Journalist Glenn Greenwald has announced plans to publish his final big leak from the Snowden files: A list of U.S. citizens that the NSA has spied on. Naturally, this raises a very important question: Am I on the list? ‘Cause it would really help my badass libertarian rep if I was. I’m just beside myself with excitement!
Truthfully, I doubt they’ve ever spied on me, except to the extent that they’ve spied on everyone, such as phone call metadata. Actually, I’m kind of hoping that the list will run to hundreds of millions of people — damned near everyone with a digital footprint. That would make the NSA’s contempt for privacy pretty damned clear.
But if the list is more exclusive than that, I doubt I’ve drawn their attention. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of the people I know in the blogosphere have made the list. A couple of obvious candidates come to mind:
#1 by a mile is Mirriam Seddiq. She’s a Muslim criminal defense and immigration lawyer from Kandahar, Afghanistan. If the NSA isn’t watching her, they’re not paying attention.
Another likely candidate is Jamison Koehler. Jamison seems mostly harmless, but his wife Susan Burke likes to stir up some shit, and she travels overseas to do it.
Beyond that, I follow a bunch of criminal defense lawyers who probably make a lot of trouble between them — Mark Bennett, Norm Pattis, Rick Horowitz, PDgirl, Matthew Haiduk, Matt Brown, Gideon, the Squawk, the list goes on and on — but they mostly do state work, which I’m guessing wouldn’t draw a lot of attention from the national security types at the NSA. But maybe Scott Greenfield… He does federal work and used to represent drug dealers, and we know the NSA was feeding information to the DEA. Scott is also friends with Lynne Stewart, a defense lawyer who was prosecuted in connection with her defense work for some accused terrorists. If he had contact with her during that time, he could be on the list. Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time the feds spied on Scott.
After that, I don’t know. I’d like to think all us libertarians are on the government’s list, since we hate it so much — maybe Jennifer Abel for all the shit she says about the TSA or anyone at Reason because they despise both parties — but the truth is I suspect nobody in the government regards us as a threat. It kind of hurts my feelings.
(There is, of course, the hive mind that is Popehat. Between Clark’s libertarian ranting and Ken’s federal criminal work, maybe the hat made the list.)
The thing is, if the NSA is spying on libertarian writers like me, it’s an invasion of privacy in service to a witch hunt. That’s pretty bad, but it’s nothing compared to what it means if they’re spying on people like Mirriam Seddiq or Scott Greenfield or any of the other people for whom opposing the will of the government isn’t just a political leaning but their whole professional calling. And if the government has been spying on privileged lawyer-client communications, it raises a lot of disturbing possibilities.
I suppose it’s unlikely that anyone I know will make the list. But if they do, I expect they’ll be really angry.
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