The era of metadata

4. The president said the recently revealed programs are subject to congressional oversight, which will help keep them from getting out of hand. But that sounded more like a Washington inside joke than a comfort. Congressional oversight of executive agencies has been chronically lacking and lackluster for years. If you are a congressman oversight is, generally, an unrewarded time-suck. It’s housekeeping that demands deep bureaucratic, accounting and now technological expertise. (“Thank you for providing the email records, but is there any chance you have secret email accounts that aren’t included here?”) And usually nobody knows about your good work—it yields little in the way of credit.

Oversight is time taken away from fundraising calls, from the four-minute hit on “Hardball” or Fox, from the urgent call with the important constituent, from time in the gym where you hide from your staff. And Congress isn’t even in Washington often enough to establish ready and present oversight—members work from Monday through Thursday, and then go home to meet with people and show they’re normal. That’s part of the reason the Internal Revenue Service thought it could function as a political entity—they didn’t fear oversight. The General Services Administration on its champagne-soaked boondoggles—they didn’t fear oversight. Do the technicians, data miners, lawyers and technology officers in the NSA warehouses fear oversight?

Props here to Darrell Issa: He does oversight. But his work is exceptional because it is the exception. And congressional oversight still leads us back to where we began: the built-in bias toward doing too much.