The sudden
cascade of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden through Glenn
Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras in the Guardian,
and Barton Gellman in the Washington
Post has provided
stark confirmation of our worst fears about the American government’s contemptuous
disregard for our most fundamental rights.
As Greenwald, speaking on Democracy
Now, succinctly summarizes the
extra-Constitutional world we now live in:
[T]he objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. … It is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do. [Emphasis mine]
Every single
time is what they want, and – digitally, at
least –
they have it.
It’s hard to
overestimate how radical this is. Any serious discussion about this issue has
to begin with a clear understanding of what we are talking about. We have to understand not only this or that
discrete program – the Verizon/telco
“metadata”
order, Prism,
Boundless
Informant, etc. – but the whole
matrix of the supercharged surveillance state that has been constructed over
the past twelve years, of which these programs are the building blocks. We also have to understand the
legal-constitutional and ethico-political premises and consequences of this new
techno-social construct. It’s hard to
overestimate how thoroughly this parasitic entity has already embedded itself
in our polity, and how difficult it will be to extricate ourselves from
it. Referring to the East German secret
police who kept voluminous, detailed records on virtually everyone, Daniel
Ellsberg is on the mark when he calls what we’re becoming “The United
Stasi of America.”
