{"id":42537,"date":"2013-06-17T05:27:23","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T04:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/5-ways-the-global-security-state-cant-stop-itself-from-abusing-our-privacy-and-destroying-peoples-lives\/42537\/"},"modified":"2013-06-17T05:27:23","modified_gmt":"2013-06-17T04:27:23","slug":"5-ways-the-global-security-state-cant-stop-itself-from-abusing-our-privacy-and-destroying-peoples-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/5-ways-the-global-security-state-cant-stop-itself-from-abusing-our-privacy-and-destroying-peoples-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Ways the Global Security State Can't Stop Itself from Abusing Our Privacy and Destroying People's Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Flickr (cc)<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

June 16, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations<\/a> about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we\u2019ve come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24\/7 — waves of leaks<\/a>, videos<\/a>, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery<\/a>, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it\u2019s always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here\u2019s my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised<\/a>, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse. \u00a0 <\/p>\n

1. The Urge to be Global<\/strong><\/p>\n

Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It\u2019s become common since 9\/11 to speak of a \u201cnational security state.\u201d But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it\u2019s that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state. <\/p>\n

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up<\/a> and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating<\/a> the First and Fourth Amendments<\/a> of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency\u2019s key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering \u201c97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide,\u201d has been named<\/a> \u201cboundless informant.\u201d If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community<\/a> imagines itself going, you couldn\u2019t ask for a better hint than that word \u201cboundless.\u201d It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet. <\/p>\n

Today, that “community” seeks to put not just the U.S., but the world fully under its penetrating gaze. By now, the first \u201cheat map\u201d has been published showing where such information is being sucked up from monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of intelligence); then come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7 billion), Egypt (7.6 billion), and India (6.3 billion). \u00a0Whether you realize this or not, even for a superpower that has unprecedented numbers of military bases scattered across the planet<\/a> and has divided the world<\/a> into six military commands, this represents something new under the sun. The only question is what? <\/p>\n

The twentieth century was the century of \u201ctotalitarianisms.\u201d We don\u2019t yet have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures Washington is building in this century, but there can be no question that, whatever the present constraints<\/a> on the system, \u201ctotal\u201d has something to do with it and that we are being ushered into a new world. Despite the recent leaks, we still undoubtedly have a very limited picture of just what the present American surveillance world really looks like and what it plans for our future. One thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are staggering and global. <\/p>\n

In the classic totalitarian regimes of the previous century, a secret police\/surveillance force attempted, via every imaginable method, including informers, wire tappers, torture techniques, imprisonment, and so on to take total control of a national environment, to turn every citizen\u2019s life into the equivalent of an open book, or more accurately a closed, secret file lodged somewhere in that police system. The most impressive of these efforts, the most global, was the Soviet one simply because the USSR was an imperial power with a set of disparate almost-states — those SSRs of the Caucasus and Central Asia \u00a0— within its borders, and a series of Eastern European satellite states under its control as well. None of the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, however, ever imagined doing the same thing on a genuinely global basis. There was no way to do so. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo Credit: Flickr (cc) June 16, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we\u2019ve come in the building of a surveillance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-42537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}