The most profound recent change, however, has been our current era’s rapidly advancing technology. Government now has the technological tools at hand to know far more about the details of citizens’ lives than ever before. If officials wanted to, they could use surveillance cameras to follow every one of us around through almost every moment of our lives. If they wanted to, they could use electronic eavesdropping to track every web search, text, social post, or phone call we make.
We’ve comforted ourselves in all of this with the belief that, while government might potentially have all of this power, it would rarely use it or that, when it did, its use would be well-intentioned and circumscribed. Plus we had rules and systems to stop any abuse: The Bill of Rights, the due process clause, oversight by the media and courts, the two-party system, and strong procedural requirements.
What the Benghazi-IRS-AP scandals suggest — and what victims of drone strikes and people such as Aaron Swartz might testify — is that these protections are inadequate. Rules can be bent or ignored, people are venal, and in the pursuit of what government officials think are good ends, any means become acceptable. Power, as the saying goes, corrupts, and absolute power — and surely, we’re getting close to that point, aren’t we? — corrupts absolutely.
The trio of current scandals has already caused heads to roll and, doubtless, more will. More broadly, they may also cause people to rethink the intrusiveness of government in their everyday lives.
