You may not have heard about it, but the latest in a long line of symbolic gestures against the ever-encroaching national security state played itself out on Wednesday when a little-noted amendment to the annual U.S. House Defense Appropriations bill was narrowly defeated, 205 to 217. The gist of the bill? To defund the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata information from the nation’s telecommunications companies.
The effort, led by renegade Republican Justin Amash of Michigan, has been widely seen by pundits as sign that there is broad Congressional unease with the breadth and extent of NSA surveillance since its revelation by leaker and now dissident-in-exile Edward Snowden earlier this year. Snowden, as well as others, allege that the NSA operates a vast electronic eavesdropping dragnet that vacuums up literally billions of telephone calls, emails and other communications from around the world – including those of ordinary American citizens – and uses sophisticated data-mining algorithms to distill from that vast haystack of electronic chatter actionable intelligence for use by the U.S. national security establishment.
Social movement for the surveillance state?
For those aware of the NSA’s existence, mission and history, none of this is surprising. Nations, even friends, spy on one another and unless one counts themselves among the blushing virgins of international politics one should expect such widespread, technologically advanced espionage to be taking place. This is the real world, after all, not a convent. The naïve need not apply, and agencies like the NSA do not build vast, secret data-storage farms in the Utah wastes for no reason.
Still, the ability of the NSA and the rest of the security establishment – particularly the FBI – to potentially use what is indiscriminately vacuumed up on average Americans is disturbing enough a possibility that many in Congress felt compelled to voice their protest by voting for Amash’s proposal to defund NSA snooping. Indeed, the effort created a number of odd political alliances which saw civil libertarians on the far-left and far-right of each party in the House coalesce against the political center.
This centrist support for the NSA’s near-lawless campaign of surveillance against all enemies, both foreign and domestic, is perhaps the most important piece of information to come out of the Amash affair. This is so because it powerfully demonstrates that mass spying, along with indefinite detention of enemy combatants, assassination of suspected militants abroad and torture have all more or less become accepted practice and standard operating procedure under the security regime put in place since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Thought police
More to the point, not only are these practices not going away – they are likely to deepen and expand in the future as our technology becomes an ever greater, indispensable part of our daily lives.
While all is not lost, the point at which our security and law-enforcement agencies could have a Minority Report-like understanding of our day-to-day activities is not far off. To-date, the primary stumbling block to such all-encompassing surveillance in the United States has not been technological – see how well the East German Stasi controlled its population for so long with such limited resources and backwards technology – but cultural and political.
This change in centrist opinion on the desirability of such surveillance is something that has developed only recently. In the 1970s, for instance, fallout from Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and revelations that the FBI, in cooperation with other U.S. intelligence agencies, had engaged in a widespread program of domestic spying targeting suspected subversive groups known as COINTELPRO eventually led to the formation of the Church Committee in 1975. The Committee, led by U.S. Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, had a broad investigatory writ that, for the first time, put the wide-ranging work of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to Congressional questioning.
Out of Frank Church’s crusade came revelation after revelation on the dirty deeds of America’s intelligence agencies, such as U.S. assassination attempts on foreign leaders, widespread illegal domestic surveillance including spying on the Civil Rights Movement, coup attempts on foreign governments and even experimentation with drugs such as LSD.
Rogue elephants and spy princes
Such was the outrage that it led Church and many others to label our spy agencies as rogue elephants that posed a clear danger to popular sovereignty and democratic control over foreign policy. Secrecy had not, as intended, protected the country from foreign threats, but had instead given protection to the nation’s spy princes from public accountability and Congressional oversight.
As a result, Congress for the first time passed legislation mandating the creation of House and Senate oversight committees that would oversee and, in theory, share governing responsibility over America’s sprawling intelligence empire with the White House.
Also important for today’s news about the NSA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act created special courts that would rule on the case-by-case constitutionality of surveillance requests by the government’s spy agencies. While important developments that checked, for a time, the power of the spymasters to do what they wanted, public anger eventually waned, the media lost interest, and the unrelenting pressure of the Cold War led to things getting back to normal.
Hearings, hearings and more hearings
There matters stood, seemingly fixed, but by the late 1980s it became clear that a White House determined to keep secrets from Congress could, as in the past, act with near impunity.
The Iran-Contra Affair, in which high-ranking members of the Reagan administration flouted the will of Congress by illegally selling arms to Iran in order to raise funds for the Nicaraguan Contra guerrillas, showed that official secrecy, unthinking patriotism and partisanship could, in a pinch, snooker Congress for a long enough period of time to effectively get away with any manner of evil deeds. Once again, hearings were held, officials were scolded and punished, and the country was aghast at what had gone on.
In hindsight, all it took to get to where we are now was a big enough pretext to justify action and provide political cover for those seeking to aggressively expand the surveillance powers of the national security state. September 11th provided exactly that, and in its immediate aftermath we should recall that in addition to the passage of the Patriot Act, the predecessor program to the NSA’s all-encompassing electronic surveillance of everyone on the planet also made an appearance. A little project named Total Information Awareness was a data-collection and mining program whose bureaucratic champion was none other than Admiral John Poindexter – a key figure in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra Affair who was convicted, and subsequently pardoned, of lying under oath to Congress.
Then as now, public queasiness over the existence of an electronic Big Brother run by the nation’s spymasters led to media investigations and Congressional outrage – prompting the program to be cancelled. As it turned out, Total Information Awareness merely went underground, with its various parts bureaucratically disassembled, given new codes names, and funded out of the huge covert budget that receives next to no public oversight.
In 2005 aspects of this submerged program became more widely known via media revelations into the then-Bush Administration’s program of warrantless wiretaps. It was TIA all over again, now just renamed PRISM and run by the NSA, not the Department of Defense (though that’s effectively a distinction without a difference).
Moreover, it is now known that not only does such a program exist, but it has widely been deemed to be constitutional by the very secret courts that emerged as a legislative response to the revelations the Church Committee dug up in the 1970s.
Deepening the deep state
The inability of the nation’s elected representatives to meaningfully stop the birth and maturation of an American “deep” national security state that operates effectively beyond the writ and reach of democratic control is a disturbing aspect of early 21st-century American political life.
To see how far we have fallen, one has merely to look at the post-government career of Lt. Col. Oliver North – the de facto operational ringleader of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Instead of going to prison, he is instead now firmly ensconced in the closed world of right-wing media and politics.
All this is a development that is nonetheless all too predictable. As with other republics that have tasted the fruits of Empire, we too are learning that domination of others necessarily leads to the curtailment of freedom at home. It is no coincidence, for instance, that as our country expanded into an overseas empire that the first incarnations of an American deep state – the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about and the super-secret intelligence agencies Frank Church crusaded against – initially blossomed. War and Empire beget secrecy, lies and the hunting down of traitors, so the institution of permanent quasi-war after World War II of course gave birth to the now-permanent, insatiable national-security monster that we see today.
The question for us now is whether, after so much unopposed growth, such a monster can be cut down to size and rolled back into its cave. The backers of the Amash amendment certainly think so, but their failure – even by such narrow margins – suggests otherwise. The monster is out and has shown a decades-long determination to gather unto itself as much power and secrecy as it possibly can. Furthermore, it has for the first time wide-ranging support from the political center such that now even ostensible liberals champion its existence – all for our collective safety, you see.
So it will remain unless we as a society tackle head-on that which gives the monster sustenance – the overwhelming sense of legitimacy that American hegemony enjoys in mainstream U.S. political circles. If we do not make a dent in this penchant for imperialism then it is unlikely our national security state can ever be fully contained or our privacy and freedoms protected.
Unless we relearn the simple truth that freedom at home requires a retreat from Empire abroad – the opposite of what all our leaders tell us – then all our efforts to roll back the monster we’ve created, however noble, will, like Don Quixote’s heroic foray against windmills, end up being useless.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy.