“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. There would be no
place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could
enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to
fight back.”—Senator Frank Church (1975)
August 21, 2013 "Information
Clearing House -
We now find ourselves
operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only
views the citizenry as suspects but treats them as suspects, as
well. Thus, the news that the National Security Agency (NSA) is
routinely operating outside of the law and overstepping its
legal authority by carrying out surveillance on American
citizens is not really much of a surprise. This is what happens
when you give the government broad powers and allow government
agencies to routinely sidestep the Constitution.
Indeed, as
I document in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging
American Police State, these newly revealed privacy
violations by the NSA are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider
that the government’s Utah Data Center (UDC), the central hub of
the NSA’s vast spying infrastructure, will be a clearinghouse
and a depository for every imaginable kind of
information—whether innocent or not, private or public—including
communications, transactions and the like. In fact, anything and
everything you’ve ever said or done, from the trivial to the
damning—phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google
searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank
statements, commuter toll records, etc.—will be tracked,
collected, catalogued and analyzed by the UDC’s supercomputers
and teams of government agents.
By sifting
through the detritus of your once-private life, the government
will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you
fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise.
Indeed, we are all becoming data collected in government files.
Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for “innocent”
reasons, surveillance of all citizens, even the innocent sort,
gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits
personal options—denies freedom of choice—and increases the
powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of
this activity.
If this is
the new “normal” in the United States, it is not friendly to
freedom. Frankly, we are long past the point where we should be
merely alarmed. These are no longer experiments on our freedoms.
These are acts of aggression.
Senator
Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select
Committee on Intelligence that investigated the National
Security Agency in the 1970s, understood only too well the
dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its
authority in the name of national security. Church recognized
that such surveillance powers “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. There
would be no place to hide.”
Noting
that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny”
upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared
that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the
bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight
and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating
both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it
that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology
operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we
never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there
is no return.”
Unfortunately, we have long since crossed over into that abyss,
first under George W. Bush, who, among other things, authorized
the NSA to listen in on the domestic phone calls of American
citizens in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and now under
President Obama, whose administration has done more to undermine
the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy and bodily integrity
than any prior administration. Incredibly, many of those who
were the most vocal in criticizing Bush for attempting to
sidestep the Constitution have gone curiously silent in the face
of Obama’s repeated violations.
Whether he
intended it or not, it well may be that Obama, moving into the
home stretch and looking to establish a lasting “legacy” to
characterize his time in office, is remembered as the president
who put the final chains in place to imprison us in an
electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape. Yet
none of this could have been possible without the NSA, which is
able to operate outside the constitutional system of checks and
balances because Congress has never passed a law defining its
responsibilities and obligations.
The
constitutional accountability clause found in Article 1, section
9, clause 7 of the Constitution demands that government agencies
function within the bounds of the Constitution. It does so by
empowering the people’s representatives in Congress to know what
governmental agencies are actually doing by way of an accounting
of their spending and also requiring full disclosure of their
activities. However, because agencies such as the NSA operate
with “black ops” (or secret) budgets, they are not accountable
to Congress.
In his
book Body of Secrets, the second installment of the
most extensively researched inquiry into the NSA, author James
Bamford describes the NSA as “a strange and invisible city
unlike any on earth” that lies beyond a specially constructed
and perpetually guarded exit ramp off the Baltimore-Washington
Parkway. “It contains what is probably the largest body of
secrets ever created.”
Bamford’s
use of the word “probably” is significant since the size of the
NSA’s staff, budget and buildings is kept secret from the
public. Intelligence experts estimate that the agency employs
around 38,000 people, with a starting salary of $50,000 for its
entry-level mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers.
Its role in the intelligence enterprise and its massive budget
dwarf those of its better-known counterpart, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). The NSA’s website provides its own
benchmarks:
Neither the number of
employees nor the size of the Agency’s budget can be publicly
disclosed. However, if the NSA/CSS were considered a corporation
in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel
employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of the Fortune 500
companies.
If the
NSA’s size seems daunting, its scope is disconcerting,
especially as it pertains to surveillance activities
domestically. The first inkling of this came in December 2005
when the New York Times reported that President Bush
had secretly authorized the NSA to monitor international phone
calls and email messages initiated by individuals (including
American citizens) in the United States. Bush signed the
executive order in 2002, under the pretext of needing to act
quickly and secretly to detect communication among terrorists
and their contacts and to quell future attacks in the aftermath
of September 11, 2001.
The
New York Times story forced President Bush to admit that he
had secretly instructed the NSA to wiretap Americans’ domestic
communications with international parties without seeking a FISA
warrant or congressional approval. The New York Times
had already sat on its story for a full year due to White House
pressure not to publish its findings. It would be another six
months before USA Today delivered the second and most
significant piece of the puzzle, namely that the NSA had been
secretly collecting the phone records of tens of millions of
Americans who used the national “private” networks AT&T, Verizon
and BellSouth.
It would
be another seven years before Americans were given undeniable
proof—thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—that the NSA
had not only broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal
authority thousands of times every year but was
actively working to flout attempts at oversight and
accountability, aided and abetted in this subterfuge by the
Obama administration.
Then
again, all Snowden really did was confirm what we already
suspected was happening. We already knew the NSA was
technologically capable of spying on us. We also knew that the
agency had, since the 1960s, routinely spied on various
political groups and dissidents.
So if we
already knew that the government was spying on us, what’s the
big deal? And more to the point, as I often hear many Americans
ask, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you care?
The big
deal is simply this: once you allow the government to start
breaking the law, no matter how seemingly justifiable the
reason, you relinquish the contract between you and the
government which establishes that the government works for and
obeys you, the citizen—the employer—the master. And once the
government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no
one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of
revolution.
As for
those who are not worried about the government filming you when
you drive, listening to your phone calls, using satellites to
track your movements and drones to further spy on you, you’d
better start worrying. At a time when the average American
breaks at least three laws a day without knowing it
thanks to the glut of laws being added to the books every year,
there’s a pretty good chance that if the government chose to
target you for breaking the law, they’d be able to come up with
something without much effort.
Then
again, for those who insist they’re not doing anything wrong,
per se, perhaps they should be. Because if you’re not doing
anything wrong, it just might mean that you’re not doing
anything at all, which is how we got into this mess in the first
place.
