An open letter to His Excellency, Ambassador Terence P. McCulley
URGENT REPLY NEEDED
AMBASSADOR TERENCE P. McCULLEY (info@live.com)6/22/13
From: AMBASSADOR TERENCE P. McCULLEY (info@live.com) Sent: Sat 6/22/13 7:14 PM To:
Dear Ambassador,
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I admit I've had my doubts about the administration lately. All this stuff with the NSA, the ongoing issues with drone strikes, the embarrassment of the IRS screening political non-profits in a way that suggests more partisanship than was likely occurring, all of the political setbacks dealing with the House Of Representatives on various issues from the sequester earlier in the year to the to-and-fro on immigration these days, etc., etc. ad nauseum. It's hard for a poor progressive Southern boy to know what to do with himself, other than throw votes away on candidates who don't even have a shot at making ballots in actual truly liberal parts of the country. So getting an e-mail promising that someone from the administration was going to help me deal with miscreants and imposters who have taken over the Internet really made my day. It was a true ray of sunshine falling upon a path in a cold gloomy wood.
I mean, I really did think the President's only response to the whole question of whether this PRISM program was logging citizens' e-mails was going to be that we shouldn't worry, because the whole process is transparent, thanks to review by the secret FISA Court, which can't tell anyone what cases they've heard and what their decisions were, so fuck you for asking. I did find this, I confess, a sort of perplexing use of the word "transparency" to refer to something, a process, that is the exact opposite of "transparent", i.e. I believe "opaque" is the word usually used, or "opacity". Happily, though, it seems like I'm wrong, and that the State Department will be dealing with the NSA "taking over the Internet" (though that's an exaggerated way of putting it; still, thank you).
And yet I found the rest of your missive perplexing, Your Excellency. On the one hand, you have this infectious unbridled optimism: "I shall be bringing it myself and there is nothing anyone can do about it," you say, clearly willing to run over your President and the national intelligence community. Only to turn around and write, moments later, "time will be against us". This isn't a direct contradiction, no, except that it seems to me the only ways time could be an obstacle is through the agency of people; this isn't the sort of thing like milk going sour in the fridge or mold taking over a stale piece of cheese; if anyone tries to tell you that something is too late, that the time has expired for whatever cleverness you have in mind, seems to me you could just say to them, "You can't stop me, mwah-ha!" and you proceed, unstoppably. (Unless, of course, you're going to stop these miscreants with perishables, which seems... well, I don't want to tell you your business, but it's not what I would have expected. This doesn't have anything to do with force-feeding all the indefinite detainees remaining at Gitmo, does it?)
Still, for someone who is so wonderfully reckless, who wouldn't even let Congress' Great Orange Hope, John Boehner, stop him (I swear that man must be at least part Muppet somewhere in his family tree), you seem to be daunted by the odds. You say you need my package registered as an ambassadorial package, and for some reason it will cost me $175.00 despite the fact that nothing and no one will stand in your way. Again, I don't mean to tell you how to do your business, but it does seem to me you could just go and register the thing yourself. "Bah," I imagine you saying, Your Excellency, "this man needs his doubt and mistrust allayed by the strong action of progressive government working by and for the people! This fee shall be waived! I shall waive the fee! I shall just carry it through customs, unmarked, and when the TSA workers ask me to step through the backscatter X-Ray pervo-scanner, I shall say, 'Bah! Out of my way, you wage-slave voyeurs and critics of youthful fad and fashion! By God, I will have this package through customs or you shall feel my wrath, for I have the veto power to go through customs! A veto for you, sir! And you, ma'am! Veto! Veto! Veto! Begone, or I shall add to my veto a kick in your ass, the likes of which you have not felt since your days as a mewling adolescent!"
And then, really, you don't even have to bring me anything, you know. Because really, all I want isn't even for the government to stop accruing data that, frankly, I've willingly allowed private corporations who think much less of me to accrue that data for decades, now. Nor do I necessarily need to know what arcane and mystical algorithms are being used to spider-trawl the data, sifting it through spindly long-legged octo-fingers to see how the strands cross and link. I would just like some process to assure that if this data is ever used to accuse someone of a crime, the accused has the right to face his digital accuser, to see what digital evidence has been assembled against him and the power to confront it in some kind of courtroom. It seems to me that there ought to be ways to preserve and screen all of this information, so that it can't be abused (or at least the abuses require so many failsafes to fail that the dangers are negligible). It seems to me, too, that there are ways to divulge the nature of what's being collected, and even some specifics, without unduly revealing arts and methods of national security. And there has to be a way to get proper oversight beyond a Congress that the Executive claims was briefed but that, in its turn, claims it didn't understand or approve a damn bit of it. And to make sure the FISA courts are really doing their job and not rubber-stamping things. Oh, and to repeal the PATRIOT Act, or thoroughly revise it. If it isn't too much to ask. But all that or even some of it would be worth more than a ten-million-dollar ATM card; I don't know what I'd do with it, really, seeing as how my bank puts a much lower limit on daily withdrawals. Not to mention, I'd likely squander a chunk of it on donations to the ACLU and EFF to try to get across some of the things I just mentioned, so why not get rid of the middlemen and just directly go to the procedural fixes?
Thank you again for all your help!
Sincerely,
R. Eric VanNewkirk
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