Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old NSA whistleblower who leaked a byzantine collection of classified documents, insists that the US government is building “an architecture of oppression.” While it has not yet become a reality, the capabilities of the security state are astounding, as Snowden notes.
Similar rhetoric has been recently used by Brian Jenkins, a man at the other end of the spectrum. A counter-terrorism expert and high-level consultant, Jenkins helped create the first database of international terrorists in 1971. In an interview with Slate, Jenkins remarked: “What we have put in place is the foundation for a very oppressive state.”
Both of these characterizations of the sprawling national security apparatus acknowledge that “the tools are in place,” as Jenkins puts it, but the oppressive state is not yet fully formed. However, the two men indicate that a capricious turnkey response to a crisis, or the contrasting policies of a newly elected leader, for example, could easily undermine basic democratic freedoms and create a tyrannical regime.
Here are five ways that an “architecture of oppression” has already grown publicly and been normalized since September 11, 2001.
1. The Patriot Act
The big daddy of reactionary power grabs, the Patriot Act was put before Congress on a rare fast-track by Attorney General John Ashcroft just nine days after September 11. It was passed in a whirlwind of jingoistic fervor with only two hearings in the House and none by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) was the only senator who voted against it.
The Patriot Act made a variety of significant changes to law. It defined or redefined terrorism, domestic terrorism, cyberterrorism, and established or modified existing laws that indict those crimes. The powers of the US Attorney General and the Secret Service were expanded to eliminate barriers to investigating terrorism. Surveillance abilities were enhanced including weakening restrictions on wiretapping and other stored communications like voicemail. The power of the Treasury Department to regulate financial transactions and importantly foreign corporate or personal transactions was also broadened in an effort to crack down on financing terrorism.
It is the jewel in the crown of state repression, and has been used to criminalize an entire generation of political dissidents, whether they be environmental activists who were rebranded “eco-terrorists,” hacktivists who became “cyberterrorists,” or international solidarity activists who were accused of “material support for terrorism.”
2011 saw numerous reports that the government had used the Patriot Act in 1,618 drug cases, and only 15 terrorism cases. It has long been known as the “Kitchen Sink approach to National Security” but the government’s abuse of the intentions of these provisions is astounding.
The Patriot Act is central to understanding how the NSA is conducting its dragnet surveillance. Critics have pointed out that PRISM, one of the secret programs exposed in Snowden’s leaks, allows the US government to collect and store metadata directly from the servers of companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. It is clear that communications with individuals outside of the US are subject to this collection process, along with more conventional data gathering, like the filtering and collecting of data running across fiber-optic cables. However, the extent to which this affects the Internet communication of all US citizens is unclear.
The program has been enabled by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA. A legal framework for surveillance, FISA was inspired by the findings of the Church Committee in order to give Congressional and Judicial oversight to domestic surveillance programs. It was a reform brought about after the nefarious disclosure that President Nixon had been spying on political organizations and activists in violation of the 4th Amendment’s requirement of probable cause. But in 2001 FISA was expanded by the Patriot Act under the Bush administration and renewed again by the Obama administration in December 2012 with bipartisan support.
This article originally appeared on: AlterNet