The Zimmerman files

We’ve all been relentlessly bombarded in the past few weeks about the trial of George Zimmerman.  The jury found Zimmerman not guilty of second degree murder and manslaughter or Trayvon Martin, which were the charges against him.

Celebrities are quick to cash in on a perceived opportunity to appear to have a social conscience.  Kirsty Ally tweeted “White people used to make black people drink from separate fountains. Now we just shoot their children.”  Never mind that George Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white.

Miley Cyrus, that intellectual titan, tweeted “No justice, no peace”. Concise, yet vapid.

The Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson never let facts get in the way of a good public outrage. They calling for federal prosecution, prison for Zimmerman and a UN investigation to right the wrongs of an oppressive America.  That’s what they do.   

Eric Holder, who’s FBI already investigated and found no evidence of racism in George Zimmerman’s background, is investigating whether to bring federal charges against Zimmerman. And no less than the President of the United States chose to disregard the judge, jury and prosecution in the Zimmerman case declared who declared that the Zimmerman trial was not about race or Florida’s stand-your-ground law but about self-defense.  “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago”, he told the world.  Really?  Obama would have been wandering around a housing complex in the middle of a rainy night and tried to beat in the head of a neighborhood watch volunteer because he thought he was being followed?  I suppose if he would have taken any questions at the ‘press conference’ someone might have actually asked him that.

Nobody is surprised that celebrities and politicians make grandiose statements about public events to try to polish their image.  But this isn’t about global warming, charity or demagoguing about Wall Street tycoons, big oil, or corporate America. The target here is a living, breathing man who has been found not guilty by an American jury.    We might expect gang leaders like Sharpton and Jackson to regard the welfare, reputation and even the very life of one non-white man as a collateral damage in a larger war.  But we ought to be frightened and outraged that our President can so easily throw an American citizen to the wolves to score political points. 

The Florida prosecutors didn’t even want to try the case because they couldn’t find enough evidence to convict.  But, bowing to public outrage from the racist community, the Florida attorney general went out and retained a different prosecution team and pressed ahead.  I can almost imagine how Pontius Pilot might have felt when an angry mob demanded appeasement.  Yet Pilot at least had the integrity to wash his hands of the injustice rather than be part of the travesty.  Our administration wants to be out in front of the mob, waving torches and basking in the glory.

George Zimmerman’s life has been a nightmare for the past year and a half, and he didn’t do anything other than defend himself.  Now, some public figures are determined to make him suffer even more – not because there is any evidence that he should – but only because they are willing to sacrifice his life for what they consider a more noble cause.  We have heard a lot of emotional speeches from people who ‘fear for their children’ in wake of the Zimmerman verdict.  Even more justified may be the fear of having our lives ruined by shameless, publicity hungry government officials.  

The Edward Snowden Affair

I’ve been trying to understand the media frenzy around NSA contractor Edward Snowden.  As media types are prone to do, they focus far more on headlines than investigating facts so it’s difficult to find out exactly what happened.  We are led to believe that Snowden, a high-school dropout who worked as a contractor to the US National Security Agency, not only had access to but also revealed these alarming details regarding highly sensitive surveillance that the US government was conducting on unsuspecting citizens:  Our phone records are being monitored.   

 Is anyone really shocked by this?  Anyone who has ever watched a spy movie or a gangster film knows that the government has the ability to see and hear just about anything we do.  And when terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers conspire to detonate bombs at the Boston Marathon, we demand that the government do more to eavesdrop on bad guys so they can be stopped before they inflict their damage.  We want our government to identify, locate and round up all the colleagues that the Tsarnaev brothers corresponded with in the days leading up to and immediately after the attack, and the only way to do this is to have access to their phone records.  

So what’s the big deal?  The big deal is that people are uncomfortable with the idea that Big Brother knows too much about us.  Most brutal regimes demand loyalty from their citizens, and resistance can be easily nipped in the bud if the ruling class has access to otherwise private correspondence.    But at the end of a long, heated debate, most of us acknowledge the inevitable tradeoff of personal freedoms for greater security.  But we would feel more comfortable that our government would be responsible with this information if we didn’t have bald faced scandals involving the IRS and justice department using their influence to target political enemies.   It’s hard to take politicians seriously when they say “Trust us, we won’t use this information against you” when we just heard the IRS apologize for unfairly targeting groups who used names that ran afoul of the political leanings of the government employees in power.  

But let’s get back to Snowden.  We should be concerned that a low-level systems administration contractor could get access to classified information.  I’ve been to the NSA headquarters, and I have to say these are the most paranoid group of people I’ve ever encountered.  We couldn’t bring into the building any laptops, cameras, phones, jump drives, SD disks, CD-ROMs or anything that could be used to transfer information. We had to bring a US Government issued ID that matched the NSA employee sponsored invitation list, and there were guards with machine guns posted at the metal detector entrance to let us know how serious they were.  The conference rooms had no windows, lest someone spy through from some remote mountain vantage point. Nothing could be removed from the room, and we were subject to search before retrieving our items when exiting.  How could such a group possibly say “Oops, we didn’t think to restrict contractor access to our classified information”?  

More likely the case is that Snowden really didn’t have access to anything top secret, or even anything that wasn’t common knowledge.  Some people – maybe Snowden himself - apparently don’t spend time thinking that much of the stuff they put on the Internet, emails, facebook, etc can be seen by anyone with a computer, and that includes NSA employees.  So those people act shocked to learn that the US Government can see what you posted and who you called.  But just because Snowden isn’t the James Bond he wants to portray doesn’t mean we should treat his activity lightly.  The US Government’s response cannot be limited by the value of the information Snowden revealed, but it must send a message to any and all future traitors that the US takes disclosure agreements seriously, and you should not think that 15 minutes of international fame is a good tradeoff for betraying your country.  Just like presidents lying to congress, we cannot allow ourselves to discern between ‘important lies’ and ‘excusable lies’.  It’s the principle of the act and the integrity of the security measures that must be considered.  

So I hope we catch Edward Snowden, put him on trial, and send him to prison for a very long time.  But maybe not until he has had to live in hiding for a few months, and the world finds out how meaningless this spy info really is.  Then the world would see clearly how fame and notoriety is such a bad trade for a lifetime of fear, regret and shame.