After Domestic Spying Revelations, Do You Trust the Government?

Defenders of the “PRISM” spying program claim it has helped authorities avoid at least one terror attack in 2009 aimed at the New York subway system.

But British and American legal documents from 2010 and 2011 contradict that claim. And that gets to the heart of the matter with the numerous examples of government spying that have broken in recent days: trust.

The heart of the issue is not that some amount of intelligence gathering is necessary, or that companies ranging from Verizon to Google to banks and credit card processors have much choice but to comply with lawful orders to hand over data, at times.

The issue is that the apparently far-ranging scope of such intelligence gathering now is so broad, so unfocused, with no assurances that the data on lawful U.S. resident and citizen activities could not be misused.

That is why the Internal Revenue Service targeting targeting of persons and groups for political reasons is so damaging. It destroys confidence in the actual impartial operation of administrative parts of the government.

But that IRS scandal happens at a time when the National Security Agency has probed phone records from the Associated Press, likewise gathered records of reporter James Rosen on apparently false pretenses, and gathered millions of call records from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and probably other firms as well, without warrants and in a broad way, necessarily obtaining and storing records on millions of innocent U.S. residents.

NSA also apparently has been collecting data from a number of Internet app providers, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

So the real issue now is not whether there are some instances where intelligence has to happen. The real issue is that so broad and possibly illegal have been the intrusions that people now are right to mistrust the federal government to behave in a responsible way with programs most would say are sometimes needed to prevent terrorist acts.

The issue isn’t that Internet application providers, phone companies and others have to comply with information requests. The problem is that nobody anymore can be sure the data will be used in a careful or even lawful way.

And the problem now is growing doubt about whether the federal government can be trusted to act lawfully. That is a huge issue.