The events of the past few weeks revealed far more about
Americans and our society than any actual insight to the actions of our
government. The media is now obsessed with the Snowden Identity movie franchise in which a man on the run
hopscotches international capitals. How one responds to the disclosures is sort
of a Rorschach test as to your tolerance of government intrusion into your
life. Predictably, the right which sees a government boogeyman around every
corner has gone batshit. Glenn Beck, always the voice of measured reason, said,
“I’m telling you, America, if we don’t stop this right now, we will be
remembered as the most evil nation in history of the world. We will dwarf what
Germany did. This is the way totalitarian states are created.” There is no
mountain of hyperbolic bullsh** that man cannot climb.
Meanwhile, on the left or what passes for it these days,
there has been a chorus of media and governmental officials condemning Snowden
in the loudest terms. Mika Brzezinski has gone beyond criticism of Snowden, who
she’s determined was “not a whistlebower”, but who she says is a “weasel”, and attacked the reporter, the Guardian’s Glenn
Greenwald, who she feels was “too close” to the story to address it honestly or
fairly. David Gregory also went after Snowden on what Mark Levin calls, Meet
the Depressed. The Wall Street Journal goes further suggesting that Snowden and
Greenwald were working in collaboration to “steal government secrets”. Odd that
the Washington Post which printed the exact story, some say with even greater detail,
has escaped the scrutiny that has found Greenwald. Is it easier in this context
to attack a British based paper than one populated by people the talking heads
one meets at dinner parties? As so often happens media attention as drifted from the
core of the story, massive government surveillance of communications between law
abiding citizens in whatever form, to the far more dramatic and immeasurably
less important pissing contest between journalists.
As with the Wikileaks case we are told, breathlessly, that American
lives will be lost as a result of this breach. Small problem there, the BBC quoted a Pentagon
official in December 2010 as saying that months after the Wikileaks dump that
resulted in Bradley Manning being held, naked, in solitary confinement “The US
military still had no evidence that people had died or been harmed because of
information gleaned from Wikileaks documents.” Just months earlier, in July 2010,
Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff was quoted
as saying “[Assange] can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks
he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their
hands the blood of some young soldier…"
I’m not sure but with summer coming on and the hammock or
fishing pole calling my sense is the American public has already checked out.
They damn sure have lost interest in the IRS case, where poor Darryl Issa soldiers
on in moronic isolation. But we may do well to pay attention to the NSA stories
for a few more weeks. Just last week while the Supreme Court was emancipating
gays into the freedom of who does what chores around the house, the court also
decided that Americans could not challenge the rulings of FISA courts. As the Washington
Post editorializes today, “The act permits surveillance without having to show
that the target is suspected of anything.” Continuing the Post piece went on to
say that, ”The Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs’ claims could not be
heard because they could not show that they had actually been subjected to the
surveillance. The catch: The surveillance is conducted in secret, so no one can
be certain that he or she is subject to it.”
The administration has made two claims about these NSA programs.
The first, that either dozens or hundreds of plots have been broken up as a
result of the programs, can’t be proven. The second, that American Citizens
have not been targeted or accidentally swept up in unconstitutional dragnets,
cannot be determined even in a court of law.
This is some of what we do know. A massive data base of
virtually all email and telephone communication has been created by US government
agencies. While the government claims that actual communications have not been
monitored, we are told the machinery is only in place to highlight areas where specific
communications would be targeted. Law
abiding citizens can relax, I suppose. You didn’t need that right against unlawful
search and seizure anyhow. You were just planning a barbecue.
When communications take place between a US citizen and a
foreign national, or anyone suspected by the US government, the American
citizen has no specific or automatic right against unreasonable search and seizure.
Whoops… Go further we have learned that Americans believed to be planning terrorist plots may not enjoy the same constitutional protections as the rest of us, so that unravels the thread a bit more. Suspicion has travelled rapidly from those suspected of terrorism
to these reporting the news, so that in two cases that we know of, the AP and a
reporter Fox News, actual communications were hacked, monitored, and recorded.
There is rather large security apparatus in place now. It
may have been created under Bush, or it may have been initiated earlier, but it
exists and it can be taken down from the shelf as needed or desired in any case.
The circumstances of which might be unpredictable and since the programs are
opaque, potentially illegitimate. According to the Partnership for Civil
Justice Fund (PCJF) the movements of Non-Violent Occupy protestors were monitored
by the FBI, The Department of Homeland Security, and private security interests
representing the NY Stock Exchange and several Wall Street financial firms. It is fair to ask what part of that apparatus was
turned against the Occupy Protesters.
As serious as the NSA disclosures here, the suggestion that government
agencies are performing similar surveillance, in consultation with large business
interests, is several degrees more chilling. While the Supreme Court was insulating
the NSA from scrutiny this week it also ruled in another case that further restricted
the reach and development of class action lawsuits. Taken on balance the Supreme
Court has equated speech with money in the Citizen’s United Case, and then
further protected those moneyed interests with a series of rulings restricting
class action status. Now the government comes along as a partner to business
interests. There was a time Tea Party activists would have raised concerns about
big business coalitions with government, especially in the context of a growing
security state. But no more….
Whatever circumstances created the impetus for the
development of NSA programs it is now clear that they have been perpetuated over
12 years, almost certainly longer, and two presidencies. Since 9-11 the
Department of Homeland Security has spent close to a trillion dollars. One
example of the spread of those dollars beyond these incredible costly and
complex programs was the military and security presence which was marshaled in
such short order after the Boston bombings on the streets of Watertown. The sad
state of things is that men and women in similar gear have confronted Wal-Mart
workers protesting for better wages, environmental concerns, and the formation
of unions in Illinois, California, and elsewhere. Americans, assured that the security
apparatus is there to stop bad guys, seem to tune out when it is massed to meet
occupy protesters or union activists in pursuit of democratic goals through the
use of free speech or the right to assembly.
In addition to the DHS budget the US has spent nearly a
trillion In Iraq, and about the same in the Afghanistan/ Pakistan theatre. The colossus
of nearly four trillion dollars in spending is a living testament to the seemingly
secure notion that the #1 priority of the US government is defending its citizens.
Yet, while Snowden sits in a terminal in Russia, the subject
of international press attention, something like 600 Americans a week are being
killed each week by gun violence. While the nation is transfixed by the
Zimmerman case, about half the six hundred lost lives will be African Americans
killed by other African Americans. An obscene number will be children, not
Newtown Kids of course, but 6, 7, 8 and 9 years olds nonetheless. While Senators
argue about assault weapons and high capacity magazines, the overwhelming majority
of gun deaths are murder or suicide by cheap, easily obtained, pistols.
While China and India make massive investments in infrastructure
and education, America remains mired in a dead-end conversation about deficits.
In 2012 about 60% of those that took the ACT college entrance test showed insufficient
knowledge in at least two of the four basic subjects, English, math science, and reading. More than a quarter were
not prepared in at least two of the four subjects. Yet, that same country has
the creativity and financial resources, the intelligence and technology, to monitor
for National Security purposes every call, and every email which is initiated
or ends in the US.
We can harness the algorithms to show which of those making
a call or sending an email is dangerous. Yet we could not save Chastity Turner,
shot in the neck while washing her dogs on her front porch in Chicago. While we
obsess about deficits, 17 million school age children do not have enough food in
their stomach so that they can learn every day. Charities do heroic work in
filling the gap, but the SNAP program which provides about $1.50 a meal per
person is called wasteful and worse, a vote seeking bribe.
Republicans argue that Democrats rule over a donor state of
the needy. Kill the programs that feed the poor and house the homeless they
argue. Some of them, they point out rightly, have been in existence for decades and
poverty hovers at levels unchanged since the end of the Great Society push in
the 60’s. Conservatives say that what America needs is jobs not handouts. While
we can agree with that we might ask why abortion gets so much more of their attention,
or if they have any employment solutions that extend beyond tax cuts for the super wealthy.
Recently a Republican Congressman released a list of all the
great stuff you can get for the week using your SNAP (food stamp) benefits. He
listed everything from soda, to Honeycombs cereal, to canned beans. Nowhere included
was fresh meat like chicken, fish of any kind, or fresh vegetables. Almost everything
was processed which basically equates to too much sugar and salt, too many calories,
and obesity. But in fairness neither party has shown sustained commitment to
the problems, concerns, or life and death struggles of the poor. Anti-terrorism
is far sexier and easier to run on. It’s
certainly easier to raise money from military contractors, then people in
Bed-Stuy or the South Side of Chicago.
Personally, I don’t care much about Snowden. I sympathize
with those who ask how a 29 year old got access to so much information. But let’s
be honest, when you grow the apparatus this quickly to this size and scope, and
create so much profit incentive for private firms and individuals to participate,
this is what’s going to happen. I see Snowden as neither a hero nor a villain.
I am deeply uneasy about his certain knowledge of what was best for all of us.
But the paramilitary presence lined up against the Wal-Mart protestors is no
cause for patriotic joy either. We can debate the NSA programs, but I would
greatly prefer more dialogue about those hungry and poor, sick and deprived,
among us.
When I was a young man I was literally schooled about issues
in the gay community as a witness to the discreet and awful silence about the
AIDs epidemic which was literally killing people I knew. Then President Ronald
Reagan only broke his language boycott of the words HIV and AIDs to argue against
education. He hoped, I think, that his
silence would make the problem go away, but as the ACTUP community noted again
and again: Silence=Death. When the Supreme Court ruled favorably on Gay
Marriage this past week, I thought back to the friends I knew then. Marriage
would have been a dream for Eddie and a couple guys I knew named Joey. They would
have been happy to be alive. So it is in this spirit that I can ignore the
international intrigue surrounding Edward Snowden and ask simply, while all
that sh*** was happening, and all that friggin’ money was being spent, how many
lives could we have saved?
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