Jonah Goldberg is not jumping on the bandwagon of Obama critics blasting the administration for its collection of so-called “meta-data” linked to mobile telephone calls. But Goldberg uses his latest column to urge a healthy dose of skepticism.
Just because Obama might be a hypocrite for employing the tactics he decried when his predecessor used them, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong. One can flip-flop from the wrong position to the right one.
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor (he put away the “Blind Sheikh” who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing), makes a strong case that the NSA program is not only legal, important, and necessary, but also that the outrage over these revelations is overblown. …
… Still, I think McCarthy’s missing something. No, I don’t have much confidence in this administration. But I don’t have an abundance of confidence in government generally. That’s one of the things I love about America: The default position is to be skeptical of government, no matter who’s in charge.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but sometimes it can work the other way around. Invention — i.e., new technologies and techniques — creates obligations and opportunities that never existed before. Fifty years ago, nobody needed to charge their cell phones — because they didn’t have cell phones. Before the smallpox vaccine was invented, it would never have occurred to someone in government to require that all children be inoculated for smallpox. I’m not against mandatory inoculations; my point is to illustrate that invention often creates new necessities.
The arrival of “big data” — the ability to crunch massive amounts of information to find patterns and, ultimately, to manipulate human behavior — creates opportunities for government (and corporations) that were literally unimaginable not long ago. Behavioral economists, neuroscientists, and liberal policy wonks have already fallen in love with the idea of using these new technologies and insights to “nudge” Americans into making “better” decisions. No doubt some of these decisions really are better, but the scare quotes are necessary because the final arbiters of what constitutes the right choice are the would-be social engineers.
