Data mining, Dash Hammett and other "useful idiots"

Editor's note: The following is in response to a Bart Hinkle column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch which asks some hard questions about the proposed "data mining" operations for purposes of national security. Hinkle is, pound for pound, my favorite Libertarian scribbler, so I thought his good questions required the best responses I could 'gin up. Here they are:

Dear Sir:

Your Saturday offering on the intelligence data "mining" proposal has challenged the limits of my Libertarianism, and for that I thank you. Without y'all wild-ass cowboys out riding the fences and pushing the envelope, we'd all get too complacent. This is a great danger to the Republic, since as Sinclair Lewis and Ayn Rand so presciently noted, it damn well can happen here …

Nonetheless, I find myself in support of the proposal, just as I did the mining of European financial transaction records which notoriously preceded it. Here's why:

During WWII and in the immediate Cold War aftermath - which ended with the death of Stalin in 1953 - virtually every German Nazi and Muscovite Commie intelligence operation on our soil was carried out with the assistance, support and coordination of the German-American Bund or the American Communist Party.

So historically, during time of national emergency, the selective government security agency mining of personal information, even before the info-tech revolution, led to the rolling up of numerous enemy intel networks - in the case of the Nazis, in a matter of weeks or months - by agents of the FBI.*

Minimum damage was thereby done to the national defense posture, and minimum harm was done to the citizens who were innocent of any crime.

All the rolled-up WWII networks led back to the Bund, which had a great majority of loyal American members and a hard core of fanatic nationalists and racists devoted to the downfall of their adopted nation. When detected these hardcores, just as their Communist sympathizer and card-carrying cousins did, subverted justice by whining about the persecution they suffered at the hands of a totalitarian government.

Funny, except for Dash Hammet and less than a dozen other Americans who refused to Name Names, no American citizen suffered from anything worse than being blacklisted and being forced to go to Europe to continue their work. And yeah, I know the script for High Noon was based on a short story by a raving pinko, but a really good movie does not justify treasonous criminal intent, even by a talented writer.

Observe the "victim" posture of the American Communist party during the HUAC/Hiss investigation and the Rosenbergs' delivery to the Soviets of A-Bomb plans some estimated five years before they could have researched and invented their own.

The judgments in both these cases have been proven valid beyond a reasonable doubt by the declassification of KGB files; the accused were indeed traitors working at the highest levels of government and military research, and every one was a sympathizer who knew card-carriers or who was a card-carrier himself. And each case was decried by influential persons, in the media and elsewhere,** as a terrible witch hunt, obliterating the rights of loyal Americans while convicting the innocent of unspeakable crimes against liberty.***

So it would seem the selective mining of personal records of those Americans with ethnic, political or religious ties to terrorist activities would be a wise, and in this case, well-tested way to identify the guilty, even perhaps short-circuit a few sleeper cells before they get the chance to blow up anyone.

Such data mining intel might also help spare the innocent, if not of the minor inconvenience of having the state know the contents of our e-mail correspondence and financial records, at least of the deadly inconvenience of another set of attacks on the 9/11 model.

So sure, the feds can look at anything I've got and they can check out my neighbor, too. I'm not letting the state do it; I'm encouraging the state to do it in the name of collective security and the protection of our constitutional rights.

Thanks again for forcing me to think this through. You, I like!

Yer LibCon Main Man,

Mark Dorroh

* Source: Game of the Foxes by Ladislas Farrago, the military historian whose bio of Patton was used as the basic script for the movie of the same name.

** A whole lot of chi-chi cocktail parties in Hollywood, Georgetown and Manhattan.

*** These characterizations of the prosecutions of Hiss and the Rosenbergs were made, loudly, by that elite corps of American and European intellectuals famously referred to by Lenin as "useful idiots."