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August 8, 2013
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Now that Americans know the federal government domestically spies and lies about it—thanks to a
litany of “misstatements” by top officials that have been
debunked following
disclosures by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—very big questions emerge about what kind of country we are going to be.
Americans keep hearing more news reports about the national security state’s growing reach. Reuters just broke the story of
more police efforts to use data collected in the NSA’s domestic digital dragnet for FBI drug investigations. Meanwhile, the
New York Times reports that other federal agencies are clamoring for the NSA’s data and are engaged in turf battles over it.
The parade of domestic spying stories has been met with a stream of
official denials, which have been unmasked by the media as lies. House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers
said that the NSA didn’t read Americans' emails, but Snowden’s
disclosure of the XKeyscore program—including the user manual showing that functionality—disproved that.
ProPublica.org put together this
video
montage debunking six more domestic spying lies: Is the NSA spying on
Americans? (The NSA said no.) Does it only collect data from bad guys?
(The NSA said mostly). Does the NSA keep data on citizens? (The NSA said
no.) Is NSA data collection any different from a local grand jury? (The
Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman said no.) Is the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court transparent? (Obama said yes.) And what
other lies did the NSA present to Congress in “fact sheets” prepared for
oversight committees? (It won’t say.)
The domestic spying and lying should not surprise anyone, given the
growth of the national security state and a private sector that has been
selling militarized gear and tactical training to local police ever
since 9/11, according to the
Washington Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin, who trace these trends in their
series and more extensive
book,
Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.
Priest and Arkin’s 2011 book—which doesn’t even discuss the NSA dragnets
exposed
by Snowden—details how law enforcement’s mindset has been hijacked by
the post-9/11 belief that all levels of government can never have enough
tools or firepower, which, in 2013 includes the ability to assemble
digital dossiers on every American. For example, the military’s
NorthCom
command, based in Colorado, has its version of Google’s streetview
camera and mapping for every block in America, which is eerie for
privacy advocates and not even in the headlines.
What’s missing from today's jarring headlines is the big picture context: how the national security state has changed America.
Before 9/11, the military was supposed only to operate overseas, Priest and Arkin
note.
Not anymore. Before 9/11, the military did not run covert operations
for the CIA. Not anymore. Before 9/11, there was no joint FBI/Department
of Homeland Security database filled with hundreds of thousands of
citizens who were seen by police doing suspicious things, such as
pulling their car over to take a picture of a pretty waterway near a
bridge. Not anymore.
These and other examples confirm a security state run amok. They're
accompanied by a battlefield mentality and militarization of local
police, which we see
infiltrating protest groups, forcibly
breaking up protected First Amendment speech, and
treating protests like combat zones, all of which was already happening before Snowden’s disclosures about the digital dragnet.
But even as
Times runs reports
titled,
“Spy Agencies Under Heaviest Scrutiny Since Abuse Scandal of the ‘70s,”
there’s little evidence that Congress is willing to rein in what looks
like a cyber version of 1950s
McCarthyism, where a paranoid federal government searched for a menace everywhere.
President Obama’s
announcement that
he would not meet Russian President Putin on the sidelines of an
upcoming economic summit sounds like a script from the Cold War. Even if
that posturing gives way, it reflects a mindset that hasn’t given way,
that the government, from top federal agencies to local police, can and
should use every tool, including intelligence, military tactics and
weaponry, in its mission.
For example, the stalled federal immigration reform bill would turn the border with Mexico into a domestic
version of the
Berlin Wall, or the
barrier between Israel and the West Bank, with contractors running a sizeable slice of the militarized no-man’s-land.
Who has the power to say
no to all of this? New civil liberties advocates such as
RestoreTheFourth
have emerged and organized protests. But what’s been happening in
Congress largely seems like a parallel universe. The domestic spymasters
respond narrowly and opaquely to questioning, and when pressed, all too
frequently
lie about what their agencies are really doing.
And there’s more to this story than the headlines suggest. Priest and Arkin write in their
book that
there are so many top secret programs post-9/11 that the few people
with security clearances to know about them all cannot keep them
straight, or absorb what they are supposedly doing—even if some are
acting redundantly or at cross purposes. That's the true state of
congressional oversight.
This new national security state adds up to a
constitutional crisis.
These top investigative reporters and whistleblowers are not just
documenting that the surveillance state exists, is growing wildly, and
is out of control. They are saying that no one really is in control, or
that there are very few controls that meaningfully give more weight to
constitutional privacy concerns than policing.
“Let’s not fool ourselves,” said California Rep. Jane Harmon, an
intelligence hawk and otherwise liberal Democrat, in a March 2010
hearing cited by Priest and Arkin. “If homeland security intelligence is
done the wrong way, then what we will have is… the thought police and
we will be the worst for it.”
The solution, Harmon said in 2010, was “clarity and openness,” but
that hasn’t happened. The privacy pendulum has swung the other way and
that was before Snowden appeared. We have since learned that America’s
spy agencies, military and select police units can
assemble
with a few keystrokes full profiles of our lives—phone calls, emails,
texts, WiFi use, location information, bank accounts, biometrics, what
our homes look like—without old-fashioned search warrants.
It’s hardly comforting that some members in Congress are
thanking Snowden for starting a "conversation" about balancing privacy and security.
Last December, the Democrat-controlled Senate
defeated
an effort to get the NSA to disclose its domestic spying activities.
And before the current August recess, the GOP-controlled House narrowly
defeated an amendment that would have barred bulk collection of citizens’ data under the Patriot Act.
In contrast, almost no one in Congress is questioning giving the national security state (and its contractors) another
blank check for the 2014 federal fiscal year starting Oct. 1. Instead, we are hearing some bipartisan
calls
for NSA disclosure of its domestic spying, but that won’t bar the NSA
from compiling that data. And there are plenty of politicians calling
Snowden a
traitor and defending the NSA.
Meanwhile, at the top of national security pyramid sits Obama, who
has canceled a meeting with Putin over Russia allowing Snowden to stay
there, rekindling Cold War memories. And over what: unmasking a
21st-century dragnet that would make Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy
smile.
Steven Rosenfeld covers
democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A
Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).
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