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A Missed Opportunity With Retroactive Immunity |
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Here’s what the Congressional Democratic “leadership” is enabling by allowing retroactive immunity to pass:
The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.
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it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested. (emphasis added)
Aside from the horrifying precedent this creates (and it’s clear that the Democratic leadership doesn’t care about that), I don’t think it makes strategic sense to capitulate on this.
There isn’t a lot of opinion data in the public domain on FISA and virtually nothing on retroactive immunity specifically. My sense is that there’s little awareness among the public about retroactive immunity, and that most people lack meaningful opinions on FISA. However, we know that when probed after being given context for the issue, most people would oppose retroactive immunity. There is clearly room to define the public’s attitudes here.
People are, unfortunately, usually not very concerned about their own privacy. Still, there’s some indication that people react strongly against entities that give out their personal information without their permission. If Democrats activate these feelings, they can turn the fight against retroactive immunity into a winning issue.
In the absence of hard data, the strong emotional reaction that people felt toward the initial version of the Facebook “News Feed” is a good case study of this dynamic. For those who don’t know/remember, Facebook’s first version of their news feed aggregated users’ activities on the site and broadcast them to their friends. Although this didn’t change anything about how user data was collected or stored, it did fundamentally change the way the data was accessed. People were outraged at the way their behavior was being broadcast, and opposition culminated in negative media attention and a protest group numbering almost 700,000 members. Facebook finally caved into user demands and built more nuanced privacy settings into the News Feed.
Let’s think about what happened as it relates to individual notions of privacy. Users were perfectly happy to give away their personal information for Facebook to use as they saw fit. It’s only when people lost control of how their data was being distributed, and were conscious that they lost control of this process, that the site raised a gut level red flag.
Given that the telecom companies are flagrantly violating the privacy of their customers, that the public is open to adopting our attitudes on retroactive immunity, and that people get upset when they are conscious that their own privacy is being violated by trusted external entities, an argument against retroactive immunity could be a compelling message to voters.
Yes, there are going to be 30 second campaign commercials attacking Congressional Democrats who stand up on this issue for being godless terrorist lovers. Still, there’s an opportunity here to define the framework for this discussion, instead of running scared from ads that are going to be run against us anyway. We’ve seen that pro-civil liberties candidates can win tough races centered around national security. The “leadership” needs to think hard about finding a more effective way to deal with this issue, instead of continuing to capitulate while behaving in bad faith with activists.
This is exactly right. The more Americans know about this issue the more they will side with the progressive position on it. People place a lot of trust in corporations, especially telecoms, to use their information responsibly and with discretion. That trust has now been blown, and those who are trying to cover up for the telecoms should pay a price politically.