone and just because the calls you do participate in are without exception so innocuous that it would be pure comedy that anyone, much less the FBI, would ever want to overhear one, doesn't mean that all the rest of us aren't in fact making highly sensitive calls every minute of the day and night, and even when we're not, we still highly resent any idea of the Government listening in, with the collusion of the telephone companies."

That says most of it for my first reason, except that I also happen to fervently believe that no matter how important and "sensitive" phone users believe their conversations to be, it is all, when one comes right down to it, just a cartload of pure twaddle and fiddle-faddle, save for genuine emergencies. And added to that is my big question of just who can be hired to listen in on all these phone phests? I think it would give the expression "thankless task" a whole new meaning. And so for that reason I think the whole business of endless wiretaps is just a football field full of empty threats.

Maybe I'm also unworried about the Govt listening in to me or to anyone else because I've seen so much of the excellent if sometimes harrowing HBO miniseries, "The Wire."

Though it has won few if any bigtime awards, "The Wire" nevertheless is such a well-done story, with numerous interesting characters, that it has built up a large and fervid audience. Now, sadly, it is in what is advertised as its 5th and final season, though the only reason I can see for the necessity of the "final" business is the writers' somewhat idiotic tendency to kill off too high a percentage of its best characters.

At the heart of "The Wire," and thus its name, is the continuous attempt to tap into the phones and other electronic gadgetry that is cunningly used by some often vicious and deadly inner city drug dealers in Baltimore. Sometimes these attempts work and sometimes they don't, though there's a hard core of dedicated police who have to combat their less principled colleagues as well as higher-ups. All in all it presents a picture in which wire-tapping is not the cakewalk that its opponents might fear that it is. And in "The Wire" it is presented -- whether accurately or not I do not know -- as the best hope of controlling and even eliminating the drug scourge and all its attendant miseries.

Finally I don't know why anyone would get all worked up over anything that the Congress does or fails to do, and I haven't had any hope of great things from it since the Civil Rights days. It is just what you would expect if you had a barrel with hundreds of bad apples mixed in with the good ones. The ego count in both halls is through the roof. Several years of watching their hearings on C-span convinced me of that. Pitiful, and scary!