Leading Authors in the World Now Come Down on Surveillance State

Some of the 500 leading authors who've forcefully come out against mass surveillance as "theft".

For some time I had been wondering exactly when the writers-authors of the world would get involved in condemning mass electronic surveillance - as revealed by Edward Snowden. After all, as they have e-books and Nook books circulating-  they would also be coming under state scrutiny, perhaps to the extent of being placed in the NSA's Main Core as "enemies of the state" if certain writings seemed to be overly sympathetic to terrorism.

Well, at last they have come out and warned that spy agencies such as the NSA and Britain's GCHQ  are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo ('Libra'), Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people's digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.

This, of course, is spot on. As I  noted in earlier blogs, all the data -metadata collected can be kept for up to six years and much of it is permanently stored in a program called Main Core - for which some eight million Americans' files are already included as potential "enemies of the state". These people could be guilty of nothing more than participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, or an anti-fracking demonstration, or just bringing food to the actual protestors. See also:  http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/12/national-security-state-spied-on-occupy.html

The authors' timing could not have been better, coming only a day after the world's leading technology companies demanded sweeping changes to surveillance laws to help preserve the public's trust in the internet. Of course, these companies - like Google, Facebook, etc. have a monetary - profit interest in keeping the spooks at bay. They know if their wares, programs aren't secure people will be scared off and find alternative access programs. So they will lose sales. They are also, of course, concerned that their programs' security codes are being incessantly undermined by the national security fetishists.

The companies have delivered an open letter to Obama, issuing from firms including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. It is to  be followed by a petition, drawing together a remarkable list of the world's most respected and widely-read authors, who have accused states of systematically abusing their powers by conducting intrusive mass surveillance.

Again, the authors are spot-on. The spooks have, by their excesses, ruined the very meaning of democracy as well as personal liberty. To quote Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from a blistering UN speech delivered in September:

"Without the right of privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of opinion, and so there is no actual democracy."

In other words, people denied this right - by NSA intrusiveness - via XKeyscore, PRISM, CO-TRAVELER or whatever, are inhabiting a Potemkin democracy. They have no true freedom of speech because they can't know how their (spied and mass-grabbed) speech is being used. This is why in a fascist dictatorship “personal effects” don’t exist. “Personal papers” has no meaning. The state has full monopoly:  de facto ownership on whatever the person has, even his own body. Hence, in fascist dictatorships, such as existed in Nazi Germany, all personal effects, papers could be seized by the Nazis on a whim or remote suspicion - under the Reich Laws. A fundamental right to privacy, meanwhile, insists there exist bona fide entities that one can uniquely own, e.g. papers, effects – including photos or what not- that are private. Without this fundamental right, then, “personal papers, effects” has no meaning hence the 4th amendment is meaningless.

To be sure,  the authors' statement does not mention the NSA programs by name, but says the extent of surveillance revealed by Snowden has challenged and undermined the right of all humans to "remain unobserved and unmolested in their thoughts, personal environments and communications. "  Of course, Snowden as a former NSA contractor, has revealed all the nastiness embodied in the NSA's disreputable programs.  The authors' statement continues:

"This fundamental human right (to privacy)  has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes".

The statement adds, resonating with what I noted above:

"A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space."

Demanding the right "for all people to determine to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed", the writers also called for a digital rights convention that states will sign on to and adhere to.  The underlying meme explicated reads:

"Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property, it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behavior, we are robbed of something else – the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty."

Author Ian McEwan, invoking Thomas Hobbes' classic 'Leviathan' - was quoted as saying:

"Where Leviathan can, it will. The state, by its nature, always prefers security to liberty. Lately, technology has offered it means it can't resist, means of mass surveillance that Orwell would have been amazed by. The process is inexorable – unless it's resisted. Obviously, we need protection from terrorism, but not at any cost."

This jibes with what I already noted above about the Nazi state, wherein personal papers and identities could not exist because that state - in the Third Reich- had metastasized to the extreme of hyper-security - which is exactly why the current incarnation must be resisted. So it doesn't reach the level of the Nazi repudiation of individual rights, liberties.

Meanwhile, Hobbes' Leviathan firmly warns us of the excesses of the state if citizens aren't paying attention and playing a  role in its direction. While the state in its tyrannical form regards citizens as enemies of the state or mere "consumers"  to be manipulated by PR, Jefferson enjoined us to be its watchdogs - directing it like benevolent and attentive parents might a wayward, willful child along the straight and narrow. In his own words:

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED."

Jefferson meant citizens have a responsibility in the formation and direction of the state - whether it exists as benign or malevolent. If citizens' minds are "asleep at the switch", too invested in nonsense, games, frivolity and foolishness, then they can't be responsible civic stewards and will likely end up as puppets. Thus, their safety is bound up with the attention and activity of their minds.  In addition, since information is continually changing and increasing, the quality of their minds must be constantly improved. Ed Snowden's revelations call for drastic improvement in citizens' minds given the depth and breadth of the state malevolence disclosed.

It is up to the rest of us to get up off our asses and act on it, as the world's leading authors have done. Even if that merely means writing a blog post to spread the word so that others can know.

For a lighthearted take on the NSA as "all seeing Santa" - check out:

https://www.aclu.org/secure/stopnsa?sid=1799158?emissue=national_security&emtype=petition&ms=eml_acluaction_stopnsa_131212&etname=131212+The+NSA+Is+Coming+to+Town+Petish&etjid=1176406

TIME's PERSON of the YEAR? It Has to be Edward Snowden!

Anti-NSA demonstrators pay homage to Ed Snowden back in October.

As the scuttlebutt heats up over who will be TIME's Person of the Year, most of those who've been paying any attention at all believe it to be a no-brainer: Edward Snowden! The reason is simple: No other man or woman on this planet has done more to enhance the knowledge of citizens as to how their rights have been gutted by mass, indiscriminate surveillance, than Ed Snowden.  No other person has done more to expose maleficent deeds, including spying on allies and setting up an ancillary 'Patriot Act' program called "Main Core" to identify future "enemies of the state".  No other person has disclosed the extent to which the national security fascists have run amuck - even to the extent of seizing citizens' laptops - as disclosed by Green Greenwald on the UK Guardian some months ago (as occurred to his partner at Heathrow Airport - compliments of the GCHQ, NSA's Brit "sister".). 

Given this, and the fact knowledge is power, and the knowledge transmitted by Snowden also amounts to a global influence on world events, decisions -  on which the  'Person of the Year' is supposedly based, Snowden is a simple choice.  Yes, yes, the political class -  all in bed with the national security state   - will howl like stuck pigs, what would you expect? Their warp and woof is lies, political subterfuge and keeping us all deaf, dumb, blind and stupid. If we all had been kept as quiet, ignorant little sheep left to our own material consumption, debt and distractions,  they'd have no complaints about Snowden. But because this one Constitutional patriot opened daylight on their shenanigans he thereby became Public Enemy Number One. Never mind, to real citizens he's a hero for exposing the extent to which our 4th amendment rights have been gutted by false legislation that actually rendered legal what was once lawless.

What are some of the many contributions Edward Snowden has made in the last 6 months?

- Revealing the PRISM and XKeyscore programs of the NSA to gobble terabytes of "metadata" and other data, simply because the technology allows it. This, in direct violation of the 4th Amendment which demands specific warrants apply. But because a cowardly congress couldn't bring itself to prosecute the Bushies (who used warrantless wiretaps from 2005-07) then it made their lawlessness legal retroactively via a  2011 Fisa redo, with new rubber stamping Fisa courts replacing real ones (set up under the original 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

To acknowledge these mighty contributions of a true patriot, not a paper patriot, Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department ethics advisor,  now a director with the Government Accountability Project, read a statement from Snowden to a crowd of NSA protestors back in October:

 

 

"This isn't about red or blue party lines, and it definitely isn't about terrorism. It's about being able to live in a free and open society."

Indeed! But Snowden's June-July revelations were just the beginning.


- In September, before a U.S. -Brazil meeting Snowden revealed how the U.S. and NSA had spied upon the email messages of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff. Outraged, Rousseff took to a UN podium to decry the tactics, e.g.

She said:

"Without respect for a nation's sovereignty, there is no basis for proper relations among nations,"

This ought to be a no-brainer. Because to spy on another country is to display malignant distrust of the spied -on nation. It therefore undermines polity, as well as civility, and in the process destroys any potential for normal relations or mutual respect. I would advance the same regarding the relation between a state and its citizens. If the former intrudes and spies on its people, then it mistrusts them at the core, and the citizen - knowing this - has no choice but to mistrust the state.

Rousseff added:

"Without the right of privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of opinion, and so there is no actual democracy."

In other words, people denied this right - by NSA intrusiveness - via XKeyscore, PRISM or whatever, are inhabiting a Potemkin democracy. They have no true freedom of speech because they can't know how their (spied and mass-grabbed) speech is being used.

But without Snowden's justifiable revelations we'd never had been made aware of this!

Rousseff went on to say (ibid.):

"Tampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and is an affront of the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations. A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation. The right to safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating fundamental human rights of citizens of another country."


- Within another month, Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA's spying on our own European allies.  This centered on grabbing up the cell phone messages of Germany's Angela Merkel. As the word leaked out, German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere told German ARD television the alleged surveillance would be “really bad” if confirmed. He added:  “The Americans are and remain our best friends, but this is absolutely not right.”


These revelations prompted a full court press to rein in the NSA spooks via new legislation ('USA Freedom Act')  touted by Patriot Act co-authors, Jim Sensenbrenner and Patrick Leahy.  Quoted in the UK Guardian, Sensenbrenner said:


"Oversight only works when the agency that oversight is directed at tells the truth, and having Mr Clapper say he gave the least untruthful answer should, in my opinion, have resulted in a firing and a prosecution,"

Referring to Clapper's lying before a Senate Committee earlier, in March. Sensenbrenner's outrage occurred even as it was disclosed that Americans' communications were supposed to be destroyed as soon as possible, but they could be kept by NSA  for up to six years to see if they meet certain criteria, according to recently declassified guidelines (pdf). In addition, it was learned that metadata about nearly every phone call made within the United States, kept in another NSA storehouse, can be saved for five years. 


Meanwhile, a New York Times report revealed that the NSA keeps a wide range of information about Americans' communications for up to five years in online databases and another ten years "offline for 'historical searches". Also revealed is that an FBI agent can open an intrusive investigation with no reason to suspect criminal activity, and any resulting information can be kept for 20-30 years, even if it has no relationship to the investigation.

All of which prompted Sensenbrenner to tell the Guardian:

"We had thought that the 2006 amendment, by putting the word 'relevant' in, was narrowing what the NSA could collect. Instead, the NSA convinced theFISA court that the relevance clause was an expansive rather than contractive standard, and that's what brought about the metadata collection, which amounts to trillions of phone calls." 


- Leading to the most recent revelations of the NSA "CO-TRAVELER" program which gobbles up 5 billion cell phone calls each day from around the world.  According to the most recent Guardian report, e.g. 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/04/nsa-storing-cell-phone-records-daily-snowden
 
"The spy agency is said to be tracking the movements of “at least hundreds of millions of devices” in what amounts to a staggeringly powerful surveillance tool. It means the NSA can, through mobile phones, track individuals anywhere they travel – including into private homes – or retrace previously traveled journeys.

The data can also be used to study patterns of behaviour to reveal personal information and relationships between different users."

If Edward Snowden doesn't receive the 'Person of the Year' award, then one can only conclude the award itself doesn't matter as it's not based on its own fundamental criteria!

What Would Nelson Mandela Have Done About the NSA?

If Mandela was U.S. President - would he have allowed the NSA to metastasize to what it is now? Hardly!

As the world mourns the death of Nelson Mandela, many tributes will be paid, and achievements recalled. As on Rachel Maddow last night, most of us will finally be brought up to speed on a nation's history we may not have known: that of the South African Apartheid Security state - dedicated to protect the Afrikaner from any contact with those viewed to the next thing to terrorists.

A few of us, mainly in the realm of deep politics, will recall Mandela's signature role as a freedom fighter and how he was persecuted by the S.A. national security state. Working as a lawyer, Mandela was repeatedly arrested for seditious activities and, with the ANC (African National Congress)    leadership, and was initially  unsuccessfully prosecuted in the Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961. Although initially committed to non-violent protest, he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1961 in association with the South African Communist Party, leading a sabotage campaign against the apartheid government. In 1962 he was arrested, convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the government, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial.

This is important to learn because in order for us to parse an "alternative history" - say if in some parallel universe Mandela had somehow become President of the U.S. instead of Obama (back in 2008). Then asking: What would he have done with the National Security State with which he'd been saddled - given his background, not as a "constitutional law professor" but an actual freedom fighter?

We know the following already about Mr. Mandela - which many of his latter day idolizers seem to have forgotten:

1. Mandela was a political activist and agitator. He did not shy away from controversy and he did not seek — or obtain — universal approval. Before and after his release from prison, he embraced an unabashedly progressive and provocative platform.

2. Mandela blasted the Iraq War and American imperialism. Mandela called Bush "a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly," and accused him of "wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust" by going to war in Iraq. "All that [Mr. Bush] wants is Iraqi oil," he said.  He also saw the Iraq War as a greater problem of American imperialism around the world. "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care," he said.

3. Mandela called freedom from poverty a "fundamental human right." Mandela considered poverty one of the greatest evils in the world, and spoke out against inequality everywhere. "Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils," he said. He considered ending poverty a basic human duty: "Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life," he said. "While poverty persists, there is no true freedom."

4. Mandela criticized the "War on Terror" and the labeling of individuals as "terrorists"  without due process. On the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008 himself, Mandela was an outspoken critic of President George W. Bush's war on terror. He warned against rushing to label terrorists without due process. While forcefully calling for Osama bin Laden to be brought to justice, Mandela remarked, "The labeling of Osama bin Laden as the terrorist responsible for those acts before he had been tried and convicted could also be seen as undermining some of the basic tenets of the rule of law."

5. Mandela embraced some of America's biggest political enemies. Mandela incited shock and anger in many American communities for refusing to denounce Cuban dictator Fidel Castro or Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had lent their support to Mandela against South African apartheid. "One of the mistakes the Western world makes is to think that their enemies should be our enemies," he explained to an American TV audience. "We have our own struggle." He added that those leaders "are placing resources at our disposal to win the struggle." He also called the controversial Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat "a comrade in arms."

6. Mandela was a die-hard supporter of labor unions. Mandela visited the Detroit auto workers union when touring the U.S., immediately claiming kinship with them. "Sisters and brothers, friends and comrades, the man who is speaking is not a stranger here," he said. "The man who is speaking is a member of the UAW. I am your flesh and blood."

(Source: ThinkProgress and the Center for American Progress Action )


Let's assume then, for the sake of argument, the parallel universe would also feature a U.S. of A. that had undergone 9/11, and also had a Bush Jr. who started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  However, by some anomaly Nelson Mandela - under different constitutional election laws- became President of the U.S. But this Mandela was Nelson after just being released from Robben Island - so was still in full possession of his faculties at age 72, as opposed to age 90 (in 2008).

The first thing Mandela would certainly have done is pulled all troops out of both Afghanistan and Iraq - especially after just being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in that parallel cosmos. There is no way, especially after an economic crash such as occurred in 2008, he'd have been able to justify squandering hundreds of billions a year on military adventures while tens of millions lost jobs, children went to bed hungry for lack of enough food, and genuine domestic security unraveled.  The next thing he'd have done is to cut back national security funding that the Bushies had fueled by using "terrorism" as a bogeyman to scare citizens into nodding compliance with surrendering civil liberties.

In particular, he'd have been flabbergasted to find out about the COG (continuity of government) program which under the Bushites  equated political dissent with treason. To him, this would have been contrary to everything he stood for, fought for in his homeland.   He'd have been further infuriated on learning of the "Main Core' program - especially after learning the Fourth Amendment and all others in the Bill of Rights. He'd have pulled back after seeing that:

"without a warrant all the following can be collected: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database."

The final straw for Mandela would have been learning that up to the time he entered office,  8 million Americans were listed in Main Core as potentially suspect.

And: "In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

With recollections of the South African national security state, demanding papers for everyone's travel and assembling massive file data bases on ANC members, families, Nelson would have disassembled COG in a heartbeat. In the next step, he'd have issued an executive order to disband Main Core and the other nefarious additions under the "Patriot Act". It is not beyond possibility he'd have attempted to derail or repeal the Patriot Act itself. At the very least when it was learned how the Bushies used warrantless searches under certain provisions of the Act, he'd have vigorously sought to have them overturned - or at least have vetoed any new "law" passed by a cowed congress, say that reverse-legalized them.

In this parallel universe neither PRISM or XKeyscore would have materialized.  Nor would the mass spying on our allies, which Nelson would have viewed as disreputable and unworthy of a superpower that embraced - or claimed to - principles of liberty.  Finally, the recent revelation about 5 billion cell phone calls a day being compiled would never have been disclosed by an Edward Snowden - indeed it is doubtful there'd have been an Edward Snowden - given Mandela wouldn't have let the agency hire millions of private  sub-contractors.

According to the latest NSA hijinks:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/04/nsa-storing-cell-phone-records-daily-snowden

"The spy agency is said to be tracking the movements of “at least hundreds of millions of devices” in what amounts to a staggeringly powerful surveillance tool. It means the NSA can, through mobile phones, track individuals anywhere they travel – including into private homes – or retrace previously traveled journeys.

The data can also be used to study patterns of behaviour to reveal personal information and relationships between different users."

 Again, being conscious at the most personal level of what personal liberty means Nelson Mandela,  as U.S. President , would never have countenanced such an unimaginable violation of it worldwide, and would have done all in his power to ensure the national security state never attained such power after being elected.

In the parallel universe of December, 2013, Mandela would still have died - but it would have been out of office, and the America for which he served as a steward would have seen greater prosperity by not squandering blood and treasure on unwinnable "wars". That money instead would have been available domestically - to serve the people's needs - as opposed to the warmonger, national security state.

Would the scourge of Neoliberalism still exist in this parallel universe?

Undoubtedly! But given Mandela's background, he'd have wanted no part of it. He knew that no autonomous, "free" markets existed, and that so long as huge corporations dominated and exploited mergers,  markets would tend to be coercive.  As a man of the People, Mandela would know he couldn't also be a Neoliberal or remotely acknowledge "business as the rightful ruler of the country".

Any country!