By Diane Carman, Denver Post
December 20, 2005
I need to apologize. I owe it to so many of you out there. You know who you are.
You have called to tell me about the funny clicking sounds on your telephone calls, the peculiar hiccups in your Internet e-mail service, the cars parked in the alleys outside your houses, and I always blew you off.
I suggested counseling. I recommended support groups. I told you to call Mike Littwin at the Rocky Mountain News.
Instead of balancing my checkbook and deleting spam while you railed on in 30-minute phone calls with impassioned pleas for help, I should have listened.
Sure, some of you really were irrational; admit it. You insisted the CIA must have implanted devices in your children's heads. What else could explain how they suddenly began sulking inexplicably and leaving half-eaten cheeseburgers under their beds, you said.
Now, convenient as it would be to blame teenage insolence on Big Brother, I'm pretty sure even in George W. Bush's America, it's just hormones.
Then again, with the president saying Monday that secret electronic surveillance is essential, legal and for our own good, and that to talk about it at all is a "shameful act" tantamount to treason, almost anything is possible.
The most disturbing thing about the warrantless surveillance of Americans by their own government is that there is absolutely no recourse, said Cathryn Hazouri, executive director of the Colorado ACLU. Gag orders prohibit phone companies, Internet service providers and other organizations from informing anyone about it. With secret warrants - or no warrants at all - there's no paper trail.
"We know it's happening," said Hazouri, "but we have no way of knowing whose phone is being tapped or whose electronic communication is being intercepted."
Or why.
One woman who immigrated here from Germany and became a U.S. citizen decades ago fears that her calls to her sister are being tapped because she has sent Bush e-mails protesting the war in Iraq.
It could all be innocent, she said. It might be ordinary static on an international call. But she has never concealed the anti-war sentiments she developed as a child hiding in bomb shelters during World War II.
Maybe the fact that she opposes war and makes frequent calls to Germany has led the government goons to think she's a terrorist, she said.
It's impossible to reassure her. "We know the National Security Agency is doing warrantless taps on phones and e-mails, so there's really no way of knowing if her communications are being tapped," said Hazouri.
In this context, the debate in Congress over extending the Patriot Act is a joke, said Dan Recht, a Denver lawyer specializing in First Amendment issues.
"Why are we even concerned about the Patriot Act when the administration says, 'We can do whatever we want'? The whole debate seems like mere pretense. "
In this context, there's really no such thing as irrational paranoia anymore. And at a time when the beep from a titanium hip in an airport security line can set up an octogenarian for a pat-down, X-rays of her shoes and inspection of the underwear in her carry-on bag, I can't even comfort my friend with the why-would-they-bother-a-little-old-lady logic. She wouldn't buy it.
So all I can do is apologize.
I confess, I used to have faith in the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law. I used to think all those people who saw government agents behind every rock were delusional.
Unlike The New York Times, I didn't know about the government program to protect our civil liberties by violating them. Honest.
Now I know better.
So since you were right all along about the phone taps and the e-mail intercepts, please, don't call or write anymore. In fact, don't even think about me unless you're wearing a lead-lined helmet.
After all, you never know who might be listening.