Last week's House debate on the Defense Appropriations bill for 2014 produced
a bit more drama than usual. After hearing that House leadership would do
away with the traditional "open rule" allowing for debate on any funding
limitation amendment, it was surprising to see that Rep. Justin Amash's (R-MI)
amendment was allowed on the Floor. In the wake of National Security Agency
(NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of US government
spying on American citizens, Amash's amendment sought to remove funding in
the bill for some of the NSA programs.
Had Amash's amendment passed, it would have been a significant symbolic victory
over the administration's massive violations of our Fourth Amendment protections.
But we should be careful about believing that even if it had somehow miraculously
survived the Senate vote and the President's veto, it would have resulted
in any significant change in how the Intelligence Community would behave
toward Americans. The US government has built the largest and most sophisticated
spying apparatus in the history of the world.
The NSA has been massively increasing the size its facilities, both at its
Maryland headquarters and in its newly built (and way over-budget) enormous
data center in Utah. Taken together, these two facilities will be seven
times larger than the Pentagon! And we know now that much of the NSA's
capacity to intercept information has been turned inward, to spy on us.
As NSA expert James Bamford wrote earlier
this year about the new Utah facility:
"The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September
2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless
databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete
contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as
well as all sorts of personal data trails -- parking receipts, travel
itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital "pocket litter." It
is, in some measure, the realization of the "total information awareness" program
created during the first term of the Bush administration -- an effort
that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its
potential for invading Americans' privacy."
But it happened anyway.
Over the last week we have seen two significant prison-breaks, one in Iraq,
where some 500 al-Qaeda members broke out of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison,
which the US built, and another 1,000 escaped in a huge
break in Benghazi, Libya - the city where the US Ambassador was killed
by the rebels that the US government helped put in power. Did the US intelligence
community, focused on listening to our phone calls, not see this real threat
coming?
Rep. Amash's amendment was an important move to at least bring attention to
what the US intelligence community has become: an incredibly powerful conglomeration
of secret government agencies that seem to view Americans as the real threat.
It is interesting that the votes on Amash's amendment divided the House not
on party lines. Instead, we saw the votes divided between those who follow
their oath to the Constitution, versus those who seem to believe that any
violation of the Constitution is justified in the name of the elusive "security" of
the police state at the expense of liberty. The leadership - not to my surprise
-- of both parties in the House voted for the police state.
It is encouraging to see the large number of votes crossing party lines in
favor of the Amash amendment. Let us hope that this will be a growing trend
in the House - perhaps the promise that Congress may once again begin to
take its duties and obligations seriously. We should not forget, however,
that in the meantime another Defense Appropriations bill passing really means
another "military spending" bill. The Administration is planning for a US
invasion of Syria, more military assistance to the military dictatorship
in Egypt, and more drones and interventionism. We have much work yet to do.
