After Snowden: Freedom Of Speech In A Surveillance State

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In June of 2013, the global public latched its eyes onto America as we dug up our old copies of “1984” and surreptitiously eyed our computers’ webcams. We learned what many had long suspected — the National Security Agency collects and stores troves of data on international and domestic targets alike without warrant or, seemingly, discretion.

Since the initial leaks, we have learned much about the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother. The constitutional argument against this surveillance typically focuses on the Fourth Amendment right to protection against unlawful search and seizure. However, it is at least as important to consider the toll on our right to express and associate freely, without any government agency peering over our shoulders or, worse, digging through our belongings.

Supporters of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance argue that no harm can come from these tactics provided that you have “nothing to hide.” In order to address this nonchalant or blindly trusting population, perhaps the conversation should shift focus from the data collected to the collecting itself. Is there an intrinsic harm solely in the act of surveillance?

Benign Intent: Tools of Corporate Media Propaganda

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In a healthy society governed by democratic principles and the rule of law, news media would be analogous to a powerful telescope, a roving, scrutinizing eye from which little or nothing can hide. Corrupt societies — ones that require the vast majority of the population to be passive, obedient, misinformed, ignorant, distracted and consumptive — require instead a media that acts as a kind of prism, a distorting lens that presents a perversion of reality.

The scale of this distortion varies greatly around the world, with some — mostly independent — media (sometimes lone journalists) laudably aiming to shine a torch as best they can on state and corporate power. At the other extreme, dictatorships like North Korea use state media to portray a false reality to help control their people, who nonetheless are surely aware that their freedoms are strictly limited.

Western corporate-owned media, however, is unique and quite remarkable in that while it depicts a reality as laughably false as that shown to the North Koreans, its readers/viewers — more accurately its consumers — are overwhelmingly unaware that they are being fed a pack of lies, that the picture given to them is — in key areas that concern corporate power and Western control of world resources — diametrically opposite to reality. With a corporate media monopoly over the information that enters people’s brains, information that is crucial to the formation of their worldview, reality is skewed with ease to serve the interests of capital and control. Not only are consumers of such information not aware of this cynical manipulation, they are not even aware that they are not aware.

The USA FREEDOM ACT And The Price We Pay for Security

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The US Senate voted on a bill that would heavily reform the NSA’s methods of data collecting and the protection of privacy in the United States.

The USA FREEDOM ACT was to “rein in the dragnet collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies, increase transparency of the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), provide businesses the ability to release information regarding FISA requests, and to create an independent constitutional advocate, to argue cases before the FISC.” [1]

The Freedom Act didn’t pass through the Senate, by two votes. Two votes is all we needed to ease some of the power the NSA has had unchecked since at least 2001.

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