Surveillance and Executive Privilege

So, I read an article recently about how the White House
has for the past few years been eschewing the use of
government e-mail addresses. The reason is that those
e-mails send a carbon copy of all messages to a database
where they are stored, and can from there potentially be
subpoenaed: “Even former President George H.W. Bush said
his son, the current president, spurns e-mailing because
the records could be subpoenaed.”  The quote is from the
American Progress Action Report which put out a pretty
comprehensive and convincing report on the issue.

What I found missing from the article however was any
comment upon the manifest irony of the situation.  The
Bush Administration has for the past few years been 
expanding public surveillance oftentimes unilaterally
and possibly illegally.  However, while they’re
scrutinizing us more so than ever before, they’re
doing everything within their power to prevent us,
who they’re ostensibly serving from knowing what they’re 
doing.

The whole situation makes me wish that we could subject
them to the same sort of surveillance they subject us
to.  It makes me, in a way, very angry at the American 
system of government that these people have the power
to watch the rest of us, and yet there seems to be no
effective mechanism for us to do the same to them.  
They ostensibly work for us, and yet for political
reasons we are prevented from knowing what exactly 
they’re doing in fulfilling that service.  Fuck this
serving at the pleasure of the President shit that
we’ve heard so frequently from white house staff
recently.  They’re supposed to serve at the pleasure
of the American people and the American Constitution.

Anyway, there’s a very real likelihood that the White
House poses almost as serious a threat to the safety
of the American people as do the terrorists which
the White House’s surveillance is supposedly designed
to deal with. Their incompetence in Iraq has killed more
Americans than the terrorists ever did, and quite
frankly, it looks like a good surveillance campaign
conducted against the white house would probably score
more convictions than Bush’s anti-terror surveillance
ever did.