About those poll results…

May 13, 2006

The political world was taken a back a bit yesterday when a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that Americans didn’t much mind that the government has kept a [tag]secret[/tag] [tag]database[/tag] that logs almost every [tag]phone call[/tag] made by every American. What’s worse, respondents were asked specifically if it would bother them if there was a record of their phone calls, 66% said it would not.

Did the poll’s wording influence the results? Was the poll asked too soon (about 12 hours after most Americans learned about the secret [tag]NSA[/tag] program)? Newsweek has done a poll of its own which offers a more complete look at the public’s reaction to the controversy.

Has the [tag]Bush[/tag] administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest [tag]NEWSWEEK[/tag] [tag]poll[/tag], 53 percent of [tag]Americans[/tag] think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.

President [tag]Bush[/tag] tried to reassure the public this week that its privacy is “fiercely protected,” and that “we’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans.” Nonetheless, Americans think the White House has overstepped its bounds: 57 percent said that in light of the NSA data-mining news and other executive actions, the Bush-Cheney Administration has “gone too far in expanding presidential power.” That compares to 38 percent who think the Administration’s actions are appropriate.

The wording of the question matters: “As you may know, there are reports that the NSA, a government intelligence agency, has been collecting the phone call records of Americans. The agency doesn’t actually listen to the calls but logs in nearly every phone number to create a database of calls made within the United States. Which of the following comes CLOSER to your own view of this domestic surveillance program?”

Given this, 53% of Americans believe the program goes too far (partisan breakdown: 73-21 Dems, 56-41 independents, and 26-69 GOP)

As Kevin put it, “My faith in the American public is slightly restored.”

May 13, 2006 at 3:38 pm

I’ve been doing a slow burn over NSA data mining from the moment I heard about it. What steams me the most is that this has happened with zero oversight, simply on the say-so of an administration in which I have no trust. (Worse, in fact:- I am convinced that they go out of their way to lie to the public, expand their own powers, and deliberately trample over civil liberties in much the same knee-jerk way they trash environmental initiatives and effective government programs, apparently just because they find such things personally and ideologically offensive.) This administration is operating as a law unto itself, and I keep finding unhappy parallels with Germany’s slide into fascism and Rome’s switch from a republic to an empire.

Jane Hamsher over at Firedoglake has the goods on the Washington Post “poll”:

The headline blazing across the Washinton Post this morning reads: “Poll: Most Americans Support NSA’s Efforts.”

It was written by Richard Morin, and we’ve been down this road before. Just days after the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal broke, before people had become wise to what was going on (and long before Clinton’s popularity soared during the congressional hearings), Morin was polling on impeachment with carefully worded questions. He got the results he was looking for, and long after public opinion had turned they existed as a bulwark against any change in conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill.

It’s really sad that the paper that saved the country 32 years ago is nothing but litter-box liner and toilet-paper subsitute nowadays.

The time, date, and phone number of my calls are personal information that is every bit as private to me as whatever I say on the call.

Since when do we consult polls to decide whether to enforce the Fourth Amendment?

Now that we have all these “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court, surely they will strike down the NSA domestic programs on Fourth Amendment grounds, right? Right????

Interesting that the poll question STILL isn’t entirely accurate. We don’t know whether NSA is listening to the phone calls (they do say this is the “largest database in the world”, which implies a little more info than “what number called what number and when”). From all accounts, its more accurate to say that these phone records are being used in part to fuel thousands of warrantless wiretaps, most of which are turning out to be groundless.

Interestingly, this question is close enough to that of the WaPo question that I’m curious as to whether WaPo got a really bad sample to boot. Of course, WaPo set up the question with a long string of other questions that may have primed most people to answer that they had no problem with the NSA program.

Billmon says what needs to be said about polls on this issue:

The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto. Hobbes may not have believed in natural rights, but our founders did. And their opponents, the anti-Federalists, were even more zealous about restraining the powers of the federal superstate, which is why they forced the Federalists to write the Bill of Rights directly into the Constitution.

[…]

Real conservatives used to understand this. But the authoritarian right, for all of its talk about moral absolutes, understands and respects just one thing: power. In our system power flows from votes — and having the money to demagogue those votes. It doesn’t get more relativistic than that.

Duh, here’s the link to Billmon’s post: http://billmon.org/archives/002441.html.

Billmon rules. That is the clearest exposition of the issue I’ve yet seen.

It’s arguably the clearest exposition of any issue I’ve seen in a long time.

Look up Hamilton’s thinking on “the tyranny of the majority” in the Federalist papers.

I’d like to see two polls taken at the same time with a comparable audience:

1) Is it okay for our President to tap phone calls in order to determine what the terrorists are up to?

2) Is it okay for George W. Bush to violate the federal law, the Constitution of which he has sworn to uphold, protect and defend?

Now, I have a solution for this problem.

Let America agree to allow the Bush White House to listen to all our phone calls if they reciprocate — make all their phone calls available to us Americans, too.

I really want to know if Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, or any of those other WH staff are in contact with al-Qaeda.

Just called WAPO city desk and suggested the include Newsweek poll results in their reporting, since it’s more up-to-date and certainly better reflects the opinions of most folks.

Fat chance? We’ll see.

Dander gets it right.

The GOP is 69% in favor of illegal wiretapping and, by extension, other violations of the Fourth Amendment? Just who the f_k *are* these people anyway???

Most people, it seems to me, only answer such polls with the “as it relates to me” mindset.

Polls are like sound bytes. The secondary question becomes, if I had five minutes to talk to these people, could I convince them that it is BAD?
People think “well…I’m honest. I have no secrets. Anyone can know who I call up, what’s the big deal?”.

Start asking them “well…what about politicians for example? The potential abuse of blackmail, if a politician is sleeping around, and someone has the records to prove it, woulnd’t it be easy for them to manipulat that politician to vote whatever they tell him to?” or “how about reporters with sources? How could any source think they can remain anonymous?”

There are literally hundreds of repurcussive, “blowback” possibilities with this. Like any of the spying issues. The spies have the power to get more power because of the uncovering of secrets. Doesn’t do SQUAT for catching terrorists though.

look …. thirty odd percent of americans STILL think saddam blew up the twin towers … over fifty percent voted The Decider into office in 2004, when there was overwhelming evidence of his stupidity and criminality.

a majority of americans at any given time are uninformed, and clearly their misguided ‘opinions’ about anything don’t mean anything.

the nsa wiretaps are breaking the law. last time i looked, most laws aren’t open to review by popularity contests, or polls among dumbasses that don’t even understand what they’re responding to.

i’m sure a vast majority of americans don’t like parking tickets, either, but last time i looked: the ability of police forces in every nook and cranny of the country to write parking tickets was stilled enshrined.

domestic spying by this deranged dictator is illegal: the percentage of americans who are too brainwashed by Bush’s terror meanderings or otherwise too clueless to have a legitimate opinion DOESN’T MATTER.
if 87 percent of people say they don’t mind: DOESN’T MATTER …

it’s still illegal.

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