God, not government, should know our every thought

By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel
Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

CHULA VISTA, California –Most rabbinical students attribute omnipresence and omniscience as qualities befitting a Creator. Only God is called, The Knower of Thoughts, and The Searcher of the human heart. Rabbinical wisdom has long taught, “Always keep in mind these three things, and you will never come to the brink of sin: know what is above you a watchful Eye, an attentive Ear, and all your deeds are recorded in a book” ( Mishnah Avoth 2:1.)

What if somebody other than God is recording our deeds, email and telephone conversations in a special databank that can be shared with any part of government, not to mention hackers and other unscrupulous people?

The Orwellian society no longer is limited to the realm of fiction. It has become virtual; it exists in real time. Every place we go, there are cameras recording, tracking, and tracing our movements. The idea of the Government spying upon its citizens has the makings of a dystopian novel, but this reality is chillingly real. In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother did not always hear everything its citizens said, the words evanescently disappeared. In today’s dystopian society, everything we say or do is recorded for future reference.

Fortunately, we do have heroes who have acted as the vanguard of freedom.

Daniel Ellsberg is an iconic figure in modern American history. He is a man who ought to inspire all of us of what it means to be an advocate for freedom and civil liberties.

Ellsberg is famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers back in 1971. This past week, he has gone on record saying that the United States is rapidly moving toward becoming a police state because of the NSA (National Security Agency) method of collecting data on its citizens, not to mention its shabby treatment of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.

He boldly proclaimed:

  • We have not only the capability of a police state, but certain beginnings of it right now,” Ellsberg told The Huffington Post Wednesday. “And I absolutely agree with Edward Snowden. It’s worth a person’s life, prospect of assassination, or life in prison or life in exile ” it’s worth that to try to restore our liberties and make this a democratic country. When people understand that their every conversation of every kind on phones, email, chat logs whatever, is being recorded and can be retrieved, that will certainly curtail people’s freedom of speech over any digital means . . .[1]

There is a sense of irony here. When candidate Barack Obama ran for the presidency back in 2008, he lavished praise upon the whistleblowers for performing acts of courage and patriotism.

How strange! The President’s administration has so far charged eight people under the Espionage Act more than all the previous presidents combined.

Two days ago, the Washington Post revealed that the NSA has overstepped its authority thousands of times since Congress expanded the agency’s powers back in 2008. Most of these infractions pertained to spying on Americans’ emails and telephone calls.

Recently, some journalists have suggested that Greenwald should be held criminally responsible for “aiding and abetting” Snowden with his security leak. In response, Glen Greenwald of the British paper, The Guardian, evoked Thomas Jefferson and stood by his performance and took a swipe at NBC News’ David Gregory who posed that question to him. Greenwald replied:

  • Thomas Jefferson, 250 years ago, said those who most fear investigations are the ones who attack free press first. This is what journalism is about, shining a light on what the most powerful people in the country are doing to them in the dark. So we’re going to continue to do that no matter what David Gregory and his friends say.[2]

In the August 18th edition of The Guardian, Greenwald writes about a Brazilian film maker named David Miranda, who had been “detained” at the London airport “under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 for nine hours for his investigation of the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. Fortunately, the GCHQ released him and failed to intimidate him.

Who could imagine that the champions of Western freedom would borrow a page from the Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, or from the behavior of the Stasi of East Germany?

Greenwald is a young man and judging by his appearance, he probably is about 30 years old. He is however, a very brave person. His conclusion is compelling:

  • If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world – when they prevent the Bolivian President’s plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today – all they do is helpfully underscore why it’s so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.

I think Greenwald is correct. The voice of conscience must not be silenced by secret agencies that fear criticism from the public. Let us pray that the ACLU and the whistle-blowers succeed in holding the Obama Administration responsible for giving our government a complete list and record of our associations and public movements, not to mention our  familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations.

Our country’s Founding Fathers would be proud of the whistleblowers who are forcing the Obama Administration and its British counterpart to make the NSA fully accountable to its citizens.

In the final analysis, only God has the power to discern the secrets of the human heart—not  government.

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Rabbi Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista.  He may be contacted at michael.samuel@sdjewishworld.com