Privacy's Twilight: Rise Of The Total Surveillance Society

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By Steve Elliott (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Steve Elliott - Writer

We may be the last generation that will have ever known privacy.

Every day, we are one step closer to the Total Surveillance Society. Every day, we lose a little more of that part of being human that claims the right to be left alone, that knows freedom from the prying eyes of the corporate state, that has the boldness to claim some inner sanctum where the all-seeing eyes of technology cannot penetrate.

The dystopian dreams of mid-20th Century writers like George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick and Barry Malzberg are coming true all around us, but it seems the majority of citizens are so dazed by mass media distractions, by government-instilled fear, and by the drudgery of their daily existence that they can't be bothered to wake up and take stock of what is being taken from them.

Our telephones don't just transmit our voices from point A to point B anymore. The government is there in the middle between us and those with whom we speak, listening, analyzing, weighing the possibility that we are Enemy Combatants who should be whisked away in the dead of night and stored in a cage from which we'll be periodically extracted for "harsh interrogation."

The telecom companies which have been entrusted with the sanctity of our private conversations have not only rolled over -- all of them but Qwest and CREDO Mobile, anyway. They have acquiesced to the demands of government that they allow federal goons to hover over our every word. They have been paid handsomely for their complicity, but at the cost of their humanity and our freedom. And now they have been told by a spineless and morally bankrupt Congress that they won't ever be held accountable; that it's OK to break the law when the President tells you to do it. If you are rich and powerful enough to buy Congressmen, then the law apparently wasn't meant to apply to you, anyway.

The telecom companies (again, with the notable exceptions of Qwest and CREDO) have no problem at all handing the info over to the government -- and that's without a court order. And as we sadly found out July 9, a spineless Senate (with the exception of 28 true patriots) is more than willing to give them carte blanche to do so, by including telecom immunity in the FISA bill.

"Congress has been far too compliant as President Bush undermined the Bill of Rights and the balance of powers," The New York Times editorialized on July 8. According to the Times, the FISA bill just approved by both the House and Senate needlessly expands the government's ability to spy on Americans and ensures that the country will never know the full extend of President Bush's unlawful, warrantless wiretapping.

Even though the old FISA law, enacted in 1978 as a response to the abuses perpetrated by the Nixon administration, created a court which, over a 30-year period, approved nearly 20,000 wiretapping warrants while rejecting perhaps a half-dozen, according to the Times, and in any case, the government can wiretap first and get permission later in moments of crisis, that wasn't enough for Bush and an eerily compliant Congress. The new bill, the Times said, makes it much easier to spy on Americans at home, reduces the courts' powers and grants immunity to the companies that turned over Americans' private communications without a warrant.

The new FISA bill, now the law of the land thanks to an imperial president and a spineless Congress, allows the government to bypass the FISA court entirely and collect large amounts of Americans' communications without a warrant simply by declaring that it is doing so "for reasons of national security." "It cuts the vital "foreign power" provision from FISA, never mentions counterterrorism and defines national security so broadly that experts think the term could mean almost anything a president wants it to mean," the Times noted.

Apparently Congress goes along with the attitude that if you're the President or his lackeys in the intelligence agencies, you don't follow the law -- you ARE the law, and you make it up as you go along, spinning lies upon lies as you gut the Constitution, barely able to conceal your contempt for the weak legislative branch which cowers at the mention of those nebulous bad men who are supposed to be such a threat to our freedoms that we should give them up preemptively.

Our computers don't just connect us to the World Wide Web anymore. Now instead of just being our dumb servants they are silently, secretly reporting on us, every moment of our surfing, every click, every choice, every view open to review by those governmental or corporate entities large enough to laugh at our pitiful expectations of privacy and autonomy.

Highly classified programs are run by a variety of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Government agents are hunched vulture-like over their desks at this very minute, observing, storing and analyzing the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for "suspicious activity," with all the breadth and ambiguity -- and potential for practically inevitable abuse -- that phrase implies.

Where can this "thought crimes" mindset lead? A 23-year-old journalism student and reporter has been sentenced to death in Afghanistan for an Internet download that the government deemed "counter to Islam." The Iranian parliament is set to debate the death penalty for bloggers who "harm mental security in society."

The U.S. government's warrantless surveillance of its own citizens includes data-mining programs that allow the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to sift through large databanks of emails, phone calls, and online transactions and conversations, not for specific information, but in search of suspicious patterns. It's all grist for the dark satanic mills of a world view based on fear, secrecy and suppression.

Information as seemingly routine as everyday bank transactions is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

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http://realitycatcher-alapoet.blogspot.com/

I'm a 48-year-old writer, editor, ex-musician, dreamer, reality catcher, ex-con, and father. I have three kids, five tattoos, a criminal record, a terminal disease, and an attitude. I was born in Alabama and spent the first 38 years of my life there (more...)

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