The Surveillance Mindset And The Aftermath
By Fazal M. Kamal
23 January, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Reliable studies have demonstrated numerous times that once they are ensconced in the White House all US presidents tend to move to the center, regardless of whatever they may have declared before being voted into that august and greatly symbolic structure.
This is no surprise, of course, because when you’re a candidate you’re likely to think more of the humongous power that comes with the office rather than worry about the enormous responsibilities and the pressures that are bound to emanate from different sides as well as the eagerness---especially due to political considerations---to please everyone.
But of course no president, or for that matter no politician, once in office has ever succeeded in satisfying all the various groups that vie for his/her attention and who feel they deserve to have their agendas fulfilled as the candidate had, in fact, promised. That’s the reality of politics and being elected to an office.
Against that backdrop it’s by no measure a revelation that on the issue of intelligence gathering and national security operations President Barack Obama has failed to satisfy any single quarter; right, left or center. It was destined to be so as soon as he became the most powerful leader in the world (in spite of Mr. Putin’s bare-chested photos galore).
The main cause for all the brouhaha---particularly in the United States whose example was subsequently emulated by most other nations---over surveillance, national security, et al actually goes back to the fact that both the US political leaders as well as the entire national security apparatus was caught napping and was comprehensively flummoxed when the tragedy of 9/11 struck.
Therefore, according to the laws of nature this was followed by the pendulum, as it were, swinging to the other extreme. Given the environment then prevailing, with George Dubya in the Oval Office, those who had failed to detect, foresee or have any inkling of what was being planned for that calamitous day went ahead with enacting rules, regulations and laws which in a calmer atmosphere revealed themselves to be what they in reality were: over the top.
To ensure that they were never again out-foxed, the spies and spooks armed themselves with tools that were way beyond what were required. Hence, the collection of all that metadata, data and volumes upon volumes of information, messages and what-have-you. Naturally it finally came to the stage where a most innocuous search on the Internet could easily be viewed as “highly suspicious” (to use a euphemism) as has actually occurred.
To wit, from a Guardian report:
“Writing anonymously … [a] man explained that halfway into the screening [of a movie] in Columbus, Ohio, he was hauled out by police and officers from homeland security's ICE unit, which monitors piracy. ‘A guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says 'Follow me outside immediately',’ said the man, who was taken into a room for interrogation. His [Google] Glass had been switched off during the movie, and he was wearing it for its prescription lenses.
"After a long time somebody came with a laptop and a USB cable at which point he told me it was my last chance to come clean. I repeated for the hundredth time there is nothing to come clean about and this is a big misunderstanding so the [ICE officer] finally connected my Glass to the computer, downloaded all my personal photos and started going though them one by one … Then they went through my phone, and five minutes later they concluded I had done nothing wrong."
Consequently, through whatever prism you may perceive former NSA contactor Edward Snowden and former soldier Bradley Manning---with one on the run and the other in prison---and whichever position you may assume with regard to their actions, there’s no way of denying that they, and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, have brought into the public domain major issues concerning information and intelligence gathering in the context of a citizen’s guaranteed privacy and protection rights.
In these circumstances it’s relevant to quote a report that’s self-explanatory: After a public meeting on Jan. 23, the oversight board (which, it is worth noting, was created soon after Sept. 2001 but wasn’t fully operational till last year) will release a report containing "a detailed analysis" of the phone data program and addressing the program's "statutory basis, constitutional implications, and whether it strikes the right balance between national security and privacy and civil liberties," according to a board statement.
The report added, it will also "make recommendations for legislative and program reform" to the surveillance program and "recommend reforms to the operation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," which approves government requests for surveillance authority. Further, the oversight board will release a second report "in the coming months" about a separate surveillance program that allows the NSA to collect electronic communications without a warrant.
Evidently these would not have been debated and discussed publicly if no one had brought to the notice of the people that all that was being done in the name of national security---unfortunately, as is the case in most countries, and more so in pseudo-democracies where often national security justifications are utilized specifically to cling on to power by any means---was not only unnecessary but was hugely gratuitous besides.
As result of this public airing and, equally importantly, the relentless lobbying of civil liberty advocates and activists the US President has now announced that whenever the much-talked-about National Security Agency wants to query its database of US phone records, it will have to get permission from a special surveillance court. Also, the NSA will face new limits on how widely it can search its database.
Additionally, President Obama has “directed the attorney general and intelligence officials to determine how to remove the phone records database from government control, while ensuring the NSA can access to it when certain conditions are met. Obama has also called on the US Congress to establish a panel of public advocates who can represent privacy interests before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”
While these will not address all the concerns of privacy advocates, human rights activists and other citizens, in fairness it has to be noted that, at the very least, some tangible measures are being initiated after years of transgressions, misuse and unchecked license to intrude into the personal space of citizens who were not consulted on matters that they had always assumed belonged in their private domain.
Despite the American administration’s belated efforts to allay the people’s worries a recent poll shows that a majority of Americans now opposes the National Security Agency's data-collection practices (USA Today and the Pew Research Center). In a poll of 1,504 adults, 53 percent said they opposed the government's collection of phone and Internet data as a part of anti-terrorism efforts while 40 percent said they supported such actions.
As noted in a report in The Hill, President Obama’s speech on NSA reforms appeared to have no measurable effect on public opinion of the agency. Only 8 percent of respondents said they had “heard a lot” about Obama's planned changes, and 50 percent had heard nothing at all. Even among those who had heard something about the changes, it is worth underscoring, 73 percent believed they would not make a difference in terms of protecting privacy.
In view of what has gone before and what may or may not happen in the future, it will be advisable to remember the words of wisdom of Senator Frank Church, as truthdig.com editor Robert Scheer wrote in the Huffington Post, who way back in 1975 had forewarned:
“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 NSA] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”
That was, Robert Scheer underlined, “before the Internet and supercomputers, biometrics and all the devilish means of data mining that can convert even one's turned-off cellphone into an instrument of surveillance. We continue to ignore Church's warning at our peril.”
The writer has been a media professional, in print and online newspapers as editor and commentator, and in public affairs, for over forty years.
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