Rich Graves writes:
On Thu, 25 Jan 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I am a funny sort of person. I don't believe that governments should be able to do anything that individuals cannot. If it is bad for me to steal, it is also bad for a government official to steal. If it is bad for me to listen in on my neighbor's phone calls, it is bad for the government, too.
Er, I believe the above was clearly intended to mean "for one government to read another government's mail."
I'm funny in more ways than one. I don't believe in the existence of "Governments". I'm sure that most people seem to believe in this quasi-Divine Being, of course. A lot of people seem to have constructed temples to some Holy Being that they refer to as "The Government", made of marble and steel and glass (often in the manner of temples constructed in ancient times to Jove or Apollo). There are strange rites associated with the worship and sustenance of this Divine Entity, such as the ritual sacrifice of vast amounts of our wealth. There are a a bunch of people that walk around in these temples, whom one might characterize as the priests of this cult, and they are supposedly imbued with astonishing extraordinary powers by virtue of association with this Divine Entity, but when I glance at them I usually see only ordinary humans, with no visible stigmata of their association with this extracorporeal Holy Being worshiped by the body of the people. In any case, we are here expected to believe that it is okay if the Secular God of our land mass, our Government, spies on the Secular Gods of other land masses. However, viewed from my perspective, when "the Government" of our land listens in on "another Government's" communications, from what I can tell what is happening is that individual humans in the guise of High Priests converge at their temple in Fort Meade for the purpose of listening in on conversations between individuals humans elsewhere who are associated with other Government cults in some sort of ordained capacity. One might argue that this discourtesy between the followers of rival cults is not something for we, the arch-atheists, to care about, but I must note that in principle what is going on is the same -- people are listening in on other people's communications -- not the Divine Governmental Being itself listening in on the communications of other Divine Governmental Beings. These Divine Governmental Beings don't exist. Only the humans claiming the authority of the Divine Governmental Beings exist. So, in summary, if we believe that it is wrong for our fellow humans to tap phones and listen in on the communications of other humans, I see no reason to believe in an exception granted to some humans associated with the Government Cult of our land mass to listen in on humans associated with the Government Cult of another land mass.
It is the ethical duty of a responsible government to read other government's mail, absent any treaties or gentlemen's agreements to the contrary.
This might be fine were there such a creature as a Holy Governmental Being that wished to listen in on other Holy Governmental Beings, but just as one never actually could prove the existance of the Capitoline Jove in spite of the great temple that the Romans built to Him, so too I find no evidence for the existance of the Holy Governmental Being in spite of the fervor of the followers who have built the great marble temples in the manner of the Romans all over Washington and other provincial capitals throughout the Empire, pardon, the land mass we call the United States. Perry