Managing the Message: Terrorist Surveillance Program

The resurfacing of this oldie-but-goodie on the front pages today makes it seem like the perfect time to deconstruct the history of this term a bit. But as a brief aside, I would encourage everyone to go and read Prof. Jack Balkin's post today on his blog regarding the Administration's proclivity to grab as much power as they can and hold it until the can't hold on any longer, at which point they abruptly change direction and expect us to all get amnesia about their prior arguments on the given subject. He does a much better job of articulating the problems with this approach than I ever could.

And now back to the TSP. What's so interesting about this piece of Administration rhetoric is that unlike the death tax, for example, we can see exactly how the term was ginned-up. This is because the term TSP emerged as the moniker for a previously unknown intelligence program, which almost axiomatically, had no real name prior to its public disclosure (NYT subscription required) by the New York Times. This story first broke on December 16th, 2005 and it took over a month, until January 23, 2006, for the Administration to roll out the now-ubiquitous TSP as the description of choice for this once-secret program.

What I find so interesting about this example of Managing the Message is that in this case, it's not so much about misleading anyone as it is about accenting certain elements over others. Critics of the warrantless wiretapping program / TSP were particularly bothered by the fact that this wiretapping was being done without a warrant and without court supervision, in violation it now seems, of the spirit if not also the letter of FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While "warrantless wiretapping program" is a faithful description the activity which was taking place, it unquestionably puts an emphasis on the legal issues and ramifications associated with the program and is less descriptive of the purpose or intended targets of the program.

Conversely, the Administration thorough the use of the term TSP to describe these activities clearly wanted to shift the focus away from the legalities and towards the intended targets, and implicitly, their justification for creating the program. TSP is also, at least partially, faithful to the factual underpinning of the program, in the sense that the stated intent is to use this surveillance as a tool to disrupt terrorist plots.

Where this analysis starts to break down a bit, not surprisingly, is where the legal issues collide with the program's stated purpose. Unfortunately, the principal objection to this program concerns whether the lack of oversight is leading to non-terrorist Americans being eavesdropped upon with any sort of Court oversight. It's on this dimension where I think the TSP rhetoric becomes somewhat more disingenuous, as it attempts to imply that only terrorists are being surveilled. That may or may not be the case, and it's that general uncertainty which led to the enactment of statutes like FISA in the first place.

Perhaps it's even too obvious to discuss at this point, but the Administration's goal in branding this program the TSP was as much to put the focus on terrorism and all that they are doing to prevent it as it was to deflect attention from the dubious legalities, two things which the word "warrantless" doesn't accomplish. And to a large degree, I think the Administration was successful is shifting the terms of the debate. My gut tells me that the early polling probably indicated that the warrantless nature of the program was concerning to Americans and that the rebranding to the TSP was likely in response.

I found this analysis by a pollster who maintains the blog Mystery Pollster as a forum for him to comment on the "inside baseball" of political polling. This entry summarizes a no-longer-free Gallup write-up which, at the time of its writing (late Feb. 2006, well after the introduction of TSP but he Administration), showed an pretty even split on the issue. What I don't know is when the underlying polling data was generated. I think it would be very interesting to track the change in public opinion as the the moniker TSP was introduced. The post goes on to talk about how the framing of the questions can have a massive impact, much along the lines we've been discussing here. Interesting point of view regardles....