Some years back, I was working with a group that was proposing to build a free port in Africa. For various reasons, the involvement of American nationals in the project made a bit of a stir among the local and regional leadership council with whom our group needed to have an agreement. Their primary liaison to our group was curious about the American form of government, so, at the suggestion of one of our team members, I gave him a booklet from the Cato Institute which contains both the Declaration of Independence and the constitution of the USA, with its amendments. I said, "These are the design documents. You should look them over and we'll talk more soon."
He did so, and said, the next morning, "That's a pretty good design. I really liked most of the things written in that booklet. But, what went wrong?"
What went wrong, indeed. It was evident that a great deal had gone wrong, and that the ideals stipulated in the declaration and the rights guaranteed in the constitution were not the basis of government in the USA. Not having a super abundance of time, I reflected briefly on how to answer. What I came up with was, "People had to be trusted to uphold the principles in those documents. It turned out that not everyone was trustworthy."
Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, calling for a return to the limited government approach that he and others in his party favoured, after a period of outrageous interference by Federalists under president John Adams, made a similar point. Jefferson said, in 1801 that "Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."
Looking backward from Jefferson's day, it was clear that kings like George III and Charles I were not angels, could not be trusted, and had to be removed from power over the people they were pretending to govern (but were in fact exploiting for financial and political gain). Jefferson clearly felt that an examination of past history would reveal that self-government was better.
Two hundred years later, another group of politicians chose to go much further than the "alien and sedition acts" had done in Jefferson's day. The Bush administration, with the enthusiastic support of Illinois senator Barack Obama, and later with his cooperation as president, undid all the rules put in place after the espionage scandals of the Nixon administration in the 1970s. Everything that was supposed to limit what spy agencies like the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency could do was to be ignored or forgotten. As a result, the kind of society Americans now live in is very far from the design ideals of the Declaration, constitution, and bill of rights.
James Bamford, writing in the 15 August 2013 issue of The New York Review (in his article "They Know Much More Than You Think," which is effectively a review of 1984 by George Orwell), noted: "Within days of Snowden's documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency's extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984. 'The telescreens,' Orwell wrote, 'have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone...'. Today, as the Snowden documents make clear, it is the NSA that keeps track of phone calls, monitors communications, and analyzes people's thoughts through data mining of Google searches and other online activity."
Why is that important? Of course, it is tempting to say that the importance of an individual right to privacy is that the right to privacy is implicit in the text of the fourth article of the bill of rights, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It is tempting to say that the importance of the right to privacy is directly indicated in the text of the ninth article of the bill of rights, securing all other non-enumerated rights to the people. While it is certainly true that every single individual who has ever served in any capacity in the United States government has sworn to uphold and defend the rights, both enumerated and non-enumerated, which are guaranteed by the constitution, we are well past the point where lamenting over a broken implementation of a nicely designed set of principles is relevant.
In short, the idea of a government with strictly limited powers is an experiment that has taken place, has been looked at from every conceivable angle, and has failed. There is no way to have a government with powers and not have that government grow out of control. I certainly disagree with the people who swore to defend and uphold the constitution failing to do what they agreed to do, but I have no illusions that any of them are angels. No one who swore to uphold the constitution and then succumbed to the temptations of going along with violations of the constitution, or, worse, wrote extensive opinions justifying such violations (John Yoo comes to mind) is any more of a monster than anyone who calls for government regulation of the crypto-currency industry. There are, obviously, not enough people like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Andrews Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, and Diane Roark (to name a few prominent whistleblowers and investigators) to keep the militaristic, voyeuristic slime under control.
Bamford notes, "The US intelligence agencies also seem to have adopted Orwell's idea of doublethink - 'to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.' For example, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was asked at a Senate hearing in March whether 'the NSA collects any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.' Clapper's answer: 'No, sir... Not wittingly.' Three months later, following the revelations of the phone-log program in which the NSA collects telephone data — the numbers of both callers and the length of the calls — on hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper switched to doublethink. He said that his previous answer was not a lie; he just chose to respond in the 'least untruthful manner.'"
Of course, Clapper did lie, and is a liar. He and everyone else working for the NSA in a management capacity should be held in contempt of Congress, prosecuted for malfeasance, and imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives. Their assets should be forfeit and sold off to be distributed to every individual whose information has been kept by the NSA, ever, for any reason, including all Americans and as many foreign nationals as the NSA can identify. In order to distribute the assets of everyone who has ever worked at the NSA to the victims of their fraudulent, illegal, unconstitutional, and malicious espionage programme, the records of the NSA must be made public. And, naturally, these things that should happen won't ever happen.
Bamford wrote: "For much of the next century, the solution would be the same: the NSA and its predecessors would enter into secret illegal agreements with the telecom companies to gain access to communications. Eventually codenamed Project Shamrock, the program finally came to a crashing halt in 1975 when a Senate committee that was investigating intelligence agency abuses discovered it. Senator Frank Church, the committee chairman, labeled the NSA program 'probably the largest governmental interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.' As a result of decades of illegal surveillance by the NSA, in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was signed into law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) came into existence. Its purpose was, for the first time, to require the NSA to get judicial approval for eavesdropping on Americans."
Then Bamford descends into what must either be irony or naivete, saying, "For a quarter of a century, the rules were followed and the NSA stayed out of trouble, but following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided to illegally bypass the court and began its program of warrantless wiretapping." It seems unlikely that Bamford never heard of ECHELON, an NSA programme that the European Parliament described as the "Technology of Political Control" in 1998. The idea that the NSA had been following the rules in the 1980s and 1990s is silly.
Bamford: "I was told by Adrienne J. Kinne, who in 2001 was a twenty-four-year-old voice intercept operator who conducted some of the eavesdropping... She or her superiors did not have to get a warrant for each interception. 'It was incredibly uncomfortable to be listening to private personal conversations of Americans,' she said. 'And it's almost like going through and stumbling and finding somebody's diary and reading it.'"
"Anytime you hear the United States government talking about a wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order," President George W. Bush told a crowd in 2004. "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
Bush was lying. For his many crimes against humanity, Bush should be imprisoned for the rest of his life and have all of his assets seized for distribution among his very many victims. Of course, that will never happen - there is no justice in the United States, and any president can get away with mass murder and mass covert domestic espionage with complete impunity, because Americans don't do anything about these crimes. It is a reasonable defence of Americans that they may not believe they can do anything about these crimes. However, that is not a reasonable defence of Bush, nor of Obama.
Bamford: "...rather than strengthen the controls governing the NSA's spying, Congress instead voted to weaken them, largely by codifying into the amendment to FISA what had previously been illegal. At the same time, rather than calling for prosecution of the telecom officials for their role in illegally cooperating in the eavesdropping program, or at least a clear public accounting, Congress simply granted them immunity not only from prosecution but also from civil suits. Thus, for nearly a century, telecom companies have been allowed to violate the privacy of millions of Americans with impunity. In addition to the denial ... by James Clapper, General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, also blatantly denied that his agency was keeping records on millions of Americans. ... In the months afterward, General Alexander repeatedly denied Binney's charges. 'No... we don't hold data on US citizens,' he told Fox News, and at an Aspen Institute conference he said, 'To think we're collecting on every US person...that would be against the law.' He added, 'The fact is we're a foreign intelligence agency.'"
General Keith Alexander is a liar. He should be stripped of his assets which should be distributed among his many victims. Of course, that won't ever happen. What may happen is, you may catch a few clues, secure your private communications with encryption, use effective means to safeguard your economic transactions, and remove yourself from contributing to the problems.
Bamford: "But the NSA has, on a daily basis, access to virtually everyone's phone records, whether cell or landline, and can store, data-mine, and keep them indefinitely. Snowden's documents describing the PRISM program show that the agency is also accessing the Internet data of the nine major Internet companies in the US, including Google and Yahoo."
"Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere," Snowden said. "Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president, if I had a personal e-mail."
Bamford: "What Snowden ...semed to be indicating - although this remains to be officially confirmed -that while under FISA, a court order would be required to enter an American on a target list, analysts have the capability to unilaterally bypass the procedure by simply listing a name or e-mail address on the target list."
And what I believe is that such a capability did not magically arise after 11 September 2001, but was implicit in the ECHELON system and was the design ideal of the NSA from its founding year.
Here are a few passages from Bamford:
"...according to the draft of a top secret NSA inspector general's report leaked by Snowden is that approximately one third of all international telephone calls in the world enter, leave, or transit the United States. 'Most international telephone calls are routed through a small number of switches or chokepoints in the international telephone switching system en route to their final destination,' says the report. For example, the report notes that during 2002, less than one percent of worldwide Internet bandwidth ... 'was between two regions that did not include the United States.' According to a slide released by Snowden, the cable-tapping operation is codenamed 'UPSTREAM' and it is described as the 'collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.'
"According to the leaked inspector general's report, the agency has secret cooperative agreements with the top three telephone companies in the country. Although the report disguises their names, they are likely AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint: NSA determined that under the Authorization it could gain access to approximately 81% of the international calls into and out of the United States through three corporate partners: Company A had access to 39%, Company B 28%, and Company C 14%."
"The filters are placed at key junction points known as switches. For example, much of the communications - telephone and Internet - to and from the northwestern United States pass through a nearly windowless nine-story building at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco. This is AT&T's regional switching center. In 2003, the NSA built a secret room in the facility and filled it with computers and software from a company called Narus."
"According to William Binney, the former NSA senior official, the NSA has established between ten and twenty of these secret rooms at telecom company switches around the country. It is this daily access to the telephone metadata of all Americans without FISA warrants that the nSA and the Office of National Intelligence tried to hide when they falsely denied that the agency had surveillance records on millions of Americans."
"...according to...senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, the real reason the program was shut down was that the NSA was 'unable' to prove the usefulness of the operation. 'We were very concerned about this program's impact on Americans' civil liberties and privacy rights,' they said, 'and we spent a significant portion of 2011 pressing intelligence officials to provide evidence of its effectiveness. They were unable to do so, and the program was shut down that year....It is also important to note that intelligence agencies made statements...that significantly exaggerated this program's effectiveness. This experience demonstrates to us that intelligence agencies' assessment of the usefulness of particular collection program - even significant ones - are not always accurate.'"
For my own part, I would put it differently. Rather than saying that the intelligence agency officials "significantly exaggerated," I would say that they deliberately, knowingly, and wilfully lied. That way, their lies are understood to be lies and not merely "significant" exaggerations. If you exaggerate about something significant in a way that is deliberately constructed to get authority to keep a program of no merit that violates the privacy of Americans and runs roughshod over the constitution, and you work for the government in any capacity, I think you should be imprisoned for the rest of your life and forfeit all your assets to be distributed among the many victims of your crimes. Of course, that won't ever happen.
More from Bamford:
"Speaking on Meet the Press, Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and journalist...mentioned a still-secret eighty-page FISA court opinion that, he said, criticized the NSA for violation of both the Fourth Amendment and the FISA statute. According to Greenwald, 'it specifically said that they are collecting bulk transmissions, multiple conversations from millions of Americans ... and that this is illegal.'"
"According to The Economist of June 29, 'the NSA provided congressional intelligence committees with what it said were over 50 cases in which the programmes disclosed by Mr. Snowden had contributed to the ... disruption of terrorist plots in America, and over 20 other countries.' ... Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch and a former federal prosecutor commented that 'upon scrutiny' many of the plots referred to by the NSA 'appear in fact to have been uncovered not because of the mass collection of our metadata but through more traditional surveillance of particular phone numbers or e-mail addresses - the kinds of targeted inquiries that easily would have justified a judicial order allowing review of records kept by communications companies or even monitoring the content of those communications.'"
"At the AT&T facility on Folsom Street and the other locations, fiber-optic cables containing millions of communications enter the building and go into what's known as a beam-splitter. This is a prism-type device that produces a duplicate, mirror image of the original communications. The original beams, containing Internet data, continue on to wherever they were originally destined. The duplicate beam goes into Room 641A, the NSA's secret room one floor below, a discovery made by another whistleblower, AT&T technician Mark Klein."
"These claims by Snowden, and other revelations from the documents he released should be investigated by either a select committee of Congress, such as the Church Committee, or an independent body, like the 9/11 Commission."
I would be curious to know why James Bamford thinks another Church Commission is going to do any good. I remember Frank Church's work leading that commission, and the investigations done into the improper behaviour by the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies, way back in the 1970s. I remember the government saying, "Now we have investigated our wrong-doing, you can trust us not to do it any longer." I remember thinking to myself that there wasn't any chance that the investigation was going to produce any change in the way the government did things, only in the extent to which it would cover up future efforts to do the same things, and the extent to which the system's worst offenders would try to buy off, or blackmail, the people charged with supervising them. Evidently, the Church Commission failed to put a leash on intelligence agencies. Why would a revived Church Commission be any better?
Whether or not the 9/11 Commission's findings of fact lead you to conclude that the 9/11 Commission was prevented, as the commissioners noted themselves, from having complete information by government agencies, including intelligence agencies, or lead you to conclude that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were part of a vast al Qaeda conspiracy, it is clear that the sort of power consolidation that took place in late 2001 is directly comparable to the kind of power grab achieved by the Nazi Party in Germany after the notorious Reichstag fire. Does it really matter what happened on 9/11 when the result is that the freedoms Americans hold dear were eliminated in a gutless power grab by cowardly politicians and bureaucrats? Or that hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on government employees and government contracts to military and intelligence contractor companies in an effort to spy on every American, lie about the spying to the public, to Congress, to the FISA court, and to anyone charged with overseeing those activities, making it very profitable for a great many people to destroy the Bill of Rights?
Are we to believe, as Bamford apparently does, that a government commission is going to cause the government to straighten up, abandon hundreds of billions of dollars of future opportunities for graft and corruption, and restore the constitutional guarantees for individual liberty? I think, given that we have the example of the Church Commission, that we ought not to believe in similar ideas. Put not your faith in government commissions, nor princes.
Bamford: "According to a recent slide released by Snowden, the NSA on April 5, 2013, had 117,675 active surveillance targets in the program and was able to access real-time data on live voice, text, e-mail, or Internet chat services, in addition to analyzing stored data."
"Another new document released by Snowden says that on New Year's Eve, 2012, SHELLTRUMPET, a metadata program targeting international communications had just 'processed its One Trillionth metadata record.' Started five years ago, it noted that half of that trillion was added in 2012. It also noted that two more new programs, MOONLIGHTPATH and SPINNERET, 'are planned to be added by September 2013.'"
It seems from the proliferation of these programs that it is good to be an intelligence contractor. It also seems clear that the government has no checks and balances in place and cannot be trusted to safeguard the privacy of anyone. Unless the government decides to eliminate the NSA and CIA in the same way that the Black Chamber was eliminated in the 1920s, there won't be any freedom or privacy for anyone who relies exclusively on government to keep them free and secure from snooping. Happily, there are decentralized solutions available to anti-authoritarian individuals.
Bamford: "One man who was prescient enough to see what was coming was Senator Frank Church, the first outsider to peer into the dark recesses of the NSA. In 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat it poses to privacy today...Church issued a start warning: 'That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no America would have any privacy left...There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within reach of the government to know. ... I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.' Church sounds as if he had absorbed the lessons of 1984."
Of course, that abyss has been crossed. The oligarchy has total control, and gets everything it wants from a cowardly president and a compliant congress. There is no supervision by the government of the government. No agencies that "possess this technology" operate within the law, and none ever will. Government cannot be trusted to govern.
The question before you is: whose choice should it be whether you remain free? Evidently, the scum running the NSA and operating its surveillance programmes believe that it should not be your choice. Rather, they believe that you should be watched, closely, and exposed to public humiliation if you step out of line. General Keith Alexander seriously proposed "going after not terrorists or criminals but 'radicalizers,' including innocent Americans by searching the Internet for their vulnerabilities, such as visits to porn sites. Then by secretly leaking this information, the NSA could discredit them," according to a speech James Bamford gave on the occasion of Edward Snowden winning the Ridenhour prize. So, not only should you not have any privacy, according to scumbags like General Keith Alexander, you should not be allowed to speak out against any government activity without him finding out and exposing you.
Note that Gen. Alexander had not quite gotten to the point, in the memo identified by Bamford, of suggesting that people in the government make up lies, manufacture false evidence, and plant it in the computers of people they don't like. But why should you assume that such things aren't being done by vile filth like Gen. Alexander who clearly cannot be trusted to uphold their oath to defend the constitution? Never mind, that was a rhetorical question.
Your privacy is yours to protect. Your freedom is yours to protect. If what you've read on this blog post infuriates you, good. Use that emotional energy to take action. Act to protect yourself, to protect your wealth, to protect your privacy, to protect your freedom. Act now, before a government puts you in a death camp.