By Dr Tim Stanley
Those crazy American conspiracy theorists who live up trees with guns
and drink their own pee don’t seem quite so crazy anymore. It
turns out that a “secret court order” has empowered the US government
to collect the phone records of millions of users of Verizon, one of
the most popular telephone providers – a massive domestic surveillance
programme and a shocking intrusion into the lives of others. For the
first time in history, being an AT&T customer doesn’t seem such a
bad thing after all.
Of course, it isn't the first time that a US administration
has spied on its own people. The origins of this particular order lie
first in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and then in
Section 215 of the Patriot Act, backed by George W Bush and passed by
Congress after 9/11. Normally, domestic surveillance only targets
suspicious individuals, not the entire population, but in 2006 it was
discovered that a similarly wide database of cellular records was being
collected from customers of Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth. There was
plenty of outrage and plenty of lawsuits, but the National Security
Agency never confirmed that the programme had been shut down. It would
appear that it’s still in rude health: the latest court order for
collecting data runs from April 25 to July 19.
A few observations. First, America is so conscious and proud of its
history as a beacon of liberty that it often overlooks the tyranny that
occurs on its own shores in the name of safeguarding democracy. The
national security state has expanded to the point whereby it now
functions outside of democratic control and with clear disregard for the
Constitution. What’s especially creepy about this case is that the
state felt no legal obligation to tell citizens that it was spying on
them – or at least considering it. The result is a disturbing paradox:
it’s legal to collect information from companies but illegal for the
companies to try to tell their customers about it. It seems that the law
prefers to take the side of the state.
Second, you get what you vote for
– and both Republicans and Democrats keep on voting for authoritarians.
There’s a frustrating hypocrisy that many conservatives applauded the
accrual of state power under Bush for the sake of fighting the War on
Terror only to scream blue murder about it now that it’s happening under
Obama. Likewise, many liberals resented the domestic espionage
programme of Bush but have been less vocal about opposing it under
Obama. The journalist Martin Bashir has gone to far as to claim that the
IRS scandal is a coded attack upon the President’s race, that “IRS” is
the new “n word”. Sometimes it feels like Obama could be discovered
standing over the body of Sarah Palin with a smoking gun in his hand and
liberals would scream “racist!” if anyone called him a murderer. Their
capacity for self-delusion knows no bounds.
Finally, totaling every scandal up – IRS, AP phone records, Fox
journalists being targeted, the Benghazi mess – this has to be the most
furtively authoritarian White House since Nixon’s. We don't yet have a
"smoking email" from Obama ordering all of this, but it can’t be said
often enough that there is a correlation between Obama’s “progressive”
domestic agenda and the misbehavior of the other agencies governed by
his administration – forcing people to buy healthcare even when they
can’t afford it, bailing out the banks, war in Libya and the use of
drone strikes to kill US citizens. This is exactly what the Tea Party
was founded to expose and oppose. All the laughter once directed at the
“paranoid” Right now rings hollow.
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