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- Why “I Have to Hide” Is The Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance
- Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State
Protest in New Terror Citation: Royden, Derek. (2015). Protest in New Terror. Axis of Logic. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_70908.shtml Royden Article Summary: Historically the government has always targeted, infiltrated, and attack activist movements I found threatening. This includes surveillance against the civil rights movement and COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panthers. Today technology and surveillance overreach has made these tactics worst. There is evidence that the Black Lives Matter Movement is being targeted. The main reason for this is intelligence agencies like the NSA and FBI must constantly find new terror threats to justify their growing budgets and technology. Royden Article Strategic Points:
Full Article: It’s well established that the FBI surveilled civil rights and other activists from Martin Luther King Jr. to leaders of the National Lawyers Guild as part of its wide ranging COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program) during the 1960s and early 70s. The use of planted news stories, faked communications to create dissension within activist groups, informants to make dubious cases and even assassinations was revealed by a group of activists called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, who broke into a bureau office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and found ample evidence of the agency’s misdeeds. This is generally seen as an era of terrible government overreach in the name of fighting “communism.” The problem is that the use of similar tactics has been discovered again and again in the years since. Following the anti-globalization protests of 1999, the 9/11 attacks, and the Occupy protests of 2011, similar strategies, enhanced by modern technology, have been ratcheted up and deployed against an ever-increasing number of activists and political groups of all ideological stripes as part of the even more dubious “wars” on drugs and terrorism. Part of this is due to the fact that there simply aren't enough real threats of terrorism to justify all the money and toys that have been given to U.S. law enforcement. Add to this the fact that police at all levels seem eager to see potential terrorism in even the mildest forms of dissent and you have a recipe for disaster. In one of the most recent instances, it was revealed that the FBI has been coordinating with local law enforcement to target the Black Lives Matter movement. Another story, unrelated to current anti-racist organizing, is a bizarre case out of Minneapolis in the lead up to the Republican national convention in 2008. According to the City Pages, a Univ. of Minnesota police officer who was the department’s only officer on the local Joint Counter Terrorism Task Force worked with an FBI Special Agent to recruit college students who acted as paid informants at “vegan potlucks” hoping they’d discover activist plans to disrupt the city's upcoming convention. Extending the Long Arm of the Law Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), of which there are currently 104 located in cities and towns across the United States, were created in the 1980s and greatly expanded in the aftermath of 9/11. They were set up to coordinate between diverse federal agencies and local law enforcement, and often work in tandem with “Fusion Centers” that are supposed to collect and analyze data related to potential terrorism. To see how these task forces can overstep their bounds, take the case of Eric Linsker, who police tried to arrest for allegedly trying to throw a trash can over the side of a walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge during the large, mostly peaceful protests that erupted in New York City following the failure to indict the officer whose choke-hold led to the death of Eric Garner. Other protesters intervened to stop the arrest but Linkser left his bag behind which, according to authorities, contained “his passport, three hammers, and a small amount of marijuana.” While police may have been well within their rights to track down Linsker and charge him if the vandalism allegations were true, it's who did the arresting that is problematic: rather than the NYPD, it was the New York JTTF that brought Linkser in, perhaps believing that the hammers were potential instruments of terror. This should be a cause for worry, since it means either law enforcement's definition of terrorism has become far too broad, or they are targeting more than just terrorism. Stingrays and the Dangers of Technology Activists with Occupy Wall Street, and later Black Lives Matter, have relied on social networks and technology to organize their efforts. Ubiquitous phones with video recording capacity have revealed abuses of power by law enforcement and discredited Why “I Have to Hide” Is The Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance Citation: Marlinspike, Moxie. (2013). Why “I Have to Hide” Is The Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance. Wired. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/ Marlinspike Article Summary: Marlinspike argues that there are so many laws and sections of the United States Code that government itself can’t even count them all. So, as private citizens we can never be sure that we are not breaking a crime. If the government only surveils “criminals” that could technically include every person in the country. Marlinspike Article Strategic Points: This article demonstrates how surveillance programs could technically target every person in the country. Full Article: Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are nearly 10,000. If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them? As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates: The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation. For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self-defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster. If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet. Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State Citation: Paglen, Trevor. (2013). Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State. Creative Time Reports. 1/2/16. http://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-the-construction-of-a-terror-state/ Paglen Article Summary: Terrorism does not pose a threat to the United States. However, a country that is in a state of terror can be a threat. Terrorism work by instilling so much fear in a society that the society begins to collapse itself. Surveillance is an example. Surveillance primarily targets religious and political minorities by scaring people away from non-mainstream thought. Paglen Article Strategic Points:
Full Article: Politicians claim that the Terror State is necessary to defend democratic institutions from the threat of terrorism. But there is a deep irony to this rhetoric. Terrorism does not pose, has never posed and never will pose an existential threat to the United States. Terrorists will never have the capacity to “take away our freedom.” Terrorist outfits have no armies with which to invade, and no means to impose martial law. They do not have their hands on supra-national power levers like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They cannot force nations into brutal austerity programs and other forms of economic subjugation. But while terrorism cannot pose an existential threat to the United States, the institutions of a Terror State absolutely can. Indeed, their continued expansion poses a serious threat to principles of democracy and equality. At its most spectacular, terrorism works by instilling so much fear in a society that the society begins to collapse on itself. The effects of persistent mass surveillance provide one example of such disintegration. Most obviously, surveillance represents a searing breach of personal privacy, as became clear when NSA analysts passed around phone-sex recordings of overseas troops and their stateside spouses. And while surveillance inhibits the exercise of civil liberties for all, it inevitably targets racial, religious and political minorities. Witness the Department of Homeland Security’s surveillance of Occupy activists, the NYPD’s monitoring of Muslim Americans, the FBI’s ruthless entrapment of young Muslim men and the use of anti-terror statutes against environmental activists. Moreover, mass surveillance also has a deep effect on culture, encouraging conformity to a narrow range of “acceptable” ideas by frightening people away from non-mainstream thought. If the government keeps a record of every library book you read, you might be disinclined to check out The Anarchist Cookbook today; tomorrow you might think twice before borrowing Lenin’s Imperialism. Looking past whatever threats may or may not exist from overseas terrorists, the next few decades will be decades of crisis. Left unchecked, systemic instability caused by growing economic inequality and impending environmental disaster will produce widespread insecurity. On the economic side, we are facing an increasingly acute crisis of capitalism and a growing disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots,” both nationally and globally. For several decades, the vast majority of economic gains have gone to the wealthiest segments of society, while the middle and working classes have seen incomes stagnate and decline. Paul Krugman has dubbed this phenomenon the “Great Divergence.” A few statistics are telling: between 1992 and 2007, the income of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States rose by 392 percent. Their tax rate fell by 37 percent. Since 1979, productivity has risen by more than 80 percent, but the median worker’s wage has only gone up by 10 percent. This is not an accident. The evisceration of the American middle and working class has everything to do with an all-out assault on unions; the rewriting of the laws governing bankruptcy, student loans, credit card debt, predatory lending and financial trading; and the transfer of public wealth to private hands through deregulation, privatization and reduced taxes on the wealthy. The Great Divergence is, to put it bluntly, the effect of a class war waged by the rich against the rest of society, and there are no signs of it letting up. All the while, we are on a collision course with nature. Mega-storms, tornadoes, wildfires, floods and erratic weather patterns are gradually becoming the rule rather than the exception. There are no signs of any serious efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions at levels anywhere near those required to avert the worst climate-change scenarios. According to the most robust climate models, global carbon emissions between now and mid-century must be kept below 565 gigatons to meet the Copenhagen Accord’s target of limiting global warming to a two-degree Celsius increase. Meanwhile, as Bill McKibben has noted, the world’s energy companies currently hold in reserve 2,795 gigatons of carbon, which they plan to release in the coming decades. Clearly, they have bet that world governments will fail to significantly regulate greenhouse emissions. The plan is to keep burning fossil fuels, no matter the environmental consequences. While right-wing politicians write off climate change as a global conspiracy among scientists, the Pentagon has identified it as a significant threat to national security. After a decade of studies and war games involving climate-change scenarios, the Department of Defense’s 2010 Quadrennial Review (the main public document outlining American military doctrine) explains that “climate-related changes are already being observed in every region of the world,” and that they “could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.” Nationally and internationally, the effects of climate change will be felt unevenly. Whether it’s rising water levels or skyrocketing prices for foods due to irregular weather, the effects of a tumultuous climate will disproportionately impact society’s most precarious populations. Thus, the effects of climate change will exacerbate already existing trends toward greater economic inequality, leading to widespread humanitarian crises and social unrest. The coming decades will bring Occupy-like protests on ever-larger scales as high unemployment and economic strife, particularly among youth, becomes a “new normal.” Moreover, the effects of climate change will produce new populations of displaced people and refugees. Economic and environmental insecurity represent the future for vast swaths of the world’s population. One way or another, governments will be forced to respond. As future governments face these intensifying crises, the decline of the state’s civic capacities virtually guarantees that they will meet any unrest with the authoritarian levers of the Terror State. It won’t matter whether a “liberal” or “conservative” government is in place; faced with an immediate crisis, the state will use whatever means are available to end said crisis. When the most robust levers available are tools of mass surveillance and coercion, then those tools will be used. What’s more, laws like the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides for the indefinite detention of American citizens, indicate that military and intelligence programs originally crafted for combating overseas terrorists will be applied domestically. The larger, longer-term scandal of Snowden’s revelations is that, together with other political trends, the NSA’s programs do not merely provide the capacity for “turnkey tyranny”—they render any other future all but impossible. 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