I don\u2019t have a weak stomach, but I confess that watching TV news does get me nauseated. So I do so sparingly. I have of course been following the coverage of the Edward Snowden story, just to see how opinion is being shaped.<\/p>\n
In the days immediately after June 5, when Snowden revealed that the U.S. government daily collects mega-data of all phone call records in the U.S. and beyond, the cable news networks seemed puzzled about how to deal with the story.<\/p>\n
They couldn\u2019t very well denounce Snowden out of hand, lest they be accused of being shameless lackeys of the state (even though that\u2019s in fact what they are). They all like to posture as \u201cfair and balanced,\u201d so they did initially pose the question: is Snowden a hero, or a villain?<\/p>\n
Early opinion polls showed considerable support for Snowden\u2019s action; a Time<\/i> poll released June 13 showed 54% of those surveyed in the U.S. thought he\u2019d done the right thing. Some unlikely people (Bill O\u2019Reilly, Glenn Beck) called Snowden a \u201chero.\u201d But that may be changing, as the networks now compete with one another to generate outrage<\/i>\u2013not at the spying, mind you, but at Snowden <\/i>for violating the law. <\/i>O\u2019Reilly\u2019s current position is that while a hero, Snowden should be placed on trial and judged by a jury. Which is to say, he should be apprehended abroad, brought back in handcuffs and treated to the same benefits of the U.S. judicial system enjoyed by a Bradley Manning or a Guantanamo detainee.<\/p>\n
He broke the law! He told us: \u201cAny analyst at any time can target anyone.<\/i><\/b>\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cHe took an oath,\u201d thunders Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (and thus someone complicit in the spying programs). What she means by this is that he broke his pledge, made when he became an employee of the CIA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton\u2013which helps handle the massive effort to monitor all of us daily\u2013to conceal any secrets he obtained as an employee. She is of course not <\/i>referring to the oath he made at the same time, to uphold the Constitution of the United States, which says very clearly that \u201cthe right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Snowden has not merely revealed that the U.S. government has forced service providers Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple to share all their records with itself, in the form of mega-data that can only be accessed for content following the issuance of warrants from (secret) courts, in order to thwart real or imagined terrorist plots.<\/p>\n
He hasn\u2019t merely shown that the NSA intercepts 1.7 billion electronic records every day (in order, of course, to thwart the terrorists). He has charged the following:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAny analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere\u2026 I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
He is referring to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of employees of the state security apparatus. (The numbers are of course secret.)<\/p>\n
That was and is the main story. Obama may say, \u201cNo one is listening to your phone calls,\u201d and acknowledge, now that Snowden has come forward, that the government \u201cmerely\u201d has available for perusal (following clandestine court procedures that secretly authorize such inspection) all of your telecommunications addresses and locations, all of your email and online contacts, lists of all the sites you visit online such that an analyst may sit at his desk with this comprehensive picture of your life but no access to the content of your communications. That\u2019s bad enough.<\/p>\n
But Snowden indicates that those with that power can indeed gain access to what Bill Clinton recently called the \u201cmeat\u201d of your communications. That is, every word you\u2019ve spoken on the phone recently, or maybe for several years; or test-messaged or instant-messaged online; can be accessed by government \u201canalysts\u201d at their whim.<\/p>\n
Now why should this bother anybody? A virtual industry of bloggers has mushroomed overnight, people boasting, in the wake of Snowden\u2019s revelations, that they <\/i>have nothing to hide. Why should anybody not doing wrong be concerned?<\/p>\n
Well, recall how, in 2008, ABC News revealed that National Security Agency staffers enjoyed monitoring satellite phone sex involving U.S. officers in Iraq. It\u2019s worth quoting at length.<\/p>\n
\n\u201c\u2018These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,\u2019 said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA\u2019s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.<\/p>\n
Kinne described the contents of the calls as \u2018personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.\u2019 […]<\/p>\n
Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad\u2019s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.<\/p>\n
\u2018Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,\u2019 said Faulk. […]<\/p>\n
\u2018Hey, check this out,\u2019 Faulk says he would be told, \u2018there\u2019s good phone sex or there\u2019s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it\u2019s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, \u2018Wow, this was crazy,\u2019 Faulk told ABC News.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
If that\u2019s the way NSA analysts could deal with U.S. military officers in Iraq\u2013fellow cogs in the system, fighting on behalf of U.S. imperialism\u2013how much respect do you suppose they have for you <\/i>and your privacy? For your security from their searches, their violations?<\/p>\n
But the main issue is not your protection from phone-sex interlopers, but protection from those who want to do you harm. The FBI\u2019s \u201cCounterintelligence Program\u201d (COINTELPRO), active from 1956 to 1971, collected information through wiretaps and other means with the specific objective of destroying civil rights and left-wing organizations. One of its stated missions was to use surveillance on activists to release negative personal information to the public to discredit them. In many instances the agents succeeded, and they ruined lives. And their abilities to do so pale in comparison with the abilities of Obama\u2019s NSA.<\/p>\n
Tens of Thousands of Spooks, with Access to Your Data<\/b><\/p>\n
Snowden says that his personal history should not be the issue in the media, but rather his revelations. Certainly this is true. But his history is a part of this story. It shows that the monitoring of personal communications is so vast, requiring so much labor power, that those overseeing it enlist even high school dropouts without formal academic credentials to do what they do.<\/p>\n
(I do not mention this out of any disrespect for Snowden. On the contrary, I think he\u2019s obviously highly intelligent and plainly very competent at his former job. One can question the wisdom, judgment and political consciousness of Snowden at age 21, when he joined the Army as a Special Forces recruit thinking he\u2019d fight in Iraq, as he put it, \u201cto help free people from oppression,\u201d or his subsequent involvement with the CIA. But I think he\u2019s extremely bright, and more than that, at this point in his life, a real moral exemplar.)<\/p>\n
What I mean is that the demand for \u201canalysts\u201d in this data-collecting apparatus is so vast that those running it are surely signing on some people who have excellent computer skills but little understanding of anything else, are control-freaks, bigots, voyeurs (like those referenced above)\u2026 And they have ready access to your information.<\/p>\n
Just as one example of ignorance <\/i>within this stratum: after 9\/11 a friend of mine was visited by FBI agents inquiring about a recent computer game purchase. She and her husband answered all the questions posed, but she was astounded by the agents\u2019 lack of sophistication. They asked where the couple was from; India, they replied. \u201cIs that a Muslim country?\u201d they were asked. My friend was both intimidated and amused by the visit. She\u2019d assumed U.S. intelligence personnel would have some basic grasp of geography and history.<\/p>\n
Imagine such people accessing your personal information with impunity, thinking, well, here\u2019s a reason to investigate\u2013and doing it even if only just to pass (well-paid) time at their desks?<\/p>\n
Remember the \u201cInformation Awareness Office\u201d under Admiral John Poindexter, set up by a mysterious agency in the Defense Department in January 2002, and its creepy \u201cTotal Information Awareness\u201d program? The one with the weird icon of an eye atop a pyramid, staring down at the planet, illuminating the Greater Middle East? That was specifically advertized as a body to gather personal information on everybody in the country\u2013phone records, emails, medical records, credit card records, etc.\u2013so that all this could be made immediately available to law officials when required and without warrants. It generated unease, even during that period in which the Bush-Cheney administration was systematically using fear to justify all kinds of repressive measures. It was defunded by Congress the following year. But the mentality<\/i> remained, and Congress notwithstanding, the machinery of \u201ctotal\u201d surveillance obviously grew, along with the culture of secrecy.<\/p>\n
In 2004 there were reports, citing Russian intelligence, that the former East German spy chief Markus Wolf had been hired as a consultant by U.S. Homeland Security. I have not found confirmation of them (and Wolf is now dead.) But I thought at the time it was entirely plausible that the Bush administration would be willing to learn a thing or two about domestic spying from the experts of the former Stasi. What ruling elite has ever gained more total information awareness about its citizens than the old German Democratic Republic? And done it with such elegant legal<\/i> scaffolding?<\/p>\n
Legal, Like East Germany<\/b><\/p>\n
As historians such as Katherine Pence and Paul Betts have shown, the GDR authorities operated within scrupulously observed legal constraints. One sees this in the film Das Leben der Anderen <\/i>(The Lives of Others<\/i>) produced in the reunited Germany in 2006. It depicts the surveillance culture of the former East Germany, leaving the viewer nauseated. As it happens, the protagonist, a popular writer and regime loyalist named Georg Dreyman, is subjected to meticulous surveillance. His home is thoroughly bugged; an agent reports on his conversations, visitors, love-making, etc. He is never charged with anything nor punished. At one point his apartment is raided on a suspicion that he\u2019s authored an article critical of the GDR published in the west. He cooperates politely; nothing is found; the authorities leave money for the repair of furniture they\u2019d torn up. Everything according to law.<\/p>\n
I thought of that film while reading the lead Boston Globe<\/i> editorial on June 13. It concludes that the \u201cpolicies that [Snowden revealed], however objectionable, are properly authorized\u201d while Snowden himself \u201cbroke the law.\u201d Thus, you see, he\u2019s not a whistle-blower but a criminal. The editors call for him to be placed on trial, as do virtually all mainstream journalists. I should not be shocked, but it is quite amazing to see Keith Olbermann\u2019s successor, MSNBC\u2019s \u201cprogressive\u201d Ed Schultz join the crowd, labeling Snowden a \u201cpunk\u201d and lawbreaker. (Chris Hayes however remains, somewhat timidly, pro-Snowden.)<\/p>\n
The message to the masses is: How dare <\/i>Mr. Snowden tell the people that they are virtually naked in the eyes of the state, that the U.S. of A. has become one huge airport body-scanner! Because in so doing he betrays state secrets, and helps the terrorists who will now take more precautions to escape surveillance.<\/p>\n
And how dare <\/i>he tell the Chinese that Tsinghua University and the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet have been hacked by the NSA, even as the U.S. has accused the Chinese of hacking (in all likelihood, in response to U.S. actions, and less effective, and on a smaller scale)! How dare he consort with the \u201cenemy\u201d!<\/p>\n
U.S. to World: \u201cYou Must View Snowden as a Criminal, and Give Him Back\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Suddenly, the Cold War has reappeared. Snowden is charged with espionage<\/i>, some of his critics alleging that he\u2019s in the service of the PRC and\/or Russia or other \u201cenemies.\u201d It in fact appears that Beijing and Moscow both were taken by surprise by this episode, and that both have attempted to handle Snowden\u2019s unexpected presence carefully to avoid annoying the U.S.<\/p>\n
But how should they respond to Washington\u2019s logic, thoroughly embraced by the TV talking heads? \u201cLook,\u201d says the U.S. State Department, expecting the world to cower and obey. \u201cThis man has been charged with felonies. We\u2019ve gone through the legal process, through treaties we have with other countries, to have him appropriately returned to face justice. We\u2019ve revoked his passport, so he can\u2019t legally travel, except to be returned to the U.S. So damn it, do the right thing. Turn him over!\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s<\/i> supposed to be convincing? The media\u2019s complaining of Russian \u201cdefiance.\u201d Senator Chuck Schumer appeared on some show suggesting that Putin never misses an opportunity to \u201cpoke America in the eye\u201d (referring no doubt to Russian refusal to cooperate in \u201cregime change\u201d in Syria, and refusal to toe the U.S.-Israeli line on Iran). But imagine if a Russian in the U.S. revealed to a U.S. paper that Putin had a massive surveillance program, and Putin demanded his immediate extradition for breaking Russian law? How would the U.S. public react?<\/p>\n
Kerry\u2019s talking tough. He\u2019s demanding <\/i>that Putin not allow Snowden to fly out the country (presumably to Ecuador via Cuba). His tough talk might explain the reported fact that Snowden missed his planned Monday flight out of Moscow. (Might he have threatened to force the Aeroflot plane to land in the U.S.?)<\/p>\n
It all, in my humble opinion, boils down to this. The entirety of the ruling elite and the journalistic establishment are keen on defending the programs Snowden has exposed; keen on punishing him for his whistle-blowing; determined to vilify him as a punk, narcissist, egoist, attention-hungry ne\u2019er-do-well (anything but a thoughtful man who made a moral choice that has enlightened people about the character of the U.S. government); feverishly working on damage control while anticipating more damning revelations; and determined to get those four laptops with their incriminating content back into the bosom of the national security state.<\/p>\n
What sort of state is it, that says to its own people, we can invade a country based on lies, kill a million people, hold nobody accountable but hey, when one of us does something so abominable as to reveal that the state spies constantly on the people of the world, we have to have a \u201cmanhunt\u201d for him and punish him for treason?<\/p>\n
The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has the audacity to tell NBC News, \u201cIt is literally gut-wrenching to see\u201d Snowden\u2019s revelations\u2026 because of the \u201cdamage\u201d they do to \u201cour intelligence capabilities\u201d! As though there were really an \u201cour\u201d or \u201cus\u201d at this point. As though we were a nation united, including the mindful watchers and the grateful watched.<\/p>\n
No, there are us<\/i>, and there are them<\/i>. The tiny power elite that controls the mainstream press and cable channels, the corporations that dutifully hand over mega-data to the state (and then deny doing so to allay consumer outrage), the twin political parties, are sick to their stomachs that they\u2019ve been so exposed.<\/p>\n
We in our turn should feel, if not terrorized, nauseated.<\/p>\n
GARY LEUPP<\/strong>\u00a0is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of\u00a0Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan<\/a>;\u00a0Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan<\/a>; and\u00a0Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>He is a contributor to\u00a0<\/em><\/em><\/em>Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion<\/a>, (AK Press).\u00a0<\/em>He can be reached at:\u00a0gleupp@granite.tufts.edu<\/a><\/p>\n