There is a wide range of opinion about the National Security Agency's data collection program.
Some people are fine with it -- anything to protect America against terrorism and other national security threats.
Others are a bit uneasy about it, but support the government doing what it needs to to protect the country.
Others, meanwhile, are furious and appalled at what they view as a scary, illegal invasion of privacy by an evil government extending its own power.
Which of those views you hold, interestingly, seems to correlate with your age. Older people tend to be more comfortable with the NSA program, and younger people tend to be more upset about it. Middle-aged people meanwhile, tend to fall into, well, the middle.
I'm middle-aged, so, not surprisingly, that's where I come down on this.
I'm a bit uneasy about the NSA collecting and storing all that information, but I don't regard merely collecting and storing it as an outrageous invasion of my privacy. As long as what the NSA can do with this information is limited and subject to appropriate checks and balances, you won't see me marching on Washington about it.
My attitude toward this, I think, is the result of three factors:
- First, I lived through the Cold War, as well as Lockerbie, 9/11, and other terrorist attacks, so I'm not uncomfortable with having government intelligence agencies spy on people to try to make us safer. A kid from my high school was blown up on Pan Am Flight 103. My office was right next to the World Trade Center, and I knew people who were murdered on 9/11. So these attacks hit close to home. I am happy that such attacks have happened infrequently. And I am willing to give up a bit of my privacy if it will help the government continue to limit such attacks.
- I know people who have worked or do work in our government, and they're not power-hungry or evil. They're not even incompetent. On the contrary, they're professionals who could work anywhere but have chosen to spend some of their careers working in the government. I'm sure that, like all professionals, these folks occasionally make mistakes, but I have no doubt that they're trying to do the best job they can for the country and Americans. And, in part because I know these people, I imagine that most people in the government are trying to do the same thing.
- I appreciate that there is an important difference between being able to collect information about me and being able to use that information against me. Yes, our government appears to be building a humongous database filled with all of our communications, along with those of everyone else in the world. And, yes, the power of such a database is potentially immense and could be used against me. But there's a big difference between collecting that information and using it. And that's a difference that the folks who are outraged by the NSA revelations often seem to ignore.
Join the conversation about this story »
     |