Next Thanksgiving

By David K. Shipler

            Thanksgiving is the best of American holidays. It is either religious or secular, depending on your preference. It is unburdened by materialism and free from jingoistic patriotism. It celebrates neither war nor triumph. It is not a day of mourning or grievance. It does not merely turn a page on the calendar but prompts a turning inward in reflection. The only true indulgence is the elixir of good food, best observed in our closest circles of family and friends.

            Only there, for those of us who have that safe place of intimacy, does giving thanks come easily this year. If we have good health, good love, good friendships—if we have enough money to sustain us comfortably, work that we enjoy, lives that educate us constantly—gratitude flows clearly. Our act of thanksgiving is about the present, and the past that has led to our bounty.

            We cannot give thanks for the larger world. Let us hope that next Thanksgiving we can, at least in some measure. I would wish then to be grateful--

            *for the decency of my fellow Americans, who snuffed out the hateful bigotry and bluster of Donald Trump and his mob of followers, overcoming them at the polls to retain our nation’s purpose and ideals.

Surveillance: A Cautionary Note

By David K. Shipler

            In the rush after the Paris attacks to step up surveillance, the usual arguments are being heard on one side about violations of civil liberties, and, on the other, about obstacles to monitoring because of what CIA director John Brennan derides as “hand-wringing” over government intrusion. But there is a less visible problem, often mentioned by former intelligence officials: Excessive, unfocused surveillance has produced floods of information beyond what the professionals can digest and analyze.

            At an illuminating panel in Washington two months ago, three former officials of the National Security Agency—Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe—made precisely that point, and if you talk to others who have been in the business, many of them will tell you the same thing. The petabytes of data that have been vacuumed up almost indiscriminately since 9/11 are stored untranslated, unread, and unsifted in digital files, well off the radar of the agents who are charged with spotting radicals before they commit the next atrocity.

            The American Civil Liberties Union, whose overriding goal is to protect constitutional rights, came up with the perfect metaphor after the Patriot Act diluted the Fourth Amendment’s protections in 2001: You don’t find a needle in a haystack by increasing the size of the haystack. Yet expanding the haystack is what was done, and is what is now being proposed.