State secrets
It’s common knowledge that companies that provide access to the internet cooperate with law enforcement. The telephone companies have always been closely tied to emergency responders and the police — in times of need, people reach for telephones, and this close cooperation has allowed many rescuers to reach panicked callers. But the cooperative relationship springing from law enforcement’s surveillance needs is just as close.
In the NSA spying scandal, the administration has frequently claimed that to reveal the nature of network providers’ involvement with the apparently unlawful wiretapping would reveal secrets - and therefore this relationship can’t even be discussed in court. Now the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, is admitting that “the private sector” (the network operators) did indeed help out:
Now the second part of the issue was under the
president’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private
sector had assisted us. Because if you’re going to get access you’ve
got to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out the
suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies.
So my position was we have to provide liability protection to these
private sector entities.
And McConnell also says that people will die because we’ve been so public about our discomfort with this illegal wiretapping program.
It’s all pretty rich.
Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?
A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently. . .
Artistry
Fifteen minutes before the film was supposed to start tonight, a slight trim man in a madras shirt bounded towards the front of the theater. I’d noticed the organ keyboard facing the audience before he came in, and I’d idly thought about people sitting through silent movies accompanied by virtuosos staring up at the screen. But then this guy came flying down the aisle and sat down on the bench, his back to the ten or so people scattered around the theater. It took him a long time to get the light to work above the organ - he fiddled with it patiently, and his confidence in its workings paid off when the light finally flickered on.
There must be a “swoop” stop on this particular theater organ. The first few notes he played were surprisingly tremulous (weird, wild vibrato) and replete with slides from one note to the next. Was he setting the mood for the Jane Austen movie that the ten scattered people were going to see? It was a sort of Hitchcock mood, if he was. Theremin in madras.
When I got here today it was blazing hot, and I really needed yet another pair of sunglasses in order to move around outside. The woman in the store who sold me the glasses (which I will lose in the next few days) said that what she really liked about Ann Arbor was the people and the absence of franchises.
This guy at the organ was definitely not a franchisee. He played “People Will Say We’re In Love” with tremendous religiousity, big plagal cadences. He played “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” with aplomb, and “Oklahoma” with the “swoop” setting in full flower. Big blasts of sound, starting from nothing.
It was real artistry. You could tell when he was getting to his big finish - Oklahoma blew around us, big baseball-stadium chords, and we wanted to burst into applause. That’s when the real organ-show started - he improvised with “You Must Remember This,” as the screen finally lit with images.
But it wasn’t time for the film just yet. He was improvising to the sponsors’ brands, staring up at the screen, riffing on You Must Remember This, as the Ann Arbor Improvement District (paraphrasing here, I don’t remember the sponsors’ names) expressed its silent support for this great theater that had brought us all together, in emptiness, with a guy in a madras shirt playing the organ as if his life depended on it.
He ended smoothly, the sponsors stopped rolling, and the film began. No previews. This time we were released to applaud, and he bounded back up the aisle, smiling just a little.