Help us protect the neighborhood

Suppose you knew that your neighbor was a drug dealer. A nice guy otherwise, but still a drug dealer.

Then suppose that you noticed the police had been driving by your neighbor's house regularly, sometimes parking out front in unmarked cars and just generally keeping an eye on the property. Suppose you even saw someone tampering with the phone line going into your neighbor's house and you suspected that the police had tapped his phone.

Now, as a good citizen, what should you do? Tip off your drug-dealer neighbor that the police are on to him? Or stay out of the way and let the police do their job?

Hmmmm. Not really much of a choice, is it? The police win that one hands-down almost every time, unless you are a customer of the drug dealer or he has paid you off.

I mean, if you want a safe neighborhood, you really have to give the police the opportunity to do their job and catch the bad guys in action, don't you? It would be crazy to tip off the drug dealer, wouldn't it? After all, are you more concerned about the rights of drug dealers to be safe and secure in their homes or more concerned about the rights of you and your family to be safe and secure from illegal activity in your neighborhood?

About the only valid reason why you WOULD tip off the next-door neighbor is because you were SURE he wasn't a drug dealer and you wanted to let him know he was wrongly suspected. But in this case, that doesn't apply. We have already established that he is a drug dealer and that you know he is (which raises some interesting questions about why you didn't do anything about him previously, but your personal responsibility is not the issue here).

So the only possible explanation for why you would tip him off is because you want to disrupt the police from doing their job. Assuming you are a law-abiding citizen, then the only reason why you would want to disrupt the police is because you have concerns that the same kind of surveillance they are using on the drug dealer might be used against you, too.

But where did your concerns come from? Fear of government in general? Fear of the police? Is there any reason to think you are really in danger of an intrusive police presence? Or are you just paranoid? Have the police ever once in your entire life tried to spy on you while you were not doing something illegal? If they did, wouldn't they be subject to arrest?

And how exactly do you decide to give your hypothetical fear of the police maybe someday spying on little old innocent you more weight than the police being able to do their job and arrest the drug dealer who is trying to kill your children?

Oh dear, hard questions.

But at least it is all hypothetical.

Al least, for you and me it is hypothetical. For the New York Times and USA Today, it is just a story where the names were changed to protect the … innocent?

Change the drug dealer to al-Qaida. Change the police to the National Security Agency. Change the concerned neighbor to the New York Times.

And now you get the picture.

What appears to have taken over the country is a mass hysteria based on the premise that our own government is intent on herding us like cattle and that they are just using terrorism as an excuse to turn the United States into a police state.

It's an entertaining story, but it bears about as much resemblance to truth as "The Da Vinci Code" does to the Bible.

Yet Americans seem to be giving just as much credence to the "all we have to fear is our own government" crowd as they are giving to the Dan Brown novel about conspiracies within the church.

Which just encourages the national media to dig deeper into national security secrets for the purpose of providing front-page fodder. (Perhaps the Times should change its slogan to "All the news that helps al-Qaida we print.") And, meanwhile, every time they print these secrets, they lessen our confidence in our security as well as inevitably lessening our real security.

Which means they are increasing the likelihood of a second major terrorist attack on our soil. And when that happens, ironically, the government probably will take steps to limit our civil liberties. It's kind of like taking a loaded gun away from a baby. As much as you want the baby to enjoy his Second Amendment right to bear arms, sometimes it just isn't prudent.

Maybe it's like that with the First Amendment, too. The courts have long since established that the right of free speech shall be infringed when it causes harm to the general public, as in shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater where no fire exists.

That being the case, perhaps at some point we must consider whether the free press is doing harm to the general public when it runs front page stories with headlines like this: "Another top-secret program to protect us all from terrorists is revealed to the terrorists by the New York Times."

You know what I'm talking about: The president has acknowledged that he authorized warrantless wiretaps on phone calls involving suspected terrorists, as long as one of the calling parties was outside the country. The government also has acknowledged that it has been collecting domestic phone records in order to collate a database which can be used to track calling patterns that may lead from one known terrorist to another and thus help to foil an attack on our country.

The New York Times and later USA Today revealed the nature of those top-secret programs, thus helping to foil the government's efforts to protect us.

As informed citizens, we should be grateful for information, but we must make reasonable choices about what information is appropriate for the public (including the enemy public) to know. Rather than just giving the New York Times a free pass to publish whatever it sees fit, ask yourself what you would do if YOU were put in charge of vital national security secrets. Would you reveal them because you could? Or would you keep them secret because it makes us all safer?

I suspect that almost everyone in the country would be a good steward of the secrets if they were personally in charge of them. But there is unfortunately a different standard applied to people who ferret out the secrets on their own. It seems that if a secret is "leaked" to the press, then it is no longer considered a secret. Rather than being a matter of national security; it has become a matter of career advancement. The more damage you do to national security, the more likely you are to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Perhaps, the old master spy Allen Dulles summed up the danger best 40 years ago when he was writing about keeping one step ahead of the Soviet Union:

"What a government, or the press, tells the people it also automatically tells its foes… In my own experience … I always considered, first, how the operation could be kept secret from the opponent and, second, how it could be kept from the press."

He concludes his 1965 book, "The Craft of Intelligence" with a warning that is just as appropriate now as it was then.

"The last thing we can afford to do today is to put our intelligence in chains. Its protective and informative role is indispensable in an era of unique and continuing danger."

The enemy has changed; the danger has not.