"As we have all said, we understand that electronic surveillance is a vital tool in the war on terror. We all want to know when Osama bin Laden is calling: when he is calling, who he is calling, and what he is saying"
About this Quote
The line works because it wraps a controversial power grab in the language of common sense. Van Hollen opens with a pre-emptive group hug - "As we have all said" - a bit of Beltway ventriloquism that turns dissent into deviance. If "we" already agree, then objections start to sound less like oversight and more like naïveté. He then invokes the talisman phrase "vital tool in the war on terror", a post-9/11 incantation designed to short-circuit the next question: vital for whom, under what limits, and with what accountability?
The Osama bin Laden reference is doing heavy rhetorical labor. It's a familiar, high-contrast villain that gives surveillance a clean target, a cinematic scenario where the state is simply trying to catch the monster mid-phone call. But the subtext is broader: if you accept the premise that the government must know "when...who...what", you've accepted the architecture of mass collection, not a narrow wiretap. The rhythm of that triplet expands the mandate from metadata (when, who) to content (what he is saying), normalizing deeper intrusion as a logical next step.
Context matters: this is the era when politicians tried to reconcile civil-liberties branding with security-state reality - especially amid controversies over the NSA and warrantless surveillance. The intent is permission-building. By staging the most sympathetic case imaginable, the quote nudges the listener to endorse capacities that will rarely be used so neatly, and almost never just on bin Laden.
The Osama bin Laden reference is doing heavy rhetorical labor. It's a familiar, high-contrast villain that gives surveillance a clean target, a cinematic scenario where the state is simply trying to catch the monster mid-phone call. But the subtext is broader: if you accept the premise that the government must know "when...who...what", you've accepted the architecture of mass collection, not a narrow wiretap. The rhythm of that triplet expands the mandate from metadata (when, who) to content (what he is saying), normalizing deeper intrusion as a logical next step.
Context matters: this is the era when politicians tried to reconcile civil-liberties branding with security-state reality - especially amid controversies over the NSA and warrantless surveillance. The intent is permission-building. By staging the most sympathetic case imaginable, the quote nudges the listener to endorse capacities that will rarely be used so neatly, and almost never just on bin Laden.
Quote Details
| Topic | Privacy & Cybersecurity |
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