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"Governments,
like married couples, are entitled to their secrets" has
written Richard Cohen a few years back. Which secrets? Lines
have to be drawn. A government shouldn't cover up crimes under the
mantle of secrecy. It shouldn't conceal wrongful seizures and exercises
of power. This government and the preceding one under Bush have
concealed the fact that they were collecting information wrongfully,
namely, information on private communications. The term "national
security" cannot reasonably be invoked as an excuse for doing
this because it's too vague, and almost anything can be construed
as affecting "national security". The quest for catching
terrorists cannot be offered as a reason because there are bounds
on searches and invasions of privacy that have long standing and
that specifically apply to government and policing activities. These
governments have gone way beyond these bounds and then compounded
their trespasses by attempting to keep them secret.
The government
has kept secret or tried to keep secret its collecting and storing
information on everyone's secret and private communications. Thanks
to Edward Snowden and his predecessors, this wrongful secret has
been revealed publicly. There is no crime in revealing the wrongdoing
of the government by revealing a secret program of massive invasions
of privacy.
If every word
one speaks or writes in an e-mail is stored where it can possibly
be turned against you by some very costly legal imposition and accusation,
if every movement and gesture one makes can be recorded by cameras,
a climate of fear, caution, distrust, suspicion and persecution
will become established. Human beings must have privacy. Diaries
are private. Much of what we say and think we limit to people whom
we trust. We do not want our letters steamed open or our e-mails
available for reading in government data banks. We don't want records
kept by the government of whom we have called. We do not want police
snooping into our homes and private effects with the excuse that
they are looking for criminals or terrorists. We do not want the
government to have powers like this that invade privacy and that
can be used to squelch political dissent. It is very easy for government
to become oppressive and totalitarian, and getting at everyone's
communications is one way to become oppressive and keep that oppression
in place. We have to have lines we draw that prevent government
from doing what the Bush-Obama governments have been doing. All
of this is common sense. There are the strongest reasons for stopping
this NSA activity. The government officials and the corps of commentators
calling for Snowden's head and supporting the surveillance state
are dead wrong.
The spurt in
the surveillance state is in part an outgrowth of the Bush-Obama
war on terror, which in reality is a convenient propaganda device
to conceal a basic agenda of expansionism of the American empire.
Overseas expansionism is driving the creation of terrorism which
in turn is driving the surveillance state and the police state domestically.
The foreign
policy of expansion of control, taking down foreign governments,
invasions and wars, fomenting revolutions, and attempting to rebuild
states has dire domestic effects. How? The country is on a continual
war basis. Occasional terror incidents strengthen the hands of government
so that it can institute wholesale violations of civil procedures
that were once considered inviolable. Police become militarized.
Surveillance of Americans rises steeply. The government invokes
national security at every turn. The government proposes that it
can torture and assassinate. Phoney justifications for excessive
and inherent executive powers are put forward by lawyers like John
Yoo. The Justice Department loses whatever independence it had from
the chief executive. War becomes almost habitual. The president
goes into wars by his own say so. Executive power increases. Continual
war and/or the expansion of empire has important ramifications domestically.
![]() The
president is expanding the U.S. involvement in Syria. This has briefly
and temporarily taken the spotlight off of Edward Snowden's revelations.
More lie ahead. But Syria, the AUMF, terrorism, foreign expansionism
and the surveillance state are actually all joined into one big
issue. They are not separable. This "one big issue" is
not yet widely recognized or seen for what it is. These matters
are being treated as different things by the MSM, albeit related.
One big issue
is rising to the surface. Because of this one issue, Americans will
increasingly question continual warfare, government secrecy, the
police state, the surveillance state, the war on terror, executive
power, the role of the mass media, and government propaganda. They
are all linked. What is this issue and how will it be named?
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