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US Espionage And The Emperor's New Clothes
Published: Tuesday | June 11, 2013 0 Comments
André Wright, Opinion Editor
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
If there was ever a time for you to dig through that box of dusty, dog-eared books to find George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four it is now.
It's turning out that the Bush dynasty continues - only it's George W. Obama.
The revelations over the past week about the United States government's data-mining excursions should amplify just how small the world really is - closer than a global village, it's more like a global tenement yard - and how far governments will go to erode privacy. Soon, if not already, they'll know when your best butt cheek-squeezing effort ends in a whistler or a snorter.
An unlikely martyr, Edward Snowden, who only obtained his high-school diploma while attending community college, is the tech assistant who blew the lid on the cesspool of espionage in which the US government culled billions of bits of private Internet and phone info from the biggest tech companies in the world.
Whistleblower Snowden, a former CIA operative who works - by now he's been fired and targeted for extradition - for government defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a co-conspirator in the mass spy network, says he wants to put a stop to government excess.
"I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.
"I'm willing to sacrifice all (family life and career) because I can't, in good conscience, allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
And that is the rub of the Obama administration's overreach, which may not yet present a threat to fundamental democratic values, but is a slippery slope.
Trampling on privacy
The scandal enveloping US Attorney General Eric Holder - in which the Department of Justice subpoenaed phone records of editors and reporters attached to news agency The Associated Press after a story leak about new bomb technology - indicates how far the administration is willing to go trample on privacy. Cynics might argue that George W. Obama has taken a leaf out of China's Communist Party surveillance manual, putting a smirk of satisfaction on the face of mentors Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao.
While it may be true that the US does not exercise information control like totalitarian states, it is guilty, at least, of pervasive information patrol, which can be even more dangerous because it trespasses, virtually, into the mind of every user of the Internet in America - and is even far more intrusive than mining info on the freshness of Lorna Golding's salad in the WikiLeaks exposé.
Of course, national security (read: the 'War on Terror', terminology which Obama shuns but, effectively, pursues) is cited as the basis for State-sponsored voyeurism.
George W. Obama has offered a cliché excuse to justify his hijacking of Internet freedom: "You can't have a hundred per cent security and also then have a hundred per cent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're gonna have to make some choices as a society."
He describes fears of Prism and Boundless Informant being "Big Brother" as "abstract" musings, perhaps of an overactive imagination. He assures the public that he had "healthy scrutiny" for the programmes at first and that his team "scrubbed them thoroughly".
But all that's poppycock! If history has taught us anything, it is that any and every government, absent of tight reins and an accountable framework, inevitably divests or expropriates citizen rights. Blanket spying and intelligence-driven operations aren't one and the same.
George W. Obama, continuing the spy legacy of George W. Bush, seems committed to presiding over what Daniel Ellsberg, another US whistleblower, calls the United Stasi of America.
Candidate Obama, in a 2007 address at the Woodrow Wilson Center, lambasted the Bush administration for promoting a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand". Six years later, Obama has backslidden, pulling the rug of faith from under his believers and acolytes who bought the ruse that he would stand against a state coup of freedoms and privacy.
One of the myths of democracy is that the will of the collective State, though important, should not encroach dangerously on the privacy of the individual, with few exceptions.
But the Americans have come to realise that the exception is the rule - and the garments of democracy have left them bare - wearing only the emperor's new clothes.
Published: Tuesday | June 11, 2013 0 Comments
André Wright, Opinion Editor
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
If there was ever a time for you to dig through that box of dusty, dog-eared books to find George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four it is now.
It's turning out that the Bush dynasty continues - only it's George W. Obama.
The revelations over the past week about the United States government's data-mining excursions should amplify just how small the world really is - closer than a global village, it's more like a global tenement yard - and how far governments will go to erode privacy. Soon, if not already, they'll know when your best butt cheek-squeezing effort ends in a whistler or a snorter.
An unlikely martyr, Edward Snowden, who only obtained his high-school diploma while attending community college, is the tech assistant who blew the lid on the cesspool of espionage in which the US government culled billions of bits of private Internet and phone info from the biggest tech companies in the world.
Whistleblower Snowden, a former CIA operative who works - by now he's been fired and targeted for extradition - for government defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a co-conspirator in the mass spy network, says he wants to put a stop to government excess.
"I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.
"I'm willing to sacrifice all (family life and career) because I can't, in good conscience, allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
And that is the rub of the Obama administration's overreach, which may not yet present a threat to fundamental democratic values, but is a slippery slope.
Trampling on privacy
The scandal enveloping US Attorney General Eric Holder - in which the Department of Justice subpoenaed phone records of editors and reporters attached to news agency The Associated Press after a story leak about new bomb technology - indicates how far the administration is willing to go trample on privacy. Cynics might argue that George W. Obama has taken a leaf out of China's Communist Party surveillance manual, putting a smirk of satisfaction on the face of mentors Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao.
While it may be true that the US does not exercise information control like totalitarian states, it is guilty, at least, of pervasive information patrol, which can be even more dangerous because it trespasses, virtually, into the mind of every user of the Internet in America - and is even far more intrusive than mining info on the freshness of Lorna Golding's salad in the WikiLeaks exposé.
Of course, national security (read: the 'War on Terror', terminology which Obama shuns but, effectively, pursues) is cited as the basis for State-sponsored voyeurism.
George W. Obama has offered a cliché excuse to justify his hijacking of Internet freedom: "You can't have a hundred per cent security and also then have a hundred per cent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're gonna have to make some choices as a society."
He describes fears of Prism and Boundless Informant being "Big Brother" as "abstract" musings, perhaps of an overactive imagination. He assures the public that he had "healthy scrutiny" for the programmes at first and that his team "scrubbed them thoroughly".
But all that's poppycock! If history has taught us anything, it is that any and every government, absent of tight reins and an accountable framework, inevitably divests or expropriates citizen rights. Blanket spying and intelligence-driven operations aren't one and the same.
George W. Obama, continuing the spy legacy of George W. Bush, seems committed to presiding over what Daniel Ellsberg, another US whistleblower, calls the United Stasi of America.
Candidate Obama, in a 2007 address at the Woodrow Wilson Center, lambasted the Bush administration for promoting a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand". Six years later, Obama has backslidden, pulling the rug of faith from under his believers and acolytes who bought the ruse that he would stand against a state coup of freedoms and privacy.
One of the myths of democracy is that the will of the collective State, though important, should not encroach dangerously on the privacy of the individual, with few exceptions.
But the Americans have come to realise that the exception is the rule - and the garments of democracy have left them bare - wearing only the emperor's new clothes.
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