The Deeper Meaning of
Mass Spying in America
By James Petras
By James Petras
The exposure of the Obama
regime’s use of the National Security Agency to secretly spy on
the communications of hundreds of millions of US and overseas
citizens has provoked world-wide denunciations. In the United
States , despite widespread mass media coverage and the
opposition of civil liberties organizations, there has not been
any mass protest. Congressional leaders from both the
Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as top judges,
approved of the unprecedented domestic spy program.. Even
worse, when the pervasive spy operations were revealed, top
Senate and Congressional leaders repeated their endorsement of
each and every intrusion into all electronic and written
communication involving American citizens. President Obama and
his Attorney General Holder openly and forcefully defended the
NSA’s the universal spy operations.
The issues
raised by this vast secret police apparatus and its penetration
into and control over civil society, infringing on the citizens
freedom of expression, go far beyond mere ‘violations of
privacy’, as raised by many legal experts.
Most civil libertarians focus on the violations of
individual rights, constitutional guarantees and the citizen’s
privacy rights. These are important legal issues and the
critics are right in raising them.
However, these constitutional–legal critiques do not go far
enough; they fail to raise even more fundamental issues; they
avoid basic political questions.
Why has such a
massive police-state apparatus and universal spying become so
central to the ruling regime? Why has the entire executive,
legislative and judicial leadership come out in public for such
a blatant repudiation of all constitutional guarantees? Why do
elected leaders defend universal political espionage against the
citizenry? What kind of politics requires a police state? What
kind of long-term, large scale domestic and foreign policies are
illegal and unconstitutional as to require the building of a
vast network of domestic spies and a hundred billion dollar
corporate-state techno-espionage infrastructure in a time of
budget ‘austerity’ with the slashing of social programs?
The second set
of questions arises from the use of the espionage data. So far
most critics have questioned the existence of massive state
espionage but have avoided the vital issue of what measures are
taken by the spymasters once they target individuals, groups,
movements? The essential question is: What reprisals and
sanctions follow from the ‘information’ that is collected,
classified and made operational by these massive domestic spy
networks? Now that the ‘secret’ of all-encompassing, state
political spying has entered public discussion, the next step
should be to reveal the secret operations that follow against
those targeted by the spymasters as a ‘risk to national
security’.
The Politics
behind the Police State
The
fundamental reason for the conversion of the state into a
gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive
domestic and foreign policies which the government has so
forcefully pursued. The vast expansion of the police state
apparatus is not a response to the terror attack of 9/11. The
geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the vast
intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the
wars across the globe. The decisions to militarize US global
policy requires vast budgetary re-allocation , slashing social
spending to fund empire-building; shredding public health and
social security to bailout Wall Street. These are policies
which greatly enhance profits for bankers and corporations while
imposing regressive taxes on wage and salaried workers
Prolonged and
extended wars abroad have been funded at the expense of
citizens’ welfare at home. This policy had led to declining
living standards for many tens of millions of citizens and
rising dissatisfaction. The potential of social resistance as
evidenced by the brief “ Occupy Wall Street ” movement which was
endorsed by over 80% of the population, .The positive response
alarmed the state and led to an escalation of police state
measures. Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who
oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic
welfare; labeling them as ‘security threats’ is a means of
controlling them through the use of arbitrary police powers.
The expansion of the President’s war powers has been accompanied
by the growth and scope of the state spy apparatus: the more
the President orders overseas drone attacks, the greater the
number of his military interventions, the greater the need for
the political elite surrounding the President to increase its
policing of citizens in anticipation of a popular backlash. In
this context, the policy of mass spying is taken as ‘pre-emptive
action’. The greater the police state operations, the greater
the fear and insecurity among dissident citizens and activists.
The assault on
the living standards of working and middle class Americans in
order to fund the endless series of wars, and not the so-called
‘war on terror’, is the reason the state has developed massive
cyber warfare against the US citizenry. The issue is not only a
question of a violation of individual privacy: it is
fundamentally an issue of state infringement of the collective
rights of organized citizens to freely engage in public
opposition to regressive socio-economic policies and question
the empire. The proliferation of permanent bureaucratic
institutions, with over a million security ‘data collectors’, is
accompanied by tens of thousands of ‘field operators’, analysts
and inquisitors acting arbitrarily to designate dissident
citizens as ‘security risks’ and imposing reprisals according to
the political needs of their ruling political bosses. The
police state apparatus has its own rules of self-protection and
self-perpetuation; it has its own linkages and may occasionally
compete with the Pentagon. The police state links up with and
protects the masters of Wall Street and the propagandists of the
mass media – even as it (must) spy on them!
The police
state is an instrument of the Executive Branch acting as a
vehicle for its arbitrary prerogative powers. However on
administrative matters, it possesses a degree of ‘autonomy’ to
target dissident behavior. What is clear is the high degree of
cohesion, vertical discipline and mutual defense, up and down
the hierarchy. The fact that one whistle-blower, Edward
Snowden, emerged from the hundreds of thousands of citizen spies
is the exception, the lone whistle blower, which proves the
rule: There are fewer defectors to be found among the
million-member US spy network than in all the Mafia families in
Europe and North America.
The domestic
spy apparatus operates with impunity because of its network of
powerful domestic and overseas allies. The entire bi-partisan
Congressional leadership is privy to and complicit with its
operations. Related branches of government, like the Internal
Revenue Service, cooperate in providing information and pursuing
targeted political groups and individuals. Israel is a key
overseas ally of the National Security Agency, as has been
documented in the Israeli press (Haaretz, June 8, 2013). Two
Israeli high tech firms (Verint and Narus) with ties to the
Israeli secret police (MOSSAD), have provided the spy software
for the NSA and this, of course, has opened a window for
Israeli spying in the US against Americans opposed to the
Zionist state. The writer and critic, Steve Lendman points out
that Israeli spymasters via their software “front companies”
have long had the ability to ‘steal proprietary commercial and
industrial data” with impunity . And because of the power and
influence of the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish
organizations, Justice Department officials have ordered dozens
of Israeli espionage cases to be dropped. The tight Israeli ties
to the US spy apparatus serves to prevent deeper scrutiny into
its operation and political goals – at a very high price in
terms of the security of US citizens. In recent years two
incidents stand out: Israeli security ‘experts’ were contracted
to advise the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security in
their investigation and ‘Stasi-like’ repression of government
critics and environmental activists (compared to ‘al Queda
terrorists’ by the Israelis) – the discovery of which forced the
resignation of OHS Director James Powers in 2010. In 2003,
New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevy appointed his lover, an
Israeli government operative and former IDF officer, to head
that state’s ‘Homeland Security Department and later resigned,
denouncing the Israeli, Golan Cipel, for blackmail in late
2004. These examples are a small sample illustrating the depth
and scope of Israeli police state tactics intersecting in US
domestic repression.
The Political and
Economic Consequences of the Spy State
The
denunciations of the mass spy operations are a positive step, as
far as they go. But equally important is the question of what
follows from the act of spying? We now know that hundreds of
millions of Americans are being spied on by the state. We know
that mass spying is official policy of the Executive and is
approved by Congressional leaders. But we have only fragmented
information on the repressive measures resulting from the
investigations of “suspect individuals”. We can assume that
there is a division of labor among data collectors, data
analysts and field operatives following up “risky individuals
and groups”, based on the internal criteria known only to the
secret police. The key spy operatives are those who devise and
apply the criteria for designating someone as a “security
risk”. Individuals and groups who express critical views of
domestic and foreign policy are “a risk”; those who act to
protest are a “higher risk”; those who travel to conflict
regions are presumed to be in the “highest risk” category, even
if they have violated no law. The question of the lawfulness of
a citizen’s views and actions does not enter into the
spymasters’ equation; nor do any questions regarding the
lawfulness of the acts committed by the spies against citizens.
The criteria defining a security risk supersede any
constitutional considerations and safeguards.
We know from a
large number of published cases that lawful critics, illegally
spied upon , have subsequently been arrested, tried and jailed
– their lives and those of their friends and family members
shattered. We know that hundreds of homes, workplaces and
offices of suspects have been raided in ‘fishing expeditions’.
We know that family members, associates, neighbors, clients, and
employers of “suspects” have been interrogated, pressured and
intimidated. Above all, we know that tens of millions of law
abiding citizens, critical of domestic economic and overseas war
policies, have been censored by the very real fear of the
massive operations carried out by the police state. In this
atmosphere of intimidation, any critical conversation or word
spoken in any context or relayed via the media can be
interpreted by nameless, faceless spies as a “security threat” –
and one’s name can enter into the ever growing secret lists of
“potential terrorists”. The very presence and dimensions of the
police state is intimidating. While there are citizens who
would claim that the police state is necessary to protect them
from terrorists – But how many others feel compelled to embrace
their state terrorists just to fend off any suspicion, hoping to
stay off the growing lists? How many critical-minded Americans
now fear the state and will never voice in public what they
whisper at home?
The bigger the secret
police, the greater its operations. The more regressive
domestic economic policy, the greater the fear and loathing of
the political elite.
Even as
President Obama and his Democratic and Republican partners boast
and bluster about their police state and its effective “security
function”, the vast majority of Americans are becoming aware
that fear instilled at home serves the interest of waging
imperial wars abroad; that cowardice in the face of police state
threats only encourages further cuts in their living
standards. When will they learn that exposing spying is only
the beginning of a solution? When will they recognize that
ending the police state is essential to dismantling the costly
empire and creating a safe, secure and prosperous America ?
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