U.S. Spying on U.S. Citizens - Privacy Part I.
Issue:
You do not really feel it but it is there: the profound loss of privacy from intrusion by government and business into your personal affairs. Because the violation is not tangible and does not cause emotional or physical pain, or even perhaps a drain on your bank account, it is easy to be ignorant of its effect - and so we accept it in much the way a living body accepts slow poisoning. We do not comprehend the loss until it is too late.
This two-part post paints a comprehensive picture of your extreme loss of privacy - how and why it is happening, and why it is worse than you have been told. We in the United States now have less privacy from our government than did the citizens of the former East Germany under Soviet rule. The imagined future of the all-knowing, all-controlling state is here whether we choose to admit it or not. Just how much do any of us know about our loss of privacy and how it will affect us in the years to come?
There are few legal protections against the loss of personal privacy to the prying computers of corporations, a deplorable situation which will be addressed in a later post. An extremely strong law defines, however, protection against the violation of our privacy by the state: the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which proclaims your right to be secure in your private life (quoted in Privacy: Background). For over 220 years our Fourth Amendment protections have served us well, even in times of war and domestic conflict. Frequent assaults by the government have traditionally been turned back by an outraged public or responsible Congress, but the attacks of September 11, 2001 instilled within the public a fear which the government exploited to stage a brutal assault our privacy - and since the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001 the assault has escalated to its final outcome: we have finally lost our privacy and the Fourth Amendment has been gutted in an attack by government with the aid of corporations.
Deception:
The government first claimed it is not intruding on our privacy; then claimed that any loss of our privacy is essential to our national security and is a small price to pay for staying safe. This is all deception.
Reality:
Gutting the Fourth Amendment and robbing citizens of our right to privacy is not necessary for national security - it is instead harmful because national security is not just protection from foreign adversaries but homegrown adversaries as well, and that includes our own government, our corporations and our media. It includes those who would undo the successes of our democracy by destroying its very foundation. The U.S. government, in its wisdom, understands this and so has been loathe to admit to its destruction of our privacy and other constitutional rights.
While much of the assault is only now being grudgingly acknowledged, the government continues to misrepresent and lie about the true nature and extent. It started in earnest in those fear-wrought days following the attacks of September 11, 2001 while the U.S. public was attempting to make sense of the terribly tragedies that had just unfolded on our soil. Lacking a true understanding of the forces behind the attacks the U.S. public was primed to accept radical and reactionary action by Congress and the George W. Bush Administration without regard to its rationale, necessity or constitutionality. Within six short hysterical weeks the USA Patriot Act was conceived, written and enacted granting the government broad and unprecedented powers of the sort that had never before in our nation's rich and tumultuous history been judged necessary or desirable. These powers included the collection of information on citizens in direct violation of our Fourth Amendment protection.
These powers have been expanded by amendments to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which, despite its name, permits domestic government spying on U.S. citizens and effectively forbids court challenges to its consitutionality. Indeed, the Patriot Act and FISA are comprised of many unconstitutional provisions but Congress and the courts, as well as the Executive Branch under Bush and Obama, have been complicit in allowing these provisions to stand as a supposed defense against terrorism.
Patriot Act and FISA explained in Privacy: Background.
Contrary to protestations made by government and corporations, this spying includes the collection of every phone call and text message you make or receive, every web page you visit and virtually every other piece of digital data you generate or receive. It is being archived on government computers indefinitely for indefinite purposes by the National Security Administration (NSA). The U.S. government is building a vast complex between Salt Lake City and Provo, Utah commonly known as the Utah Data Center to collect, store and mine this data and has developed the world's most powerful supercomputers for these tasks. More recent disclosures show that this spying extends to the monitoring of all of our paper mail sent and received as well as our license plates as we go about our daily affairs.
Because the government refuses to divulge any substantive information regarding the nature and extent of this spying we must assume the worst. Unfortunately, all indications are that the worst is the truth. The truth is that the government knows everything it can know, and that is just about everything.
The media has been slow to discover and report the magnitude of this spying and even now admits that it does not know anything even close to the truth. Nor does Congress, whose members are briefed on this subject by Congressional members of its intelligence committees who are themselves sworn to secrecy and cannot reveal all they learn from the Executive Branch and the intelligence agencies, even to other members of Congress. Sadly, even these intelligence committee members are too often kept in the dark by the Obama Administration. Any claim by the Obama Administration or any Congress member as to Congressional "buy-in" to our loss of privacy is a gross misrepresentation at best and an outright lie at worst. The result is that the Executive Branch, currently occupied by the administration of Barack Obama, is enjoying unprecedented and absolute powers over U.S. citizens.
All of this has been reported by some media outlets in recent years yet it took the daring action of a U.S. citizen (Edward J. Snowden) and the assistance of a British newspaper (The Guardian) to force the Obama Administration, Congress and the mainstream U.S. press to acknowledge the spying to a fuller but still wildly insufficient extent. The public seems largely tolerant of the spying yet woefully ignorant of its gravity, scope and effect on our lives. President Obama not only continues the spy programs made common by George W. Bush but has extended their reach and has lied to Congress and the public as to the extent to which these programs operated and their scope.
The effectiveness of these spy programs for preventing terrorism is at best incidental and pales in comparison to the terrorism commited by the government against the constitutional and human rights of its own citizens. If you believe otherwise, ask the government for proof - because the government has failed to show that the few plots they claim to have intercepted through this spying were not or could not have been discovered by other means or that the plots could have even been effectively executed. Indeed, many of plots known to have been prevented by the government (with or without the spying programs) are plots the government itself set up to entrap witless souls. And for all the supposed value of the Patriot Act, FISA, telephony metadata and PRISM (all of which are defined in Privacy: Background), the government failed to intercept a man of suspicion who was the lead player in the 2013 Boston bombings, who was brought to its attention long ago and who even posted his intentions on Facebook. Either the government's tools and procedures are flawed or the bomber was one of the government's own witless souls gone rogue, a possibility made more plausible the the FBI's murder of one of his friends, never charged but gunned down in his own home while being questioned by FBI agents and police.
The worst of it is that the Patriot Act and FISA allow the government to not only keep its spying activities secret but forbid court challenges to the constitutionality of its spying, an arrangement also unprecedented under U.S. law - which means we might never know how effective the spying really is or is not at preventing terrorism nor how completely it deprives us all, every one of us, of our privacy.
Resolution:
The U.S. government has plenty of tools available to fight terrorist threats without resorting to the wholesale violation of the constitutional rights of its own citizens. Congress must shut down the NSA's collection of data on U.S. citizens and the secret FISA courts and require that warrants be obtained from open courts for every violation of privacy rights - that is to say, the U.S. intelligence and national security apparatus must not continue to operate in ways that would have made Hitler's SS and the Soviet Union's KGB green with envy and resembles too much the oppression we witness today in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other totalitarian states. The courts nationwide must rise to their constitutional responsibility of standing firm against incursions on our constitutional rights and the media must work to uncover the true and full scope of government abuses. Congress must repeal the Patriot Act and the FISA provisions that allow for domestic spying on U.S. citizens. And we the people must finally demand not only government transparency but that we be left alone.
Part II of this post analyzes the distortions of truth committed by the government and the telecommunications and internet corporations in their attempt to mask their theft of our privacy: Truth Distortion.
The Background section provides explanations of terms and programs discussed in these posts: Privacy: Background.
You do not really feel it but it is there: the profound loss of privacy from intrusion by government and business into your personal affairs. Because the violation is not tangible and does not cause emotional or physical pain, or even perhaps a drain on your bank account, it is easy to be ignorant of its effect - and so we accept it in much the way a living body accepts slow poisoning. We do not comprehend the loss until it is too late.
This two-part post paints a comprehensive picture of your extreme loss of privacy - how and why it is happening, and why it is worse than you have been told. We in the United States now have less privacy from our government than did the citizens of the former East Germany under Soviet rule. The imagined future of the all-knowing, all-controlling state is here whether we choose to admit it or not. Just how much do any of us know about our loss of privacy and how it will affect us in the years to come?
There are few legal protections against the loss of personal privacy to the prying computers of corporations, a deplorable situation which will be addressed in a later post. An extremely strong law defines, however, protection against the violation of our privacy by the state: the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which proclaims your right to be secure in your private life (quoted in Privacy: Background). For over 220 years our Fourth Amendment protections have served us well, even in times of war and domestic conflict. Frequent assaults by the government have traditionally been turned back by an outraged public or responsible Congress, but the attacks of September 11, 2001 instilled within the public a fear which the government exploited to stage a brutal assault our privacy - and since the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001 the assault has escalated to its final outcome: we have finally lost our privacy and the Fourth Amendment has been gutted in an attack by government with the aid of corporations.
Deception:
The government first claimed it is not intruding on our privacy; then claimed that any loss of our privacy is essential to our national security and is a small price to pay for staying safe. This is all deception.
Reality:
Gutting the Fourth Amendment and robbing citizens of our right to privacy is not necessary for national security - it is instead harmful because national security is not just protection from foreign adversaries but homegrown adversaries as well, and that includes our own government, our corporations and our media. It includes those who would undo the successes of our democracy by destroying its very foundation. The U.S. government, in its wisdom, understands this and so has been loathe to admit to its destruction of our privacy and other constitutional rights.
While much of the assault is only now being grudgingly acknowledged, the government continues to misrepresent and lie about the true nature and extent. It started in earnest in those fear-wrought days following the attacks of September 11, 2001 while the U.S. public was attempting to make sense of the terribly tragedies that had just unfolded on our soil. Lacking a true understanding of the forces behind the attacks the U.S. public was primed to accept radical and reactionary action by Congress and the George W. Bush Administration without regard to its rationale, necessity or constitutionality. Within six short hysterical weeks the USA Patriot Act was conceived, written and enacted granting the government broad and unprecedented powers of the sort that had never before in our nation's rich and tumultuous history been judged necessary or desirable. These powers included the collection of information on citizens in direct violation of our Fourth Amendment protection.
These powers have been expanded by amendments to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which, despite its name, permits domestic government spying on U.S. citizens and effectively forbids court challenges to its consitutionality. Indeed, the Patriot Act and FISA are comprised of many unconstitutional provisions but Congress and the courts, as well as the Executive Branch under Bush and Obama, have been complicit in allowing these provisions to stand as a supposed defense against terrorism.
Patriot Act and FISA explained in Privacy: Background.
Contrary to protestations made by government and corporations, this spying includes the collection of every phone call and text message you make or receive, every web page you visit and virtually every other piece of digital data you generate or receive. It is being archived on government computers indefinitely for indefinite purposes by the National Security Administration (NSA). The U.S. government is building a vast complex between Salt Lake City and Provo, Utah commonly known as the Utah Data Center to collect, store and mine this data and has developed the world's most powerful supercomputers for these tasks. More recent disclosures show that this spying extends to the monitoring of all of our paper mail sent and received as well as our license plates as we go about our daily affairs.
Because the government refuses to divulge any substantive information regarding the nature and extent of this spying we must assume the worst. Unfortunately, all indications are that the worst is the truth. The truth is that the government knows everything it can know, and that is just about everything.
The media has been slow to discover and report the magnitude of this spying and even now admits that it does not know anything even close to the truth. Nor does Congress, whose members are briefed on this subject by Congressional members of its intelligence committees who are themselves sworn to secrecy and cannot reveal all they learn from the Executive Branch and the intelligence agencies, even to other members of Congress. Sadly, even these intelligence committee members are too often kept in the dark by the Obama Administration. Any claim by the Obama Administration or any Congress member as to Congressional "buy-in" to our loss of privacy is a gross misrepresentation at best and an outright lie at worst. The result is that the Executive Branch, currently occupied by the administration of Barack Obama, is enjoying unprecedented and absolute powers over U.S. citizens.
All of this has been reported by some media outlets in recent years yet it took the daring action of a U.S. citizen (Edward J. Snowden) and the assistance of a British newspaper (The Guardian) to force the Obama Administration, Congress and the mainstream U.S. press to acknowledge the spying to a fuller but still wildly insufficient extent. The public seems largely tolerant of the spying yet woefully ignorant of its gravity, scope and effect on our lives. President Obama not only continues the spy programs made common by George W. Bush but has extended their reach and has lied to Congress and the public as to the extent to which these programs operated and their scope.
The effectiveness of these spy programs for preventing terrorism is at best incidental and pales in comparison to the terrorism commited by the government against the constitutional and human rights of its own citizens. If you believe otherwise, ask the government for proof - because the government has failed to show that the few plots they claim to have intercepted through this spying were not or could not have been discovered by other means or that the plots could have even been effectively executed. Indeed, many of plots known to have been prevented by the government (with or without the spying programs) are plots the government itself set up to entrap witless souls. And for all the supposed value of the Patriot Act, FISA, telephony metadata and PRISM (all of which are defined in Privacy: Background), the government failed to intercept a man of suspicion who was the lead player in the 2013 Boston bombings, who was brought to its attention long ago and who even posted his intentions on Facebook. Either the government's tools and procedures are flawed or the bomber was one of the government's own witless souls gone rogue, a possibility made more plausible the the FBI's murder of one of his friends, never charged but gunned down in his own home while being questioned by FBI agents and police.
The worst of it is that the Patriot Act and FISA allow the government to not only keep its spying activities secret but forbid court challenges to the constitutionality of its spying, an arrangement also unprecedented under U.S. law - which means we might never know how effective the spying really is or is not at preventing terrorism nor how completely it deprives us all, every one of us, of our privacy.
Resolution:
The U.S. government has plenty of tools available to fight terrorist threats without resorting to the wholesale violation of the constitutional rights of its own citizens. Congress must shut down the NSA's collection of data on U.S. citizens and the secret FISA courts and require that warrants be obtained from open courts for every violation of privacy rights - that is to say, the U.S. intelligence and national security apparatus must not continue to operate in ways that would have made Hitler's SS and the Soviet Union's KGB green with envy and resembles too much the oppression we witness today in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other totalitarian states. The courts nationwide must rise to their constitutional responsibility of standing firm against incursions on our constitutional rights and the media must work to uncover the true and full scope of government abuses. Congress must repeal the Patriot Act and the FISA provisions that allow for domestic spying on U.S. citizens. And we the people must finally demand not only government transparency but that we be left alone.
Part II of this post analyzes the distortions of truth committed by the government and the telecommunications and internet corporations in their attempt to mask their theft of our privacy: Truth Distortion.
The Background section provides explanations of terms and programs discussed in these posts: Privacy: Background.