Is There Anybody Listening?

Yep, about to write a blog post on Homeland Security with a Queensryche song as the post title. This is some slacker-era activism, baby. Lace up your Doc Martens and get ready to organize a protest without the benefit of social media.

So why does the NSA want to monitor all phone conversations and emails?

1) To catch terrorists. Because we can't let terrorism go unpunished. That would be a travesty of justice, to be able to commit terrorism and get away with it. Except we caught all the terrorists -- or at least identified who they were, give or take a DB Cooper -- prior to extensive domestic spying.

2) To prevent terrorism. Because if we catch the terrorists plotting terror, we can stop terror from happening. Except it keeps happening anyway because the dataset is too massive and criminals are smart enough to either plot "off the grid" or use code words like the rumrunners did 100 years ago to foil phone tapping G-men. The idea that the NSA could read an email that says "meet me at the Pentagon at 5pm for the bombing" is absurd, but I fear the primary fantasy behind whatever public support this program has.

3) To make terrorism more difficult. Meaning something between 1 and 2 above. That's fine. I guess that's the rationale behind the TSA implementing arbitrary restrictive rules on air travel. And I suspect this is the best and only possible outcome of our massive, expensive security state. If we make terrorism difficult to pull off, acts of terror will be less frequent and less spectacular.

The budget for Homeland Security is $46.9 billion. The budget for the EPA, the federal agency in charge of (I hope) doing whatever we can to minimize the effects of climate change is $8.7 billion. FEMA is under Homeland Security, and that's the agency that cleans up after natural disasters, so I guess we could transfer their $6.8 billion from one column to the next, but let's get this straight:

Terrorism is going to kill a countable number of people. Climate change is going to kill us all. If we're going to dedicate unseemly resources and tremendous manpower to mitigating a problem, maybe we ought to train all those domestic spies on how to rescue people trapped in floods.

The threat of a terrorist group attacking the United States is existential, sure, but also preventable by other means, statistically unlikely, and fundamentally unstoppable. The threat of climate change displacing millions of people and inexorably altering the landscape of the planet is inevitable, known, and also fundamentally unstoppable.

We're reading the wrong novel. It's not Man vs. Man. It's Man vs. Nature. Summer is coming, and we're making all the wrong plans. We're the Lannisters. It's time to start paying attention to what's going on beyond The Wall -- you know, The Wall that's melting?