That Person-of-the-Year Thing

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

OK, so one week I write a column lauding Pope Francis I and the very next week he gets named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. More than coincidence? Perhaps. But as much as I do admire this pope, I think Time made the wrong call.

It’s always been somewhat puzzling to me that the choice of Person of the Year is eagerly awaited by the media and often causes controversy. A lot of people seem to regard it as some sort of reward or honor.

This, despite the fact that every year Time stresses that the award goes to the person who “for better or for worse, has done the most to influence the events of the year,” not just one who’s been the nicest, most positive, or most beneficial to mankind.

(This still doesn't explain why Time said demented teen songstress Miley Cyrus was among its top contenders this year, but perhaps there are some things we aren't meant to know.)

Time’s been naming a Man of the Year since 1927, when aviator and Adolf Hitler apologist Charles Lindbergh got the nod. Hitler himself was named in 1938, which is probably why he felt cocky enough to invade Poland the next year.

Other luminaries achieving the status of Man (or Person) of the Year include Queen Elizabeth II, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

It was in 1999 that they started calling it Person of the Year. Sometimes, the Person of the Year isn't an actual person at all, like the years the magazine named “The Computer” (1982) or “The Endangered Earth” (1988).

Then there was the year Time copped out completely, put a mirrored panel on the cover and proclaimed that the Person of the Year was … wait for it … “You”! It was like something from some half-baked self-affirmation book, or maybe an Oprah episode.

You may have gathered from this that I think the whole POTY thing by Time is pretty lame, and you’d be right. Especially this year. I think the title should have gone to that prolific leaker of NSA secrets, Edward Snowden, who only made runner-up for POTY.

Whatever you may think about Snowden himself (and I for one don’t think anyone who flees to Russia is any kind of hero), there’s no denying the effect of his revelations about just how far American surveillance of people, even its own citizens, has gone.

People were also stunned to discover just how much of it is legal, such as the collection of so-called “metadata,” showing what numbers were called when and for how long.

The Supreme Court, as far back as 1979, ruled that that kind of data collection wasn’t even a search for Fourth Amendment purposes, because “we doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial.”

No one thought much about that at the time, because hey, we were fighting crime, right?

But once the Supremes ruled gathering that kind of data wasn’t a search, it meant it was fair game for any purpose, anywhere.

Even when programs like the FBI’s Carnivore and DARPA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) came to light in the early 2000s, only a few voices, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and, it must be mentioned, your Humble Columnist), expressed any alarm at all, and they were regarded as crackpots at best.

At worst, they were told they were trying to subvert the Dear Leader George Dubbya’s Global War on Terror and that they wanted to bring on another 9/11.

It wasn’t until Snowden revealed the breadth of the net the NSA was casting (and until the election of a Democratic president terrified wingnuts into realizing that giving power to one president meant the next one kept it) that the general public started to wake up to the need to ask some hard questions about how much privacy we’re willing to give up, and how maybe we need to change the laws as they stand.

The words and deeds of Francis I may have an effect far beyond this year. I hope they do. In that case, I’ll enthusiastically endorse him for Person of the Decade, may even of the Century.

However, as much as I admire and respect His Holiness for, in Time’s words, “pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets,” it’s Snowden pulling NSA surveillance out of the shadows and into the light that’s “done the most to influence the events of the year.”

Relevant to Today's Column

Seems I've Heard All This Before

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The story is told in these parts of a local lawyer who, many years ago, was appointed to represent a man on a charge of indecent exposure.

Sadly, it wasn’t said defendant’s first such charge. In fact, it seems that the disturbed young man had a long record of flashing people. Thinking quickly, the lawyer argued that the law defined “indecent exposure” as the display of one’s “private parts.” This man, the lawyer argued, had displayed himself so many times that none of his parts could be considered “private” any more.

Case dismissed.

If the law ever catches up with Edward Snowden, the former “civilian contractor” who claims to be the inside source for a spate of recent news stories revealing the extent of government data collection of phone and Internet traffic, he could always use the defense my long-ago colleague used: This stuff’s so well-known and has been documented for so long, it’s not really secret.

See, I’m a little bemused (not to mention amused) by the people who are suddenly shocked — SHOCKED, I tell you — to find out that the government is (1) collecting the metadata (which number called which other number and for how long) from millions of phone conversations; and (2) collecting data regarding people’s interactions on the Internet, including “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats,” as reported in the British newspaper The Guardian.

My bemusement (and amusement) are caused by the fact that I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that this was going on. I mean, if I knew and was writing about the phone thing as far back as 2006 (and I was), the knowledge must have been pretty doggone common.

I also recall a conversation I had with someone discussing the government’s collection of Internet data.

“What’s the matter?” the person smirked. “Is there something in your Google searches you don’t want someone to see?”

I answered that, since my online research for the book I was writing had recently included searches on child pornography distribution networks and Claymore mines, I did have concerns that someone might get the wrong idea. (The book, by the way, was my novel “Breaking Cover,” which first came out in 2005. Still available on Amazon. Just saying.)

Anyway, anyone who’s surprised to find out that the government has been using sophisticated computers to spy on phone and Internet traffic really hasn’t been paying a heck of a lot of attention the past few years. What some people claim to be upset about is the breathtaking amount of data trawled by the government’s electronic nets.
“We had no idea,” they claim, “that when we handed incredible amounts of authority to collect data to a government equipped with massive banks of supercomputers, they’d go after THIS much!”

There’s a word for people like that. That word is “fools.”

See, the real scandal is, it’s all legal. In fact, the best thing said about this whole kerfluffle came from John Oliver on his first night as summer host of “The Daily Show.” “We’re not saying that you broke any laws,” he said to the president and the NSA. “It’s just a little weird that you didn’t have to.”

The entire PRISM program, which began in 2007, was a successor to the widely criticized “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” which began after 9/11 under the President Who Must Not Be Named. The TSP drew fire because it hadn’t been authorized by law or overseen by anyone, including the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

PRISM, on the other hand, was created under the umbrella of the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which were renewed by Congress under President Obama in 2012 (because once you give one president power, the next ones are unlikely to give it back). All of this happened without much comment by anyone, except a few liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald (who helped write the Guardian story), and libertarian conservatives like Ron Paul.

That’s another one of the weird things about this whole debate — it’s created some of the strangest bedfellows since Billy Bob Thornton took up with Angelina Jolie. Liberal California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican House Speaker John Boehner both called Snowden a “traitor” and defended the surveillance program, while Glenn Beck and Michael Moore have hailed Snowden as a hero.

So, with the ideological walls crumbling, will some actual, nonpartisan scrutiny be given to the claim that “we need to invade your privacy, because of TERRORISM”? Will we finally get an honest, non-party-driven debate over what privacy actually means in an increasingly nonprivate, nonsecured, globally networked datasphere most of us barely understand?

Well, we live in hope.