July 4, 2012 |
Editor's note: The following is a transcript of a speech delivered
by Glenn Greenwald at this month's Socialism 2012 conference, on the
massive growth of government and corporate surveillance and their
chilling effects on Americans' rights.
Last year was my maiden trip to the Socialism 2012 world. I started off
by standing up and saying -- I was actually surprised by this,
pleasantly surprised, because I didn’t know what to expect -- how
amazingly inspirational I actually found this conference to be. The
energy of activism and the sophisticated level of the conversation and
the commitment that people displayed and the diversity of the attendees,
really is unlike any other conference. And so when I was asked back
this year, I was super excited to come back and accept. Not only because
of that, but also because the conference organizers asked if I could
speak about challenging the Surveillance State.
The reason that I was so eager to come and do that is because I really
think that this topic is central to all of the other activism that’s
being discussed here this weekend.
The Surveillance State hovers over any attacks that meaningfully
challenge state-appropriated power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It
impedes it, it deters it and kills it. That’s its intent. It does that
by design.
And so, understanding what the Surveillance State, how it operates --
most importantly, figuring out how to challenge it and undermine it, and
subvert it -- really is, I think, an absolute prerequisite to any sort
of meaningful activism, to developing strategies and tactics for how to
challenge state and corporate power.
To begin this discussion, I want to begin with a little story that I think is illustrative and significant in lots of ways.
The story begins in the mid-1970s when there were scandals that were
erupting, arising out of the Watergate investigation in the Nixon
administration and/or scandals surrounding the fact that, as it turned
out, the Nixon administration and various law enforcement officials in
the federal government were misusing their eavesdropping powers. They
were listening in on people who were political opponents, they were
doing so purely out of political self-interest, having nothing to do
with legal factors or the business of the nation, and this created a
scandal, and unlike today, a scandal 40 years ago in the mid-1970s
resulted in at least some relatively significant reactions.
In particular, a committee was formed in the Congress and the Senate,
and it was headed by someone named Frank Church, who was a Democratic
Party of the United States senator from Idaho who had been, in the
Senate, at this time, for 20 years as one of the most widely regarded
senators, and was chosen because of that. And he led this investigation
into these eavesdropping abuses and tried to get into the scandal. One
of the things that he discovered was that these eavesdropping abuses
were radically more pervasive and egregious than anything that had been
known at the start of the investigation.
It was by no means confined to the Nixon administration. In fact, it
went all the way back to the 1920s, when the government first began
developing the detective audio capability to eavesdrop on American
citizens and heightened as the power heightened through the 1940s, when
WWII would justify it; into the '50s when the Cold War did, and the
1960s when the social unrest justified surveillance. What Senator Church
found was that literally every single administration under both
Democratic and Republican presidents had seriously abused this power.
And not in isolated ways, but systematically. This committee documented
all the ways in which that was true, and the realization quickly
emerged that, allowing government officials to eavesdrop on other
people, on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the
dark, is a power that gives so much authority and leverage to those in
power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing
that power. That’s how potent of a power it is.
But the second thing that he realized beyond just the general
realization that this power had been systematically abused was that,
there was an agency that was at the heart of this abuse, and it was the
National Security Agency. And what was really amazing about the National
Security Agency was that it had been formed 20 years ago back in 1949
by President Truman, and it was formed as part of the Defense
Department. It was so covert that literally, for two decades, almost
nobody in the government even knew that it existed, let alone knew what
it did. Including key senators like Frank Church.
And part of his investigation -- and actually, it was a fairly radical
investigation, fairly aggressive even looking at it through cynical eyes
and realizing that the ultimate impact wasn’t particularly grand, but
the investigation itself was pretty impressive -- and he forced his way
into the National Security Agency and found out as much as he possibly
could about it.
And after the investigation concluded, he issued all sorts of warnings
about the Surveillance State and how it was emerging, and the urgency of
only allowing government officials to eavesdrop on citizens, that they
have all kinds of layers of oversight in the courts and Congress, but he
issued a specific warning about the National Security Agency that is
really remarkable in terms of what he said. And this is what he said --
and you can find this anywhere online, in the
New York Times, everywhere -- he said, as part of a written report, and in an interview:
The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned
around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy
left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone
conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.
He continued,
There would be no place to hide. If a dictator takes over the United
States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would
be no way to fight back.
Now, there are several things that I find extraordinary about that
statement. For one, the language that he uses. I mean, this is not
somebody who is a speaker at the Socialism conference 2012. This was
literally one of the people who was the most established institutional
figures in American politics. I mean, he was in the liberal way of the
Democratic Party but very much, he was mainstream for many years [ ... ]
And here he is warning the country of the dangers, not just of the U.S.
government but specifically about the National Security Agency using
words like “dictator” and “total tyranny” and warning of the way in
which this power can be abused such that, essentially it would be
irreversible. That once the government is able to monitor everything we
do and everything we say, there’s no way to fight back because fighting
back requires doing it away from their prying eyes.
And if you look now, 30 years later to where we are, not only would you
never, ever hear a U.S. senator stand up and insinuate that the
National Security State poses this great danger or use words like
“tyranny” and “dictators” to describe the United States the way that
Frank Church did only 30 years ago. Now it’s virtually a religious
obligation to talk about the National Security State and its close
cousin, the Surveillance State, with nothing short of veneration.
Just a few weeks ago, Chris Hayes, who’s an MSNBC host on the weekends,
used the opportunity of Memorial Day to express this view in this very
tortured, careful and pre-apologetic way that maybe it’s the case that
not every single person who has ever served as an American soldier or
enlisted in the American military is a hero. Maybe we can think about
them in ways short of that. And this incredible controversy erupted,
condemnation poured down on him from Democrats and conservatives,
liberals and the like, and he was forced in multiple venues in the
course of the next week to issue one, increasingly sheepish apology
after the next. That’s how radically our discourse has changed, so that
you cannot talk about the National Security State or the Surveillance
State in these kinds of nefarious terms, the way that Frank Church, who
probably knew more about it, did just a few decades ago.
The second remarkable aspect of that story, of that quote to me, is
that the outcome of that investigation was a series of laws that were
grounded in the principle that, as I said earlier, that we cannot allow
government officials to eavesdrop on American citizens or in any way to
engage in surveillance without all kinds of oversights and checks. The
most illustrative of which was the FISA law, which said that no
government official can eavesdrop on the occasion without first going
through a court and proving to a court that we’re actually doing
something wrong and getting the court permission before they can
eavesdrop.
There was a similar controversy in the mid 2000s and in 2005 when the
New York Times
revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do
exactly what Frank Church warned against -- which is spying on the
communication of American citizens. And the outcome of that was not new
laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses, it was
exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the
support of President Obama, most of his supporters in the Democratic
party and almost all Republicans basically gutted that law. Repealed it
in its core and made it much, much easier for the government to
eavesdrop on American citizens without constraint, and then immunized
the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program.
So you see the radically different attitudes that the United States has
to surveillance just some 30 years ago, when abuses resulted in a whole
variety of a weak, but still meaningful legal constraint, versus what
we do now when we find out that the government is lawlessly spying on
us, which is act as quickly as possible to make it legal.
But the third part of why I think Church’s statements are so remarkable
and important: If you look at what he said, he phrased his warning in a
conditional sense. He said, If A happens, then B. A was: If the NSA
starts using its eavesdropping capabilities and not directing them at
foreign, nationals we suspect of spying, but instead at the American
people, then B will happen. B being, we’ll essentially live under a
dictatorship. There will be total tyranny where the American people will
be unable to fight back because this net of surveillance will cover
what we do.
And what’s really remarkable is that that conditional that he warned
against -- the apparatus of the NSA being directed domestically and
inwardly rather than outwardly -- has absolutely come to pass. That is
the current situation, that is the current circumstance of the United
States. The NSA, beginning 2001, was secretly ordered to spy
domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has
escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful ways, such that it is
now an enormous part of what that agency does. Even more significantly,
the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of
agencies, including the FBI, so that this surveillance net that Frank
Church warned so stridently about, in a way that if we stood up now,
we’d be immediately be branded a sort of shrill, submarginalized
radical, has come to be, in all sorts of entrenched and legal ways.
Now there’s a few ways to think about the Surveillance State and try to
understand its scope and magnitude. I think the most effective way to
do that is to look at a couple of numbers. And to use the most
mainstream sources to do that in terms of where we are, in terms of the
American Surveillance State.
In 2010 the
Washington Post published a three-part series
called "Top Secret America" written by their Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin. The first
installment in that series looked at the National Security State and the
Surveillance State, how it functions in the United States, and this was
one of the sentences that appeared in this article. Listen to this, it
said, “Every day -- every day, collections systems at the National
Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls,
and other types of comunication.”
That’s every day, they intercept and store, and keep for as long as
they want, 1.7 billion e-mails and other forms of telephonic
communications.
William Binney is a NSA official, who is a high-ranking NSA official
for decades, and he resigned in the wake of 9/11 because he was so
outraged that the NSA was starting to be turned against the American
people. And he resigned, and recently he has begun to speak out about
the NSA’s abuses and he gave an interview on Democracy Now! three weeks
ago, and this is what he said about surveillance under the Obama
administration. He said,
“Surveillance has increased every year since 9/11. In fact, I would
suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions
about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens: 20 trillion transactions
have been assembled by the NSA and its related agencies about U.S.
citizens interacting with other U.S. citizens."
He then went on to add that, that’s only e-mails and telephone calls,
and not things like financial transactions or other forms of video
surveillance. So that pretty much tracks with the
Washington Post
report as well -- if you’re storing 1.7 billion e-mails and telephone
calls each and every day, it’s likely that you’ll fairly quickly reach
the 20 trillion level that William Binney identified.
Now the most amazing thing about the Surveillance State given how
incredibly liquidated it is and how incredibly menacing it is, is that
we actually know very little about it. We’re almost back to the
mid-1970s when nobody even knew what the NSA was. The big joke in
Washington whenever anyone would mention the NSA is that the “NSA” stood
for “No Such Agency.” It was something that you were not permitted to
talk about, even in government. No one knew what it did.
We’re basically at that point. We get little snippets of information
like the two statistics that I just described that give us a sense of
just how sprawling and all-encompassing the surveillance state is. But
we don’t know very much about who runs it, how it’s operated, at whom
it’s directed and who makes those decisions. And in fact, so clear is
that lack of knowledge that there is an amazing controversy right now
about the Patriot Act.
You may remember, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was
something that was really controversial. And mid-September, October of
2001, Congress enacted this law and everyone went around warning that it
was this massive expansion of surveillance that was unlike anything we
had ever seen before -- became the symbol of Bush-Cheney radicalism.
Now, the Patriot Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed
without any notice every three years with zero reforms, no matter which
party is in control.
There are two Democratic senators that are very, kind of, mainstream,
loyal, Democratic Party supporters. They’re President Obama supporters [
... ] One is Ron Wyden of Oregon and the other is Mark Udall of
Colorado. And what these two Democratic Party senators have been doing
for the last three years is running around warning that the Patriot Act
is so much worse than anything that any of us thought all that time when
we were objecting to it. And the reason it’s so much worse is because
the U.S. government has secretly interpreted it -- what the Patriot Act
admits it to do in terms of surveillance on American citizens, is
completely unrelated to what the law actually says, and it’s something
that almost nobody knows.
Just listen to these two quotes that they gave to the
New York Times a month ago. Senator Wyden said:
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people
find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,
they will be stunned, and they will be angry.”
Now he’s talking about a different American people than the one that I
know, but the point is that if you were paying attention and cared about
these things as you should, you will be stunned and angry to learn
about what the government is doing under this already broad act.
Senator Udall said, “Americans will be alarmed if they knew how this
law is being carried out.” Now they are two, as I said, established
Democrats warning that the Democratic control of the Executive branch is
massively abusing this already incredibly broad Patriot Act. And one of
the things they are trying to do is extract some basic information from
the NSA about what it is they’re doing in terms of the surveillance on
the American people. Because even though they are on the Intelligence
Committee, they say they don’t even know the most basic information
about what the NSA does including even how many Americans have had their
e-mails read or had their telephone calls intercepted by the NSA.
So one of the things they did a couple months ago is, they wrote a
demand to the NSA saying, we don’t want you to tell us anything
sensitive, we just need to know the basic information about what it is
that you’re doing. Such as, for example, the thing we want to know, is
how many American citizens on U.S. soil have had their e-mails read by
you, and their telephone calls listened to by you. That’s what we want
to know, most of all.
And the NSA responded two weeks ago by saying -- I’m not exaggerating,
I’m not saying this to be humorous, I’m not being ironic, I’m not
snippeting a part of it to distort it -- their answer was, "We can’t
tell you how many millions of Americans are having their e-mails read by
us, and their telephone calls listened in by us, because for us to tell
you that would violate the privacy of American citizens." (Laughter)
And just so you believe me, because if I were you I’d think, “That’s
just ridiculous.” I just want to read you from the letter that the head
of the NSA wrote to the Intelligence Committee as a response, “The NSA
inspector general and NSA leadership both agree that a review of the
sort you’re suggesting would itself violate the privacy of U.S.
persons.”
So, I think the important thing to realize is how little we know about
what it is that they’re doing. But the little that we do know is
extraordinarily alarming in exactly the way that Frank Church
described. Now, I just want to make a couple other points about the
Surveillance State, that don’t get enough attention but that really are
necessary for completing the picture about what it really is and what it
does.
We talk a lot about things like the NSA and federal government agencies
like the FBI, but it actually stands well beyond that. We really live
in a culture of surveillance. I mean, if you even go into any normal
American city or even, increasingly, small or mid-sized towns, there are
all kinds of instruments of surveillance everywhere that you probably
don’t even notice. If you wake up in the morning and drive to your local
convenience store, you’ve undoubtedly been photographed by all sorts of
surveillance cameras on the street. If you go to the ATM to take out
money to buy things, that will be then recorded. If you go into a
convenience store to buy things you want to buy, you’ll have your
photograph taken and will be reported.
An article in
Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of
American surveillance and this is what it said: “There are an estimated
30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States
shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched.
All of us, almost everywhere.” There is a study in 2006 that estimated
that that number would quadruple to 100 million cameras -- surveillance
cameras -- in the United States within five years largely because of the
bonanza of post-9/11 surveilling.
And it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance, but
just as menacingly, corporations, private corporations, engage in huge
amounts of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every
moment of where we are physically, and then provide that to law
enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant. Obviously,
credit card and banking transactions are reported, and tell anyone who
wants to know everything we do. We talk about the scandal of the Bush
eavesdropping program that was not really a government eavesdropping
program, so much as it was a private industry eavesdropping program. It
was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint,
Verizon and the other telecom giants.
In fact, when you talk about the American Surveillance State, what
you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies.
What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal
government and industry. That is what the Surveillance State is. They
are equally important parts of what the Surveillance State does.
I think the most interesting, and probably revealing, example that I
can give you about where we are in terms of surveillance in the United
States is a really ironic and unintendedly amusing series of events that
took place in mid-2011. What happened in mid-2011 was that the
governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which as we
know are very, very oppressive and hate freedom, they said that what
they were going to do was ban the use of Blackberries and similar
devices on their soil. The reason is that the corporation that produces
Blackberries was either unable or unwilling to guarantee that Saudi and
UAE intelligence agencies would be able to intercept all
communications.
And the governments in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were
horrified by the prospect that people might be able to communicate on
their soil without them being able to intercept and surveill their
communication. And in response, they banned Blackberries.
This created huge amounts of condemnation in the western world. Every
American newspaper editorialized about how this showed how much these
governments were the enemies of freedom, the Obama administration issued
a stinging denunciation of both governments, saying that they were
engaged in the kinds of oppression that we couldn’t tolerate. And yet,
six weeks later, the
New York Times reported that, “The Obama
administration was preparing legislation to mandate that all services
that enable communications” -- and I’m quoting from the
New York Times -- “to
mandate that all services that enable communication, including in
encrypted e-mail transmitters like Blackberry, social networking
websites like Facebook, and software that allows direct pure messaging
like Skype, be designed to ensure government surveillance,” which is
exactly the same principle that everyone can damn United Arab Emirates
and Saudi Arabia for.
The principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially
no human communication, not just for international between foreign
nations but by America citizens on American soils that is beyond the
reach of the U.S. government.
This was the mindset in 2002 when the Bush administration, to dredge up
John Poindexter, from wherever it was that he was -- and he was going
to start the program that they call the Total Information Awareness
Program. The logo which, I actually looked in the last couple of weeks,
you should go look at that, you won’t believe how creepy it is, has a
pyramid with this huge eye hovering over it. This eye is the “all-seeing
eye” and the only problem with the Total Information Awareness Program
is that, they just put a name on it that was too honest about what it
was.
It freaked everybody out and they had to pretend like they weren’t
going to go forward with it but what they did was incrementally, in a
very clear way, recreated the Total Information Awareness Program under a
whole variety of different legislative initiatives. And this idea that
every single form of technological communication, by law, must be
constructed to permit government backdoor interception and surveillance
is an expression of what this Surveillance State mindset is: that there
can be no such thing as any form of privacy from the U.S. government.
That is the mindset that has led the Surveillance State to beam the
sprawling, vast, ubiquitous and always expanding instrument that state
and corporate power users employ in order to safeguard their power.
One other point worth making about how this works, about how the
Surveillance State works and how powers exercise through it -- and this I
think is probably the most pernicious part. I refer to this as the
one-way mirror. The government’s one-way mirror.
At exactly the same time (this is really, so remarkable to me), at
exactly the same time that the government has been massively expanding
its ability to know everything that we’re doing it has simultaneously
erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing
anything that they’re doing. There is this amazing controversy when the
documents from WikiLeaks were disclosed, and the American media had to
rush to assure everybody simultaneously that this was all a completely
meaningless act and a completely horrible act.
So, the two claims that were made was, this horrible, traitorous
organization, WikiLeaks, has severely damaged American national
security, but at the same time we want you to know, there’s nothing new
in anything that they disclosed. There’s nothing worth knowing. That was
literally the two claims that was named and nobody ever bothered to
reconcile those.
But what was true is that, of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
pages that WikiLeaks disclosed, it’s actually an excess of a million
now. The vast, vast bulk of it were very banal content. It was stuff
that really wasn’t particularly interesting, that didn’t really reveal
very much about anything that was worth knowing. And what was actually
so scandalous about that was that very fact, because every single page
that WikiLeaks disclosed was stamped “Classified” and they made it a
crime to disclose any of it. Even though so much of it was banal and
revealed nothing worth knowing. And what that reflected is that the U.S.
government reflexively labels everything that it does of any
conceivable significance as “classified” and “secret." It keeps
everything that it does from us, at the very same time that it knows
more and more about what we’re doing. If you think about [...] what a
radical reversal [that is] of how things are supposed to work, it’s
really startling.
The idea is supposed to be -- and this is just basic political science,
basic design of the founding -- that there’s supposed to be
transparency for government. We’re supposed to know virtually everything
that they do. Individuals are supposed live in a sphere of privacy.
Nobody’s supposed to know what we’re doing unless there’s a
demonstrated, good reason to invade that wall of privacy.
We completely reversed that, so that the government now operates with
complete secrecy, and we have none. The reason this is so disturbing is
-- you can just look at the famous aphorism, typically attributed to
Francis Bacon that “knowledge is power.” If I’m able to know everything
about you, what you do, what you think, what you fear, where you go,
what your aspirations are, the bad things that you do, the bad things
you think about, and you know nothing about me? I have immense leverage
over you in all kinds of ways. I can think about how to control you, I
can blackmail you, I can figure out what your weaknesses are, I can
manipulate you in all sorts of ways. That is the state of affairs that
this Surveillance State, combined with the wall of secrecy, has brought
about.
Now if you want to talk a little bit about the mechanisms by which this
has been done, and the reasons why it matters so much [...] in
relationship to the government and the corporate component of the
Surveillance State [...]
When you look at the way in which the war on terror functioned in the
first, say five to seven years after it was declared, and the civil
liberties abuses that it ushered in particularly and inevitably, you’ll
find that all this, without exception (there were few exceptions), they
were directed toward foreign nationals -- not American citizens, but
foreign nationals -- who were on foreign soil, not on U.S. soil. And the
reason is that governments, when they want to give themselves abusive
and radical powers, typically first target people who they think their
citizens won’t care very much about, because they’ll think they’re not
affected by it. And that’s pretty much what happened.
We detained, without charges and without trials, a bunch of Muslims who
remain nameless, who were being picked up in places that nobody really
knew about or cared much about. We sent drones to assassinate them. All
of these powers were directed at foreign “others.”
But what has happened in the last three to four years is a radical
change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported
into United States policy. It is now directed at American citizens on
American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to foreign soil to
assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and
kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than
indefinitely detaining foreign nationals like Guantanamo, Congress last
year enacted, and President Obama signed, the National Defense
Authorization Act that permits the detention -- without trial,
indefinitely -- of American citizens on U.S. soil.
Rather than sending drones only over Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan,
drones are now being approved at an alarming rate. Not just surveillance
drones, but increasingly, possibly, weaponized drones that will fly
over American soil, watching everything that we do in ways that say,
police helicopters could never possibly accomplish.
Even when President Obama promised to close Guantanamo -- and lots of
his defenders say, not accurately, that he was prevented from doing so
because Congress blocked the closure -- the plan that he had was not to
close Guantanamo and eliminate the system of indefinite detention that
made it so controversial. The plan was to take that system of indefinite
detention, close Guantanamo because it had become an upsetting symbol,
and import it, move it, onto American soil (video cuts out) ...
So what you see is the gradual importation of all the abuses of the war
on terror. Now they are entrenched and not just into foreign nationals
but to U.S. citizens and on U.S. soil as well. That’s the mechanism by
which this is being done.
If you listen to US officials -- intelligence and defense officials --
talk about terrorism, what they emphasize now is not Al-Qaeda in
Pakistan, which they largely acknowledge has been eliminated. Or even
Al-Qaeda in Yemen which isn’t really much of a threat to anybody. What
they talk about is the threat of a home-grown terrorism.
This is now the grave menace that American terrorism officials will
warn, needs to be restrained, and the solution to that has been the
gradual transference of all these abuses that we let take root because
they weren’t happening to us but were happening to us but were happening
to people "over there," and are now being imported into domestic
powers.
And the reason that’s being done isn't difficult to see. American
policymakers know that the financial unraveling that took place in 2008
that’s even more visible in European states like Spain and Portugal and
Greece, has never really been rectified, and it can’t be rectified
because there are structural problems. The way in which oligarchs in
the United States monopolize wealth and then use that wealth to control
our political processes, ensure that this is not going to change, it’s
only going to worsen. Mass unemployment, mass foreclosure, all these
income inequality pathologies are here to stay, and the future that
America policymakers see is visible if you look at what happened in
London for a weak period of time and what happens all the time in
Athens, what is happening with increasing frequency in Spain: huge
amounts of social unrest. And you see lots of that happening. I think
that’s what the Occupy movement, in many ways, is.
And the elites in the United States, both corporate and government, are
petrified about that type of unrest, and what people in power always do
when they fear unrest, is they start consolidating power in order to
constrain it, in order to suppress it.
And this is what the Surveillance State is designed to do. It’s
justified, in the name of terrorism, of course that’s the packaging in
which it’s wrapped, that’s been used extremely, and in all sorts of
ways, since 9/11 for domestic application. And that’s being, that’s
happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and
the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using
Patriot Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in
the United States and all other dissident groups that have themselves
[dealt with] with surveillance and law enforcement used by what was
originally the war on terror powers.
I just want to close by talking about why I think this matters. The
attitude that you typically encounter, and it’s not a very easy mindset
to address or to refute, is that, and one that the government has sold
continuously and peddled...is that privacy in the aspect I can
understand as something to value, but ultimately, if I’m not really
doing anything wrong, if I’m not one of the terrorists, if I’m not
plotting to bomb a bridge, I don’t really have much reason to care, and
people are invading my sphere of privacy and watching and learning what
it is that I’m doing.
So I think it’s worth talking about the reasons why that is such an
ill-advised way to think. Why it absolutely matters that privacy is
being invaded in these systematic ways. I mean, one obvious answer is
that any kind of social movement needs to be able to organize in
private, away from the targets of the organization. (applause)
If you look at the revolutionary movements in the Arab world, one of
the greatest challenges that they had was that the government sought all
sorts of ways to prevent them from communicating with one another,
either at all, or in privacy. The fact that the Internet was not nearly
as pervasive in those countries actually turned out to be a blessing
because it enabled them to organize in more organic ways. But if the
government is able to know what we speak about and know who we’re
talking to, know what it is that we’re planning, it makes any kind of
activism extremely difficult. Because secrecy and privacy are
prerequisites to effective actions.
But I think that the more difficult value of privacy, the one that’s
harder to think about, the one that’s more important than the one I just
described. And that is that, it is in the private realm exclusively,
where things like dissent and creativity, and challenges to orthodoxy,
reside.
It’s only when you know that you can explore without external judgment,
or when you can experiment without eyes being cast upon you, that the
opportunity for creating new paths comes and there are all kinds of
fascinating studies that prove this to be the case. There are
psychological studies where people have sat down at their dinner tables
with their family members and friends talking for a long time in a very
informal way. Then suddenly one of them pulls out a tape recorder and
puts it on the table and says, “I’m going to tape-record this
conversation just for my own interest. I promise I’m not going to tell
anybody, I’m not going to show it to anybody, no one’s going to hear it,
I’m just going to tape-record it because I like to go over all of the
wisdom that you give me.”
And it’s an experiment to psychologically assess what the impact of
that is. And invariably, what happens is, people who are now being
recorded radically change their behavior. They speak in much more
stilted sentences, they try and talk about much more high-minded topics,
they are much stiffer in their expression of things because they now
feel that they are being monitored. There was a pilot program in Los
Angeles six or seven years ago that was in response to a couple of
exaggerated news stories about rambunctious school children, elementary
school children, on buses that were apparently being bullying and
abusing other students.
The solution that they came up with was, they were going to install
surveillance cameras in every single public school bus in Los Angeles
county, which is the second or third largest county in the United
States. The response, when it was ultimately disclosed, was well, this
is going to be extraordinarily expensive! How can you have tens of
thousands of working surveillance cameras with people monitoring them,
recording them, every single day for every school bus in LA county? The
answer that they gave was, Oh no, we’re not going to have working
cameras in these buses, there may be a few buses that have working
cameras, just so nobody knows which buses have those. We’re going to
have faux cameras, because we know that if we put cameras up, even
though they're not working, that will radically change the behavior of
students.
In other words, we are training our young citizens to live in a culture
where the expect they are always being watched. And we want them to be
chilled, we want them to be deterred, we want them not to ever challenge
orthodoxy or to explore limits where engaging creativity in any kind.
This type of surveillance, by design, breeds conformism. That’s its
purpose. that’s what makes surveillance so pernicious.
The last point I want to make is this. One of the points about the
Surveillance State, one of the things that happens is that, the way in
which it affects how people think and behave is typically insidious.
It’s something that is very potent and yet it’s very easy to avoid
understanding or realizing. Now sometimes people do know about the
effects of the Surveillance State and the climate of fear it creates.
I went on a book tour last October and early November and I went to 15
different cities and in each of the cities, I honestly didn’t really
care about the book events, I was much more interested in going to the
Occupy camps in each city. It was much more enlightening.
One of the things that would happen is -- literally almost the entirety
of my book tour was taken up by taking about the Occupy movement. It’s
what everybody was thinking about, they had written many times that it
was by far the most significant political development in many years, and
I still think that.
Everywhere I’d go to talk about the Occupy
movement, literally all the time I would get people who would say things
like (and I would be on radio shows, and I’d get calls that say this),
like, "look, I’m really supportive of the Occupy movements. I want to go
down there and be a participant in it, but I’m a woman who has a small
baby. Or, I’m a man who has a bad leg, and given all the police abuse
that’s taking place there and all the infiltration, I’m just afraid of
going and participating in these movements."
That was definitely part of the effect of this infiltration and police
abuse had, it created this kind of fear in the way that people knew.
I spend a lot of time with American Muslims and American Muslim
communities doing the work that I do and where I go and speak, and one
of the things that emboldens me and keeps me very energized and engaged
about these issues is if you go and speak to communities of American
Muslims is you find an incredibly pervasive climate of fear.
And the reason is that they know that they are always being watched.
They know that they have FBI informants who are attempting to infiltrate
their communities, they know that there are people next to them, their
neighbors, fellow mosque-goers, who have been manipulated by the FBI to
be informants. They know that they are being eavesdropped on when they
speak on the telephone, they know that they are having their e-mails
read when they speak or communicate to anybody. What they will say all
the time is that it’s created this extreme suspicion within their own
communities, within their own mosques to a point where they’re even
afraid to talk to any new people about anything significant because they
fear, quite rightly, that this is all being done as part of a
government effort to watch them.
It doesn’t really matter whether it’s true in a particular case or it
isn’t true. This climate of fear creates limits around the behavior in
which they’re willing to engage in very damaging ways.
But I think what this Surveillance State really does more than making
people consciously aware of the limits in those two examples I just
described: people not wanting to go to Occupy movements and people in
Muslim communities being very guarded is, it makes people believe that
they’re free even though they’ve been subtly convinced that there are
things that they shouldn’t do that they might want to do.
I always use dog examples. I have 11 dogs. It’s one of the thing,
examples that I use. I know you probably think I’m crazy, it’s all
rescue dogs, it’s one of the things we do, so I draw a lot of lessons
from dogs. One of the most amazing things about dog behavior is, if you
don’t want dogs to go into a certain place because it’s dangerous for
them, one of the things you can do is put a fence around the area that
you want to confine them.
But eventually, you can remove the fence and you don’t need the fence
anymore because they will have been trained that the entirety of the
world is within the boundaries that you first set for them. So even once
you remove the fence, they won’t venture beyond it. They’ve been
trained that that’s the only world that they want or are interested in,
or known.
There are studies in what was formerly East Germany, which was probably
one of the most notorious surveillance states in the last 50 years,
where even once their boundaries were removed, once the Stazi no longer
existed, once the wall fell... the psychological effects on East German
people endure until today. The way in which they have been trained for
decades to understand that there are limits to their life, even once you
remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not things they
need to transgress.
And that’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and
constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless against this
omnipotent government corporate institution does to people, it convinces
people that the tiny little box in which they live is really the only
box in which they want to live so they don’t even realize being in
prison.
Rosa Luxembourg said, “He who does not move does not notice his chains.”
You can acculturate people to believing that tyranny is freedom, that
their limits are actually emancipations and freedom, that is what this
Surveillance State does, by training people to accept their own
conformity that they are actually free, that they no longer even realize
the ways in which they’re being limited.
So the last point I just want to mention, and we can talk about this in
the discussion that follows and it probably will, it’s usually what
discussions afterwards entail, is what can be done about all this?
There are just a few quick points I want to make about that.
One is that you can do things that remove yourself from the
surveillance matrix. Not completely, but to the best extent that it can.
There are people who only engage in transactions using cash, as
inconvenient as that is, it at least removes that level of surveillance.
There are ways of communicating on the internet using very effective
forms of anonymity, which I will talk about in a minute. There are ways
of educating yourself about how to engage in interaction and activism
beyond the prying eye of the U.S. government.
There are important ways to educate yourself about the rights that you
have when interacting with government agents. So much of what the
government learns about people is that they let them learn that without
having any legal obligation to do so. So much of government searches or
government questioning is done under the manipulative pretext of
consent, where people thought they had to consent or they don’t have the
right to, and give up information about information they didn’t need to
give up. And educating yourself about what your rights are by going to
the Center for Constitutional Rights Web site or the National Coalition
to Protect Civil Freedoms or the ACLU. Lots of places online will tell
you how to do that.
Very important means of subverting this one-way mirror that I’ve
described is forcible, radical transparency. It’s one of the reasons I
support, so enthusiastically and unqualafiably, groups like Anonymous
and WikiLeaks. I want holes to be blown in the wall of secrecy.
The way that this ends up operating effectively is only because they’re
able to conceal what they do, and that’s why they consider these
unauthorized means of transparency so threatening.
The last point I want to make about things that can be done is that
there are groups that are pursuing very interesting and effective forms
of anonymity on the internet.
There are things like the Tor project and other groups that enable
people to use the internet without any detection from government
authorities. That has the effect of preventing regimes that actually bar
their citizens from using the Internet from doing so since you can no
longer trace the origins of the Internet user. But it also protects
people who live in countries like ours where the government is trying to
constantly monitor what we do by sending our communications through
multiple proxies around the world that can’t be invaded. There’s really a
war taking place: an arms race where the government and these groups
are attempting to stay one tactical step ahead of the other. In terms of
ability to shield internet communications from the government and the
government’s ability to invade them and participating in this war in
ways that are supportive of the “good side” are really critical as is
veiling yourself from the technology that exists, to make what you do as
tight as possible.
I really don’t think there’s one any more important front, or battle,
if there are any, than combating the Surveillance State. So that’s why
I’m so interested in the topic, and I’m so happy to be able to speak
with you.
Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at
Unclaimed Territory. His forthcoming book,
How Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok will be released by
Working Assets Publishing next month.
