Surveillance State – Page 2

We’ve Had Threats To Our Constitutional Rights Before

“The Past Is Never Dead, It Is Not Even Past” – Faulkner

Does this sound familiar?

They called for imprisonment of Americans who came from a foreign country. They called for shutting down immigration from certain countries and deporting the immigrants already here. They were for stifling dissent against a looming foreign war by calling the anti-war protestors traitors. They passed laws that curtailed several rights granted in the Bill of Rights.

An administration worked hard to “sell” a war to the American people.

This is not America in the post-9/11 period, it was during World War I, not during Iraq, or our current battle against ISIS.

And it occurred while a progressive Democrat was in the White House.

On April 6, 1917, Woodrow Wilson delivered his war message to Congress. The US, Wilson said, was to embark upon a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy“. Unfortunately, Wilson’s administration gave rise to the greatest attack upon civil liberties (up to that time) since the passage of the Sedition Act in 1798.

Wilson had two problems. First, the citizenry had to be mobilized behind a war effort that did not involve a direct attack on the US. Second, he felt a need to guarantee our internal security against both real and imagined enemies. To solve the first problem, in April, 1917, Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), under the leadership of George Creel, a respected progressive. The Committee’s job was to convince citizens that the war was righteous, and to educate all Americans about American war goals.

Writers turned out “true” stories concerning what the Germans planned to do to America; speakers toured the nation delivering anti-German talks. Movie audiences thrilled to “Pershing’s Crusaders” and came by the thousands to hate the enemy by watching dramas such as “The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin.”

Congress also enacted laws that curtailed our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and press. Shortly after Wilson’s war message, in June, 1917, the Espionage Act was passed. This made it a crime to make false reports which would aid the enemy, incite rebellion among the armed forces, or obstruct recruiting or the draft. In practice, it was used to stifle dissent and radical criticism.

In October, 1917, another law required foreign language newspapers to submit translations of all war-related stories or editorials before distribution to local readers.

In May, 1918, the Sedition Act bolstered the Espionage Act. It provided penalties of up to 20 years imprisonment for the willful writing, uttering, or publication of material abusing the government, showing contempt for the Constitution, or inciting others to resist the government. Under this Act, it was unnecessary to prove that the language in question had affected anyone or had produced injurious consequences. In addition, the Postmaster General was empowered to deny use of the mails to anyone who, in his opinion, used them to violate the Act.

In October 1918, Congress passed the Alien Act, by which any alien who, at any time after entering the US was found to have been a member of any anarchist organization, could be deported.

Volunteer organizations sprung up, dedicated to discovering alleged traitors, saboteurs, and slackers. The volunteer groups were hyper-patriotic, and were often responsible for violations of civil liberties, although the government made no real attempt to discourage or limit their activities.

With the quiet consent of the Department of Justice, the American Protective League’s 250,000 civilian members—many of whom wore official-looking badges reading “Secret Service”—undertook vigilante actions against supposedly disloyal socialists, pacifists, and immigrants; they engaged in domestic surveillance operations; and raided businesses, meeting halls, and private homes in an effort to uncover pro-German sympathizers. As a result, force became the order of the day.

Somewhere during the fight to make the world safe for democracy, Americans lost their tolerance, compassion and mercy, and much of their democratic ideals.

Does this sound familiar?

The various Acts of 1917 and 1918 helped destroy what remained of the left wing in America. Victor Berger, the first socialist elected to Congress, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for hindering the war effort. Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making an anti-war speech.

On November 11, 1918, the Allies and Germany signed an armistice: the war was over.

The American public had shown a willingness to tolerate and even to participate in censorship, mugging, imprisoning, harassment, and forced deportation of Americans who didn’t agree with them.

Given where we are today, it could easily happen again.

Don’t bet against it.

Los Estados Banditos

Today, let’s consider the bombshell dropped by the Wall Street Journal. Apparently the NSA spied on the efforts of the Netanyahu government to ~~purchase~~ win support in Congress when they were considering approval of the Iran Nuclear Deal. A US intelligence official familiar with the intercepts said Israel’s pitch to undecided lawmakers often included such questions as:

How can we get your vote? What’s it going to take?

There’s more. The Hill reported: The NSA helped the White House figure out which Israeli government officials had leaked information from confidential US briefings our government gave to the Israelis:

The NSA’s snooping allegedly found Netanyahu and his aides leaked details of the negotiations gained through Israeli spying, coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal and asked those lawmakers who were undecided on the deal how it could get their vote…

So, the WH knew that the NSA was spying on both Netanyahu and certain Congress critters. Some will say that the Executive Branch was spying on Congress. But there are two other ways to look at this.

• The NSA was spying on an ally, which we have done in the past (Merkel, Hollande).
• And that spying revealed that members of Congress were apparently working with Israel.

Either way, some in DC will be outraged. In fact, Rep. Devin Nunes, (R-CA) has already started an investigation into the allegations in the story. That is hilarious, since that spying is authorized by NSA procedures, procedures that Rep. Nunes has said are more than adequate to protect the privacy of US persons. You know, in his role as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From Emptywheel:

If NSA’s minimization procedures are inadequate to protect US persons, the first thing Nunes should do is repeal [the] FISA Amendments Act, which can expose far more people than the tailored…tap placed on Bibi…

However, you could also return to the basic question from last fall: Why are members of Congress working to help a foreign government derail a major foreign-policy initiative of the US? And be outraged yourself.

This is the reason that allowing lawmakers’ communications to be incidentally collected is such a risk — because it inevitably collects details about the legislative process. That can also disclose an untoward quid pro quo by foreign governments to members of Congress. Finding that is within the purview of the Executive branch’s mandate.

Maybe more privacy protections, including for Members of Congress, are needed. But wiretapping the communications with foreign leaders is solidly within the parameters of Congressionally-approved NSA spying, even if it incidentally collects information about members of Congress. Congress itself has deemed these actions may sometimes be important to protect the US.

And didn’t Congress approve all of this spying to catch terrorists? Or, was it just to get intelligence to assist our drone attacks. Or, to assist in the war on drugs, so that we can play catch-and-release a few more times with El Chapo. The problem is, when you build an intelligence gathering system this big and this technologically capable, it will inevitably intrude into domestic politics. Or vacuum up not-so-innocent information that is incidental to its intended target.

As for surveillance of members of Congress, surely everyone in Congress knows how that game works, THEY VOTED TO IMPLEMENT IT!

There’s a substantive difference between direct surveillance of members of Congress, and surveillance of a foreign ambassador’s reporting back to his government about communications with those Members.

If Nunes, et. al were simply trying to hang on to the remnants of our Constitution like the rest of us poor schlub voters, maybe the poutrage would be understandable.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – Moar Terror, Moar Gunz Edition

The argument has already started: “They were Arabs, and no amount of gun control would have stopped them.” The OMG, they were Muslim Terrorists (!!) yelp obscures two problems: America has 300+ million guns in the hands of 320 million citizens. We’ve allowed guns to become ubiquitous. Second, the vast majority of American deaths from guns do not involve Muslims. The NYT reports that there’s been a mass shooting of four or more people in America every day in 2015. Including San Bernardino, a total of 462 people have died and 1,314 have been wounded in such attacks this year. Republicans tell us that this is the cost to water the Tree of Liberty.

Wrongo has no problem with gun ownership. If people wish to own guns for hunting or self-defense, fine. If people hunt for food, fine. If they hunt for sport, they should examine their consciences, to see if they can find one.

But no one needs dozens, much less scores of guns. No one needs semi-automatic, or worse, automatic weapons, other than to kill lots of their fellow citizens. You can defend your house nicely with a pump-action shotgun with ‘00 buckshot. You don’t need a 30-round magazine and a semi-automatic AR or AK rifle. The legitimate reasons to have a gun are:

• You are a cop
• You are registered in an organized, regulated militia
• You hunt for food
• You feel the need for home protection.

These purposes can be accommodated within a framework of reasonable laws. But unlike freedom of speech, or assembly, or religion, where most people see rational limits for other Constitutional rights such as: you can’t threaten a person’s life and claim a 1st Amendment privilege, or form a lynch mob. But, when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, people make the most extreme demands for freedom to own any weapon.

We cannot stop terrorist attacks on our soil. Despite our federal surveillance and the training of local police, more attacks are coming. It only takes a few people to pull off such attacks, weapons are easy to obtain in the US, and the materials to make explosives are everywhere.

We will see more virulent Islamophobia, and more restriction of immigration. What we won’t see is more restrictions on who/how many guns people can own, despite the fact that we could make it more difficult for those who want to commit these atrocities.

One shooting victim we’d like to see:

In other news, it’s beginning to look a lot like Trump:

New poll has The Donald at 36% among Republicans:

The Zuckerberg donation: A good thing, or a PR thing?

Paris: A Time for Bed-wetting, or Leadership?

From Krugman:

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

It is always better to wait a day before reacting to something like the Paris attacks. It’s easy to say “We have to do something”, that our response must be vicious and overwhelming. Let’s call that “bed-wetting.” As used here, bed-wetting isn’t a physical or psychological term, it is describing the emotional response to fear that causes us say “do something!” So put French President Hollande into the “bed-wetting” category. He said that France would engage in “pitiless war”, as if some wars involve pity.

Really? A “war” on terrorists? Does that sound familiar to anyone? We know how that ends.

It is bed-wetting when several US state governors respond to Paris by announcing the ban of Syrian immigrants.

Other “bed-wetting” examples are Republicans ratcheting up the rhetoric, intimating that what’s being done by President Obama has failed to keep the country safe. Some are calling for an increased US footprint in the Middle East, including “boots on the ground,” and an increased role for the NSA in surveillance and intelligence-gathering capabilities.

So, can we see beyond bed-wetting to leadership? This is certainly a time for leadership. But what are the chances? Mr. Obama is in Turkey for the G20 meetings. He has conferred with Putin. Did they talk concretely about cooperating in Syria?

Obama is also meeting with Erdogan, the Saudi king and the Emir of Qatar about how to combat ISIS, despite the fact that all of them are ISIS sponsors. Will anything come from those meetings?

Bed-wetting says terror is about Islam, and leadership is about the bold use of our military. The roughly one billion Muslims who aren’t currently engaged in killing us (or each other) must be made part of the solution through leadership. Yet, bed-wetting demonizes all of them.

So, what should we do?

We need to stop pussyfooting around what we know to be true.

1. We should declare war on ISIS and Al Qaeda. A declaration of war forces us to get beyond posturing and political finger-pointing.
2. It is high time we tell Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to stop funding the head choppers and suicide bombers. We have to say, “One more dollar to the jihadists, and we no longer buy your oil”, regardless of the consequences. The friend of my enemy is my enemy.
3. We must recruit Russia and Iran as allies in this fight. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. This means we must stop demonizing Putin about Crimea and Ukraine, at least for the time being.
4. Europe must re-establish strict border controls.
5. Erdogan’s facilitating of a Muslim invasion of Europe must end.
6. The West must accept that Syria’s Assad is going to stay in power for a while.
7. We must accept the cooperation of all who fight ISIS, including Hezbollah, despite what Israel might say.

Now, none of the above points will be supported by the bed-wetters. Their dependence on the politics of fear prevents them from thinking outside of the neocon box. As Charlie Pierce said:

A 242-ship Navy will not stop one motivated murderous fanatic from emptying the clip of an AK-47 into the windows of a crowded restaurant. The F-35 fighter plane will not stop a group of motivated murderous fanatics from detonating bombs at a soccer match. A missile-defense shield in Poland will not stop a platoon of motivated murderous fanatics from opening up in a jammed concert hall, or taking hostages, or taking themselves out with suicide belts when the police break down the doors.

Posturing about Russia and Iran fall into the same category.

We must accept that there will be Paris-type attacks inside the US homeland. Despite our huge anti-terror funding of the police, the possibility of jihadi success here is real. The Paris model of mostly local French and Belgian jihadis born of Muslim immigrants is also a viable model for attacks in the US.

It’s very human to fall for the ‘we’ vs ‘them’ meme. Because it feels good, and you can be sure it makes those around you feel good too. But that is only an illusion in times of fear and insecurity, when we don’t have a simple answer.

Leadership or bed-wetting. You choose.

29% of Americans Support a Military Coup

A law professor at West Point was forced to resign after it emerged that he had authored a number of controversial articles. In one, he suggested that the US military may have a duty to seize control of the federal government if the federal government acted against the interest of the country.

Link that thought to a YouGov poll taken this month that found that 29% of US citizens would support a military coup d’état. Moreover, a plurality of Republicans, (43%) would support a coup by the military. They were the only group with a plurality in favor in the poll:

They polled 1,000 people on September 2nd & 3rd. The poll has a margin of error of ±4%. Another theme of the poll was that Americans think the military want what’s best for the country, followed by police officers:

The other categories, which included Congress, local politicians, and civil servants, went in the other direction. The vast majority of those polled thought that local and DC politicians were self-serving.

In other words, most Americans have a lot of confidence in the police and the army, the armed enforcers of government’s rules, but very little confidence in the politicians and bureaucrats who actually write and enact them. This is a rather dangerous disconnect when you think about it. A fascinating poll question was: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

5. Should active duty members of the US military always follow orders from their civilian superiors, even if they feel that those orders are unconstitutional?
Should . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18%
Should not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49%
Not sure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33%

The answer shows that many Americans think:

1. The military are all Constitutional scholars, and

2. Americans want soldiers to think for themselves, even though the civilian superior who matters is the Commander-In-Chief, or Mr. President to the rest of us.

All of this, despite the fact that the US military has long embraced the idea of civilian control of national affairs, and apart from certain rare moments, the American officer corps has faithfully followed the orders of their civilian superiors.

The weakening of support for many of our institutions is clear: Every year Gallup asks Americans about their confidence with 15 major segments of American society. The police and the military routinely top the list with overwhelming support, while no other government institution inspires confidence among the majority of voters. That includes the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, the justice system, and Congress. Also near the bottom, are the media, big business, and banks.

Essentially, the YouGov poll shows that most Americans have completely lost faith in the system, and the powers that run it. The only people they still trust are cops and soldiers. And a society that trusts its armed enforcers more than everyone else is a society that could be ripe for a coup. In today’s age of blanket surveillance, the military coup option may be especially appealing to quite a few US citizens who are afraid to risk their own lives opposing their government. It is a version of “let you and him fight”.

Those military officers who would make good political leaders are smart and too principled to launch a coup against the civilian government. We would likely see mass resignations of the officer corps before any attempted coup. So, a few questions:

• Why conduct this poll now?
• Who commissioned the poll, and why?

It’s clear that people are seriously disgusted with the political class. The first reasonably persuasive demagogue who comes along may give America’s political class exactly what it deserves.

Sadly, the rest of we Americans deserve better.

Monday Wake Up Call – July 27, 2015

The Connecticut Democratic Party has decided to change the name of its “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner”. Apparently prompted by the national controversy over the Confederate flag, the state’s Democratic Party last week voted unanimously to change the name of its annual fundraising dinner and remove the names of two slave-owning American presidents.

The clear implication is that there’s something wrong with Thomas Jefferson which puts him in the same category as the Confederate Flag. The Hartford Courant reported this quote from the state Democrats’ resolution:

As members of the Democratic Party, we are proud of our history as the party of inclusion. Democrats have led the way on civil rights, LGBT equality and equal rights for women…It is only fitting that the name of the party’s most visible annual event reflects our dedication to diversity and forward-looking vision.

Wrongo doesn’t care if the Democratic Party stops naming their fundraisers after Jefferson and Jackson.

What is bothersome is the implication that Jefferson is a pariah. Andrew Jackson is another matter, despite the fact that the symbol of the party is the donkey, or jackass. “Jackass,” stood for Andrew Jackson. It came from an 1837 political cartoon referring to Jackson as a “Jack-ass.” Jackson thought it was funny, and used it to his advantage. Democrats embraced the symbol, and it has stuck for nearly 180 years.

What message does the CT Dems public disowning of Jefferson send? Do CT Dems understand history? We owe a debt to Jefferson. It’s easy to say that Jefferson did things that were wrong, but he wrote the Declaration of Independence, managed our relationships with France during the Revolutionary War, and was a highly successful president. It is a huge mistake to invalidate his accomplishments because of his personal foibles. He was a man of his time, and did what he did. But, without him, our revolution would have been different.

Making perfection the enemy of great is wrong-headed. It places the CT Dems in a similar intellectual place as Donald Trump, who says McCain isn’t a war hero because he was captured, or that John Kerry wasn’t a good negotiator because he fell off his bike.

Maybe we could all be adults? The effort at political correctness by the modern Democratic Party is fine, but we should remember that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a perfect man. African-Americans know that, but Dr. King is still revered by almost all Americans.

And the fact that today’s GOP embraces Abraham Lincoln does not make the modern GOP a racism-free party, regardless of how often the GOP invokes Lincoln’s name to claim credit for his greatness. Judging our founders, or our heroes by today’s standards, would condemn almost everyone past and present. Maybe, Democrats in Washington, CT, named after George, will want to change its name, since George Washington owned slaves.

Yes, there are egalitarian threads in both the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian traditions that resonate with Democrats today—but both men based the equality of some men upon the subordination of others.

Since CT Democrats are determined to replace Jefferson and Jackson as patrons of these events, and are holding a meeting to decide the new name of the event in September, without question, FDR-JFK could serve pretty well, despite each man’s foibles. Or maybe, Joe Lieberman?

Are you the one American without personal foibles?

So, wake up Connecticut Democrats. To help with their wake-up, here is #4 in our songs of summer series, “Summertime Blues”, the great Eddie Cochran tune done here by Brian Setzer on MTV, recorded live for the ‘La Bamba’ concert. It reminds that there was a time when MTV was watchable:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:
Foreign Policy reports that back in 2000, the NSA intercepted a call to Bin Laden’s operations center in Yemen from a 9/11 hijacker in San Diego. They failed to follow-up, which should set off warning bells. Now 16 years later, the NSA denies they knew where the calls originated. That’s bullshit two ways: In 2000, the telephone network’s technology automatically provided a digital equivalent of caller ID to every phone switch, including NSA’s. And former NSA people like Tom Drake and William Binney say there’s no way the NSA wouldn’t have tapped this line.

Dark matter is the stuff that cosmologists think makes up some 85% of all the matter in the universe. A new theory says dark matter might be a known particle. If true, that would open up a window onto an invisible, dark matter version of physics.

Turkey launches war on Islamic State’s worst enemies – The Kurds. This blog site, Moon of Alabama, can be decidedly anti-American, but this is a must read article.

Gun deaths will surpass automobile deaths in the US this year, says The Atlantic. Car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Firearms killed 32,251 people in the US in 2011, the most recent year for which the CDC has data. The young are most at risk: CDC data show guns will kill more Americans under 25 than cars in 2015. Surely, a small price to pay for our Second Amendment freedoms?

Marilyn Tavenner, who served as the chief administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services from 2013 until February, is now in charge of an insurance industry lobby. This tells us all we need to know about where insurance companies see their next pot of gold. It is the Medicare Advantage program, which over the past several years, has become an increasingly important revenue stream for the country’s insurers. Revolving door much?

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – June 7, 2015

This week, mass surveillance by the USA Freedom act replaced mass surveillance by the Patriot Act.

It’s as if Kafka and Orwell collaborated on a novel that was too unrealistic to publish. The plot shows how the NSA operates a $multi-billion program in violation of the Constitution. But, EVERY element of that program is protected by national security secrecy, so no one knows about it. In addition, the managers of the program lie to Congress and hide the extent of the program from lawmakers.

Then an NSA contractor informs us that the illegal program exists. As the story unfolds, the contractor is pursued, is forced into asylum, and faces prosecution if he returns home. And he can’t use the fact of that illegal program to defend himself because of state secrecy. Here is Charlie Pierce on the new legislation:

The ambivalence about Edward Snowden, International Man of Luggage, all clears away at one simple point — without him, none of this happens. Without what he did, nobody looks closely enough at the NSA and its surveillance programs even to think of reforming them even in the mildest way, which is pretty much what this is. Without what he did, the conversation not only doesn’t change, it doesn’t even occur.

Without Edward Snowden, this timid effort to roll back from the politics of fear created in the wake of September 11, 2001 would not have happened last week in Washington. Instead of thanking Snowden for his public service and inviting him to come home, the US government is still seeking to arrest him and try him on charges that carry long prison sentences. Bring this hero home.

Is the new Act the same, or better than the old act?

Apparently, phone records were not covered by the founding fathers:

You didn’t lose your privacy, it was transferred to Squillionaires:

In other news, Caitlyn Jenner dominated:

Denny Hastert’s indictment reminded us of who holds the moral high ground:

And California’s water problems get executive attention:

Where Are The Activists?

And why aren’t they out in the streets? Why isn’t every bank office, and every legislature, “occupied?”

The NYT reported on their NYT/CBS News poll on income inequality. It found that Americans are broadly concerned about inequality of wealth and income despite the improving economy. Among the findings:

Nearly six in 10 Americans said government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.

Inequality is no longer a partisan issue. The poll found that inequality is important to almost half of Republicans and two-thirds of independents, suggesting that it is likely to be a central theme in next year’s general election. We are already seeing populist appeals by politicians of both parties who are trying to capitalize on the sense among Americans that the economic recovery benefited only a handful at the very top.

Sadly, the surveillance society has changed the costs and benefits of protests. The Occupy movement was crushed with a coordinated 17 city paramilitary crackdown. In this day of background checks as a condition to get a job, a misdemeanor arrest for protesting can make you unemployable. You can find yourself on any one of a variety of official lists that cannot be challenged because of secrecy laws; there are sham arrests like those conducted at Occupy Wall Street or, at the NYC Republican convention in 2004 by then-Mayor Bloomberg.

And the financial services industry seems to be able to get cops to come in and round up people on their behalf.

It is not enough to gather in the street. Once you are there and gathered, it must lead somewhere, there must be a goal. Admittedly, the problem with activism is that the fight is to change perceptions and narratives, and progress toward those goals is slow, and rarely concrete and visible.

It’s astonishing today to see how Americans have been conditioned to think that political action and engagement is futile. The Wrongologist was a demonstrator when the reverse occurred, when activism in the 1960s produced significant advances in civil rights for blacks and women, and eventually led the US to exit the Vietnam War. But today, when activism is an option, quite a few argue that there is no point in making the effort, that we as individuals are powerless. Yet, what Richard Kline wrote about protest in 2010 still applies:

The nut of the matter is this: you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, and [then] they give up. As someone who has protested, and studied the process, it’s plain that one spends most of one’s time being defeated. That’s painful, humiliating, and intimidating. One can’t expect typically, as in a battle, to get a clean shot at a clear win.

What activism does is change the context, and that change moves the goalposts on your opponent. It also raises the political price for governments that make bad decisions. Demonstrations helped stop LBJ and Nixon from making a few bad decisions. The same principle could apply to the Conservative’s desire to kneecap Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare while they hand out more baubles to their rich friends. This kind of class inequality is deeply un-American, but it has big political benefactors in both parties.

We can’t use the protests of the 1960s as a model in today’s political environment. Back then, power feared the people. Power feared the people because there was a free press to publicize and record events. The White House press confronted presidents; they didn’t pander, or act as stenographers as they do now.

That no longer exists. The press has been destroyed by corporate consolidation and foreign ownership. Investigative reporting and the institutions that nurtured and supported it were alive and well.

In the 1960s, few local politicians would refuse a permit for a peaceful demonstration, if in fact, a permit was even required. That is no longer true. No permit, no demo. The arrogance of power is demonstrated repeatedly right in front of cameras and reporters; the police harass and provoke, restrain and intimidate at peaceful demonstrations. They also create incidents to blame on demonstrators, which are dutifully captured by the cameras.

If one unit of protest worked in 1965, we need 10 units today to achieve similar results. In the meantime, reflect on this quote from a noted demonstrator:

“When the idea is a sound one, the cause a just one, and the demonstration a righteous one, change will be forthcoming”–Martin Luther King, Jr.

See you on Sunday.

Exactly Who Does the FBI Work For?

The Keystone Pipeline has been off the radar for a few months, but The Guardian brought it back this week with an article describing the FBI’s bad behavior towards activists who are against Keystone:

The FBI breached its own internal rules when it spied on campaigners against the Keystone XL pipeline, failing to get approval before it cultivated informants and opened files on individuals protesting against the construction of the pipeline in Texas, documents reveal.

The documents connect the investigation of anti-Keystone activists to other “domestic terrorism issues” in the agency. The FBI files also suggest that the Houston part of the investigation was opened in early 2013, several months after a high-level strategy meeting between the agency and TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.

The Guardian hired Mike German, a former FBI agent, to help decipher the documentation. German said they indicated that the agency had opened a category of investigation that is known in agency parlance as an “assessment”. An “assessment” was an expansion of FBI powers after 9/11. Assessments allow agents to open intrusive investigations into individuals or groups, even if they have no reason to believe they are breaking the law. German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said:

It is clearly troubling that these documents suggest the FBI interprets its national security mandate as protecting private industry from political criticism

The Wrongologist wrote about this very issue in February 2015, making several points:

• The FBI was meeting with and surveilling anti-Keystone pipeline activists in the US.
• The FBI indicated publicly (and untruthfully) that they could only conduct investigations when they had reason to suspect criminal activity.
• The FBI failed to disclose that they had changed their mission statement. Instead of listing “law enforcement” as its primary function, as it had for years, the FBI fact sheet started listing “national security” as its chief mission.

At the time, we reported that the FBI was essentially doing pre-emptive security work for a Canadian corporation. From Charlie Pierce:

The FBI has no business dropping in on citizens who have not committed a crime, nor are they suspected of having committed one, and especially not at the behest of a private multinational concern.

That would be a foreign private concern. More from Pierce:

Names are going into a file…This never has worked out well in the area of political dissent in this country, and, given the fact that we now have a staggering network of covert domestic intelligence-gathering and a huge government law-enforcement apparatus, it’s unlikely to work out well in the future…

Finally, the new Guardian report states that the FBI said it was compelled to

take the initiative to secure and protect activities and entities which may be targeted for terrorism or espionage.

So, here we go. The FBI, never a friend of civil liberties, has once again violated the law by spying on activists in the absence of any reasonable suspicion that these pose a threat to life and/or property. They shouldn’t be in a position to conduct an unauthorized witch hunt and they shouldn’t be able to just say there is a threat of terrorism.

How convenient that the Houston FBI office didn’t seek approval in advance for their investigation. Plausible deniability for those up the chain of command preserves cushy government pensions.

Our security state says it requires all of this very intrusive information-gathering in order to protect us. Yet we read again and again that some terrorist or another was known to law enforcement prior to their criminal acts, just as the FBI missed clear opportunities to stop the Boston Bombers.

We could all learn from Al Swearengen in Deadwood:

I don’t like the Pinkertons. They’re muscle for the bosses, as if the bosses ain’t got enough edge.

There is a name for what happens when the government’s law-enforcement powers are put at the direct convenience of private corporations. Fascism.

See you on Sunday.

Is Snowden the First, or Last of His Kind?

Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right saw “CitizenFour” a few days after the Oscars. It is interesting that the Academy recognized both “American Sniper” and “CitizenFour.” The former bagged one Oscar, for Best Sound Editing, while the latter won for Best Feature Length Documentary. One made big bucks, the other is already on HBO. Both celebrate heroes, one a tool of the Global War on Terror, the other a whistleblower computer geek who saw that the War on Terror was compromising our Constitution.

Laura Poitras accepted her Oscar, but Edward Snowden couldn’t, because of that little “treason” thing.

As Kunstler says: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

He [Snowden] appeared to know exactly what he was doing, and with quiet, unshakable moral commitment. And then he disappeared down the gullet of America’s modern times nemesis, Russia, where he continues to taunt with his very existence, the NSA gameboys, lizard-lawyers and puppet-masters who cordially invite him back home to face, ho-ho, our vaunted justice system. Of course any six-year-old understands that they would love to jam Snowden down some federal supermax memory hole as an example to any other waffling NSA code-jockey having second thoughts about reading your grandpa’s phone records.

Snowden is a much more interesting hero than the sniper, Chris Kyle. The documentary follows Snowden, who was hiding in plain sight in Hong Kong in the spring of 2013, after he stole over 220,000 files belonging to the National Security Agency. Glen Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras later began revealing to the public the extent to which the American government was spying on everyone’s electronic life while ignoring that pesky US Constitution, and setting the USA on a track towards becoming a police state.

Listening to Ed talk, you’re pleasantly surprised. He gets the concepts, he articulates them beautifully.

Towards the end of the movie, one of the characters (Greenwald?) makes an amazing statement. He says:

What we used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And now people are saying privacy is dead.

Is that what we’re all fighting for? Liberty? Is that a concept that unites the left and the right in America?

You’d expect people to be up in arms about “CitizenFour” but the truth is they just don’t care. That’s our government’s job. If we don’t let the agencies run wild, ISIS will attack Kansas. So we suspend your rights for a while. That’s right, the head fake of fighting “terrorism” has caused us to let our First Amendment freedoms go down the drain, and if someone like Snowden blows the whistle, they are a traitor, or a pariah.

Snowden sparked a debate about how to preserve privacy in the information age—and whether such a thing is even possible. If Snowden hadn’t come forward, the steady encroachment of the surveillance state would have continued, and most people might never have known about the government’s efforts.

There’s something hollow in the soul of America today. Right and wrong used to matter. But now, the government works to keep the average person off balance via subterfuge and fear. And very few of us grasp the facts, even when they’re staring us in the face.

So, we’re dependent on lone wolves to help us see. Snowden says he’s only the first, that the government may get him, but others will follow in his wake. Really?

Once upon a time, “CitizenFour” would have incited a national debate. Now it’s just grist for the mill, Snowden’s character has already been assassinated by the main stream media, and his Oscar-winning movie will come and go.

All of the political debating about immigration, DHS funding, taxes, and ISIS are the sideshow. The main event is how they’ve got our number and we’re already living in 1984. And you believed it couldn’t happen here.

The truth is it already has. We need more Snowdens. People who will say, as Snowden did:

There are things worth dying for.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Surveillance State