All the laughter once directed at the “paranoid” Right now rings hollow
By 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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