Leakage

With the epidemic of leakage in and around Washington these days--the Valerie Plame case, the NSA wire-tapping revelations--it should not have surprised me to hear a mysterious dripping emanating from the bowels of my house.   As you know if you read this column regularly, there are generally uncanny parallels between matters of home improvement and our current political situation.

As I sat at my computer last month reading about the seepage of information from the White House to our nation's newspapers, I began to notice the faint sound of running water.   At first I thought it was just inside my head, but a quick investigation revealed that it was somewhere in the vicinity of our water heater.   Apparently, water was leaking, and we didn't notice because it was dripping into a part of our cellar that can't be accessed unless one is a reptile or a rodent.   The only tip-off that something was amiss, besides the sound, was the faint aroma of drowned mouse.

Clearly, something had to be done.   We immediately went to Store #1 (Hint: this one has everything, or used to) and chose a likely-looking water heater for a minimal cost.   But quick discussion with a bored salesperson revealed that while Store #1 would be happy to drop the water heater off at our house, they couldn't be bothered to install it unless that meant simply plugging it in.

Annoyed, we went to Store #2 (Hint: they really do have everything, but you can't find any of it), who were willing to do a bit of re-plumbing, but for a hefty fee, to which they tacked on what appeared to be a random $500 surcharge.

Fine, we said, since we were desperate, and went home to our dripping sound, which was now more of a roar.   It turned out that Store #2 paid subcontractors to do the plumbing (the $500 surcharge was Store #2's cut), and that the subcontractors were very busy and couldn't handle our job right away.   They sent someone to scope out the situation.   "You have a leak," he said, and turned off the hot water heater for us.   We thanked him, though in retrospect, we shouldn't have.

Because it turned out that the subcontractors couldn't actually do the job at the moment, and we now had no hot water.   After days of waiting, I yelled at them and fired them, which was rash of me, I admit, since it meant we were doomed to spend more days without being very clean.   I know, people all around the world live without hot showers and have done so for centuries, but most of them probably don't have to teach, a profession in which people make fun of you if you smell bad.

For the Bush administration, the Valerie Plame leak was like one of those showers--a deliberate, heavenly stream.   On the other hand, the information that the NSA (No Such Agency) had been illegally eavesdropping on Americans' phone calls was like the water seeping into the dark recesses of our cellar: the White House can only guess at where the flow of information is headed, which of their reptiles and rodents lurk there, and what the results might be.  

The difference between the two leak cases could not be more stark, and I think the word "leak" is therefore not appropriate in both cases: with the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative by Robert Novak, who remains curiously immune from the consequences of his action, the White House turned on the tap that is the mainstream media and bathed in the results.

On the other hand, the wiretapping revelations, rushed into print by the New York Times in a frantic attempt to precede James Risen's new book, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration , were a genuine leak.   Evidently, the White House did a bit of plumbing before the 2004 election and managed to staunch the flow from the Times , but the Gray Lady evidently could not bear to be scooped by one of her own reporters and decided to come clean.

The funny thing is that if anyone had wanted to know if the NSA had ever eavesdropped on Americans' phone calls overseas, they could have asked me.   During the Reagan years, I taught military students in a remote part of England on a small airbase that was what's known as a "listening post."   (You can identify these by the giant golf balls surrounding them.)   While my students were drilled in the notion that "loose lips sink ships," they were a pretty garrulous bunch, and I distinctly recall them telling me that under Reagan, the NSA, with whom such listening posts were affiliated, routinely monitored all phone calls between the US and points overseas.   Apparently, as they told me, a computer system listened to the phone calls and if it heard a key-word that was on its list of suspicious terminology, it would swing into action and record the whole call.   I guess some unlucky linguist like one of my students would have to wade through it later.

For reasons that will become clear in a second, I deduced at the time that this had to be a pretty boring job.   As I said, the base was in a remote rural location, one of the green, pleasant parts of England that are overrun with sheep and make you want to hum the Bach cantata, "Sheep May Safely Graze."   Rumor had it, however, that this was not the case for the sheep on this particular base, and that on at least one occasion, some military personnel were interrupted in flagrante delicto with some of their woolly friends and sent home on MAC flights before the first notes of "Reveille."

I don't know if the sheep story is true, although it seemed more plausible to me at the time than the story about the eavesdropping computers, but this NSA wiretapping business has indeed been done before.   Don't ask me to name my sources: it's been twenty years, and I couldn't pick them out of a line-up.   The only student I remember clearly from that halcyon bastion of ovine love was the daughter of an organized crime lord who once told me that if someone crossed her, she knew where to hire people to break their kneecaps.   As I recall, she was a good writer, but I like to think that if she'd deserved an F, I would have given it to her.

So my point, insofar as I have one, is that whereas the Valerie Plame case was not a leak but a "leak," the wiretapping story is a leak, and as to the sheep story--well, you herd it here.

see Peter Dale Scott's interesting article on AlterNet to this effect, "Eighties Surveillance Revivial": http://www.alternet.org/rights/30434/

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